Author Susan Johnson describes what drives her to write
Susan Johnson
Susan Johnson is an Australian author living in London. After beginning a career in journalism, she decided to focus on writing fiction full-time at the age of 28, and has since published seven works of fiction, including Life in Seven Mistakes
What drew you to become a journalist?
My father was a journalist in his youth and I think that was what probably first got me interested, in that I personally knew someone who was already a journalist. Plus, it seemed to me that it wasn’t an ‘ordinary’ kind of job, in the sense that it seemed it might provide novelty and a certain excitement.
Of course what I spent most of the first year doing was typing out the television guide and the shipping news! This was in the days when you were a cadet or cub reporter, and the newspaper paid for you to attend university part-time. I did English and Journalism but never finished my degree.
How did you make the transition from being a journalist to becoming a novelist?
I found that after ten years or so in journalism, the work I was doing at home – that is, writing short stories – were becoming more interesting to me than journalism.
In fact, they seemed more ‘true’ to me than journalism, which was supposed to represent the truth but in fact seemed more and more to just represent the surface of things, rather than the reality of things.
I firmly believe in Edith Wharton’s dictum that writing should reveal ‘the back of the tapestry’, all the knots and grief and sadness of real, lived life. I think journalism was helpful to me in that it trained me to notice things, to have a keen eye for the smallest give away expression or mannerism, but I certainly had to jettison the idea that everything had to be very clearly named.
Fiction names things in a more muted way, a more dense and complex way, and it took me a while to move into this new way of writing.
What do you find the most challenging aspects of writing?
I could lie and say technique or something, but actually the most challenging thing is keeping on doing it when you don’t sell vast numbers of books, win prizes, or make the Richard and Judy list.
It is hard to keep yourself believing that what you are doing is worthwhile when the publishing/literary/ reading community doesn’t seem very interested in your work!
You have to re-examine all the time what you are writing for: is it for recognition? Money? Kudos? You have to be very sure you want to do it before you begin, and then you have to re-affirm your vows, so to speak, all the time.
What do you enjoy most about it?
When the execution of an idea comes close to the original idea.
You mention that you decided to focus on writing fiction full-time in 1984. How soon after that was your first novel published?
I was lucky in that I got a literature board grant the following year (the equivalent of an Arts Council grant – enough to live on for a full year).
And so I wrote my first novel and had another piece of luck in that Harper and Row were just setting up a branch to publish new Australian fiction and were actively seeking new writers.Never underestimate the value of luck in a writing career.
My moments of rejection all came later: for example, Faber didn’t want to publish my third novel (after modest sales and respectable reviews for the two they had published). I found this devastating, actually.
And now, living here in London, my last two novels have failed to find a UK or US publisher, despite great reviews and good sales in my native Australia, so that has been hard. Effectively, here in the UK I am an unpublished writer, and I have found that hard to deal with.
There isn’t really any magic answer as to how one deals with rejection – it depends on personality, how much support you have, on a lot of things. I’m lucky in that I have a wonderful group of supportive friends.
With your novels, what comes first – the plot or the characters?
Different things with different novels. I would say the idea for the book comes first usually – with my first book I wanted to write about the generation of women who were the first to be ‘liberated’ by the pill, and the effect this had on them.
In my second I wanted to juxtapose the wonder at the beginning of the twentieth century: pre WW1 and surrounded by great scientific and medical and artistic advances – with the fag end of the twentieth century: loss of anything to believe in, disillusionment and so on.
I don’t really know any writer who starts with plot – I think everything grows organically out of characters or images or vague ideas.
Do you have a favourite character?
It would have to be Billy from A Big Life – the character of Billy the tumbler just walked in. That said, I am fond of Emma in Flying Lessons and I have a soft spot for the terrible old sexist Bob Barton in Life in Seven Mistakes.
How do you make the transition from writing fiction to writing for memoir?
Hey, writing memoirs is easy – you know what happens! I’ve just finished another non-fiction piece, an essay On Beauty for Melbourne University Press, part of a series of essays on rage, digestion, indignation, obsession, and so on.
Writing non-fiction is like falling off a log; it’s like journalism, everything has its place and everything has a beginning, middle and end. Fiction is like pulling teeth in comparison.
You’ve said that you believe all writing is, to a degree, autobiographical. What do you think it is that drives you to express elements of your life in this way?
I hold the terribly unfashionable view that writers are born and not made – I couldn’t say what it was exactly that made me a writer, apart from the fact that writing became my means of fashioning myself in the world, of having my own way of controlling the world, or at least the illusion of having a certain command over it.
A lot of writers share the experience of being isolated from their fellows in some way – either in reality, through illness or poverty or else by their own personalities – and I certainly think this is true of me.
I am very much an introvert, although if you met me you would never know it. I am a high—performing introvert masquerading as an extrovert!
In your descriptions of your writing processes it seems quite organic – how much do you know about a book when you begin?
I either know the end before I begin, or else I haven’t got a clue. Mostly I write the end scenes when I am about halfway or two-thirds through. I am not a great plotter. I just tend to do most of the finding out through the characters…
Whose writing do you admire?
Some AS Byatt, certain Doris Lessing, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, an Australian novelist called Helen Garner, Anne Tyler, Marilynn Robinson, Nancy Mitford, Richard Yates, F Scott Fitzgerald, Lionel Shriver, the list is endless…
How would you describe your writing style?
It is literary fiction but it is not high-end, elaborate lit fiction. It is strong, emotional, muscular writing I think – people either love it or hate it!
Where do you carry out the majority of your writing?
At home, at my computer at my desk, but I have two sons aged 12 and 13 who also use it for their homework and I can never find staples or paper clips or anything I want. Now they are also going into my computer, which is a real nuisance…
What advice would you offer an aspiring writer?
It’s better to learn sooner rather than later that for every story you hear about a first-time author landing a million pound advance there are three thousand more authors out there lucky to be scraping a living. You have to really, really want to do it, and no one will be able to persuade you out of it if it’s what you want to do. Hang in there.
Is there a book you have written but never published?
No. The Australian writer Sonya Hartnett says she is constitutionally unable to write anything for no money, and I think that’s good advice. Doris Lessing says you can never remind yourself too much that the entire publishing world would not exist except for you.
What are you working on at the moment?
A novel called My Hundred Lovers, but it is proving very, very hard to write. It will either be my masterpiece or the book I have written but never published!
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