Scaring people ‘sh*tless’: the craft of crime writing

We got settled in our seats, while chairman John Green looked out over us, his sweeping gaze settling on everyone. He asked us to trust him.

“Don’t turn around,” he said. “Don’t panic. Don’t leave your seats, but there’s a shifty looking man at the entrance with something explosive. It’s not a bomb – it’s a crime novel!”

Well, there isn’t anything too scary about that is there? Well, if you met the panelists at this session of the 2011 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, you might say differently.

Jaye Ford was living the typical Australian life; a sport presenter on SBS and regional television, and then running her own public relations business. But the lure of crime writing couldn’t be stopped. Her first novel, Beyond Fear, was published earlier this year, and she is currently working on her second.

LA Larkin has many busy days, working at one of our country’s leading climate change consultancies and writing. Her first novel, The Genesis Flaw, was released last year with her second novel to be released later this month.

The final member of this panel was a veteran of crime fiction, Michael Robotham, who has published multiple international bestsellers. He has written as a ghostwriter for celebrities and decorated soldiers since his first thriller, Suspect, was written in 2004. His latest, The Wreckage, was released in April this year.

This group of crime buffs, led by our creepy chairman John Green, walked the audience through what it takes to scare the readers. Developing characters, setting the scenes and taking the reader on an adventure are only just three of the factors needed to write ‘the perfect crime’.

When asked if it’s is important to scare the readers, Jaye Ford didn’t think so.

“I want them to read a rocking good story, and if they get scared along the way, then I did a good job,” she said and Larkin agreed.

“It’s not about the scare, it’s about the adventure; how you get the reader back safely,” Larkin added.

But it isn’t the most popular line of work, as Robotham found out after his wife reviewed a draft of Shatter.

“[She said] no one’s going to invite us round to dinner anymore,” he said. “Everyone will think you’re a sick bastard.”

As stories were told about gathering research and finding time to write, these three authors lent their magnifying glass to the audience to discover the secrets behind crime writing. A great help for the detective in all of us, and the perfect note to end our experience of the 2011 Byron Writers’ Festival.

Amelia Turner and Josephine Mooney are Southern Cross University media students.

Should journalists be impartial?

Jane Hutcheon, Michele Nayman, Niki Savva deal with the age old question of the impartial journalist each day at work. At this Saturday morning session at the 2011 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, they explore objectivity in the news world. The session was chaired by Alex Easton from The Northern Star.

Jane Hutcheon is a senior ABC journalist and presenter of One Plus One on ABC News 24, and is the author of From Rice to Riches. Michele Nayman is a UK-based writer and author of Jetlag among others. She has worked as a journalist with The Age, The National Times and The Guardian. Niki Savva was one of the most senior correspondents in the Canberra Press Gallery and is the author of So Greek: Confessions of a Conservative Leftie.

Listen to highlights from Should journalists be impartial?

Highlights edited by Southern Cross University media student Justin Fenwick.

Cate McQuillan – The Dirtgirl phenomenon

Lively Dirtgirl Cate McQuillan performs for children at the 2011 Byron Bay Writers Festival. A Northern Rivers local, Cate didn’t seem to be dug up by her character’s sudden rise to fame.

In this audio package Cate involves children and sings the now well-known song that is Dirtgirl’s theme.

Listen as Cate entertains the children at Byron Bay Writers’ Festival

Highlights edited by Southern Cross University media student Brigette Lucas.

The Kids Are All Right

Amberley Lobo and Kayne Tremills

Sunday was Youth Day at the festival and everywhere I looked there were kids clutching books. I remember how much I loved reading when I was a kid and how much books meant to me: they offered me a secret world of my own, taught me about life and how other people thought and, more than anything, how to imagine. I decided to talk to some kids about reading and why they’ve come to the festival.

I meet Quinn, age nine, in the autograph line for ABC3’s Amberley Lobo and Kayne Tremills. I confess to Quinn that I’d never heard of them until about 20 minutes ago when Festival Director Candida Baker informed me that the duo are a big deal; a huge deal even. Quinn agrees: “They’re really funny! They’re good at presenting and keeping the kid’s attention – and they’re energetic.” I had just seen them bouncing across the stage impersonating butterflies so I understood what he meant.

Quinn

According to his Dad, Quinn “devours books”. Quinn breaks it down for me: he read a 600-page book over the last school holidays and on average can finish about one and a half Deltora Quest novels in a month. I tell Quinn that I’m a bit out of touch so he explains the world of Deltora to me and that the characters go looking for gems, namely Diamond, Emerald, Lapis Lazuli, Topaz, Opal, Ruby and Amethyst. He likes fantasy and is currently reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I nod in recognition and he looks relieved that at least I’ve heard of that.

Camille

Six-year-old Camille also just got an autograph. She’s holding a copy of Very, Very Pearlie, signed by the author Wendy Harmer. She hasn’t read it yet since she just bought it but her grip and grin show excitement. Camille tells me that her favourite book is The Audrey of the Outback. She says it’s about “a girl named Audrey that wanted to do something because something was scaring her little brother”. I ask her what happens next but she’s not sure. “It’s a thick book,” she says.

Kate

Standing next to Camille in line to meet Alison Lester, is Kate, age nine. She reads “every night and every morning” but doesn’t have a favourite book because it changes all the time, although she’s a big fan of Enid Blyton – especially The Naughtiest Girl series.

Brother and sister Finn, nine, and Freya, seven, love reading. Finn says, “It’s entertaining and fun.” He’s into fantasy and adventure and his favourite is “probably Percy Jackson”, who, he explains, writes about “Greek gods and stuff.” Today he’s really looking forward to seeing Kayne and Ambo and Alison Lester because “they’re funny”.

Freya and Finn

Freya says she reads “lots and lots”. She’s looking forward to reading all the Harry Potter books one day but at the moment is reading a story called The Talking Fish. I ask her what the fish says. “The big fish are bullying it,” she explains, “and it gets bigger and bigger so it can bully them”. I ask Freya what her view on poetry is. She says she likes it, a bit, and then tells me about a “poetry song” she wrote about her brother Finn. It goes like this: “Finn, Finn, quite a bin, he likes to be a pin. He pins stuff on the wall, he pins stuff on the floor, he puts stuff in the bin cause his name is Finn.” Freya smiles up at me proudly and says: “I made it up”.

Simba

I see a group of children reading books to two beautiful dogs. A woman called Lenna explains to me that they are part of a group called Story Dogs, which helps kids with reading difficulties improve their skills by reading books to dogs. I actually feel tears brewing as she passionately tells me about the organisation and how the loving and non-judgmental nature of dogs helps the children. I sit down with the kids and Simba and Sooti the dogs for a while and I start to like the world again.

Sooti

My last stop for Youth Day is Wendy Harmer’s session. She’s talking about her book Very, Very Pearlie, which is all about fairies and obviously a huge hit. Little girls of various shapes and sizes, dressed in pinks, florals and rainbows, are draped all over the stage, gazing at Harmer in rapture as she talks fairies. The girls have questions: what do fairies eat? “They’re vegetarians, or flowertarians,” says Harmer. “You wouldn’t see a fairy sit down and eat a chop”. Do they eat fairy floss and fairy bread? “No because it’s bad for their teeth and bad for yours as well.” Do they drink coffee? “No! It causes them to hyperventilate and move their wings too fast.” Do fairies get along with animals? “They’re not very fond of birds because they eat them,” says Harmer. “Especially seagulls because they tend to think fairies look a little bit like hot chips”.

The session runs over time and Harmer explains that she’s got to go and catch a plane but the girls refuse to let this fairy forum end. A little girl, maybe three or four years old, rolls onto the stage. In a tiny voice she tells Harmer that she’s seen a fairy. It was in her garden, wearing orange and singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The audience, including Harmer, melts. Obviously, the plane can wait.

Hannah Brooks

Meet the Music Men: Chugg and Cadd swear it’s the truth

It’s been a bumper weekend for music fans at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival.

You’ll have to excuse the oxymoron.

Given, the two are entirely different disciplines; one centres as heavily on melody as it does on the written word, and the other strives to arrange its lexemes in such a way that they take on their own melodic shape. Contingent to both,  however, is the sense of narrative that promoter Michael Chugg and performer Brian Cadd are exceptionally well versed in.

The pair spoke on a panel in the Weekend Australian tent this Sunday afternoon as a part of the festival’s continuing In Conversation series.

Chugg, the stocky rock manager fluent in the kind of French that would shock your grandmother into an early grave, and Cadd, the bearded (and slightly more mannerly) balladeer, shared stories from their interlocking pasts while promoting their respective autobiographies (released last year).

Chugg’s book, Hey You In The Black T-Shirt, draws its title from a now infamous Guns and Roses concert in Melbourne in 1993.

“The thing sold out,” Chugg said. “We had 40, 000 kids running up over the hill and going nuts. So I just grabbed the microphone and said ‘HEY! You, in the black T-Shirt! Stop  f**king running! And then 40, 000 kids stopped, looked at each other, and fell over laughing.”

The two men at times appeared to be chalk and cheese – one Statler and the other Waldorf [perhaps better known as the grumpy old men from The Muppet Show]. Chugg wasted no time dobbing Cadd in for a severe case of stagefright in the eighties:

“We were playing to 3,000 people in regional Victoria – the first show of our tour – and this bastard was backstage drinking and trying to get up the nerve to go onstage. So I ended up going on before him; I took my shirt off and did pushups, just generally made an arse of myself, and we had them in stitches.  So I went backstage and I said to Brian: ‘If I can  go out there and make a complete arse of myself, you can go out there and bloody play!’”

“I didn’t have much choice, then,” Cadd countered. “I could stand backstage and be yelled at by Chuggy, or I could go out and sing in front of three thousand people. So I sang, and neither of us ever looked back.”

The two giants also offered their insight 0n the Australian music industry as a whole, having worked for forty years to foster it into what it has become today.

“We used to work so hard just to get noticed here and overseas … now we have sixty or seventy bands in Australia making serious inroads in the US because of the crazy shit we used to do!” Chugg said.

“It’s true,” Cadd confirmed. “In my autobiography [From This Side of Things] I wrote about working in France writing songs … I didn’t ever understand what the words were, but I certainly knew what the cheques meant!”

Max Quinn is a Southern Cross University Media Student

AUDIO EXTRA!

Music promoter Michael Chugg and musician Brian Cadd talk about their life on stage and behind-the-scenes in the Australian music Industry.  Chaired by music writer and journalist, Iain Shedden, who co-wrote Hey, You in the Black T-Shirt! with Michael Chugg.

Beware: Very strong language is expressed with the expected eloquence of someone who has lived life in the close vicinity of a road crew and a stack of Marshall amps.

Listen to Chuggy and Cadd.

Highlights edited by Southern Cross University media student Justin Fenwick

Writing for the young adult – Where do I begin??

Hoping to be a budding novelist, I know that writing, of any kind, isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Characters, plot, setting, it all seems too much sometimes. But then selecting the target audience for your upcoming work is the hardest of all.

Meeting the people that have achieved this, those have climbed the mountain of ideas and got over the other side with their pack of ideas still intact, gives us, as young writers, hope. This was certainly an outcome of the Writers’ Festival.

In one of the final sessions on Saturday, I was lucky to catch up with Martine Murray, James Roy and M V Snyder, who write fiction for young adults, and they shared their tales of woe and achievement with the small crowd. But young adult fiction wasn’t the first choice for James.

“No,” he said when chairman Tegan Bennett-Daylight asked if he had set out to write YA. “I wanted to write a real book.”

Thankfully, he changed his opinion and realised that YA can be a real book too. Having published twenty books in this genre, he seems to have the know on the correct technique. His latest release, Town, was released in 2007 and was awarded the NSW Premier’s Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult fiction.

Martine Murray has written a wide range of children’s and young adult books, and has written three novels that have been published internationally. Her first novel, A Dog Called Bear, revolves around the companionship of her own dog Bear, and since it was first published, all her stories have some touch of doggie comfort to them.

M V Snyder, or Maria, was previously a meteorologist (don’t ask me to say what kind) before changing to writing YA fiction. She is now a New York Times best-seller with her Study Series, but she likes to play that down.

“Once you become a [New York Times] best-seller, that’s all you’re associated with,” she joked.

Well, I’m sure if she would like to swap, I could take her place…

As writing YA is such a wide topic to cover, our panellists touched on many different ideas and topics, from whether Pride and Prejudice should be published as a YA novel, to what they were reading when they were that age (Martine still reads Dr Seuss), and what could be considered relevant in a YA novel. It was a rewarding session, with ideas and helpful hints supplied in excess.

Amelia Turner is a Southern Cross University media student

Kamahl: The Man in the Cream Suit

Ah…Kaaaamaaaahhhhhllllll…Has ever a name floated out so smoothly? Before this year’s festival, I knew very little about this mysterious figure called Kamahl. I didn’t know his hit “The Elephant Song” or why he’s famous for asking ‘why are people so unkind?’. But I do know his face. It’s stared at me a thousand times from the covers of old records I’ve found while searching through crates of vinyl, looking for gems. And now here he is shaking my hand.

Since the Festival began I’ve developed a slight obsession with Kamahl. As previously blogged, I spent a good deal of Friday morning gazing in wondering as he, a vision in cream, strolled through the festival grounds. The sunlight bounced off the giant gold K-shaped ring he wore on his left pinkie and off his equally shimmering hair. Like a 70s mirage, it seemed he had climbed out of a record cover and into the present. Intrigued, I hightailed it to his Friday night performance.

The event, titled Fire and Ice: Poems of Passion, was an evening of poetry and performance featuring Kamahl, writer and actress Teresa Bell, musician Yantra and a musical prelude from a trio, who are usually a quartet, called co. sonance. Passion was the night’s theme and from Teresa’s red velvet dress to the Steinway and the red handkerchief delicately poking out of Kamahl’s breast pocket, the air was thick and heavy with it.

Tonight, Kamahl was here not to sing but to perform a selection of handpicked poems of passion, which included works from W B Yeats, Rudyard Kipling and some love letters between Robert and Elizabeth Browning. However, to the audience’s delight, he bookended the poems by singing two songs a capella.

Kamahl’s presence was smooth and graceful. He had an almost Gainsbourg-esque demeanour mixed with a studied humility that saw him talking about how he used to be “chronically shy and insecure”. He also mentioned that he had this “other thing called an inferiority complex”. He talked about his early life, when he wanted to sing but didn’t know if he could, and how he built confidence by practicing in the dark.

Kamahl answered the question buzzing through everyone’s head: just how old is he? “I’ve reached the state in life,” he said, “where I don’t take vitamins – I take preservatives”.

As the final notes of his last song ended, the blue curtain enveloped him and, like an apparition, he was gone.

Hannah Brooks

A terrifying prospect turns to pleasure

Finalists hear the judges' feedback after making our 'perfect' pitches

I’ve always had a fear of public speaking so naturally I entered the Perfect Pitch.
What I was thinking of? Pitch Perfect was session where six writers were selected to talk about their manuscripts for five minutes. It means putting your work and your ideas right out there.
I was still nervous when it came time yesterday to pitch my novel, The Search Engine. I hadn’t slept well and had been busy with the blogging team but had a good support team of friends. That helps. The public speaking book and visualizations I had done helped as well. It felt a bit like going in for an operation. You have to take a deep breath and know it will be better when it’s over. I watched all the previous pitchers first – Annette Kendall with her Lost in Kakadu novel from which she read. (The judges said they hoped everyone had selected something to read. Tick.)
I watched Marissa Treichel with her excellent sounding parenting book, and Annette Marfording with her fascinating idea for an anthology of her Australian writers’ radio interviews and Sue Vader with her book that sets out a magical connection with David Boyd and his family, and Francis Dundovic-Cloake and her Sarajevo tale following me.
The judges, publishers Louise Thurtell of Allen and Unwin, Penny Hueston of Text Publishing, and John Hunter of University of Queensland Press made excellent and helpful comments.

As I began, I started to read my notes but looking up and smiling when I could, seeing many familiar faces. The crowd laughed mostly when I hoped they might, and then something happened. I started to enjoy it.
I’m sure this was because of the preparation – years on the book, and weeks, and hours on the pitch. The feedback from the publishers was positive with them identifying a couple of points in my pitch. I should more closely define my market and not mention any rejections.
Now I must go home and polish my manuscript for submission.

Marian Edmunds

Why Sinatra matters: Paul Kelly on a life well-lived

Australia’s greatest songwriter: just one of the monikers evoked by session chair David Leser to describe musician, Paul Kelly, at the start of one of the many highlights at the 2011 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. But Leser didn’t stop there: a lover, a reader, a friend …

Leser made a list of the handful of songs he would like Paul Kelly to play during this In Conversation session on Saturday afternoon. He stopped when he got to thirty-five. Kelly has written over 350 in a career that has spanned four decades.

Listen to highlights from this frank and, at times, very amusing session.

NOTE: Paul Kelly performed several songs during this session. They have been removed from this audio recording for copyright reasons.

Highlights edited by Southern Cross University media student Brigette Lucas.

Photo diary: day two at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival

The drama, the laughs, the bits in-between: photographic highlights of Saturday 6 August at the 2011 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, as seen through the lens of Southern Cross University media student Gabby Watson.

BBWF Day 2 photo highlights