My mate Mark is a brilliant multi-instrumentalist, composer and songwriter. He has created about five CD’s worth of material and worked with some of the well-to-do members of the music industry in Australia including compositions for ABC TV and one of the Hunter boys (ex ‘April Sun in Cuba’ Dragon) but you wont find his stuff on the shelves in Sanity. In fact, unless you’ve seen him live at Arthur Boyd’s Bundanon or festivals, it’s unlikely you’d have a reference point for his brilliance. He’s an unpublished musical genius.

Mark is disturbingly Zen about his lack of fame and his life. He’s busy with the chop-wood-carry-water experience of being a musician, father, teacher and partner. And he’s content. Content in a way that a corporate banker might struggle to understand.

I try to model Mark’s Zen in my own life but I’m impatient and prone to fits of rage and frustration. Things never happen fast enough or big enough or never live up to my mind’s pyrotechnic vision of what they should be.

I’m an author. My sixth book of young adult fiction (Gravity) came out with Pan in July ‘06. I prowl the festival circuit, run workshops in schools and give corporate talks like some half-baked pop star. I’ve sat on signing tables with the Carmody/Griffiths/Marsden/Gleitzmans (all successful Australian writers) of the world, humbled by the serpentine queues of star-struck kids and parents. I twiddle my pen and know that I’m lucky. That there are writers more skilled and inventive than me who haven’t come this far. I know there are literary geniuses out there, some banging their manuscripts and their heads against the clean glass doors of the publishing industry. We all know some dreadful shit gets published while our manuscripts are overlooked. We’ve all read other people’s stuff and known we could do better. It’s so subjective. It’s the fine art of tickling peoples’ fancy. Your fancy, a publisher’s fancy and hopefully a reader’s fancy. Some published and unpublished writers are content to write as a hobby. They do the thing they love (write) and stay happy, either content to ignore fame, fortune and glory or simply enamoured by the journey with no grand destination.

I’m learning the importance of chopping wood and carrying water in a writer’s life. It may sound like a pissy defeatist’s aphorism but I can assure you that it is as significant a tool to the writer’s craft as a clear head and fresh ideas. In fact, one leads to the other.
Any published author will tell you that the world doesn’t change colour after you’re published.

Sure, seeing your name on the cover of a book is a serious cut, wax and polish for the ego but it probably won’t make much difference to the state of your bank balance.

It certainly won’t make you any cooler or sexier. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be up a little earlier with a transitory sparkle in your eye, wood to chop and water to carry.

And that’s a blessing.

I hosted a work experience student for a week last year. She helped me transcribe my current novel from the written page to the computer. She could type faster than me, write with flair and honesty and was fifteen years my junior. She hadn’t finished school and she already knew that she wanted to write. I found myself getting envious of her talent, passion and direction … until the last day. Until I realised that she wasn’t interested in chopping wood and carrying water. She asked me what she had to do to become a writer so I gave her my slant on it.

You have to write, obviously, and the more you do it, the better you become. And you have to read. Der. The more you read, the more you come to understand what you like and dislike about the writing that has found ink before you. That’s your style speaking to you. What you like and dislike about other people’s writing is your innate sense of good writing/story/craft bubbling up from your history. What’s good for you might not be good for the publisher who reads it but may be earth-moving for the publisher in the next office.

That’s the easy part, she said. I love to read and I love to write.

Okay, find a job. Not necessarily one that involves writing because you could end up like a plumber with a leaky tap at home. Good jobs for novelists are not always academic or glossy and professional.

"The more you read, the more you come to understand what you like and dislike about the writing that has found ink before you"
For me, a good writer ’s job has to provide one of two things: it has to give you the time to be in your own head or feed you with story. I’m still writing ideas that came to me while pulling blackberries when I was a teenager. Mindless physical work that gave me the space to cogitate. At the end of a day, I’d be knackered, rich (!), buzzing with ideas and I’d leave behind a tract of arable land.
I earn about as much as a schoolteacher from my writing and speaking. I’m not sad about that. Schoolteachers work much harder than I do and they rarely get the opportunity to wear their pyjamas to work. I’ll be published overseas soon and I know when it happens I’ll probably be washing my kids clothes or getting something organised for tea.

Some people in the media have compared my work to (Australian children’s and young adult writer) John Marsden’s and I’m honoured by that but John and I share a more significant passion: we ‘re part of an elite group of people who enjoy pulling out blackberries. I met a publisher at one of John Marsden’s workshops at the Tye Estate and she liked what I sent her. She published it. I never got a chance to collect a rejection slip. Sometimes it’s not what you know …

Burning Eddy was shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year for older readers and the NSW Premier’s Literary awards in 2004. It’s been raining at home—at last—and all the firewood my wife and I split is getting wet. When I get home I’ll have to kick the generator in the guts and pump some of the rain up the hill for our showers. Shift wood, pump water. You’ve got to love it. It’s the wellspring of the writer’s life.

Scot Gardner lives in Victoria. His beginning as an author s one of those wonderful mythical stories which give budding writers hope. He was “discovered” (which actually means his talents were finally identified) at a John Marsden Writers’ Conference at Tye Estate in January 2000. Since then has published six critically acclaimed novels for young people, though not-so-young people also love them. For more information, go to www.scotgardner.com.