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Kelly Doust

Kelly Doust

Category Archives: Inspirations

Happy International Women’s Day

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by kellydoust in Art, Books & films, Inspirations

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Adele, Advanced Style, Big Magic, Coco Chanel, Frida Kahlo, International Women's Day, Liz Gilbert, Sarah Jane Adams, Tamara de Lempicka

I write about women for women. Marriage, motherhood and career, as well as art and fashion; these are the themes that most intrigue me and are what I want to read about myself. Let’s face it, the only men likely to read Precious Things are either in my group of friends or immediate family so I thought – given that it’s International Women’s Day – I’d share with you some of the women who most inspire me and why:

01-big-magic-book-review

Elizabeth Gilbert
I went to see Ms Gilbert at the Seymour Centre for Sydney Writer’s Festival on Friday night, and she was just as warm, engaging and intelligent in person as I expected her to be after reading her work. The Signature of All Things was one of my favourite novels of recent years, but it’s her writing on writing in Big Magic that blows me away. It’s made me look at creativity in a whole new light and inspired me to change my own writing practice.

EBEIl2ol

Adele
I think this British singer is the most talented woman in music today. She’s also willing to be raw but with real dignity – something we’re crying out for. The new album, 25, is all kinds of awesome. I heart it.

frida-one

Frida Kahlo
What a life this woman had. Whenever I’m feeling weak or in pain I think of what she went through with her health and tumultuous marriage, and how she transformed it into thought-provoking and powerful art. Her work is rich, colourful and an enduring symbol of Mexico. Frida was the bomb.

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Tamara de Lempicka
The original glamour woman of the art world, de Limpicka’s works are sumptuous and sensual and, for my money, the best examples of the cubism movement. The most fashionable portrait painter of her generation, she was feted at salons across Europe and didn’t give a fig what people thought about her fluid sexuality. All power to living such a fearless and adventurous existence.

'In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different' - illustration of Coco Chanel by Zoe Sadokierski for my book, A Life in Frocks

‘In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different’ – illustration of Coco Chanel by Zoe Sadokierski for my book, A Life in Frocks

Coco Chanel
Because she emancipated women through the power of fashion. Because she was unapologetic and impeccably stylish. Because she was, no doubt about it, a glorious broad.

Some other women I’m going to fangirl in the name of IWD: Cheryl Strayed, Isabel Allende, Joanne Harris, Kate Morton, Nigella Lawson, Cate Blanchett, the sass & bide duo, Helen Mirren, Sarah Jane Adams and the rest of Ari Seth Cohen’s Advanced Style mob. There are many more examples in books, politics, charity and my own life (of course of course) but these very public women provide a blueprint for creativity, style and chutzpah.

Who are the women who most inspire you, either alive or from history?

Writing groups and getting into character

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Books & films, Inspirations

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characterization, writing groups, writing process

An image to work from - my 1900s character, Rose

An image to work from: my late 1800s, early 1900s character

So I’ve joined a writing group. Our plan is to share a piece of writing – possibly a chapter, possibly a short passage – in the interim since we’ve last met, and we’ll reconvene each month. It’s not such a lot to achieve, but knowing that I’ll have to prepare something for the next meeting should keep me on track. Novel two is due on 1 May next year, and it’s already feeling a lot closer than it seems.

If you write, have you ever thought about joining a group? I’ve always been a bit nervous about it (the exposure!) but of course groups are fantastic for keeping you motivated. And we’ve set a strict rule of confidentiality – no sharing plots with friends or family, which have a way of turning up everywhere once you decide to write something.

We had our first meeting last Thursday. Although it’s early days, I’m feeling quite excited. There’ll be five of us – a big group – and I’m genuinely intrigued by the book ideas the other members shared. I think it’s going to be quite inspiring. Each of us is at a different stage with our novels and we’re all working on something completely different. Just to begin with, they suggested some ideas about how I might unfold my central mystery. I don’t think I would have hit upon this myself – five heads are definitely better than one.

For years I’ve been meaning to answer the famous Proust questionnaire for each of my characters, so we’ve decided to do this for our next meeting as well – at least with our main protagonists. It’s always illuminating reading the celebrity responses to these questions in the back of Vanity Fair, but I found this particularly fun when thinking about how my key characters would answer (read David Bowie’s answers here if you have a moment “What is your favorite journey? The road of artistic excess”).

If you’d like to give it a go yourself, here’s a (slightly amended) version from The Write Practice. One of my characters has answered the top ten:

  1. What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being adored
  2. What is your greatest fear? Not making an impact
  3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Submission
  4. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Artifice
  5. Which living person do you most admire? Emily Pankhurst
  6. What is your greatest extravagance? Fashion
  7. What is your current state of mind? Confident
  8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Temperance
  9. On what occasion do you lie? When I feel cornered, to impress
  10. What do you most dislike about your appearance? My feet (do you remember when Naomi Campbell said this? It’s always made me laugh…)
  11. Which living person do you most despise?
  12. What is the quality you most like in a man?
  13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?
  14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
  15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
  16. When and where were you happiest?
  17. Which talent would you most like to have?
  18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
  19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
  20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
  21. Where would you most like to live?
  22. What is your most treasured possession?
  23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
  24. What is your favorite occupation?
  25. What is your most marked characteristic?
  26. What do you most value in your friends?
  27. Who are your favorite writers?
  28. Who is your hero of fiction?
  29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
  30. Who are your heroes in real life?
  31. What are your favorite names?
  32. What is it that you most dislike?
  33. What is your greatest regret?
  34. How would you like to die?
  35. What is your motto?
Evening dress of the 1800s

Evening dress of the 1800s

Another practice I’ve found helpful is finding likely pictures of my characters and what they were wearing on the interwebz. It helps clarify them in my mind and can also be nifty when it comes time to describe them. Descriptions change a lot throughout the course of a book, so clear images are a great grounder.

What are some of your best tips for characterization, and do you have any ideas for what we should do next? Please share!

Putting imagination into (cover) images

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Books & films, Fashion, Inspirations, Writing

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Book cover, Mood boards

Mood board for Precious Things

Mood board for Precious Things

HarperCollins is in the process of designing the cover for my first novel, Precious Things. I’m so excited to see it – it should be ready in the next few weeks, and hopefully in time to grace the cover of the reading copies, which they’re working on at the moment.

My publisher Catherine and I have been going back and forth for some time on ideas about how it will look. Firstly, I was asked to send through some book covers I liked with suggestions as to what I thought worked or didn’t work about them for Precious Things. I sent through about fifteen covers, some with heavily stylised photographs and others with illustrations. Then I was asked to put together a mood board about my main character, so that Catherine could brief the designer on what the book’s about.

Maggie vintage shambolic_Precious Things

This is what I came up with. The images aren’t meant to be taken literally. My protagonist – a warm, sensitive woman called Maggie – isn’t a model, after all, but she is gorgeous in her way and these are meant to give a sense of how I see her. I compiled the mood board with tear sheets taken from fashion magazines laid out on my kitchen bench and overlaid with some of the beaded, richly embroidered and quirky vintage pieces Maggie collects. There’s also a postcard painting in there of a circus setting, which reflects her fascination with costumes and unusual or special pieces.

Maggie going out_Precious Things

I loved doing this – it’s quite fun to be asked to contribute to the design of your book and I realised I had all the images I needed, already collected in a folder which accompanied me throughout the writing process. Whenever I saw an appropriate image, I put it in there just for my own reference, along with articles that seemed to evoke the mood or setting I was looking for.

The funny part about the cover process is that you can provide all sorts of background ideas and images to designers, but it often happens that inspiration strikes them, and they come up with something so unexpected, extraordinary and right – but completely different to what was envisaged. That’s the magic of what they do.

Stay tuned for news on the reading copies. I’m hoping to be given some extra to hand out to those of you in book groups, so you can spread the word in advance x

Maggie work_Precious Things

8 lessons learned

11 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Inspirations, Writing

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Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, Graeme Simsion, Precious Things, Sydney Writers' Festival

Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, and me at my desk. Carrie Bradshaw we ain't.

Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, aka me at my desk. Carrie Bradshaw we ain’t.

I recently sent off the last big structural edit for Precious Things and it’s such a relief. It was the most fun edit I’ve done to date, because it feels like the book is so close to completion now… I can hardly believe it. Just one more copy edit and a proofread, then it goes off to print.

A friend asked me if I wouldn’t mind sharing with her writing group what I’ve learned. I’ve been mulling over what to say for weeks now, so here’s a few important points I wish I’d known beforehand, in case it might help you too:

1) Novels need conflict (it seems obvious, right? It wasn’t to me, not at first). I thought I could create a story about perfect characters who led fabulous lives and did everything better than me… That’s before I realised it would also make my book incredibly BORING. Cue putting them through the wringer in the name of good storytelling. Once I figured this out, it was more enjoyable throwing obstacles in their way than you might think.

2) It’s alright to create a bad first draft, but it’s also near impossible to do otherwise. Trust that you’ll get there after many rewrites and efforts at polishing. ‘Shitty first drafts’ is one of the tenets of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, the best book on writing I’ve read. In fact, just read Bird by Bird and you’re already streets ahead.

3) Give yourself time between edits. This is one of those things I find hardest to do, but damn it works. I had about five months off between the last structural edit and the one before, where I forced myself not to tinker with it. The flaws just jumped out at me when I finally picked it up again. Some days I wish I could go back and give all my early books the same luxury.

4) There are hardly ever the perfect conditions for writing. There’ll be family dramas or house problems, or work issues going on at the same time, pretty much always. There’s only one option and that’s to ‘turn it on’ when you need to, no matter what the circumstances – even if your house is being pulled down around your ears like ours has been recently. If I waited for those days when inspiration strikes or everything was quiet and calm, I wouldn’t have written more than a few chapters. As Henry Miller put it when devising a writing plan to finish his first novel, ‘when you can’t create, you can work.’ It’s a good point.

5) Every sentence and every word should have a purpose. If it’s not giving the reader any new or important information, it shouldn’t be in there. You might need to ‘waste’ tens of thousands of words figuring it out (I did… maybe over 100,000) but that’s what it comes down to in the end; precise prose.

6) Description is necessary at the beginning of a book but needs to give way to action the closer you are to reaching the end. This keeps the pace ticking along nicely and spurs readers on. When it’s successful, they’ll feel like they can’t put it down. When it’s not, great swathes of description or unnecessary scenes should be cut out or shifted to earlier in the book to keep the story moving.

7) Similarly, each chapter should contain a miniature story arc that climaxes at the end so that readers feel compelled to keep turning the pages. Even if you’re not writing commercial fiction, this really works. I’m convinced the massive success of The Hunger Games trilogy is thanks to Suzanne Collins’ supreme understanding and mastery of this skill.

8) And this is more of a personal preference; every year I take a few days’ out to visit Sydney Writers’ Festival and see those sessions I think I’ll get the most out of. It’s like a cheap crash-writing course. Similarly, I listen to advice from other writers on what works for them, and am prepared to give anything a go when I’m stuck. I saw Graeme Simsion’s session at SWF this year and his answer to writers’ block is to a) focus on another scene or b) lower his standards, trusting that he’ll improve with the next draft. It’s so easy to get fixated on getting something right, you can waste days or even weeks ‘perfecting’ things. That’s a killer piece of advice and it really works – momentum is everything!

Feeding the book

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Art, Inspirations, theatre & culture, Writing

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Carrie Tiffany, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nathalie Lete, Neil Gaiman

Wise owl by Nathalie Lete

Owl by Nathalie Lete

Neil Gaiman calls it his ‘staring at the wall’ phase. Carrie Tiffany hosted a workshop at Faber Academy and described it as being like ‘a car without gas’. Kazuo Ishiguro writes like a madman before experiencing an almighty crash. I call it brain freeze; that time when you’re feeling all dense yet scooped-out inside, and the thaw seems like it could be months or even years away. When I’m like that, it’s probably more precise to say I don’t feel anything – at least, I couldn’t tell you what’s going on inside my head because there’s nothing much going on at all.

I think all writers must go through this process. That time after any period of intense writing where one feels totally and utterly spent. And not just writers; almost anyone after a huge project ends and before a new one begins.

That was a lot of last year for me and I was beginning to wonder whether I’d ever see my way through it. But I’ve realised they were all right; it does end, and all you can do when the car’s empty is fill up – totally gorge yourself on information and circle around, letting the ideas sift and settle, waiting to see which ones stick.

Will you look at this gorgeous woman? Artist Nathalie Lete, looking every bit like one of her paintings.

Will you look at this gorgeous woman? Nathalie Lete, looking every bit as lovely as her paintings.

I’m not quite ready to write yet, not properly. I have a new notebook (a very pretty one from French artist Nathalie Lete, almost half-full already) with a new plot and many more discarded ones and various ideas which will never see the light of day, as well as some that will. Some may feed into the following book, or the one after that.

There’s almost a fated process at work now. Ideas germinate from even the smallest daily encounters and a conversation, news story or non-fiction read comes at just the right time. Sometimes it feels like such a perfect fit for my next book, it’s hard to believe it’s only a coincidence. This can seem like pure magic, if you believe in such things.

Raining ideasWhen I was writing the last book I visited the Art Gallery of NSW to see the Francis Bacon exhibition. I knew I wanted to feature an artist in the book but had all these stale ideas about who the character would be, and how they would fit in. Seeing the works and reading about Bacon’s life, I started to picture her more clearly; where she might have come from, what drove her and how her story was different from anyone else’s. Similarly, I’m now reading a non-fiction book called The Last Curtsey, about the end of the debutantes, and I’m starting to get a clearer idea of who my next character will be. I know her lifestyle and the times that shaped her, so she’ll be more than just a composite of someone I want to write about. This is making her feel real to me, almost as real as people I actually know.

Other seeds of ideas come in conversations with friends or new acquaintances, snippets overheard in cafés, or a look between two people that I witnessed. And they all feed into some of the broader ideas I’ve been mulling over for decades, mostly on a subconscious level. About how to behave, how to treat people, how families work or don’t work and knotty issues such as narcissism, sibling rivalry and infidelity.

Because what is a novel if not a manifesto of sorts? A moral code by which the book is governed? Authors tell you how they think things should be, not necessarily how they are, but there’s a lot of real emotion being poured into their work. Readers can only read between the lines.

I used to have an old boyfriend who wouldn’t touch fiction, saying he didn’t want to read about things that weren’t real (no, it wasn’t a perfect match). The novel might be an amalgamation of clever ideas and gimmicks sometimes – outrageous characters and scenes amped up for dramatic effect – but the book’s soul is a real thing. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t connect with it at all. It’s also hard to see why the writer would bother with such an undertaking in the first place, given the effect on our poor brains following a novel’s completion (please refer to first paragraph)!

A few of my favourite things

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Art, Books & films, Fashion, Food, Inspirations, markets & shopping

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Amy Adams, Big Eyes, Frida Giannini, Gabrielle Zevin, Girls, Gucci, Jemima Kirk, Lena Dunham, The Bakehouse Studio, The Storied Life of AJ FIkry

11057273_1538219093109222_6852092253340208011_nTO READ: THE STORIED LIFE OF AJ FIKRY
Bookish folk, this is for you. The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin is a perfect novel about a failing bookstore, its cranky owner, a perky sales rep and a precocious foundling. Mostly it’s about love, though – love and books. Mr Fikry, you’re my kind of man.

TO WATCH: BIG EYES
The story of artist Margaret Keane and her domineering cheat of a husband is so extraordinary, it seems hard to believe it hasn’t been told sooner on the big screen. Tim Burton does the tale justice without going over the top on the magic realism and it’s a better film for it, but I loved the small touches that were present in the haunting eyes of Keane’s women and children. Don’t fret, Amy Adams fans… Oscar’s coming for her one day soon. Great 60s fashion and architecture, too for all the die-hard vintage peeps out there.

10305063_1541679779429820_54041439847273506_nTO LUST AFTER: NEW-SEASON GUCCI
Frida Giannini’s nailed it – this is all I want to wear in the coming season. I’m thinking 70s nostalgia is a-ok when I missed it first time round… just. I didn’t miss out on a very fetching bowl cut, though (all photographic evidence destroyed). How amazing is this jacket!?

AND SOME ACE TV: GIRLS SEASON 4
Lena Dunham’s comedy about four twenty-something women in New York just gets better and better, and this season was the pinnacle for me. Jemima Kirk’s Jessa is a joy to behold but man, she’s a piece of work!

IMG_8086

ALSO – VISIT: YOUR LOCAL ARTIST’S STUDIO
I recently made a trip to The Bakehouse Studio, workspace of Marrickville artist Lisa Holzl. I’m writing a clay sculptor into the next novel and got such a great feel for her character and life in this magical space.

Running away with the circus

23 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Art, theatre & culture, Fashion, markets & shopping, Inspirations, Writing

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Circus Factory, Historical Novel Society Conference, Powerhouse Museum

Merry go roundIt being school holidays my friend Jess and I decided to take the smalls to Circus Factory at the Powerhouse Museum. We thought it might be more fun for them than us. How wrong we were!

Wending our way through two lower floors of amusements, performances and other curiosities – including an authentic Gypsy caravan from the early 19th century – we finally arrived at the costume collection.

Gypsy caravan

Situated on the third floor, we realised this extraordinary archive of circus costumes and accessories was the lemon butter on top of a prizewinning cake of an exhibition. Definitely up there with a V&A presentation, it made me wish I’d bought a season pass so I could visit another few times to soak it all in. At AU$35, the one-off entrance fee is a bit pricey but hot damn it’s worth it.

I was so enthralled, an attendant was obliged to warn me of Olive running up and down the viewing paths, hooting at the top of her lungs… I was so totally lost reading up on all the descriptions, off in a fantasy imagining where those pieces might have been. Who were their original owners, I wondered, and where were they now? How had these incredibly hard-worn threads managed to survive all these years?

If the same costumes had been around while I was researching and writing my last novel, I’d have been in heaven. Or at least camped out at the Powerhouse for a week. I had to be satisfied browsing through books on Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes instead, and ended up scouring the markets, with only one or two really good finds to show for my days of toil. That was about this time last year. And I spent tens of hours lost in an Etsy wormhole researching vintage dresses and dancing paraphernalia from the Belle Epoque era to 1920s, without much success. It wasn’t a hardship but I really wish these had been around then, because one of the characters in my new novel is a trapeze artist (I may as well introduce you to her now; an Austro-Hungarian beauty who falls in love with the circus’ resident Strong Man).

My character started off being inspired by Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, but she definitely grew into herself as the writing wore on. Actually, it’s not fair to say the writing wore on at all, because at times she almost wrote herself. It was a matter of my fingers keeping up with her story – always a blessed relief when others seem so difficult to wrangle onto the page.

Anyway, back to the costumes. Designed and embellished and meticulously repaired, I had to be pulled away from these exquisite pieces (literally, Olive had grown quite bored by that stage), but I may go back soon. Here’s some of my favourites – the photos don’t do them justice.

Tightrope costume

Circus headpiece

Repair kit concealed under porcelain doll's skirt

Repair kit concealed under porcelain doll’s skirt

Capes

Send in the clowns

Send in the clowns 4

Band leader

Send in the clowns 2

Send in the clowns 3

History is what’s always drawn me to vintage clothing. So much more exciting than new things, don’t you think? Dangerous, even.

I once bought a fringed tan leather skirt from a willowy actress-slash-model, and she told me that skirt had seen some wild parties in her day. Whether it was the preface she’d given me, or something ingrained in the supple leather hide of that barely-there skirt, I’ll never know, but I went on to have a good few nights of partying wearing her myself. I hope she’s still making memories (alas, I passed her on when I feared I was becoming too old for miniskirts, but have since bought two or three… there goes that theory; today I simply don’t care). And my love of vintage is what caused me to start writing fiction with an historical element in the first place. I don’t know why, but I feel the inexorable pull of the past whenever I see or touch a vintage dress… it’s my form of catnip. That and Reese’s butter cups.

This is probably a good time to mention Australia’s first Historical Novel Society Conference, to be held between 20-22 March this year. What can fiction writers learn from historians? A lot, I imagine. I’m looking forward to hearing authors such as Kate Forsyth, Colin Falconer, Toni Jordan, Jesse Blackadder and many more speak on the theme, ‘The Historical Novel in Peace and War’, and will be thinking about what characters were wearing, at all times.

More on that later, but have I convinced you for the time being to visit Circus Factory? Make haste – this wonderfully curated show won’t be on forever.

Programme

Happy New Year

01 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Inspirations, Other

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Happy New Year

Butterfly

My wishes for you, for a better 2015:

  1. To find even the tiniest way to follow your heart a bit more this year, and wishing you the courage to do so.
  2. Just more: more health, more love, more fulfilment, or even opening the door a crack to let something or someone new into your life.
  3. Peace, and much in the way of good reading.

That’s it. Do you think you can wish it back to me, too? That would be lovely.

Happy new year, mes amies.

Riding the changes

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by kellydoust in Art, Books & films, Inspirations, theatre & culture, Writing

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De-cluttering, Meditation, Sydney Dance Company

Lucy Culliton still life, currently showing at the Mosman Art Gallery

Lucy Culliton still life, currently showing at the Mosman Art Gallery

I was talking to a neighbour the other day whose close friend is a novelist. She was saying that her friend’s now given up writing because she feels so demoralised by all the rejection. I understand this. I have the same feeling sometimes, too. Until I remember – five minutes or a few weeks later – that when I’m not writing, I don’t feel like myself. It’s so strong that when I consider doing something else or try going against my nature, a voice in my head whispers: wrong, wrong, wrong.

What are some ways to alleviate the fear? I’ve found that meditation really helps. I usually do twenty minutes a day but sometimes manage to squeeze in a bit more. If nothing else, it’s a great time for reminding myself to breathe deeply and simply enjoy that brief time on my own before the world crowds in and I get caught up in the day. But at its best, it’s a time to focus on gratitude and trust, and finding peace with the unknown. I’ve only been doing it for about a year now – since the September before last – but I do feel in that time it’s helped me deal with things more calmly and helped in other areas of my life as well.

Get out of the house, and surround yourself in beauty: taken on a recent run from Bronte to Bondi beaches and back

Bondi Icebergs on my run from Bronte to Bondi earlier this week

Another idea – and this isn’t original either, I think it’s one of the major principles of The Artist’s Way – is to go for walks. Similar to meditation, it helps me think about things in a new way and gets me out of my head (and home… very important when I work here and achieve most things through self-motivation). Even ten minutes seems to help when I’m feeling flat or low. That’s just a walk around the block. Twenty minutes is better, and an hour seems best to really improve my outlook. Lots of ideas seem to flow when I’m doing a circular bay walk, and I usually take a pen and notebook so I can write them down. I felt silly the time I tried doing dictation on my smartphone, so settle on sending myself texts at a pinch.

I’m reading Gretchen Rubin’s 2009 book The Happiness Project at the moment and one thing she mentions from her research is that writers tend to focus on more wordy mediums for inspiration or entertainment (reading, theatre, films, TV). She suggests finding more ‘wordless’ mediums to indulge in eg dance, painting, music, and probably certain sports. I really relate to this.

And there's always Work Avoidance Behaviour (WAB): de-cluttering Gretchen Rubin-style in The Happiness Project

Typical Work Avoidance Behaviour: de-cluttering Gretchen Rubin-style. Space outside, space within?

The one performance style I always seem to come back to and adore is contemporary dance; there’s something about it that just exhilarates me and seems to spark creativity. I particularly love anything choreographed or chosen by Rafael Bonachela (the Creative Director of the Sydney Dance Company). I’ve been an SDC season ticket holder for the last couple of years now and recently bought tickets for all the performances coming up in 2015. Just knowing they’re set in the calendar reassures me… something to look forward to is always good.

I guess the point is, it’s all about finding those things which work best work for you and at keeping you creative rather than worrying about outcomes. A new art exhibition – especially portraits – always starts me thinking what’s your story? and before I know it, I’m off.

That’s all you need. How do you stay firm and positive through all the ups and downs?

Why write?

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by kellydoust in Art, theatre & culture, Books & films, Inspirations, Writing

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Children's books, Fiction, Imagination

A still from Sydney Dance Company's recent performance, Louder than Words (costumes by Dion Lee)

Sydney Dance Company‘s Louder than Words, performed at Sydney Theatre. Costumes by Dion Lee.

Someone asked me recently why I wanted to write a novel. Not an unusual thing to ask, but it stumped me for a bit. Because at this stage of the process, when most of the writing is done and it’s now a case of editing and polishing and trying to make the book the best it can be, it’s easy to get caught up in outcomes and lose sight of this central question, which is of course the most important one of all.

Why?

Ever since I was small – about five or six from memory – I was enthralled by the people and places authors created from their imagination. With those books I loved the most, I so very desperately wanted them to be true… each found a way to affect and remake me profoundly, not unlike certain people I’ve met over the course of my life. Somehow these characters reside in me still. Michael Ende’s Momo, the Narnia children, Frodo Baggins and Roald Dahl’s BFG. Anne of Green Gables and Moonface from the Magic Faraway Tree. The Famous Five and Owen Meany, and the strange worlds of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. As a child I lived in a sort of half-place between reality and imagination (the way most children do) wishing these people could escape from the pages and invade my own world the way Bastian found in The Neverending Story, or that I could escape into theirs. I wanted all my books to be ‘dangerous’ in this way, until one day – probably during my mid to late teens – I forgot to wish for such things.

I can tell you now, decades later, that reading has always been a way of connecting with that same sense of childish wonder and delight. Along with forays into other art forms like illustration and dance, film and music – or a trip to Cirque du Soleil – it’s the best way for me to recapture it. That another person can make us feel this way through their writing is amazing, don’t you think? It’s a small miracle, and I want in!

The same person who asked me this question the other day also said; ‘books are powerful, they change lives’. Of course she’s right, and no writer should wield this power lightly. It’s taken me a few days, but I have an answer for her (which is why I’m so rubbish in exam situations – I need time to ponder these things).

I want to take readers on a journey, and make them delight in wondrous things. To make a connection, and leave a lasting impression. Because we are all essentially the same underneath, and narrative is everything.

I would like to tell you a story…

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Kelly Doust

IT’S COMING!

Next book publishedNovember 5, 2019
The Power Age, Published by Murdoch Book

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