Judging from the two novels that came out in one year, and the third one already in the works, you are undoubtedly a prolific writer. This makes me all the more curious about your writing routines, especially being a mother of four. You’ve already shared some of your routines but how exactly do you find the time and space to work on your manuscripts? And do you have a fixed workspace from where you write at more or less fixed times, or do you squeeze in time for writing whenever and wherever you can?
SC: That is a great question, because I love to hear how other authors do it. I am fascinated, because every author always thinks of other authors doing it so much better. I work in a very small study, which is about the size of a closet and has no windows or natural lighting. My husband finds this hilarious and a little unhealthy, too. He worries that it is just not natural to sit in a small windowless room for hours on end with the doors shut. When he tries to work an hour in the shared study, he finds it very difficult. For me, the reason I am fine with that space is because I am not there. It is because I will be inside my mind, I will be in Sri Lanka in 1932 or in 2014 and, most recently, I’ve been in Sri Lanka in 2009. So, I am not in the room, the physical room, but mostly in the past.
From 2013 to 2016, I had a very good routine. Whenever the children were not in the house, I would sit down to write. When my youngest child started school, I was able to do this more effectively because I had no children in my house then. I used to walk the children to school, with the dog, and run back to start my day of writing. I am quite organized and disciplined and try to ignore everything else during the middle of the day. Chances are I did the laundry at ten o’clock the night before, because I yearn for my time to write. There are a number of things that eat into my writing time but on a “writing day” I will sit down at 9:15 to write and at 2:30 a really loud alarm will go off to give me 15 minutes to pull myself out of wartime Sri Lanka and allow myself to re-enter the leafy streets of our neighbourhood. And then I will be with my children in the way they deserve it. So, I have a really compressed writing schedule, which can be very stressful because there is so much to say in so little time. All the things that parents do, I will try and do late in the evening, like cooking dinner for the following night, bulk producing spaghetti bolognese and chicken curry, answering the endless notes from the PTA. This is how my day used to be structured in the past.
BH: So how has your routine changed, and what prompted you to change it?
SC: With my third novel, I tried out something different. It was very deliberate because that year of my life was a very unsettled one. We had a lot of sickness in the family, and I returned to work as a lawyer. So, I had things that pulled me away from writing, and I was becoming increasingly stressed and anxious that I was not writing my third novel. I had an idea, but I was not able to create or protect the time to write. I remembered Stephen King’s book On Writing where he says: “just put superglue on your bum and bash it out”. It’s easy for Stephen King to say this because he is a full-time, successful and well-paid writer, but I thought, OK, let me try this. He sets himself aggressive targets, like 3,000 words a day in six hours of writing. I was at a stage where I just could not give it six hours of writing a day. But I could put superglue on my bum, and I could set some targets for myself. I am very target orientated, perhaps because I am a lawyer. If you set me a target, like a robot, I feel the need to achieve that target. So, I would say 500 words a day or 1,000, and I would secretly be aiming for 2,000. I wrote the first draft of that third novel in eight weeks because in every spare moment, I would try to channel Stephen King. Even if it were only for ten minutes, I would sit down and just bash it out. I didn’t look at it again. I didn’t read it. I didn’t ask myself if it’s any good because those questions are the death knell. I just tried to bash it out. And then I had to stop when my first and second novel came out, so I didn’t look at the draft until some four months later. I was terrified to open the document, to look at what I had actually produced. I went back to it very anxiously but, for a first draft, it was okay. It needs a lot more work and it needs energy and it needs time. I have been doing that this year, but I need to do more. As a first draft, it wasn’t terrible though, and I was relieved to realize this.
BH: Indeed, it must have been very reassuring to realize that you were able to pull this together despite your disrupted and unpredictable schedule. How would you describe the next stage of writing a novel, that is, your process of editing a first draft?
SC: It is different, but a big job. For the next round of edits, I really feel that I need a lot of time because I actually need to restructure it. I can edit language while I am in the car waiting to pick up a child from their guitar class but, for a structural edit, you need to step back and look at the whole novel. Then, you need to step in and look at individual scenes. You constantly step out and step in, and this process requires time. I do not have much time any more because I’ve returned to running a social justice program. Given that writing is not necessarily a way to create a sustainable income for a family of six, I have focused back on being a lawyer at this stage in my life. I feel fortunate to return to the law after a few years of not working in the paid economy, and I am very fortunate that it’s a job that I love.
But I do hope that I will be able to write at least a minimum amount that nourishes my soul. Time and fatigue are my worst enemies. I need to think, once again, about Stephen King and work out how to make time my friend. And I do have an hour or two in the evening if I can overcome my fatigue. Of course, we also need to allow ourselves to not write. We have to recognize that all the other things that we’re doing are valid and necessary because, as writers, all we want to do is write. That is all I want to do. I want to be with my children and my husband, occasionally hang out with friends and then write some more. I would very happily have a completely binary life where I am either with my family or writing, either writing or with my family.
BH: Maybe one day …
SC: One day, one day.
BH: I gather that that Song of the Sun God has been accepted as the basis of a TV series. Could you give an update on the progress of that project?
SC: I’m excited about the proposed TV series. Olivia Hetreed, BAFTA-winning writer of Oscar-nominated film Girl with A Pearl Earring, will adapt the novel for Synchronicity Films, producer of the recent ABC / BBC drama The Cry, and Australia’s Dragonet Films. Olivia is working on a six-part series based on the novel, and the adaptation will focus on the youngest generation through Smrithi, a young woman living in London, who is disconnected from her culture and long-held family secrets. I have been working with the team over email and was fortunate to go to London in January 2020 with Karen Radzyner from Dragonet, to work with Olivia and Claire Mundell from Synchronicity in developing the adaptation. The team has created a compelling overview of the series which is now being pitched for development funding.
BH: A final question about the process of your writing. I was wondering how you gather and develop ideas. Do you simply type them into your computer? Or do you prefer to keep a notebook where you can jot down notes or map out more complex ideas like the intricate web of family relations in Song of the Sun God?
SC: I make notes of interesting ideas or scenes—sometimes a scene will just flash into my mind—or words. I love words. I have a notebook where all of this just gets dumped but sometimes I will put up a file on my computer where I collect ideas for future books. I keep this document secret somewhere in my computer because I think my husband would be terrified to see it—“What? You haven’t finished with the third book?” But when I write, I write directly into the computer. For Song of the Sun God, I did do some writing on a notepad because my children were much younger then, and I often needed to sit in a doctor’s waiting room or one would have speech therapy, and for an hour or so, I would just handwrite scenes. But nowadays I write directly into a computer and I actually prefer it because it is very fast, and it allows me to check my word count. A good day of writing, though, is a day when I forget about the targets because I am absorbed into my world. And when I emerge from that world, I realize that in those few hours, I wrote 2,000 words. You know, that is a beautiful day. And there are days like that. They are a real joy, and I feel that they are good for me.
Bibliography