Interview with NICK EARLS

Welcome back to the Black Sheep Pen. This month I'm very excited that Nick Earls has agreed to be interviews for the project. Nick is an award winning author from Australia, writing novels, short stories and recently, plays. For a full list of his works, please check out his homepage and of course, take advantage of the wonders of the WWW to buy some of his books if you haven't read them already! I've usually been, if not the same age, certainly in the same generation as most of Nick's protagonists, and I think this has allowed for enormous resonance with (and reassurance from!) their stories of dealing with life and its changes as a young man in Australian society. Please enjoy Nick's contribution.

Nick's self portrait

© Nick Earls, 2010

What inspires you in your creativity?

I’m intrigued by the workings of people – what they think, why they think it, why they do what they do. Writing fiction is a great way of exploring that. I’m also driven by the challenge that it is, every time. Every story starts out feeling like a puzzle I don’t quite know how to solve yet.

What is the process you apply to being creative in your field?

I’ve realised that some of the best idea start out small, and don’t look like much at all. I’ve become better at recognising them, and not losing them. I make notes and I file them away. Eventually a couple, or a few, start to to look as though they might fit together in an interesting way. Then I give them a push and see where they go. I start asking who they might be about, and more possibilities come along. Once a cluster of ideas gets some momentum, it gets its own folder. Over a year or more, ideas that might fit get thrown in. Some of them come along by chance, others by putting some deliberate thought in. I’m thinking divergently then, and throwing nothing out. Then, when the folder is fat enough, I have to think convergently. I look at all I’ve got and try to get a sense of what my main story and other storylines will be. Then I move the elements around – literally, on the floor – until I think I’ve got the shape of it. Then I sit at the keyboard and turn it into an outline. For a novel that might be 20,000 words. By then I have not only a lot of story details worked out, I also know my characters pretty well and I’ve found the voice of my story and my narrator. Then I write the first draft. Some people prefer to write that draft with far less planning than I go through, but their first drafts are likely to be far, well, draftier. They learn a lot from draft one, and their draft two might be more like my first draft. But we each make our own choices about how we work.

Where does the confidence or motivation come from to keep doing what you do?

Confidence has never been a big feature. Early on it was more about resilience, and about being unable to resist the nagging urge to write the next story. It’s still that urge – the need to solve the new unsolved, unmade puzzle – that keeps me writing. It’s a good reason to write, I think. Of course, it’s also my job now, so it’s handy to write a novel occasionally. But that would never really work for me as a motivation. For me, it’s too much of a pain in the arse to write a novel to do it for any reason other than compulsion.

How do you evaluate your success as a creative person?

I try to talk myself out of evaluating it in terms of numbers. It’s easy to do that, but almost nobody wins. Dan Brown wins. The Da Vinci Code’s sold 80,000,000 copies and it turns out my novels haven’t. But no one actually needs to sell 80,000,000. I guess better benchmarks are things like:

• did I do justice to the ideas I started out with?
• did the end result mean something to someone?
• did I learn something that might be useful next time?
• do I still want to do this job?
• is the marketplace going to let me keep doing this job?
  

So, it’s not until right at the end that filthy commerce kicks in, and it only kicks in because I need groceries.

Where should people start, when they don't know where to start?

They should look and listen, and read and think, and play with ideas, and not be in any kind of hurry. Starting is not staring at the blinking cursor on the blank screen, or at a blank canvas, since I don’t think those are the first steps. We’ve all started already. We just haven’t all worked that out yet.

© all images and text Nick Earls, 2010.

Thanks to Nick for this very thoughtful contribution to the project, and the generosity and thoughtfulness in the ideas. I am particularly and immediately struck by one of Nick's benchmarks for success - did the end result mean something to someone? I suspect this is a big issue for many creative people, the question of who are you producing your creativity for. Personally I know that while there is an ongoing compulsion to express myself, the meaning in that comes primarily from that expression initiating some kind of connection or interaction with other people.

So, the Creativity Challenge for this month is 'simply' to consider who you would like your work to be meaningful to, and in turn what that then means to you.