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Book pages 2This blog also appeared on the Random House ‘Random Blogs’ website on 5th April 2010

I find it very easy to lose myself in my writing, and once I do, I often feel more like an observer within the story rather than its creator. On coming back from one of these reveries it can seem like I’m waking up, since I’ve usually forgotten where I am. During these times, one of the absolute pleasures I get from writing is when my characters turn around and do something completely unexpected. When I was working on Come Back to Me, my husband would give me the raised eyebrow on occasions where I would excitedly announce that ‘Wow, my character did something so strange today… it took me completely by surprise’, or, ‘I found out something I never knew about my character today’. And I don’t blame him – depending on how you look at it, this sounds anything from a little bit pretentious to borderline insane. However, I’ve heard many other writers talk about experiencing the same thing. I’m inclined to believe that it happens when your imagination is firing so well that the process of creation is occurring spontaneously rather than through concerted effort. This doesn’t happen to me all the time, but it does occur now and again – and then I find my stories going off in directions that I’m quite sure were not in the original concept.

However, on evaluating such occurrences, while sometimes I love them, at other times it looks more like my characters have just been having fun running amuck in my head upon realising I’ve let them loose. Which is why it is great to be able to put my editor’s hat on again, and examine just what these new events are doing for my story. Ultimately, are they contributing to it, or taking it off on too much of a tangent. Because now and again it’s not a bad idea to remind my characters who’s boss.col-md-2

Peruvian flowersI’ve reached a very exciting point in my fledgling writing career. With the two novels that have dominated my mind for the last six or seven years now completed, I finally get to let loose all those other little seedlings of ideas for what might make a great story. I’ve already whittled them down to a chosen few that I’m germinating both in my mind and on paper. I’m playing around a lot with different concepts and seeing what begins to bed down and grow. I have notebooks full of ideas and short pieces of writing, so I don’t feel stuck. The challenge is to come up with a clear and compelling plan that I can begin to work on in earnest. I had this crazy notion that I might take a short hiatus in between writing, but it seems that a writer without a story is like a sad little droopy plant starved of nourishment. Oh well, nothing for it but to keep scribbling and see what happens!col-md-2

Past and present interweave in a story that traces the Gordon family from the arrival of Scottish immigrant Hamish Gordon in the 1850s to the life of his great-granddaughter Sarah, on their family property, Wangallon, in the Australian bush.

I was lucky enough to see this debut fiction novel before it was published. An engrossing multi-generational saga set around Wangallon, the Gordon family homestead, this multi-layered story of romance, risk and family secrets by Nicole Alexander, ‘Australia’s Newest Bush Storyteller’, is highly recommended.col-md-2

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