Mike Murphy's writing diary

Monday 5 September 2016

As part of my research for my current novel I am reading Steve Harvey's "Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man" and find it a fascinating study because while Harvey and I seem to share a lot of fundamental beliefs about male/female relationships, we express them differently and have very different ideas about how males and females should approach each other, Perhaps that's not surprising since he's a black American comedian TV show host and I'm not. He seems to be saying men don't have to change but that women have to be more clever in understanding how men think, Somehow I think that is a bit patronising, especially the way he presents some of his ideas about how men think. My view is that both everyone has to recognise the changes taking place in society and adapt to them, and the only way to do that is through learning to listen to each other. It's something I'm working on at the moment in The Man Who Didn't Like People. My protagonist has a bad case of not wanting to change and not listening but he is going to have to if he is going to solve the dilemma he is facing.

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Authors I like

Anna Jacobs

A mentor in my early writing days and still one of my favourite authors. Her sagas about family life in Lancashire are among my favourites but she is a prolific writer and it's all good.

Michael Robotham

Michael urged me to keep writing when I was in a depressed period after another publisher's knock-back. He is basically why I kept writing and turned to self-publishing. I've read all his books and I'm always waiting eagerly for the next one.

Dave Warner

I only recently discovered Dave as a writer after having had his Dave Warner and The Suburbs album since it was on vinyl. It's interesting having another writer who sets his stories in Western Australia.

Dick Francis

I've read all his books at least twice and sometime more often. He's the writer I always return to when I need to feel totally in my comfort zone. Good stories, tight plots, easy writing style. I'd love to know if it really was his wife Mary who wrote them. His son Felix is doing a great job of keeping the family business going.

Leslie Thomas

Ever since Virgin Soldiers I've been hooked on Leslie Thomas and his Dangerous Davies series are among my all-time favourites.

I am because I write

I come across a lot of people who would like to be writers and I often wonder why. For me there has been no question. Since a very young age I have been a writer. Certainly not a famous or even successful one but while other people were doctors or teachers or sportspeople, the thing I did best and was most comfortable doing was writing. For some reason I had a natural flair for it and that raw talent was honed when I became a journalist and learned that what bubbled out of my head was not what was needed. I had to to be able to write to order. One of my earliest lessons came from Bob Duffield, a reporter who took the story of the closure of Perth's Roe Street brothels and wrote different versions of it for convervative, sensationalist, religious and sociological publications. I learned that writing was a craft to be learned, and I have spent many years learning not only the craft of writing, but of story-telling, which is an art in itself. Whether it's a poem, a short story, a novel, my family history, one of my blogs or web sites, I will always be writing something. It's simply who I am and what I do.