Australian
entertainer and author Jane Clifton guest blogs for Readings to
tell us the story behind her memoir
The Address Book - in which she tracks down all 32 houses
she's ever lived in.
Ideas for stories flutter into the brain like birds through the summer window. Flapping their wings in panic, trying to escape, tripping the light switch in the writing room, rustling the leaves of the notepad. You have to be ready, but you never are. You’re always in the middle of doing something else: driving the children to school, preparing dinner for twelve, swimming, watching a film, getting you nails done. You have to pounce or that idea will fly straight out the window again and try as you may you will never remember exactly the colour of its wings, the shape of its beak, the way its beady eye looked at you and that little song it sang.
If you are lucky enough to capture just the one, it will be many months, years sometimes, before you can actually take that first feathered flash of brilliance through to its logical conclusion. And while you’re at it, more ideas will fly through the window distracting you from the task at hand. You must be disciplined, keep regular hours, exercise, study, work hard, because books take a long time to write.
I came to professional writing from a street-theatre world where you wrote the show in the evening and performed it in the park the next day. A rock ‘n roll world where you rehearsed the songs in the afternoon and played them in the pub that night. A cabaret world where you could run an entire show twice in a day before opening a few hours later on the same night. Instant gratification world. Books take a long time to write.
The Address Book took almost six years from first flutter of an idea to the finish post. But now it’s done. It’s on the bookshop shelf beckoning all comers.
I am at the window now, with my finger on the latch and seed on the sill.
