Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello authors. I'm Joanne Morrell, children's and young adult fiction writer and author of short nonfiction for Authors. Thanks for joining me for the Hybrid Author Podcast, sharing interviews from industry professionals to help you forge a career as a hybrid author both independently and traditionally publishing your books. You can get the show notes for.
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[00:00:42] Speaker B: Hello authors. I hope you're all keeping well in whatever part of the world you reside and listen to the podcast In Today's Interviews with Anne Vines on Flight, exploring passion and secrets in Wartime Melbourne and WeChat exploring love, war and forbidden desire in her new novel Flight. What draws Ann to this particular period in history and the inspiration behind the story itself? Anne's research for Flight and her surprising discoveries about Melbourne during the war that shaped the narrative, the relationships portrayed in Flight and what readers will take away Anne's publishing adventure, her burning advice for aspiring authors in the historical fiction genre or in the literature and publishing field, and much more so in my Author Adventure. This week I am still coughing and spluttering, but I feel a lot better than I did when I was sick. Down with influenza A last week, but still lingering. This cough is not going away. I'm still sort of coughing up phlegm, but it's all clear. Same as when I blow my nose. It's all clear. Not that maybe I'm over sharing here, but it's just one of those things, isn't it, with winter, how even though you can feel better and be better, things can just hang around. And yeah, I think it's sort of making me feel quite tired and whatnot. So I'm still chugging down the cough medicine and can't wait till it just clears up because it makes me sound like I'm a 70 a day smoker. It's not great. So I started my wine cellar job and yeah, it's been different to, you know, just do a different job for a while. I haven't done something like this before. It's quite a physical job, which is good. But yeah, I'm looking forward to learning about the various wines and then turning this knowledge into writing articles. So there's always a purpose behind what I'm doing. It's sort of. I hate that saying, killing two birds with one stone. But you know, I'm doing this job with the wine cellars getting A knowledge for a future aspiration of owning a vineyard, but at the same time monetizing it further by writing some articles on the knowledge that I'm going to gain. So any wine that has been tasted is spat out because I'm working.
And that is quite strange because I have never spit out a wine before. So I had to ask, you know, what are you supposed to do here? Are you supposed to swirl it around your mouth a couple times and then spit it out, or what's the actual goal? And, yeah, it's just enough. You just sort of swirl it around in your mouth enough so you're getting the taste of what the wine is. And, yeah, I mean, it's an experience, isn't it? Like, I. I know how to swirl, I know how to sniff, and now I know how to spit. And this spittoon thing, which. Yeah, but you can actually see the professionals that do it.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: A lot of people that work there.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: They'Re very into wine, they're very inspired. So school holidays are here. So again, it's a juggle between now, this job out of the home and the hybrid author business, as well as keeping the kids occupied. And so, you know, I made a schedule, as I do usually, for what I'd like to get done each day for the week. But the thing is, I think when you've got all this happening, any parents listening will know it's not feasible perhaps, to be sitting down and writing every day. It's what I want. But at the moment, writing routine is not in my. I don't have that habit. I'm sort of picking it up, putting it down, because there's other things that require my attention that people are waiting on for the podcast. As such, I figure as long as I've got a schedule of the work that I would like to complete each day, as long as that gets done of the week, then I know that effectively I'm moving forward. So, as everybody who listens to this podcast for a long time knows, it's all about just tweaking what works for you. Because life changes. You've got to roll with the punches and do what you can. Still happy to be where I'm at, having the projects I've got and the goals and plans I've got, moving forward, just moving forward at my own pace. And when I can be different, when school holidays goes back and then you've got a bit more time, I suppose. But that's just the juggling act between parenting, working, all of it. Wouldn't have it any other way.
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[00:05:50] Speaker A: Ann Vines is a Melbourne based fiction writer. Her novel the Shipwife was published in 2023. Her short stories have won a slew of awards including the Burundhara Award in 2014 and the Keith Caro Award in 2020. She was also commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript in 2008 and in the Varuna HarperCollins Award in 2007. She was also shortlisted for the Alan Marshall Award, the Age Short Story Award and the International Wasfiri New Writing Prize. Anne has worked on both her novels at Varuna Writers Centre.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: She completed a Bachelor of Arts at.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: The University of Melbourne in Literature and and taught in secondary schools and adult education in Victoria and London which led her to co write the VCE English and Literature courses. Anne's latest novel is Flight. Welcome to the Hybrid Author Podcast, Anne.
[00:06:44] Speaker C: Thank you Joanna. It's lovely to be here.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: We are so thrilled to have you. Thanks for joining us. Your new novel Flight, we're very excited about. You know, it explores love and war and forbidden desire and it's set against the backdrop of wartime Melbourne. What draws you to, you know, this particular historical period and what inspired the story itself?
[00:07:05] Speaker C: I think I'm drawn to it because it was a really exciting time in Melbourne and in a way the most important historical moment for Melbourne. And of course being born when I was a few years after the war I heard a lot about it from relatives, from parents, from aunts and uncles. I heard about what it was like in Melbourne during that time. And this always gave me a lot of questions because as a small person and then a young adult hearing about it, there seemed to be a lot that I wasn't hearing.
I became quite curious as well, to research and to read historians accounts and to talk to other people later in their lives told me what it was like in Melbourne during that time. I'm also very interested in war and why it happens, how it comes about the basis of aggression that seems to lead particularly men into taking part in wars. And I've always had a concern about that. I wanted to explore it in some fiction. I find writing fiction brings me very much to the questions that I'm interested in. And it's a wonderful way to explore through other lives and other personalities, how these events affect people.
[00:08:23] Speaker A: Well, that's incredible. Yeah, I can tell your passion and your interest there. So hence your university degree into and whatnot. So how did Flight come about? Was it the characters that were talking to you or just through, you know, your love of history and you just started to get a spark of an idea or.
[00:08:40] Speaker C: Well, I think it was the characters. And it was particularly walking around Melbourne one day I was walking in Collins street, which is one of our mart streets, and I was passing the Regent Theater, which was a cinema in the past. And I imagined. I suddenly imagined what it would have been like in the 40s when the American servicemen came and Australian girls would have been meeting them there. And I actually had a kind of epiphany with characters, visualization of characters at that time. And I wrote a short story. At first it didn't seem that I had a novel to write about it, but the short story stayed with me and I found the woman character very easy to imagine, but the man was quite hard to imagine. And so I had to do a lot of thinking, a lot of research and then writing to find this character. But when I did, it was quite astounding because there was just so much in the American background and the coming to Australia, seeing it through an outsider's eyes, seeing Melbourne through an outsider's eyes. And it just fascinated me. And I knew I did have a novel, though, when I had time, which was several years later, I did begin the novel.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Amazing. And you mentioned research there. What kinds of research do you take, you know, when researching the novel and just in general?
[00:10:01] Speaker C: Yes. Well, for that each novel is different, I suppose, but for that one particularly, I looked at historical accounts, but I also took a great deal of notice of what people told me about their recollections. I was lucky enough to know quite a few older people who did have strong memories of the war, and some people who even had strong memories of their romances with American serpents servicemen reading their marriages with American servicemen. So that was really quite wonderful. Also, I found, particularly in recent years, that there's a lot of visual material, There are a lot of films that one can find through library websites and other things that just give you such a wonderful view of what Melbourne was like at that time. In fact, I wrote a piece in the novel which is about my characters riding horses around the Tan, which is a pathway around the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. Then I found, when I was searching, there were actual films of people in their jodhpas and their beautiful knitwear riding around the town. It was empty, as I had imagined. But it was quite wonderful to find all that film material. There's such a lot of it, and I think we're very lucky these days that we can find not just newspaper material, but film material as well from the actual time.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Yeah. That's amazing. Is there any other sort of audio material and things like radio or anything like that?
[00:11:24] Speaker C: Yes, there is quite a lot, but particularly, I suppose, in terms of war experience.
And of course, yes, I did listen to that, and probably that's something that made a great impact early on in my researching. There's a lot of material of servicemen recollecting, sometimes recollecting being prisoners of war. And that also touches a little bit on my novel. Yes. So radio is always very rich source as well. Yes.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: Oh, it's amazing. So you do all the research first and then you collate it all and you're fictitiously making characters as you go. Or did you have a process that's been different between the two books, or was it?
[00:12:03] Speaker C: Yes, well, with this book, I suppose I began writing before I did any real research, because I was working from memories and conversations. But then I did a lot of research, but I tended to find that there were bursts of research and then bursts of writing, and then I would go back to the research, and of course, I redrafted and I changed the story a little here and there, and that would mean I would want to go back and find new things in the research. But also, people write books, you know, of course, about this. As I was writing the novel, there were people writing historical accounts and putting out new, updated views of what happened during that time, particularly in the New Guinea War arena. Been a whole lot of very, very detailed studies that have come out. And the Wool Memorial in Canberra, you know, has a wonderful bookshop and wonderful film possibilities to investigate. So I found that I did keep going back to the research because I write quite slowly, really thought I'd finished the book, and then I thought, well, perhaps I haven't finished the book.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Is it ever finished?
[00:13:12] Speaker C: Yes, redrafted a little. Although the elements and the characters stayed the same, they were very strong, strongly in my imagination. So. But the research I did find, I returned to again and again. So although I think you do have to, as a writer, say to yourself, okay, I now must write and stop, you know, sort of finding it easier to read other people's research, it still is good, I think, to come back to it and recheck things, even when you're at the publishing stage.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Yeah. No, that's amazing. Can you tell us more about your characters and, you know, some personality traits or what did you want readers to feel when you reflect on their relationship?
[00:13:52] Speaker C: Like, well, the character of the man in flight is Peter, an American serviceman, an American pilot.
And I really was looking for a character who had great deal of anger, but also a great deal of loneliness and a great deal of capacity for compassion and love.
When I was first writing the book, I was dealing. I was getting some help from Varuna, the writers center in the Blue Mountains. And Peter Bishop there, who was the director at the time, spoke to me on the phone on a few occasions about the book and about Peter, the character. And it was quite wonderful talking to him about it because I could see that it seemed to resonate with him. And he said, this is a particular kind of loneliness that men have. And so I was very interested to follow that up and just stick to my gun in a way, because, of course, when you begin with a character, you're really walking a little bit in the dark. But I found when I imagined Peter's childhood and went back to what he would have experienced in America, that was really worth looking at. And I found that because he was a person who didn't have a family, lost a family very early on, even lost an adopted family as well, quite early on. This was a person who had suffered a great deal of trauma. And so to go into the war in some ways was adding more trauma and in other ways was expressing his own kind of anger and aggression at the world. So that's the main male character. I can go on and talk about the women.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Yeah, tell us. Yeah, absolutely. The male Character sounds extremely full of depth and I think a lot of people will connect with that on some level. Please tell us about the female character.
[00:15:43] Speaker C: Yes, well, of course, there's also the war trauma that I explore, the PTSD and so on. With the male character. Well, the women. Initially I really only thought I was writing about one woman, but I did end up writing about at least two, which is rather nice. The main woman is Faye. She's Faye Beauregard. And one of my readers has said, well, that tells you everything about her, that name, and not quite, but certainly she is someone who comes from a very established and wealthy background. She's someone whose family have a great deal of prestige and she almost doesn't have to even think about that or think about her place in the world. So she's a person quite opposite from Peter, very secure, someone without much anger really at all. In fact, she almost appears a little too lackadaisical and accepting of the people around her, such as her mother and the man who wants to marry her. And when she meets Peter, she is quite changed.
So that's one of the things that I think is really interesting in the book. What happens to a rather self satisfied, smug lady when she finds a man who is not only very desirable, but also to some extent, a little unattainable and also someone whom her family disapproves of, her social milieu disapproves of. How does she find it within herself to fight for what she really wants and what she is hoping for?
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:17:17] Speaker C: So the other lady is quite different. The other person, the other woman in the book is a burlesque dancer at the Tivoli Theatre in Bourke Street, Melbourne. The Tivoli was a very successful burlesque comedy and music theatre. And my character is a young woman who's from a working class background who happens to be very good at dancing and also happens to be very good looking. So she finds herself a job at the Tivoli. That's how, of course, Peter sees her and comes to know her. And she also is very keen on Peter. But unlike Faye, she's much more of a realist and she's perhaps a little less confident in herself and her way of getting what she wants in the world. But nonetheless, she very much makes a play for Peter and I think it's rather almost amusing to see the steps that she takes and contrast them with Faye. So I have these two women who are really quite different and playing off each other in a sense. And they do meet and their meetings are quite interesting too. And I had a lot of fun writing those meetings between such contrasting characters.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I bet. As you're speaking, that's all I can think is how fun. It sounds like you've had a lot of fun, you know, constructing some drama and conflict there. No, that all sounds absolutely wonderful and fantastic. What about the publishing of Flight? How have you gone with the publishing journey?
[00:18:44] Speaker C: Yes, well, it has been a very long journey. I used to make a joke about how I was writing about the war and I was in a war about publishing.
It almost is how you feel because you. You of course, get the rejections at the start. It was a strange journey for me. The book, when it was first written, was a great deal longer and it received commendation at the Victorian Premier's Awards.
So that led to a couple of publishers approaching me and one publisher staying with me for a little while, but then declining. So I think I rewrote and I cut the novel into a smaller book, which it now is. The publishing approaches started again. I was very pleased when I did find my publisher, David Reicher, at Interactive Publications, when he saw the book, he was very interested in it straight away, and that was good. And he did have some queries and some changes and, you know, things like that. So one does have to be quite flexible, as I'm sure your listeners are very well aware when looking for a publisher.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. But I mean, that's the back and forth and the collaboration, I guess you can. You can kind of expect it. So how much did you trim it down when you said you. You sort of. You've cut it.
[00:20:07] Speaker C: Yes, quite a lot, really. In fact, what I've done is I took out the childhood sections about the male character, Peter, and they're in fact now in a novella. But I do think that there is a difficulty with that because I'm writing about the south of America and the north, but the south of America particularly, and quite a few agents, literary agents and publishers, said to me, well, they wouldn't really think they could publish this because I'm not in the Southern Writers Group in America, which it's a very distinct group that sees itself as having that material. And so if you. You attempt to write that material, you're not really going to be accepted. So I've had to come to realize that perhaps that section of the book, which is now a little novella, will just stay as something I've done and something very interesting, but maybe it won't get taken up. I suppose a third of the book went into that Novella.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: You could always repurpose it if you've got a newsletter and put it out as, you know, your lead magnet. Nothing's wasted.
[00:21:12] Speaker C: Well, I think that's always true in writing. Absolutely. Yes. Because often, even if you cut a whole section, you've learned a lot by writing that. And yes, often it deepens the characterization because, you know, those things that happened. And actually, one of the lovely things that happened with my publishing, one of the lovely things that happened was once I was working with David Reiter at Interactive at ip. He sometimes suggested or asked questions and pieces that I had written, thinking, oh, well, I can't really include them, suddenly became relevant. And I could say, well, I have actually written a piece about. To answer that question you just raised, I have written a piece where two characters break up or where two characters meet. And so I had those things sketched out and I could work those back into the novel. So there were some really wonderful parts of the publishing process where I could expand and deepen moments in the book and put in extra scenes, which made it a lot better, I think.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, no, that's amazing. I love that. I think it's nice to hear positive publishing journeys and things. It's. Yeah, it's definitely good.
[00:22:24] Speaker C: Well, do you have.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: You've shared so much already, Anne, but do you have any, you know, burning advice that you'd like to share with aspiring authors maybe, who want to write in your genre or with the publishing or any challenges you came up against, that you think, you know this now, next time you won't do that, or.
[00:22:42] Speaker C: Yes, I think it's important to not give up on your manuscript if you think it's one that you really want to write and you really want to see out there. I could have easily just thought, well, that was a novel that I'll never get to publish. But it really did take a great deal of persistence. So I guess one of my main messages always is, is persistence and to have confidence. It's very hard, and maybe particularly for women writers who are starting up, to have the confidence that their material is really important.
Was so thrilled when some people did recognize that book. And the first book I wrote and said, well, no one's done that before, or I haven't seen that before. And that's just a wonderful thing to hear. So if you are writing something, and even though it might seem a little outlandish to you, I think it's important to persevere and to take it through to the stage where you can give it to an editor. Or an agent or a publisher. And it's wonderful. The other thing I think is wonderful to do is to get people to read the manuscript early on, even first and second and third draft stage. I found people reading it helped enormously and particularly real writers who are published. I was fortunate to have a couple of people like that who did read the manuscripts.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's amazing. And I guess with the genre of writing and like historical fiction, do you have people sort of fact check things or. No, because you're. That's your field of expertise. But would you recommend people who maybe are from that background, credible sources? I suppose for one of the two.
[00:24:17] Speaker C: Yes. Yes, I think that probably would be very helpful. If you don't have a historical background or if you haven't studied history, it probably is very important.
I was speaking to an aspiring writer the other day who is starting writing something about a real Australian piece of history, and she has done quite a lot of research. I think if she really wants someone to come in and look at it. So I suppose fact checking or perhaps just getting someone who's written in the field, an historical person or another interested person or a person from the community you're writing about to have a. A look at the work, check in.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Oh, that's fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Ann. You shared such wonderful expertise. Flight sounds absolutely incredible. And I know our audience are dying to know where can they, you know, discover everything you do on and offline?
[00:25:08] Speaker C: Yes. Oh, okay. Well, thank you very much. Yes, yes. And of course, going to my publisher's website, ipos biz is a really easy way to look at the book and find out a little about me too.
[00:25:24] Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been wonderful.
[00:25:27] Speaker C: Thank you, Joanna. It's been lovely talking to you. And you've really challenged quite a few things about my own thinking about the book too. So I'll take those main things about them. Thank you very much.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Oh, fantastic. Thanks again.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: So there you have it, folks, the exceptional Anne Vines.
Next time on the Hybrid Author podcast, we have a loner sold from me behind the book, why I Wrote the Writer, the Hairdresser and the Nurse.
This loner sword is a little different. I want to take you behind the scenes of my latest women's fiction novel published under my pen name, Zara Ellen. This book is incredibly close to my heart, and in this episode, I'll be sharing the why behind the story, how these characters came to life, and what I hope readers take away from their adventure. If you're a writer working on emotionally charged fiction, or you just love a good story about messy, realistic women? This one's for you. I wish you well on your author adventure. That's it for me. Bye for now.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: That's the end for now. Authors, I hope you are further forward in your author adventure after listening. And I hope you'll listen next time. Remember to head on over to the Hybrid Author website at www.hybridauthor.com to get your free author pass.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: It's bye for now.
