My Writing Life

The kids nicknamed me ‘French Boy’ in England, because French was my first language.

Should have been the Potters Bar Baby of the Year

When I was seven years old, still living in England, I recall telling an old aunt that some day I wanted to be an author. I remember the incident very clearly, in the hall at 24 Oakwood Avenue.

It could only have been my father who instilled in me a love of literature. In some ways, it backfired on him when I was broke – but it paid off in the long run. In those early years I didn’t know anybody else who was interested in literature. Mum was certainly keen to read to me in French. She read novels by an efficient novelist, M Delly. However, my father spoke of Moliére, whom he claimed was as good as Shakespeare.

Wilson’s Prom, Victoria, 1967

My schooling and tertiary education (BA Dip Ed) didn’t teach me much, certainly nothing about practical writing. My lecturers hated Carl Sandburg and my school teachers had never heard of Jack Kerouac. However, in my first year of high school I was fortunate that John Cox taught me English. He drummed the principles of grammar into me. For example – he taught me how to pick a noun clause, which is tricky; and an adjectival clause which is dead easy. I did well under Cox. I came second.

In the mid-to-late 60s, there was a cultural split between language studies at school, and songs and poems which we enjoyed back home. A wall of Pink Floyd proportions stood between them. From our teachers, we learned tedious poets like Wordsworth and Keats, then we’d rush home to read Bob Dylan’s poetic liner notes on his Times They Were A-Changin’ LP.

Around this time – and largely because of Dylan’s magnetic influence - I started writing terrible poetry. Teenage angst gets no thanks.

Since then I have never stopped scribbling poems in my little notebook. I do only two edits, at the most, because – like all you other budding poets who scribble in books – and unlike John Laws - my poetry has no market. But I didn’t see this in the late-60s.

I thought I was going to be a poet. I published my own Rags poetry magazine and I had a stand at Sydney’s Domain, which no one remembers.

Rags Poetry 1970

I also edited another poetry magazine called Mustard Grass, I joined the Newcastle Poetry Association, and best of all in 1972 the esteemed poet, Norman Talbot, selected my sun poem for his anthology of Hunter Valley Poets. Maybe I was going to be a poet after all? (Didja seeit Mum?)

2002 Anthology

Edges

Robert Wolfgramm has always been a part of my life as a writer. Starting in 1971, I wrote lyrics which Robert would turn into songs. After 30 years, I still send him poems which he sets to music. Sometimes we wrote songs all in a rush, other times we would write nothing together for months. (I believe our best collaboration was the 1985 concept album, Persecution Games.)

In 1973 I wrote a play called Mona & Morgan Prince for the Newcastle Marionette Theatre. Though it was patchy, it had some good moments.

I was a school teacher during 1974-1978 and I wrote five short plays for my classes. But they weren’t much good - a 50-minute musical play called Jonah was the best of them.

Jonah (1975)

Imagining that I would get out of teaching and become a university lecturer someday, I decided to gaining further education. I was attracted to Comparative Religion and so I began studing in the evenings at Macquarie University towards a Bachelor of Divinity (BD). My area of interest was non-conformist church groups, especially the Children of God and breakaways from the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Schoolteaxching, 1978

In 1981, my interests changed and I gave all my papers on the Children of God to Robert Wolfgramm, who had became a university lecturer and sociologist instead of me. I then self-published my research - a book on Seventh-day Adventist breakaway movements. It sold quite well via direct mail, particularly to American universities.

The Edges ofr Seventh-day Adventism (1981)

1979

My first published church history was neither the COGs or the SDAs, it was Thank God For The Salvos, a History of the Salvation Army in Australia 1880-1980, commissioned by Harper and Row. This happened in 1979 after I had quit teaching in disgust. I was living with my family in Bermagui and working as a professional fisherman. I had little aptitude for the task.

Thank God For The Salvos (1981)

Around this time the owner of the Small Business Letter, Phil Ward, bought a holiday home in the area, and commissioned me to compile and distill his ‘wisdom’ from his first 50 newsletters. This was the first book I ghosted. I have since written another 40 in other people’s names.

Phil instilled in me the 20-word sentence rule – as outlined in the first chapter, which I believe is correct most of the time. Phil also re-cast my writing into a business context, which became essential to my earning a living, although in 1979 I was not yet aware how difficult writing for a living could be.

Small Business Letter

Also in 1979, Barbara Cail of Rala Publications, gave me my first paid writing job for her monthly Fisherman’s News. Having caught a pitiful amount of fish I would return to the wharf and witness everyone else’s terrific catches, which I would then write about. Barbara paid me as if it were ‘normal’ that writer should be paid a flat fee on a word count. Boy, that was an enlightening experience.

She made me realise that there was indeed a commercial living to be made as a writer.

Fisherman’s News

1980

I am grateful to Australia Council that in 1980 they awarded me a $10,000 New Writer’s Fellowship. It was like being knighted by the Literature Board, and for some 18 months I thought of myself as a ‘literature’ writer of sorts. The grant gave me the time to write a children’s novel called Taylor’s Troubles which was published by Penguin Books in 1981.

I met some great people at Penguin - ‘real’ editors, notably Julie Watt and Kay Ronai. At first, I couldn’t believe I was in the same room as these professionals! I was used to hanging out with shark meshers and abalone divers at the time.

However, I quickly ascertained that unless I could become one of the top 10 authors in the country, there was no money in fiction. Tim Winton and Thomas Kenneally had covered the ground devastatingly well. Furthermore, I didn’t like being referred to as a ‘children’s’ author.

1980 was the year that poet, Robert Adamson didn’t get a Lit grant. He was extremely disappointed, drinking heaps and living in Bermagui. By nightfall he would turn into a madman, threatening to drive his car off cliffs and babbling like a dee-jay, for which I admired him enormously.

Being an established poet, Adamson was a type of role model-writer to me, until I met Martin Sharp.

All this time I continued writing short items for Phil Ward’s Small Business Letter. I also started writing a stream of business books over the next four years. They were all in other people’s names, and I didn’t necessarily know anything about the subject matter. I simply plagiarised whatever books were supplied and I interviewed my subjects, from which I gleaned both the guts of the book and the angle.

These books had titles like, The Australian Encyclopedia of Investment, How To Make Money From Commodity Futures, How To Minimise Your Tax, How To Make Bigger Profits From Small Business, The Best Years, How To Get More From Your Marketing Dollars…and so on, bloody heaps of them.

Around this time I began to understand that speed is a most important quality in any career writer. I had never before judged the qualities of writers under the same rules as sprinters.

I also spotted that a reputation as a Deadline King would bring in extra writing jobs. I came to accept that the No 1 quality of all great writing is meeting the deadline, if for no other reason than, a missed deadline doesn’t make it to press.

1981-1985

One extraordinary day the editor of the local Southern Flyer, Steve Elias, had a brainwave. He reckoned that I was ‘weird enough’ to interview Tiny Tim who was in Australia at the time. Even though Steve couldn’t pay for anything more than my petrol, I drove to Sydney for the gig.

I had never before interviewed an international star.

David Newlands accompanied me as the magazine photographer and his wonderful pic of Tiny appeared on the cover of the last issue of the Southern Flyer. After publication, legendary Tiny Tim enthusiast and artist, Martin Sharp phoned and asked me to come to Sydney and stay with him on-and-off, because he said I had the ‘heart’ for this work. Having admired both Martin and Tiny since 1966 this was a dream come true. My next four years were intensely tied up with Martin and Tiny, and even today, my interest has not died.

It was Martin’s work with tapes that probably changed mine as a writer, because Martin would tape everything and he would urge me to do likewise. “Are you taping this?” he called out to me one evening, when Peter Royles and Toto Renshaw were clashing head-to-head. Martin Sharp is a great man with a tape recorder.

Phil, Martin & Wilts

Before meeting Martin, I would click the tape recorder on at the start of my formal interviews, and switch off at the end. After Martin I’d walked in and out of situations with the tape recorder already switched on. I’d switch it on 15 minutes before the interview, and I wouldn’t switch off until I was fully out the door.

Of course, this meant that I had to transcribe an hour of tape instead of a half an hour but, when it comes to writing, I have never looked for shortcuts.

In those days, I would leave my wife Robbie, and my children Amber and Joel in Bermagui, regularly come to Sydney and stay at Martin’s house for a week or even a fortnight at a stretch. By day I was with Phil Ward, at the office of Australian Newsletters Publications, by night with Martin and his tapes.

Phil was on a full-on readability kick. Newsletters are eight pages long, therefore tight and punchy: 100 words in a newsletter is like 1000 in a magazine. Phil would cut my 100 word articles to 25 words, and I hated him doing it. Hated it!

I had deliberately written all those slightly gracious phrases, mood-setters and adjectival clauses. Not to mention similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia and alliteration. Bang, gone, cut, slash, death.

Martin did the opposite, he ran lots of tape. And lots of tape, tightly edited, invariably produces first class results.

The other great influence, and experience, during those years was that Allan Broadhurst and I formed a band calledThe Wilts in Bermagui. It lasted two and a half years, playing 18 months as a duo and 13 months as a four piece (with Bob Harris and Martin Fowler). It was a band in which overt musicianship was discouraged. You had to win the audience in other ways.

What’s in it for the audience? was the only question that mattered – and the answer was a combination of security and surprise. After facing a live audience, I took this rule into writing.