Why be a writer?

"WASTE of time, that" gruffed my father when first told of the writing dream many, many years ago.

Hemingway

"WASTE of time, that" gruffed my father when first told of the writing dream many, many years ago.

It almost stopped me in my tracks; I was that much of a yes-girl, pleasing programmed into my female DNA. I tumbled into radio journalism, used that as a front for the secret passion; Dad had no idea. He was happy, I was happy. But the want was too insistent, and alongside the reporter's notebook was always the writer's journal. Jotting, endlessly jotting, conversation scraps, title ideas, the taste of a sky, the sadness of a smile, the whisper of a story.

Six novels down the track I'm asked again and again by aspiring writers how on Earth it's done; what's the secret. God knows, I'm always thinking, it doesn't get any easier. Write as if you're dying, I tell them; it's a great motivator. It's a little like Liza Minnelli's advice to an aspiring singer: "Remember to sing every song as if it's the last time you are ever going to sing it."

That secret formula? Tenacity. Discipline. Self-belief. The ability to keep at it no matter how many heart-sinkers there are around you; all those people telling you to give up, all those swamping rejection slips and believe me, I've had a few. The apprenticeship was short stories, for years, sent off in scatter bombardment to Australia's various literary journals and gradually I'd find that someone, somewhere, would gloriously, soaringly, take one. An early heart-lifter? Les Murray, Quadrant magazine's literary editor, who sent me a rocket-booster of confidence when he accepted a story about three generations of coal miners in the family. Dad didn't read it.

I didn't show him. Wouldn't dare.

It's never been easy, the writer's journey. Bank managers always look at me askance when the chap and I try to get a mortgage ("I think we'll just stick with your husband's details.") The mentor was the wise and gentle novelist Glenda Adams, during an MA in Creative Writing. "Nikki, the hardest thing is to get the reader to keep turning the page, to not bore them." By oath, and I've had her words in my head ever since. Always close by, a postcard of a Picasso bather - for its sheer audacity and energy. That's not a bather but it is, of course. And the Ezra Pound battle cry: "Make it new." It's the aim, as a novelist. Create something fresh and startling and bold, a new voice, a new way. Risk. Dare. Disturb. "For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment," Ernest Hemingway said in his Nobel acceptance speech, "he should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed." And never forget the need to enchant. Draw a curtain around the reader; cosy them in. "A book ... needs something to say and it needs to know how to say it," the British editor Simon Prosser said. "As readers, we want to be flirted with, flattered, gripped, excited, seduced, transported. (It's hard to avoid the language of the erotic)."

What I've learnt over the years: Writing hurts. Women who write feel too much. Honesty is the most potent thing of all - it's amazing how much support you get when you tell the truth. And it's the hardest thing I'll ever do but nothing else gives me such a quietness of the soul; I'll not be talked out of it.

My beloved Dad didn't impart any writing skills. But he gave me a sense of persistence, and tenacity. He first went down the pit at 16 - and after a lifetime of all manner of jobs he's underground again (born 1934, that's the Aussie mining boom for you). When he settles down with a tome now he hates the light from those newfangled bulbs, so puts on his old miner's cap lamp to read. It's never my books. My first novel, Shiver, had a word on page one he didn't like. He snapped it shut and hasn't read a single one since. I'm, er, rather pleased about that.

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