In Episode 58 of So you want to be a writer: The disappearance of the vocative comma, how to write blog posts when you don't want to, Bundanon Trust residency applications now open, 10 author platform examples, the rules for non-fiction manuscripts, Writer in Residence Pamela Hart, the value in routine, and much more!
Pamela is an award-winning author for both adults and children. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Technology, Sydney, where she has also lectured in creative writing.
Under the name Pamela Freeman she wrote the historical novel THE BLACK DRESS, which won the NSW Premier's History Prize for 2006 and is now in its third edition.
Pamela is also well known for her fantasy novels for adults, published by Orbit worldwide, the Castings Trilogy and her Aurealis Award-winning novel EMBER AND ASH.
I’m so excited to do this interview with you. For listeners who may not be familiar with your latest book, The Soldier's Wife, please tell them about it first.
Pamela
Well, The Soldier’s Wife is a historical novel set in Sydney during World War 1. It doesn’t go to the battle fields, it concentrates on the lives of the people who stayed home. The soldier’s wife of the title, her husband, the soldier, his life is based quite a lot on my grandfather’s war record in Gallipoli.
Valerie
Where did this idea for the book come from? When did you start thinking, “Oh, I might write this book…”?
Pamela
It was interesting that I did it because of the centenary of Anzac Day, but, in fact, that didn’t even cross my mind.
I was invited up to my son’s school a couple of years ago, because he was the only one in the class who had a direct link back to Gallipoli. For Anzac Day his teacher asked me if I could bring in my grandfather’s medals to show the kids. We have his medals and his dog tags, but we also have some documents. We have his war record and his conscription papers, and we also have a copy of the telegrams that were sent to the family when he was wounded. He was one of the very few people who were wounded in the retreat from Gallipoli, almost Christmas, the 22nd of December.
I read the telegrams out to the kids. The first one says, “We regret to report Private Arthur Freeman is wounded.” The next one said, “We regret to report Private Arthur Freeman seriously ill.” The next one was ‘dangerously ill,’ and then ‘still dangerously ill,’ and finally ‘out of danger’.
I started to think what would it be like to be the person who got those telegrams, because just reading them aloud was terrible, the kids were like, “Oh god.” I was thinking, “Yes, it would be horrible to be the person who got the telegrams.” But, the person who got my grandfather’s telegraphs was his sister, because he was an orphan. He put his age up to join the army. I thought it was more of a story if it was a wife, somebody who was really in love with a person who was wounded. And that’s really where it started.
Valerie
Did you start writing the story knowing it was going to be a book, or were you just sort of toying around this idea inspired by your grandfather’s situation?
Pamela
No, I actually think I started writing the book, because the story itself, the broad sweep of the story came quite quickly when I started thinking about it. And I should say here that I’ve done quite a lot of research into Australian history for other books that I had written. And, so I had a background, I didn’t — the other books finished in 1909, so I had six years to fill in and I knew a reasonable amount about World War I, but not the details of what it was like to be at home, because all of the text, all of the books are about the battlefields. But, I knew it was a book right from the beginning. It was very scary because I hadn’t really written anything like that before, it was a change of genre, a change of audience. So, it was a very scary book to write.
Valerie
Following on from that, I mean have known you now for ten years, but I’ve always known you as Pamela Freeman. Can you tell us why you are writing as Pamela Hart for this book?
Pamela
Well, The Soldier’s Wife is being published by Hachette Australia. And they are also the publishers of my adult fantasy novels. They are published under Pamela Freeman. When they went to try to sell these into the bookshops they did quite well, but they did find that booksellers really thought of me as a children’s writer. This is my 28th book, but 24 of those were for kids. The booksellers really thought of me as a kid’s writer. And, because this was such a new genre and it wasn’t likely I would be taking very many readers across with me from fantasy they decided they would rebrand me. Hart is my married name, which I’ve never used, I’ve always been Pamela Freeman up until now. My mother-in-law is very excited.
Valerie
I bet!
You said that the story came to you quite easily and quite quickly when you started thinking about it, did you know most of the plot before you started? Did you know the end, how it was going to end? Or were there elements that you needed to figure out as you went along?
Pamela
I had no idea how it was going to end, up until it ended, which is very different from the way I usually write, which is another reason it was a scary book to write.
I did know that the basic principle was that Jimmy, who is the soldier, he would be away for the first part of the book in Gallipoli, and that his wife Ruby would be changing during that period, because 1915 was a period of very rapid change.
One of the ways to show that is just to look at the fashions of the day. For thousands of years woman had worn skirts down to the ground, and in the space of a year they were showing ankles for the first time. When you think about it in those terms, thousands of years of women wearing long dresses and suddenly — in European culture I’m talking about here — suddenly ankles and even calves were being shown off. That kind of big shift happened very quickly after the war began.
Things like the price of bread doubled in 1915. There are things that people have no idea about, like there were food riots in Melbourne during the war, of course prices of staples went up so much.
It was a period of very rapid change and I knew that my female character would be changing with it. And, then I knew that he would be wounded and he would come home and they would have to cope with that change.
Valerie
Obviously you had to do a lot of research for this book, can you tell us what kind of research you had to do to ensure your story was authentic? When you’re researching you could go down so many rabbit holes, how do you determine what to research in the first place?
Pamela
Research is pretty addictive, actually.
Valerie
Yes.
Pamela
Obviously I had done a lot of research for my earlier books, but the big issue was what people at the home front, at home, what did they know about what was happening? We know all about Gallipoli because we’ve grown up with it. But, there was no TV nightly news, and it took a long time for stories to get cabled across to Australia, out of Gallipoli in the first place and then across to Australia. Of course they didn’t call it Gallipoli, that was another thing, they called it Anzac. And it’s not too quite late that it’s called Anzac Cove even.
What I needed to know was how did contemporary people talk and think about the war, and the best resource for that is the newspaper and the diaries, of course, and letters. The Australian War Memorial has a fantastic collection of letters and diaries, but the great research tool for anybody researching Australian history is Trove, which is the National Library of Australia’s websites. They have digitized almost every newspaper in Australia going back to European settlement.
For example, the weather in the book is the weather. I would look up every date… when I had a new scene on a particular date I would look up the weather and see what it was. It’s funny because people go, “Oh, that’s a great piece of research,” but actually it made it a lot easier. Weather is one of those things that writers struggle with, you know, because you don’t want to have the pathetic fallacy where when someone is sad it’s rainy. But, on the other hand you’ve got to talk about it because it’s part of the way people live and it affects people quite strongly. I quite like the fact that I could use actual weather, but the newspapers were really important.
Any time found, “Oh, I need to know that…” almost always I could find it in the newspapers — how much things cost, how much things were a yard, because she does a lot of sewing. There was a great series of articles about how to put together good meals, like a recipe sort of thing in the women’s pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, but they told you how much everything cost. There was a lot of information like that about daily life in the newspapers.
And when I couldn’t find what I needed I went to experts, so I got a lot of help from people like the Commonwealth Bank archives and the Australian War Memorial archives, and even some professors who had done specific research into things like how much rent was at the time.
Valerie
And you told them, “I’m writing this book, can you give me some advice so that I get it right?” Is that right?
Pamela
That’s right. And people are very, very helpful, even people who it’s not their job to be helpful, they’re helpful. People do want it to be right, if it’s their area they want you to present it correctly. I’ve very rarely have been turned down with a request for information.
Valerie
The topic of war can be very harrowing. Obviously, a part of this book is based on the experiences of your grandfather, was it difficult or emotional at times to write certain aspects of the book?
Pamela
It was, but not because it was based on my grandfather. I never knew him, he died before I was born. He never talked much about his experiences. He was very involved in — a founding member of the RSL at Parramatta and was very involved with kind of veterans’ affairs stuff, getting help for people. But, he didn’t, as far as I can find out, he didn’t talk about it much.
It’s more coming to grips with the fact that everybody was grieving. The soldier of The Soldier’s Wife, Jimmy, he doesn’t die, doesn’t die in the war, but other people do who are in the book. Some of the book is about dealing with that fallout of the grief of the people left behind. That was quite difficult, to be honest, to write about those sorts of things, honesty is hard.
Valerie
You mentioned that this is your 28th book.
Pamela
In a way it’s my 30th, but the other two are children’s picture books and they’re not coming out for awhile. So, I wrote them before I wrote The Soldier’s Wife, but because it takes time to illustrate things…
Valerie
Sure, so your 30th book, take us back 30 books ago, to when you became interested in writing in the first place. Is it something that you wanted to do when you were little, or you discovered it later in life? How did that work?
Pamela
Well, I didn’t write when I was little, but I did decide that I wanted to be a writer when I was about 12. I think that was the time when I realized that the books that I loved so much had actually been written by people, real actual people, possibly even in Australia, because most of the books I read in those days were English.
I wanted to be a writer, but I thought my life was just absolutely boring. I grew up in Sydney’s western suburbs, and I had a wonderful childhood in the sense of being very loved. But, having a wonderful childhood does seem to the child to be boring, I think. Only later on do you realize how lucky you were.
When I was 15 I decided I wanted to work in television, because I knew it was hard to make a living as a writer, and I thought, “Well, I will work in TV while I’m doing that…” you know? And in the end that’s what I did.
I was working as a script writer at ABC kids when I first started to write stories for kids, so I was a script writer and researcher there. I started writing stories, which I had done very little of. I had done practice writing, I was a fan fiction writer, you know? A lot of people who go into science fiction and fantasy writing, as I have done, were fan fiction writers to start with. I, for one, don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that.
Valerie
What fan fiction were you writing, Pamela?
Pamela
I was writing Star Trek.
Valerie
Pamela
I was a bit of an Spock fan when I was 15, you know?
I was writing poetry. I realized in my 20s that I was never going to be better than a mediocre poet. In my late 20s I started writing stories for kids, along with scripts for them. My first stories were published in the New South Wales school magazines. One of those stories was called Betony’s Sunflower. It was about a princess. I was very interested in that character and the world she lived in, so I wrote another story about her, and another story about her. And, eventually those stories together became my first book, which was The Willow Tree’s Daughter. And the funny thing is I’m still writing about Betony, I have a whole series ongoing about Princess Betony.
Valerie
You’ve obviously written across many different genres, do you have a preferred one? Or if not a preferred one, then at least one that you find easier to write over another?
Pamela
If you count them up I’ve written more fantasy books than anything else. But, I have to say there’s always been this strand of historical fiction coming through. I mean fantasy novels, particularly I pick fantasy novels like the Castings trilogy, they’re set usually in pretty industrial landscapes and societies. I did a huge amount of research about how do you make a bow, how do you make glue out of fish scales, the kinds of things that people did then. I was always as interested in that kind of research as I was in the fantasy element of it.
I must say I am really enjoying writing historical fiction. I’m in the middle of a new book, The War Bride, and a whole different set of research about surf life saving and boat building. I love the research, but I also love the sense of continuity with the past, this is Australia in the early 20th century, this book is set in 1920. And, like The Soldier’s Wife there’s that sense of exploring where my family has come from, where my society, my culture has come from, and I’m really enjoying that. I suspect historical fiction may be the go for some time yet.
Valerie
Tell me you need to do all of this research and you know you need to find out the price of bread or what rent is, whatever research that you need, do you actually determine that at a the start and do this whole ton of research and then start writing? Or do you write an research as you go? Or do you write and then fill in the research later?
Pamela
All three.
Valerie
Really?
Pamela
If there’s big stuff that I need to know about, then I will do the research first. So, for The Soldier’s Wife I needed to know about transport, because how long it takes for him to get to Gallipoli, because there’s a lot of letters involved coming backwards and forwards. I needed to know that. I needed to know things like how did she get her money, as he allocated a certain proportion of his salary to her, how does she get that money? And nobody knew, that’s where I had to go to the Commonwealth Bank archives to find out.
There were big things that I knew were necessary to the plot, which I did prior to writing. There were things that I did on the go, like the weather, before I sat down to write a scene I would just check that day’s paper. And, then there were things where I would write in big capital letters ‘CHECK’. It wasn’t that important how much a leg of lamb of cost, I could find that out later, you know? So, I would keep writing before, write to the end of the day’s scene and go back and check. I have a thing where I do big capital Xs, two capital XXs anytime there’s something missing, and then at the end of a draft I will go back and I will just search for those double XXs and I will fill those pieces in.
Valerie
When you had that seed of an idea for the book and the story came to you quite quickly, can you just give us some kind of idea of a timeline, like, from when you thought of the idea to how long you wrote for until you got a first draft, and was it consistent almost full time writing during that period, or in snatched periods of time? Just give us an idea of that.
Pamela
Well, I got the idea just after Anzac Day two years ago. It’s almost exactly two years to the day from when I got the idea to when the book is being published. That’s very fast, very fast. It probably wouldn’t have been that fast if it hadn’t been for the anniversary coming up.
It took me five months to get a first draft, and that included a little bit of research at the beginning. The first draft of the book only was not ready, it really wasn’t ready to show anybody and I tidied some up. There was one strand of the story I wasn’t sure about, and I knew that the beginning was a bit flat, but I didn’t know what to do about that.
Then I have beta readers, my husband who is my alpha reader, but then I have beta readers. Because I have been in the industry for a long time I’m lucky enough to have beta readers who really know what they’re doing. One of those, by the way, was a student of mine, who has gone through the novel writing class and who I really respect her opinion about fiction. She was kind enough to do that for me. I incorporated some of their comments and problems that they had with it, because there’s always problems, there’s always an issue.
Then when I was about two-thirds of the way through the first draft I rang my old editor, my publisher at Hachette, because I didn’t know how long it ought to be. Not ever having written one of these books before I just wasn’t sure. So, I rang Bernadette Foley at Hachette and said, “How long should a historical novel be?” And she said, “Why, what have you got? Let me see it.” I was in a very fortunate position of having people who wanted to look at it straight up. She looked at it and then said, “No, it’s not ready for me to take to acquisitions. She and I had a long discussion, which was effectively was a structural edit, and I went back and completely rewrote the second half of the book and significantly changed one particularly element in the first half, which made it a much better book as a consequence.
Valerie
What was the most challenging thing about writing this book?
Pamela
Being honest, the most challenging thing was falling in love with the main male character, because I didn’t. If you write a love story you’ve got to feel about the character the way your main character does, otherwise you can’t get that across. And Jimmy was not the kind of person that I, myself, would have fallen in love with. He was very different to my husband. My husband is the only person I’ve ever been in love with, so it’s always a stretch for me. I had to work quite hard at that.
In the end the way I managed it was to have him write another whole series of letters to her that he never posted because of the censor, because during the war, of course, the censor read every bit of mail that came off the battlefront. A lot of men didn’t write the letters they would have liked to have written. He wrote them in a notebook. I normally type everything straight onto the computer, but in this case I curled myself up in the smallest space that I could with a tiny little notebook and a pencil, which is the way he would have written them. I wrote those letters as though I were him.
Valerie
Wow, method writing.
Pamela
Method writing, yeah. I had to do something to really connect with him. And it worked, it worked, I’m quite happy with him as a character now. But, yeah, that was the hardest thing.
Valerie
What was the most rewarding thing? Apart from finishing it.
Pamela
Well, I guess the reaction has been fantastic. Given that it’s a new genre for me, and I didn’t have a contract, usually I have a contract when I write a book, because I have ongoing relationships with my publishers and I put proposals to them and I get the contract on the base of the proposal, but I wrote this on spec. In many ways I feel like this is my first novel, it’s almost like starting again, and I’m just as excited about this one as I was about my first book.
I guess the fact that it’s getting published is amazing. It wouldn’t have surprised me if it hadn’t.
Valerie
Of course it was going to get published, it’s a fantastic book!
You’re our director of the creative writing faculty of the Australian Writers’ Centre. I hear a lot of comments from people I meet who say, “Oh, I don’t have a talent for writing,” or, “I’m not born with it.” Do you think creative writing can be learnt?
Pamela
I think everybody has a book in them, but the people who are not real writers only have one, and it’s usually their story, their memoir story, or something about their family or their background or something, something that is really important to them. And those people who only have one book in them, those people need a lot of help.
I believe if you have a story that you really want to tell, we can help you tell it, you know? I think that people get scared because they’re not good at essays and they’re not good at the long, complicated sentences that got top marks for English when they were at high school. But, in fact, a lot of what we do is unlearn people, we teach people to not do the sort of writing that they did for English, because that’s not the way you connect with a reader. If people are prepared to be really honest and really brave, and to take criticism and to adjust what they’re doing on the basis of the criticism, yes, I believe that we can help anybody to tell the story, if they want to tell the story badly enough.
Valerie
Wise words, wonderful.
I think this is one of the best books I’ve read this year, Pamela, and I’m not just saying that because you’re one of our teachers — it’s awesome. I have the uncorrected proof, however, I’m sure it’s not very different to the final version.
Pamela
No.
Valerie
I just think people should just do themselves a favor and get a copy because it’s just wonderful.
Pamela
Thank you very much.
Valerie
No, it’s the truth.
Do you have some parting advice, because obviously on this podcast people are listening because they want to get into writing, or they want to get published, do you have some parting advice? If you had one piece of advice you could leave people with what would that be?
Pamela
I like Pat Farmer’s advice, which is the number one reason your book will never be published is that you haven’t written it. If you want to be a writer you have to write, and you have to prioritize it.
People say, “Oh, I would like to write a book, if only I had time…” if you are watching three hours of television a week, you have time to write a book.
Valerie
Yes.
Pamela
You just have to give it priority.
Valerie
Wonderful. Sage advice from Pamela Freeman, Pamela Hart in this case. Thank you so much for your time today, Pamela.
Pamela is an award-winning author for both adults and children. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Technology, Sydney, where she has also lectured in creative writing.
