Hi Ian,

I read your article with interest. Having completed my first novel A Harp of Truest Tone (working title The Convict because it is started as a historical fiction novel) within roughly two years, I think I was lucky to have attended the Imaginary Lives historical fiction and Year of the Novel workshops run by Craig Cormick for the ACT Writers Centre and thus able to avoid some of the problems you mention. I write screenplays as well (still learning but making progress) and I find archetype and act structures helpful.

For A Harp of Truest Tone I used a method called the Snowflake Method which Craig suggested participants look at. It has a four Act structure and I think about a dozen steps along the way, if memory serves correctly, and I found following this (which essentially uses the method for planning your novel) really useful, even though I didn’t follow it completely because I find I can’t plan down to the nth degree I simply have to write to work out what I want and where the story is going or wants to go to a certain extent.

I guess it depends on how you want to do something; I didn’t set out to write an Australian novel or one of a particular word length; I thought my novel would be around 60,000 words; with development and rewriting following assessment it ended up around 90,000 words. The reason it was an historical novel was simply because I found a picture of a convict in a newspaper article and thought his face was interesting and that it might for the basis of a story at some point (I was doing a writing course at the time so keeping my eye out for things of interest).

As it turned out, the National Library held a lot of information about him (John Boyle O’Reilly) because he was a writer himself and ended up settling in America and becoming a well known citizen there. One thing I learned from Craig’s workshops was only to do as much research as you want to/need to for your story. So whenever I felt the biographical information was starting to get into my way I stopped reading and just wrote. The biographical information and convict history was very helpful in that it gave me events which had dramatic impact and were helpful in developing the plot. The poetry was very beautiful and pertinent and helped with the theme. The fact descriptions of e.g. the west Australias in the 1860s were those as seen by Boyle O’Reilly himself was really useful in gaining a real feel for what it was like then.

I don’t know if that helps you any in writing your novel or another novel but those are my experiences thus far. I had written a children’s fairytale prior to A Harp of Truest Tone which probably helped me in a sense though now, after having completed a 90,000 word novel, children’s novels (of around 25,000 words) seem so much easier. I’d like to write novellas actually, and short stories too, something I haven’t done very much of yet.

Joanne