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Deb Fitzpatrick - Weaving real-life stories into fiction
Deb Fitzpatrick writes books for readers of all ages, especially adventurous kids with big hearts. Her books have received awards in Australia, been published in the US and optioned for film. She lives in Fremantle, Western Australia, and loves encouraging young writers in her creative writing workshops. Deb enjoys hiking and bushwalking with her family. When she can, she sneaks away to a shack in the karri forest of the south-west of Western Australia. She loves weaving stories from real life into her work.
In this episode of Not the Plot she speaks with host Teena Raffa-Mulligan about her experience of living in the cloud forest of Costa Rica and how it influenced the creation of her novel 50 Packets of Instant Noodles. She also shares insights into her writing process and the inspiration she draws from nature.
To find out more about Deb and her books visit her website at Deb Fitzpatrick | Writer in Fremantle, Perth Western Australia
Thank you for listening.
Find out more about Not the Plot host Teena Raffa-Mulligan at https://www.teenaraffamulligan.com or follow her FB author page https://www.facebook.com/TeenaRaffaMulligan You can also sign up for her occasional newsletter at http://bit.ly/2gqsJz3
Hi, and welcome to Not the Plot, the podcast that seeks out the inside stories on the creative lives of writers and artists. I'm Teena Raffa Mulligan, lifelong reader, writer, sometime artist, and daydream believer. I've always been interested in finding out what inspires writers and artists to create what they do and how they navigate the inevitable highs and lows of their creative life. Let's find out what today's guest has to say. Deb Fitzpatrick loves hiking and bushwalking with her family. When she can, she sneaks away to a shack in the Carey Forest in the southwest of Western Australia. She loves weaving stories from real life into her work. Deb is the author of 11 books for readers of all ages, which have received awards in Australia, been published in the US, and optioned for film. Her latest novel for middle readers is Tawny Trouble, and a new edition of her debut young adult novel, 90 Packets of Instant Noodles, was also published this year. Deb regularly teaches creative writing and has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from UWA. She lived for several years in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, where she did a lot of hiking, while two cans, three toad sloths and spider monkeys crossed through the forest canopy above her. Deb shares her life with her lovely family and their Kelpie. Deb, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.
Deb Fitzpatrick:Thank you so much, Teena. It's lovely to be on the uh podcast with you. Thanks for the invitation.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Deb, what is it about writing that keeps you coming back to the page?
Deb Fitzpatrick:I think it's the thoughts that come into my head when I'm in between projects that just tickle me and make me think, oh, that's a character I'd like to write about, or that's a setting I'd like to explore in my writing, or um, I want, you know, I want to keep writing about this theme or that theme. It's actually the stories that occur to me in between the writing projects, I think. Because once I'm in the middle of a writing project, I kind of can't get out of it. Like I don't particularly want to do the writing necessarily, but I more have to because then I'm committed to it and I've told my publisher or I've told myself and I'm halfway through a novel and I have to keep going. But this the desire to write comes actually when I'm not writing.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Ah, now that's interesting. So you said you don't necessarily want to write, but there is a desire to write, obviously, or you wouldn't do it.
Deb Fitzpatrick:It's a funny thing, Teena. I find I find writing wonderful, hard work. I find writing first drafts extraordinarily difficult. I'm a pantser, not a planner, so I literally don't know what is going to happen in terms of specifics. I know a very loose, I have a very loose image in my mind. And so it's quite stressful and exciting to kind of front up to the computer each day and sort of know that I need to, I need to come up with another, you know, five to eight hundred words each day when I have really no idea what I'm going to write about, except that I have now made a commitment to writing this book, and therefore I have to stay on that path. And so sometimes I find it incredibly difficult. And obviously, there are many, many times during that process that I am delighted by what I'm doing, but it's not all delighted, you know, it's a whole lot of other stuff too.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:It's interesting because when you said you're a pantser and you don't know what's going to happen, I can relate to that so well. But it sounds like you do sit yourself down regularly at the computer and decide, okay, today I'm writing.
Deb Fitzpatrick:Yeah. And I have to. I long, I long ago came to the realization, Teena, that um if I wanted to be a career writer, I was going to have to front up and do it like a job, even if I didn't have that sense of being inspired to write in that moment. And, you know, it's sort of the practical um side, the business side, the practical side of being a writer kind of comes over. And I do have to make myself sit down. And I have all these psychological blocks around writing. So when I come to my computer on a writing day, I'll unless I have a clear idea of what I want to write next, which is very rare, I will do anything other than open the document, the Word document. I will check my emails, I'll check the share market, I'll check my website, I'll do anything other than actually write words because it's so stressful or it's very challenging, and I uh might not be up to the task that day, and that will be a dreadful day.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Do you set yourself daily word tallies?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Yes, I have to be very clear with myself on that. So I read uh Graham Green quote that I've kept close. I read this many years ago and I've I've worked to it ever since. He said, if you write 500 words a day, very soon you'll have a novel. And I really have followed that and it has it has borne out to be true for me every single time. I often can only write about 500 words. Occasionally I'll smash out a thousand, that's a really good day for me. And I find that if I do that say three or four times a week, that's say two thousand words in a week, that's a good week for me. And if I can do three or four weeks in a month like that, then that ends up being six to eight thousand words. And if I'm writing a 20 or a 30,000-word novel, you could potentially have a draft in say three or four months.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Now, you've also done a lot of editing in your time as well as writing. So, do you edit as you write?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Yes, and I think that's why I'm very slow. I'm also a very slow reader of books because I think I can't take my writing brain out of reading a book. So when I'm writing my own, I am rereading those sentences unless I'm on a flow and I just have to get an idea down, which I will let myself do and tell myself just to keep going, to get these words down. They'll come out in a jumble and it doesn't matter, you can go back. Unless that's happening, I will reread that sentence before and I'll change the order of the words and I'll change the perspective or I'll turn it into a scene or dialogue. And that's partly why those 500 odd words come out so slowly. But I the other side of that, Teena, is that at the end of that day, those 500 words, whilst they will be all edited edited again the next day by me before I start writing my new stuff, they will be relatively clean and relatively workable. They won't be a complete mess.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:I can relate to so much that you're saying. I work similarly in that I'm not as disciplined as you, definitely not these days. Maybe I was more so in the past when I was more driven to get books out there and submit to publishers. These days I find I can be very haphazard about it. But like you, I don't know what's going to happen next on the page. I am creating my first drafts very slowly, and I edit as I go. And once I've finished that first draft, it's much less of a first draft than other writers would have, because I can't just spew it all out onto the page and fix it later.
Deb Fitzpatrick:That's right. And so, Teena, you and I clearly work really similarly. And the other thing I find about myself is that I don't write large numbers of words. So I'm I'm always trying to aware that I write in a very paired-back um style. My writing is very efficient, I suppose, or economical. And all of my books are quite slender. You know, the longest book I've ever written was 60,000. And I find that sort of, it's sort of like an endurance sport. You know, for me, writing a novel of 60,000 words is exhausting and I don't always have the stamina to do it, which is why as I've got older, I've noticed that my books have become shorter and for younger readers. And I'm really happy with that. I love a 20,000-word length book because I am not that writer who writes 40,000 words for a 20,000-word book. Whereas I talk to my other writer friends, like Meg McKinley, she says, I'll always have at least double. I'm like, oh, oh my goodness, I couldn't do tha t. I will often deliver my publisher a 15,000-word manuscript, knowing that in the process between Kate reading it and it being published, I'll probably add another three or four, five thousand words in that editing process with her.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:So that takes me to your past publication. Was it smooth or was it a bit bumpy?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Do you mean the most recent one?
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:No, from deciding that you were going to be a writer to becoming a published author.
Deb Fitzpatrick:No, bumpy, bumpy. I mean, in the sense of me writing and wanting to write for publication, smooth. Once I realized that how once I saw how much pleasure I gained from the writing process and the creative process working in small writers' groups and getting feedback from publishers or or editors and that sort of thing, once I realized that that that was going to be very motivating for me, I never really stepped back from wanting to be a writer. So the wanting to be a writer was there, but the getting the first novel published took a good eight years from finishing the first novel to occur. So I just I had a lot of interest from publishers. I had interest from an agent, a really fantastic agent took me on, and she shopped it out to the the big houses. And a lot of them were like, oh, we're interested in this. This is great. Could you just do this or would you consider that? Or, you know, could you could you ramp up the excitement or whatever? And so I did all that. I always sat down, I worked really hard to to do what the publishers were asking of me because I'm aware that you know I was a beginning writer and it's not a solo endeavour. You do it in a in a team. You don't get a book published on your own, you do it in a team of people. And um, so I was really happy to do that, but but gee, it still took eight years for a contract to come through for 90 Packets of N oodles, which was not the first novel that I wrote.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Usually they're not, are they? The first one that sees the light of day.
Deb Fitzpatrick:That's it. It was the third one that I wrote. And then I was able to go back and get those other two published. But you know, I mean, Bren McDibble, she says that she wrote six novels, none of which were published before she wrote the first one to be published.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:So it's an interesting industry, isn't it?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Yeah, it's really hard. Perseverance and persistence really are for me much more important than your personal talent or skill as a writer.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Is that what you point out to the writers who come to your creative writing classes, that you need to have other skills aside from a talent to write?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Yes, absolutely. You know, obviously not everybody is writing for publication, and s o one needs to be aware of that. But for those who are, and you know, who are submitting their stories to competitions and anthologies and those sorts of things, we just talk about the fact that getting an acceptance is is a rare thing. It's incredibly competitive, and you just need to keep going and know why you're writing. Hopefully, it isn't just to be published. Hopefully, you're doing it because you're trying to understand yourself or you're trying to understand the world, or you know, just other reasons than just the satisfaction of being published. That's not enough, in my view.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Now, in your bio, you mentioned that you like to use stories from real life. How does that work in practice?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Teena, for me, it just it's like a no-brainer. I mean, there are things that I enjoy in my life, like bushwalking, as I mentioned. I love nature, I love native animals and birds, and these things are just things that I've naturally woven into my writing. And as I've gone on in my writing career, I've realized that readers love these things too, particularly children. And what I've understood is that I can lean more heavily into those interests. Whereas as a beginning writer, they were just small elements of my writing. Now, those things, writing about nature, wildlife, solitude in nature, and those sorts of things, these are really big parts of my of my writing. And I really enjoy exploring them and knowing that readers will too. So these are just things that I love from my own life, and I find it very easy to weave these things into my writing just through incorporating those things into the the how the habits of my characters.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:We can't really take ourselves completely out of our stories, can we?
Deb Fitzpatrick:I can't. Not everybody's got that incredible imaginative um mind, the sort of the JK Rowling, the J.R. Tolkien mind to be able to create everything from this. I don't have that. That is not me. I need the stimulation of the world around me to give me images and thoughts and experiences that I can then weave into my writing. I don't have a great imagination. It's not a big thing that I rely on.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:That's interesting. So you sneak away to a shack in the forest. How long do you go for? And do you just write the whole time you're there? Or is it to regenerate your creative spirit?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Yes, more the latter. I actually rarely write when I'm there, but what happens is in the rejuvenation that I am able to enjoy when I'm there, my creative um needs, my creative cup is refilled. And so when I come away, or perhaps when I'm there, I'll just get a few little ideas down. Mainly it's a personal rejuvenation, and then there'll be experiences of being in nature that I'll just put us put away, tuck away, and might pop back into a piece of writing that I'm doing a bit late later on, or not at all. You know, it can just be a rest. Look, there have been times when I have gone down to that shack with the sole purpose of finishing a draft, and that is a very useful thing. And taking myself away from my normally my normal home life and family and the demands of a home and whatnot can be incredibly valuable to not have to be cooking and other things like that, um, not have those distractions, the social distractions. So, though, from the point of view of the writing, the solo time in the shack is incredibly valuable on a number of fronts, whether it's practical writing or that other kind of restorative cup filling, reminding myself what it is I love about the world that I want to share with kids who might read my books.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:I can understand that. What took you to Costa Rica? That must have been such an inspiration.
Deb Fitzpatrick:Well, it was, but it took a long time for it to become an inspiration. So that was my husband's fault. He wasn't my husband then, but look, we'd been backpacking in South America for a while, and he'd started his PhD back here in Australia. He deferred it for a while, and and he found a place in Costa Rica that were very interested in his research. And so they invited him to come and do some work with them for a few months. It was three months, and we said, Great, that sounds fabulous. So we took a plane over to Central America, Costa Rica, and we went and rented a little shack in the cloud forest for three months while Stu did this research up there, and it was an incredible experience. But what happened then was that the Institute of Monteverde, which is the place that had employed him, said, Look, can you stay longer? And Stu wanted to, my husband wanted to, and I wanted to because he wanted to, but for me, it was a very difficult decision personally, because we lived in a shack that had no telephone, it had no internet connection, you know. I was learning how to speak Spanish. We were very physically isolated and very culturally isolated, and so for me personally, I found it incredibly challenging. And for the first year, I was really, really mixed about it. I looked out my window and I could see the spider monkeys and the howler monkeys and the toucans, and it was a wonderland of nature. So, from that point of view, it was incredible, and those are the things that I most loved about it. But until I got my Spanish up, I really struggled and I was actually really quite unhappy while I was there. I was quite depressed, and we ended up living there for four years. I had to do a lot of kind of a rearranging of my life, what I had wanted to do and thought that I would be doing. So it was really an interesting time. But you know, it was the making of us, Teena, and and we're still married. It was actually our wedding anniversary yesterday. And, you know, in that last year that we lived in the shack in Monteverde in Costa Rica, I wrote the first draft of 90 Packets of Instant Noodles, which is the first book that was ever published of mine. And all of those feelings that I'd experienced, all that depression, the isolation, the loneliness, the fear, the anxiety, and the wonder that I'd experienced of living in that cloud forest in the shack, away from my culture and away from my family. I crammed into that book. And that's partly why it's such a it's such a raw, angry, sad, kind of beautiful book. It's all in there. I just was like, this is it. This is the last book I'm gonna write, because it was the third novel I'd written. The other two hadn't been published. I was in Costa Rica and I was a little bit, you know, missing home horribly. And I was like, this is it. I'm putting everything into this book. And what's happened is this book has never been out of print. This book is beloved by year 10 and 11 students and young readers of that sort of teenager age. And it's just been re-as you said in the intro, you know, it's just been re-released in a new edition. So it's a really funny thing. It was the hardest thing in my life was to live in the cloud forest for those four years, and yet it's given me so very much.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:I would imagine that an experience like that is such a personal learning experience. You'd find out a lot about yourself and what your expectations are from life and from your relationships.
Deb Fitzpatrick:Yes, that's exactly what happened, Teena. I was launched into an in a really deep dive into well, who are you, Deb Fitzpatrick, and who do you want to be? And and what are you going to, what are you going to try hard to do in life? And what do you need? And what can you not tolerate? And these were the sorts of things that I had to go through, as well as just the simple deprivations of kind of living in the forest where the water would go out regularly, the electricity would regularly go out, we would have animal visitors in our in our shack, and army ants would take over the shack and you'd have to leave. And, you know, I had to learn how to speak another language, which doesn't sound like much, but it's a huge, it's a huge intellectual endeavour to learn another language well enough to be able to speak with people so that you can have a relationship with people. You know, I couldn't have genuine friendships with people until I could actually communicate meaningfully with them. And that isn't to say, where is the nearest bathroom and where do I catch the bus to so and so? You know, it's it's meaningful conversations and those things, without those things, I was I was really lost. So it was such an interesting time. I learned so much about myself, a lot of which I didn't like. I was very disappointed in myself, actually, very disappointed. Um, but I had to accept that too.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:If you were going to start over, is there anything you would do differently about becoming the author that you are today? Or has it all been necessary to shape that author you've become today?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Such a good question. I mean, to be honest, I feel as I've had such a fantastic writing career so far. And I know I've got a couple more books in the pipeline. So I feel very lucky, Teena. Very, very lucky. I feel as I've had a fantastic run. And so because of that, I suspect I probably shouldn't go back and change anything. But one thing I do notice is that I, when I think back to me as a younger child, um, whilst I was very good at writing and I knew that I was quite good at writing and I liked writing, and I knew that I wanted to work in the world of writing, I never ever believed that I could or should become a writer. I thought that was for other people to do. I thought perhaps I'd work at a library or work in a publishing house. And, you know, those things, some of them I've done and were fantastic choices, but I never thought I could be a writer. And I think if I could change anything, I would change that belief in myself from a young age that it would be possible to do and that therefore I should pursue it.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Well, I'm certainly glad you did. I remember reading your first book when it when it actually came out, and I can understand why it has remained in print all these years. If you were giving someone advice on pursuing a career as a writer rather than writing because that is what they're compelled to do and they don't care whether they're published or not, what would you say?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Oh, well, I would probably say be prepared to do work that you don't always enjoy. And that is, you know, writing, even if you're writing what you choose to write, it's not always pleasurable, it's not always fun, it's not just a fabulous ride, it is hard work. Sometimes you, you know, quite often you go through a huge internal turmoil about whether or not you're good enough to do this work. And so there's it's it's there's a real struggle element of writing. And I would tell anyone who thinks they want to be a writer for life that they need to commit to the work and be prepared for it, not to always be an absolute bundle of laughs.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:And on a lighter note, if you were going to be stuck in a lift with someone, who would you want it to be and why?
Deb Fitzpatrick:Oh wow. Um, I mean, you know, somebody comes to mind, Teena, is just someone I was chatting to the other day, Mark Greenwood, who's an amazing children's author. And he's just such a great storyteller as well. And he can tell the story verbally so well, but his books are wonderful as well. So if I was stuck in a lift with someone, I think Mark Greenwood would be a damn good choice, actually. It'll be a good fun wait while we get the techie people to come and save us.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:And that's a great choice. I reckon he would be a good storyteller. Well, thanks so much for spending the time with me today. It's been lovely to chat with you and to hear more about your writing process and your experiences as a career writer. I hope you do continue to produce all of these wonderful books that you're producing.
Deb Fitzpatrick:Thanks, Teena. It's been so lovely to talk to you today. Thanks for your time.
Teena Raffa-Mulligan:Thank you for listening to this episode of Not the Plot. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation and will join me again as I find out the inside stories on the creative lives of writers and artists. Until then, I'm Teena Raffa Mulligan saying goodbye for now and happy creating.