Everything about writing is luck.  Everything.

There’s the luck of the idea, that little ‘what if’ that pops into your brain, you write it down somewhere – a post-it note, the back of a napkin (how appalling it’s been that sometimes I’ve had the best ideas when a little too drunk, so the idea is gone by the morning, it’s never stuck) – and then at some point or other you see if you can turn that idea into something.  There’s the luck of having the time, or being in a position to make the time, to do the hard work of writing.  And there’s the luck of being in the right headspace to produce that particular story, because every story is different.  And then there’s the luck in having the right editor read the piece and there’s always a bit of luck in terms of whether or not the publisher has the physical – or digital – space to get it out into the world.

More specifically, I have looked back at the publication of my novel Remnants as a series of events and confluences that have had as their commonality good bloody luck.  In 1999/2000 I did a Masters in Creative Arts (Creative Writing) at the University of Wollongong.  It was a great experience, a highlight of my life.  First up, I had the good fortune to spend time with writers such as John Scott, Merlinda Bobbis and Tony Macris.  Most closely I worked with Tony, and he was sufficiently blunt to tell me that my major project was good enough to give me the qualification but wasn’t good enough to find a publisher.

That night I started on a new project.

By the end of the year I had the bones of a story that I knew I wanted to take further.  I spent three years editing and re-working and polishing and worrying and fretting.  After shopping the manuscript around, and being told that it was well-written but would never be a commercial proposition, Francesca Rendle-Short, now creative writing academic RMIT but at the time was at the University of Canberra, suggested that I might like to have a chat with Ian Templeman, who was the head-honcho of Pandanus Books, the academic publisher at the Australian National University.  Excitedly, impatiently, I arranged this meeting.  (I am the least patient person in the world, so perhaps I should be serving burgers rather than writing stories.)

Over lunch Ian told me how he’d read a story of mine, ‘Song of Excess’, in Overland and would love to read the manuscript for my first novel – what luck that he’d read that particular issue!

A month later, I received a letter saying that Ian enjoyed the work but as Pandanus was primarily an academic publisher of non-fiction they couldn’t accept it; I should, however, again make contact with Ian.  More than confused, I rang Ian.  He said that he would like to publish Remnants, but he would have to establish a special imprint to do so, and this would take ‘some time’.  Ian was true to his word, and in 2005 that little novel eventually saw the light of day through Pandanus Books’ Sullivan’s Creek series.  Which would fold within a year because the ANU was adamant about focussing on the academic, not the fictional.

Remnants went on to achieve ten reviews, in places like Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Australian Book Review, Antipodes as well as literary journals.  Nine of the reviews were positive; eight of those nine were glowingly enthusiastic. There’s no doubt in my mind that I was a very lucky person indeed throughout the whole journey of Remnants, and if that book hadn’t appeared it’s highly likely that I wouldn’t have continued trying my hand with the longer narrative form.

It’s a humble book, and a flawed book, but the more distance I get from it the more I like it, the characters and their situations have resonated with me, and the story has found a small but appreciative audience.  However, it left me with two feelings: one, how lucky we need to be for our work to be published; two, that I want to go on, that I want to write more, that I might just be able to do better, but I’ll need a shit-load of luck to go that next step, along with drive and tenacity and sheer hard-work.  Plus a good idea every now and again – that wouldn’t go astray.

In terms of current work, my novella Fall On Me was published by Blemish Books last month, and I could tell you a story about that story, how my partner and I went on holiday in Tasmania in 2007, how we stayed a few nights in Launceston, how, one night, we walked up Cataract Gorge and went past the Kings Bridge Gatekeeper’s Cottage and I thought, Mmm, how good would it be to write in a place like that, how two years later, I discovered that the Launceston City Council ran a program where artists could indeed live and work in the Gatekeeper’s Cottage, so I applied, was accepted, and in April-May 2010 went down to Tasmania to live in that Cottage for a month, intending to write short stories, but instead I wrote three novellas, Fall On Me being one of those, how, a year later I saw that Blemish Books was looking for manuscripts around the 40,000-word mark, so I sent off a submission, and the good, generous folks at Blemish loved the thing, so here I am, talking to you about luck and publishing and I’m realising that good fortune plays such a big role, perhaps a bigger role than hard-work and any talent one might have (though talent is always debatable).

And I could tell you how lucky I am to have found someone like Alec Patric with whom I co-edit Verity La.

And how lucky I am to live in a country where I’ve been able to receive a good education, and there are opportunities to continue that education.

And how lucky I am to have had an English teacher in middle school who once handed back a story I’d written, an obviously average story by the look of the mark written on the top of the front page, but he said to me, ‘You can do so much better.’  So here I am, aged 42, trying to do so much better.

And I could tell you how lucky I am to make a real-estate decision eleven years ago which now allows me to write as fulltime as humanly and financially possible.

And how lucky I am to not be in the twenty per cent of the world’s population that can’t read.

And how lucky I am that you’re reading this post.

All this – every little bit of it – has lead to publication, and now I realise that I am a man of such good fortune.  And how grateful I am for every little cheeky drop of it.

Perhaps all writers feel this way, at times, to a certain extent.  I’m reminded of the greatly loved Dorothy Porter, whose final poem, ‘View from 417’, finishes with these delicious words: Something in me/despite everything/can’t believe my luck.

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With thanks to Irma Gold, who asked a question that inspired this post.

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