An appreciative audience came to hear a great writer
by Tessa Moriarty
Western Port Writes had the pleasure of hosting our inaugural Author Morning Tea with one of our local authors, Garry Disher, at the Tulum Store in Balnarring Beach on Wednesday 29th May. Quaint and cosy, the Tulum provided not just delicious coffee and pastries, but the perfect setting for storytelling at its best.
An unassuming man, Garry Disher’s quiet and humble personality belie both his storytelling ability (on the page and the stage), and his knowledge of the practice and craft of writing. In some ways, it follows that he would become a writer. Instead of reading to him from a book at night, his father created stories and their characters straight from his imagination. No book required.
Not that there weren’t books in his house to read – there were plenty, and Garry read a lot. As he said – ‘good writers read a lot’. And though he recalled enjoying Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven, he outgrew children’s books at an early age. So, he moved on to the adult books on his father’s shelf. But when he picked up a James Bond story, his dad gently took it from him and said – ‘life’s not like that’.
Garry won a writing scholarship in America and, though he was already a successfully published and well-known author, this is where he learned the craft of writing. ‘How to make writing creative’, not just to create stories. And while he’s more widely known for his crime writing, Garry’s novels and books cross genres. He has written children’s novels, YA books, non-fiction stories, short story collections and numerous literary novels. He is perhaps one of Australia’s most prolific writers.
But in crime writing, he tells us, it’s not just the question of who dunnit? But the manner of who dunnit. What is their character like? What drives them? What is their backstory? These questions take him deep into the complex personalities of the characters he creates. These questions tell us about the curiosity of the writer’s mind.
Garry also shared his wisdom on what makes for good writing and a good story. He writes six morning a week, initially on paper with a blue biro (yes it must be blue not black) – ‘writers are superstitious people’. They believe in doing things a particular way, for a particular reason. He also tells us that writer’s environments are all different. Some write in empty rooms with no distractions, some write with views out to the sea and their favourite music playing. Some write on paper, as he does, later transferring to a computer document – almost as a second draft. Others go to the keyboard straight up.
Ideas for stories often come from the big and small of life, the richness of what is happening on any ordinary day around him. The conversations he overhears in cafés or on street corners. The things that happen to him or others, things he reads about that seed an idea for a story. He tells us about an instance of true-life vandalism – the burning and destruction of letter-boxes where he lived that sparked (yes pun intended) an idea for a story about an arsonist.
His upbringing and life in South Australia provide the place from which he depicts such a deep and intricate understanding and knowledge of landscape, rural life, the environment and its people. ‘Writers must be alert to anything and everything around them’.
On an ordinary sort of Wednesday morning, in a little café at Balnarring Beach, an appreciative audience came to hear a great writer tell us how he creates his stories. How he grows and develops his complex characters for the novels he writes. How he gets to know them and write about them. How they emerge and return to him, again and again. Not unlike the character Grace in his new crime novel, Sanctuary. We have met her before and here she is back. In a different place, with a different look and different motivations – but in the pages of another wonderful story.
‘In real life,’ Garry reminds us, ‘we are often powerless, subject to good and bad luck.’ We just need to turn on the television, watch the news, read the newspaper to see that ‘bad people get away with stuff’. But in crime fiction the possibilities, the justice, the outcomes are endless.
