Mike Murphy's writing diary: April 2015

Tuesday, 7 April 2015

So much has changed - but not my writing

A lot has happened to me in the past eighteen months. My wife died and I moved from my home on a remote property on the south coast, where I was becoming increasingly lonely and depressed, to a suburban lifestyle sharing a house with my daughter.
So much has changed, but one thing is constant - my writing. I have completed the first draft of my latest novel and I'm two thirds of the way through the first major edit. It will be ready soon to go to a writer friend to be critiqued. In some ways my writing was my salvation. By making myself sit down at the keyboard every morning (well, most mornings), I gave myself goals to work towards and an intellectual exercise to keep my mind what was causing me to be depressed.
There were days when I had to force myself to write and, in the rewriting process, it is very clear where that happened. The important thing is that there is a framework there, an on-going story line within which I can now improve the writing.
I have had to close the writers retreat but it was pleasant on those occasions where I did have writers in residence. Now I am working on the creation of a writers centre near my new home. An invitation to local writers to attend the launch later this month produced more than 30 responses so I am very hopeful it will be a success.

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.