This is NOT Andrew and his daugh­ters. But the book is the same and the kids are also fans of Miss Llewellyn-Jones

It is always won­der­ful when you get a mes­sage from some­one who is actu­ally read­ing one of your books. But this week I had an unusual email, passed on by my hus­band, Peter, from a col­league of his.

The mes­sage said that Miss Llewellyn-Jones was on high rota­tion from the library because his two daugh­ters absolutely loved it and demanded he read it to them every night at bed­time. It was only when the girls, aged 4 years and 2.5 years insisted that their Dad read the entire book from cover to cover that he realised Elaine For­re­stal must be the wife of whom Peter had spo­ken when they last met about a year ago.

Who says the author is dead? Well, maybe she was but not any­more. Not for Andrew and his two girls in any case.

This is a great time of year for young peo­ple who love to write sto­ries. There are two major writ­ing com­pe­ti­tions, open to all West Aus­tralians of school age, at the moment.

The NIE Young Writ­ers Com­pe­ti­tion has two sec­tions, poetry and prose. Pri­mary and Sec­ondary stu­dents of all ages can enter one piece of work in each sec­tion. Two pan­els of judges, one pri­mary and one sec­ondary, read all the entries. Then they meet to dis­cuss and agree on the top ten pieces of work in each age group.

The Tim Win­ton Awards, run by the Subi­aco Library, accept only prose entries, but they have expanded the com­pe­ti­tion, in the last few years, to include coun­try stu­dents. This com­pe­ti­tion is also open to stu­dents of all ages and is judged by a panel of expe­ri­enced peo­ple. Tim Win­ton is the patron and has pre­sented the prizes at every cer­e­mony since the incep­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion almost twenty years ago.

Both of these writ­ing com­pe­ti­tions close at the end of May, so get busy and pol­ish up those sto­ries. Com­pe­ti­tions like this are a great way to improve your writ­ing and edit­ing skills, which will come in handy in many other areas of your life. Have a go. You never know … And there is money to be won.

It is great to be back on the Uranie, sail­ing with Rose and Jose, see­ing remote and exotic places, fac­ing the threats of pirates and can­ni­bals, learn­ing about ships and the ever present dan­gers of storms, dis­ease and starvation.

I am always amazed at how real a story becomes when you are work­ing on these later stages of the book. The char­ac­ters fol­low me around. Even when I am not in my office sit­ting at my desk, they are always with me. Some­times they talk to me, whis­per things in my ear or shout ‘That’s not how it goes!’ Then, just when I need them to help me with a dif­fi­cult sec­tion, they are nowhere to be found. Luck­ily for me they do come back and by then I have either solved the prob­lem myself or shelved it and moved on. That’s the good thing about re-drafting. You can always put an idea or a scene aside and come back to it later. By then you have dealt with a whole lot of other prob­lems and this one seems really easy to deal with. It’s just a mat­ter of putting in the time and the concentration.

Speak­ing of which, I had bet­ter get back to it.

The sail­ing ship Uranie anchored off Timor in 1818

This week I opened up my ‘ideas box’. I looked at all the scrib­bled notes, news­pa­per cut­tings and bits and pieces I had been throw­ing in there, sav­ing them up for times like this when one project is away with the edi­tor and I am begin­ning to think about what I might do next. I found a lot of things I hadn’t thought about for ages. Some I put straight back in the box. Oth­ers I put aside to look at and puz­zle over some more. But for some rea­son two of them, placed in the box at very dif­fer­ent times, seemed sud­denly to fit together.

One is a news­pa­per report from March 1st 1995 when Cyclone Bobby crossed the coast at Onslow, in the north-west, and trav­elled all the way through the out­back of West­ern Aus­tralia. It dumped so much water that the inland lakes over­flowed and flood waters rushed down towards the South­ern Ocean. These floods cut both the Indian-Pacific rail­way line and the Eyre High­way. For almost a week West­ern Aus­tralia vir­tu­ally fell off the map. No road or rail traf­fic could get through in either direc­tion. And it was a long drive back to Norse­man in the west, or Bal­lado­nia in the east. Over a hun­dred vehi­cles of all shapes, sizes and descrip­tions were stranded on either side of the flooded sec­tion of High­way. You can imag­ine how many peo­ple that would have involved. Very few of them were pre­pared for camp­ing in their vehi­cles, but there are lots of sto­ries about how they got together to pool resources and help each other, shar­ing food, bed­ding and shel­ter from the con­tin­u­ing rain.

The other cut­ting is from Tues­day Sep­tem­ber 27th 1983 and tells of a treach­er­ous water­hole in which a young Abo­rig­i­nal woman drowned her­self after her lover was killed by her angry hus­band. The husband’s fam­ily then put a curse on the water­hole so that she could never rest in peace. But this was not the end of the story. Four­teen young men, all vis­i­tors to the area, have been drowned in the water­hole since 1959. The locals believe that the rest­less spirit of the young woman is look­ing for male company.

I haven’t worked out the details yet, but some­how these peo­ple on the Nullar­bor, stranded with time on their hands, go explor­ing and dis­cover this waterhole …

At the moment the first draft of a story link­ing these two very sep­a­rate events seems to be tak­ing shape quite well. Who knows if it will ever turn into a novel? But It is fun to explore the possibilities.

This cyclist, dwarfed by the road train, is try­ing to cross the flooded sec­tion of the Eyre Highway.

The first stage of the edit­ing process for To See the Worldis almost com­plete, which means that the man­u­script will come back to me with the editor’s com­ments. I will respond and the next phase of the process, col­lab­o­ra­tion between the edi­tor and me, will begin. I find this one of the most enjoy­able and inter­est­ing parts of devel­op­ing a man­u­script for pub­li­ca­tion. The hard work of find­ing a shape for the story has been done and the fine tun­ing can begin. This means going back into the text and teas­ing out every last scrap of mean­ing from the words, mak­ing sure that the rhythm is right, check­ing the dia­logue to see that every utter­ance that a char­ac­ter makes on the page is true to that character’s age, edu­ca­tion level, per­son­al­ity and life expe­ri­ence. Often I find that char­ac­ters reveal things about them­selves dur­ing this process that I wasn’t aware of before and the whole book becomes more alive as a result.

Elaine For­re­stal act­ing as edi­tor dur­ing one of her workshps

It is a time-consuming process, but absolutely essen­tial to pro­duc­ing a book that is cred­i­ble, inter­est­ing and emo­tion­ally sat­is­fy­ing to read.

I can’t wait to get started.