Best of 2024 - Jack Heath

Music. In the spirit of reconciliation, I acknowledge the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community.

I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples today. Welcome to Totally Lit, the podcast celebrating reading, writing and creating literature. I'm your host, Kai Garvey. Thank you for listening.

Hello, lovely listeners. I'm super pumped that this episode is totally lit's 50th episode. I can't believe I've got here. I wanted to extend a big thank you to my guests, listeners and supporters of the pod. I cannot begin to tell you how much gratitude I have for you all. It is such a privilege to be able to chat to so many wonderful Aussie creatives.

I've been learning so much about writing and the publishing industry, and I sincerely hope it has been helping you along your writing journey as well. I have a very special episode lined up for you with an amazing chat with the uber-talented Jack Heath. Jack Heath is the number one best-selling author of 40 novels published in 10 languages. His first crime thriller, Hangman, was voted one of the best 100 books of all time, twice.

His mission is to create books that inspire a love of reading in children and adults. Jack started writing his first novel in Canberra while studying at Lynham High School and working at a fish and chip shop in Dixon. He submitted the manuscript to a publisher at age 17 and the book became his first international bestseller. In 2009, Jack was named the ACT Young Australian of the Year.

He took various other jobs, bass guitar tutor, call centre worker, TV salesperson, ghostwriter and bookseller, before quitting to write full-time in 2017. He spends his time writing, reading, speaking at schools and mentoring emerging writers. I hope you enjoy our chat. Jack Heath, welcome to Totally Lit. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm so excited. I really appreciate you making time because we were trying to do a bit of scheduling and And some of your parenting duties were getting in the way, which I love because I love to hear writers', normal lives as well. And to hear that you're being a great dad to your family is amazing. Oh, I'm being a present dad. I don't know if I would say I'm being a great dad, but at least I'm there.

I think it's tricky because a lot of the other writers I know, they are trying to squeeze writing and parenting in around their day jobs, which is extra hard. Whereas I feel like I'm kind of playing on easy mode because writing is my day job. them. But it does mean that when most of the other writers are free, it's outside of nine to five, Monday to Friday, and that's when I'm not free because I'm parenting. So, it's all literally.

But I've been Googling you today, and I've seen that you have had many jobs in the past. So, you have done the hard yards, and you were a person that was juggling work and writing, and now you're lucky enough to have transitioned into being a full-time writer. But I did want to point out that you and I have something a little bit in common in that we both have worked in fish and chip shops. That's wonderful. Which one? Can you tell me? I worked at a fish and chip shop

when I lived in Victoria. My best friend's parents owned a fish and chip shop. So, I actually had a job making potato chips, so the old school way. So, putting the chips through the machines and looking a wreck at the end of it because if there was a rotten potato at the bottom of a bag, it was.

Disgusting the worst smell in the world i um because i i used to work at the fish and chip shop i i got a good a taste for chips you know how some people can tell like a good wine from a bad wine i'm not one of those people but i can tell a good chip from a bad chip so my lockdown project while everyone else was making sourdough was learning how to oven bake chips so as they tasted as good as the ones I used to deep fry back in the day. So, I make a mean chip. I'll have you over sometime.

Amazing. Amazing. I also worked in North Queensland. I went to James Cook University and had a job at a fish and chip shop while I was studying. So, yeah, hooray for chips. Do they offer a degree in chipology at James Cook University? No, they don't. Well, that's a missed opportunity. I wonder if I could be up for an honorary one.

Maybe, maybe. Now, we're here to chat about writing, not tips. Oh, I forgot, yes. But I love to find common ground with my guests. So that's, I was like, oh, wow. But also to share with my listeners that are wanting to be writers themselves, that writers are real people as well. But you're like a superhuman with 40 novels out, published in nine languages, and books voted in the 100 best books of all time. You're doing really well, Jack. That's really impressive.

I am. I have some very, very supportive readers and a really good agent. And I've worked with some of the – you know what? I think my key advantage is because I started out very early. My first book was published in 2006, and I was only 19. And that was with Pan Macmillan. So I was working with some of the best, you know, structural editors and copy editors and proofreaders in Australia. So it's not that I was some kind of teenage prodigy or anything.

It's just that I'm 37 now and I have 20 years experience of dealing with world-class editors.

So I'm just experienced, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Do you want to tell me a bit about your latest book, Kill Your Husbands? Yeah, sure I can. And I've actually published one since then. Spy Academy, The Peak, came out just a week ago, two weeks ago, something like that. So that's my new kids' one about a spy school. But yes, I greatly prefer talking about Kill Your Husbands because I get to use my full vocabulary.

Okay. So Kill Your Husbands is a book about three couples, friends since high school, sort of, who go on holiday together for like an unblood weekend retreat. And one night, a game of Truth or Dare goes a bit too far. The topic of partner swapping comes up. They decide to try it, but when the lights come back on, one of the men is dead and no one can agree who he was with, thought what happened, and then their phones still don't work.

Now the bar key's missing and the killer's just getting started. So that's the basic premise of the book.

Fantastic. And how has it been received by your readers? It's interesting, you know, because there is –. It's probably my second most popular book ever, maybe third out of the 40. But I was discussing this with a friend the other day, how if you look at the sort of average reviews on Goodreads or anything, like, I mean, the aggregated score, it's funny how the more reviews you get, the closer the average creeps to 3.85.

Because it's like, to be really successful, a book has to get beyond just your diehard fans and get into sort of a broader audience of people who may not necessarily know what they're in for. So there's been a mix of people who are new to my work who love it, people who are new to my work who hate it, people who are old to my work who love it, and people who are old to my work who hate it. That last category is maybe my favourite to read the reviews by.

They say things, It's like, well, I'm a bit of a Jack Heath purist. And it blows my mind that I would be a thing that you could be a purist in, especially since my books are so all over the place in terms of genre and tone and reading level and, you know, all that sort of stuff. But either way, I'm glad that there's enough people out there enjoying it that the publisher is keen for me to write more.

I think every now and then, and I think you find this as you get more and more successful, that there'll be sentences that you never imagined that your name would be involved with. One reviewer compared it to Forrest Gump and I cannot for the life of me figure out what they were talking about. I mean, it was a five-star review, so they clearly like Forrest Gump, but I'm like, I don't remember a partner swap in Forrest Gump. I don't remember any murder. I have no idea what you're talking about.

And how do you find now that you have a following and sort of moving towards being something that is thrown in phrases like, I'm a Jack Heath purist, is that shaping and affecting your work when you write? Yeah, and mostly not for the better, I think. I recently announced that I was taking a year-long hiatus on social media, and I don't really know how people reacted to that on social media because I haven't been on it, but I do know that the people I met in person.

Everyone assumed it was because I was getting trolled and attacked. Which I was, but it's not the trolls that get to me, it's the fans. It's the fact that there's the feeling of people kind of watching over my shoulder. I find it really hard to have the brain space to wonder what a character is thinking at the same time as wondering what the readers will think of what the character is thinking. That's just too many levels of abstraction for me.

So, I'm obviously in an enormously privileged position in the sense that I have enough readers that I can do this full-time and that I get a lot of support from not only my agent and my publisher, but it's kind of my friends and family.

I know that for a lot of writers, they're friends and family theoretically supportive, but in practice don't treat what they do as being meaningful enough to be worth avoiding other things for like if you say you know i can't do x y or z because i'm busy writing they they think oh well you're kind of selfish aren't you whereas if you said i can't because i'm working they're like oh yeah that's fine so i i have enough readers that gives me quite a lot of leeway but

it's also important for my my sort of creative spirit to kind of pretend that they don't exist and i feel so bad saying that because I owe everything to them. But yeah, I kind of need to live in a cave.

It's interesting, the marketing side. So from my background, I have one book published, which is a picture book. So I spent a lot of time on one side, pushing to get a publication. Now I'm on the other side where I'm having to market and sell that book. And I spend a lot of time posting on my socials and hoping to get a bit of a following or hoping the right person might see what I'm doing.

But then there's a lot of work around not writing, creating a writing persona and appearing to be successful just so you can keep maintaining your career. And it often means I feel now that people don't necessarily see the real me in that space, but I'm not sure as a writer if I do want to. The real me out there. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

It's like there's this sense that because so many people spend so much time on social media, I guess it's theoretically an important avenue of advertising. You certainly can't ignore that it exists, but publishers aren't necessarily very good at pushing a book on social media, and that's not their fault.

It's just that they are at a natural disadvantage whereas because if you're a publisher you show up on social media and you're like we're publishing this book it's really good and people aren't going to see or care about that whereas the author can get up and say hey i wrote this book about x because i felt y and and here's where the inspiration come came from here's my background all all this stuff that sort of naturally lends itself to capital C content.

But I don't know about you, but I assume over the course of making this podcast, you've met a lot of different writers and I've met a lot of writers too. And in every case, I'm grateful for the opportunity to meet them, but it never makes me admire their work more.

Instead, I always just go, oh, you're just a regular human being.

And sometimes that can be inspiring because I know that I'm just a regular human being too so I go wow you you wrote this amazing book and you're clearly just a regular person I'm just a regular person maybe I could write an amazing book but also you then kind of look at their work and knowing that it was written by someone with the same kind of weaknesses and flaws and petty squabbles and things as everyone else you kind of it takes the book off a pedestal a little bit which

means that when you're on social media kind of promoting your own book, it's all well and good to try to come across as authentic, but don't you kind of want the reader to be able to bring their own thing to the book instead of having the sense of the author there? You can't enjoy a puppet show if you're watching the puppeteer or even if you're aware of the puppeteer, right? You've got to kind of be able to lose yourself in the story.

True, true. And I think there's two things that happen to me when I read a book of someone I've met is one, especially when it's a really powerful, beautiful piece of art as well as just being a book, so astounded that I am privileged to know someone that can create something like that. But then there's also that little feeling of, oh, I wish I could do that.

But then there's times when you might meet someone and it does take away that little bit of mystery of the book because you've now met the author. And that's not that the work isn't any good, but sometimes a book is just enjoyable to sit and read and you don't need to know the creator in any way to enjoy it. Yeah, that's right. It's something to do with verisimilitude, I think. We fall into this illusion as readers of going, well, this is written so plausibly, it must be true.

And of course, we know it's not, but we can kind of allow ourselves to believe that it's based on truth or that there's elements of truth in it or something. And then as much as anything else, even if you meet the writer and they seem like a wonderful person, if you know for a fact that they haven't had all these experiences, then you start to wonder if the work was authentic at all. And, of course, it wasn't because it's fiction. It's not supposed to be.

If you want authenticity, you should be reading nonfiction. But you want to be able to believe that it's real.

Writing is a kind of magic trick, I suppose. And if you know how it's done, then you can appreciate the skill with which the author did it, but you can't kind of be dazzled in the same way, I guess. And is it an experiment with social media or is it just you're having a break so you can be creative? Oh, I certainly feel a lot better since I've been off it, you know, mental health-wise.

I've started dreaming again. I didn't realize that I had stopped dreaming until I started again and went, wow, I hadn't had a dream in years and now I'm having them all the time. Is that one of the things that social media was taking away from me? But the reason I decided to do it now was because I don't have any books for adults coming out this year.

I had Spy Academy, The Peak, which came out in February. I have Spy Academy Doomsday, which I submitted to my publisher the other day. It'll be out sometime this year. But one of the wonderful things about writing for children is that people don't care about the author quite as much. Certainly, the readers in some cases are only dimly aware that an author even exists. The story is so real to them that they don't care who wrote it. The other thing is that kids aren't on social media in theory.

Like I'm aware that Meta is facing a class action lawsuit for not doing enough to get kids off their platform, but it's a thing. So I went, okay, I could, because I don't have a book for adults coming out this year, I could just go back to writing instead of being a writer. And there might not be a cost there in terms of sales because my efforts on social media to plug the books were likely to be wasted anyway.

So that was why I did it now. But the dream is that maybe, because you'd be aware of, I suppose, the book talk phenomenon, you know, the people talking about books. And so, yes, there are books that go viral on TikTok, but it's very rarely because of anything the author did.

It's always because readers are talking about other people's books and that gets a conversation started. So I guess it'd be really nice if that happened to me, if suddenly enough people were talking about iWorks that I didn't have to talk about it anymore and then I could just never go back to social media. But in practice, I think I'll probably be back next year when I have another adult book to plug, whatever that may turn out to be.

And have you been using anyone to manage your social media for you while you've been taking a break? Or are you just letting it be? I have, there's a graphic design thing called Canva, right, where you can sort of make images. That has sort of social media plugins, meaning that because I'm logged out of social media, that Canva is still logged into them.

If I have a new book out, I can kind of make an image on Canva and hit the post to social media button and that means that I don't see any of the comments or anything anyone responds to it, I don't get any of the messages, but at least I can still put something out there. But no, I guess I could get someone else to manage my social media probably, but I'd kind of rather just let it linger than have something...

Something that feels inauthentic is the wrong word given because i we were just talking about how it's all inauthentic it's all the sort of performance art but it would feel kind of corporate and slimy which is not a diss on the people who who actually do it but to have someone else like tweeting as me and or i mean that the publisher can do that i guess but yeah i'm not sure. I'm not, it's one of the many aspects of modern life that I'm not really quite

sure how to manage. I'm just doing the best I can. Sounds like all of us. Jack Heath is a human being like everyone.

Hopefully some of our listeners will take that inspiration. If Jack Heath can write, I can write. Hopefully so, yes. If you're listening to this right now and you're thinking, actually, Jack Heath doesn't sound as smart as I would have thought, given the books he writes, then that's good. Embrace that feeling. You take it as inspiration rather than disappointment. I think all writers have a level of imposter syndrome. I didn't start writing until I was 40 and that, it's how old I am, people.

But I let that fear of not being good enough stop me from starting. And it was sort of when you've said, oh, at 19, I had my first publication. It's like, yes, that was the right time. That's when you need to start writing. If you feel that you've got a story to share, do it. Don't let your whole life pass without starting your career.

Yeah. On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, I just heard a great interview with Chloe Hooper, who said something that I have often thought, which is that the people who debut later, their debuts are so much more well thought out, and have so much more going for them often. Because the more life and students you have, the better you understand the world, the better you'll be able to write.

So Chloe Hooper has said that she kind of goes into used bookshops and buys copies of the collections that her first short stories appeared in just so as she can, you know, make sure no one else sees them. I have kind of the same feeling about my first book. I mean, I'm sure there were things that were good about it, but there's also a whole heap of things that I would do very differently knowing what I know now.

So, whenever someone new, like today in 2024 discovers my first book, The Lab, from 2006, I'm always very wary about even recommending it to them. I go, oh, well, I hope you like it. But if you don't, please don't judge me. I was very young.

Can you take me back to the experience of your first book? First of all, what made you sit down and write your first book? Yeah, it's tricky because I don't really remember a time when I didn't feel like I was a writer in the sense that when I was a kid, I was always writing stories, which I called novels. And they were, you know, five or six pages long. Maybe when I was, you know, eight or nine, I probably wrote something.

I remember when I was eight or nine, I wrote a trilogy, and each novel in this trilogy was probably about 15 pages, something like that. But I remember when I was 13, I met a girl named Kate, and Kate really liked reading, and I really liked her. So I told her I was a writer, and she was like, really? What have you written? And then I kind of had to pull my finger out and get started to, like, justify my claim to be a writer. So, I started writing what became my first book at that time.

And what it was about was inspired by a book I was reading in English class that I just hated. In retrospect, it was probably a really good book. But at the time, I was just not interested at all. So, I went, I'm going to write the opposite of this. It's instead of being a book about, again, it was a good book.

I don't want to say on air what it was, but the main character that her parents were going through a divorce and that had led her to get an eating disorder, basically, and she was being bullied at school and all that stuff. And so I was like, I'm going to write something said in the future with as many explosions and kung fu fights as I can fit onto a single page. So I started writing that. As kind of a reaction against this sort of book that I've been reading.

And I finished the first draft when I was 17. That may sound like I was sort of very committed because 13 to 17, that's four years, that's a long time to spend working on a single project when you're a teenager. But I think lots of my other friends were writers too, but they kept getting distracted by other ideas. So lots of them had a lot of novels or stories started, but none finished.

Whereas anytime I got a new idea, I would work out some kind of way to cram it into my existing story, which is why the resulting book is not a mess, but it's got everything including the kitchen sink. It's a bit over the top. So when I finished the book, I sent it off to Pan Macmillan Australia because that was the only publisher I could find who was accepting unsolicited manuscript submissions from authors who didn't have agents.

And I sent them the first three chapters and a plot synopsis, which was what the website said to do at the time, you know, 12 point times New Roman, double spaced, four centimetre margins around the edges, single-sided, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And when they got back to me, they said, yeah, we really like it, but you've pitched this as a book for adults, and you've also told us it's only 40,000 words long. And a book for adults is typically at least 80,000, so we think it's probably

best if we send it back to you. And I said, no, no, no, we'll make it longer. So I weekly wrote it until it was 92,000 words long. And then they said, actually, it's reading more like YA now. And they didn't know that I was a teenager. There's a reason that my book was reading like YA. It was because I was a teenager when I wrote it, but they didn't know that. I met them. And they only knew that my resume was suspiciously empty.

And so i said okay i'll make it shorter so then i stripped it down to about 70 000 words and i think it was that process of expanding it out from 40 to 92 like learning to never leave a potential complication on the on the table like always throw everything in and in the process of cutting it down like stripping out absolutely everything that wasn't absolutely necessary to try to get it back down to the length of a YA book, That was probably the most important part in my development as a writer,

learning that expansion and contraction thing, because I still kind of write that way.

The difference is that now I'm often doing both things at the same time. Like anything that occurs to me to put in, I put it in. Anything that occurs to me to take out, I take it out as I go. So instead of long drafts followed by short drafts, it's more like planning for goal. It's a sort of filtration process. I like that description. That's how I write as well. So, I write, edit, write, edit in the sentence. Yeah. So, I don't just do a great big draft and then go back and edit.

I'm constantly editing. So, work on that. Yeah.

I don't think there's a wrong way to do it necessarily, but it is weird that people treat the steps as so distinct, isn't it? Like, we draw this line between plotters and pantsers, right? Like the people who plan their books and the people who make it up as they go along. And my reaction to that is, aren't we all just pantsers? It's just that some of us pants our outlines rather than our first drafts. Ultimately, you need all these skills to be any kind of writer.

So, deciding what kind of writer you are is really a bit redundant. Yes. And I think realistically as well, when you're writing bigger bodies of work, you have to do some plotting. Yeah. Otherwise, you get stuck. And I find I will hold myself up because I don't know the ending yet. And I'm like, well, I won't start a novel because I don't know how it will end. So, there's no point starting.

And that actually just gets me bound up in never getting started with some of the things I really want to do. So, that's why I write short stories and picture books at the moment. If it's any consolation, I got myself painted into a very stupid corner just this morning where I had a scene where there was an undercover cop who was at a meeting and then someone's like, Chuckles is a cop.

And then I was like, okay, I've got the reader on the hook. Now would be a great time to put in some kind of flashback. So I wrote like, it wasn't the first time my cover had been blown and then started coming up with this sort of previous thing when it happened to the character.

And then about halfway through the scene and i didn't know where the scene was going and in my head this is the kind of terrible thing i do if i spend too much time like on social media or reading fan mail or whatever i as i'm writing the scene i start imagining explaining to someone else what i'm doing and how clever it is because i go ha ha ha you can start writing a scene without really knowing where it's going because you will find some interesting things along the way and then

i got about halfway through and i went hang on isn't the reader just going to be annoyed because they want to know what's going to happen to chuckles now or not some random thing that happened to him in the past that isn't even connected to the rest of the story so that was a thousand words of writing i did this morning that i just had to delete because it was good content, but there was just not room for it and the story didn't make sense.

So, that's the kind of problem that I wouldn't have had if I'd stuck a little bit closer to my outline.

Now, I wanted to ask you a bit of a question. Just because you did start writing as a young male, do you feel... Conscious of writing for young men to encourage reading? Or do you just write without that audience? This is the sort of – I don't get exactly this question quite often, but I've had kind of variations on it throughout my career.

And it's interesting to me that the kind of reader that I have, and I'm speaking of my books for young people at the moment, the sort of teenage action adventure fiction and middle grade action adventure fiction, the kind of reader that I have is not the kind of reader that I was. So my books are very popular among young boys, which I was, but often reluctant readers, which I absolutely wasn't.

So it's interesting to me that the people I talk to where I really kind of understand how they feel and they understand how I feel and we get on really well and we have a lot in common, those tend to be women or girls. Whereas the boys, what I often hear is, you know, I never really liked reading until I read this book and now I do like reading. Can you sign my book? And on the one hand, I think I don't believe in people who don't like reading.

I believe in people who haven't met the right book yet. So, if that book was my book, then that's a great honour. And it means that even a book like The Lab, where, as I've said before, I would do a lot of things differently if I read it now, I'm still very glad it exists or exists because it's still making a difference in the lives of people who otherwise just would not be interested in reading.

So, I'm conscious of that, but when I'm writing, I'm not conscious of, oh, the reluctant readers will love this because I can't really empathize with the reluctant readers because I haven't been one since I was, you know, three years old. So, all I can kind of do is trust the story and then just hope that it will find its audience, if that makes sense. So, if you're helping young men to read, it's a by-product of writing a good story.

Yeah. I really, so for the record, I really do think young men should read and I'm happy that my books are encouraging them, but that's not something I know how to do. If I was trying to do that, I think it would come off as forced and maybe even patronising. It's a challenge to get young men to read. I have two sons who are now 18 and 21. So they're readers now.

But I found it really challenging because I picked up books at such a young age and embraced them like reading novels at six kind of thing. And my boys really fought me. And even when they would do a book in high school that I had done, And I'd be like, oh, great, we can share this story together. Nope, that wasn't happening. And then my younger son, he just picked up The Power of One one day and loved the story. And he came to me.

He cried at the end, of course, because everybody does. But he was like, you didn't tell me that it would be like that. And I was like, well, I wasn't expecting you to pick it up and read it because I haven't seen you read. But, yeah, suddenly he was reading novels. but it's got to be a story that engages him.

So I can't give him Romeo and Juliet and expect to share, whereas I love, I'll cry when I read Romeo and Juliet, but it's because I love Shakespeare and those stories, whereas he's like, mum, what are you forcing me to read this for? So, yeah, for me, I'm just interested. I still think of you as a young man, Jack, That's how your writing has impacted young men. But it sounds like if it's a good story, they want to read it.

I think one of the things that's really nice about literature is that because it's comparatively cheap to produce, I mean, compared to, say, movies, video games, TV shows, that kind of thing, you can write the kind of book that appeals to a fairly narrow audience and then still break even on it, which means that, you know, for you it might be Shakespeare, for your son it's the power of one. For me it might be The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North or whatever.

Like there can be a book that feels like it was written to appeal to you specifically, whereas if you go see, say, the latest Marvel or Star Wars movie, then it might be a really good movie, but you've got to bear in mind that they also made it to appeal to literally everybody. It's not going to feel very tailored to you.

So the advantage of that is that you can find a book that speaks to you much more deeply than those other mediums, but the disadvantage is it's often way harder to find that book. I think that's why it takes some people a lot longer.

Now, have you got anything that you're starting next? Is there another project? Yeah, right. Okay. So there's a few projects on the horizon, but I'm in the kind of odd position for me where I don't know. There's a couple of things that I don't know about. Often I can be like, okay, my next books will be this, this, this, and this, and they come out on this date, this date, this date. So I know there will be a sequel to Spy Academy, The Peak. So that's the book that just came out.

It's about a kid who gets recruited to a secret spy school. So imagine Harry Potter that is learning espionage rather than magic. So Harry Potter meets Alex Rider is the basic premise for that. And so I've written a sequel to that called Spy Academy Doomsday, which will be out later in the year.

But I've also I've written an outline for a book called I Know What You're Hiding which would be another teen murder mystery in this with the son of the same characters from If You Tell Anyone You're Next which was one of my earlier books I've written an outline for a book called Kill Your Boss which would follow on from Kill Your Brother but I've also got a murder mystery set on a cruise ship currently called choppy water and i

don't know if i'm supposed to be talking about this yet but you can't edit audio so i'll just say it i'm also supposed to be writing a doctor who book and it's so here listeners yeah so i have a lot on my plate but i'm not sure when anything is coming out or even what the final title of all these things are going to be so i guess all i can say is keep an eye out you won't hear it on social media because i'm not there but.

So when you have the idea for, Does it just start with an inkling or is it do you have to sit down and work at an idea? I've tried it both ways, like, and with varying levels of success. Like, sometimes I will try to force an idea. I'll sort of sit down and just come up with some random things and then follow it and edit it until it feels right. And eventually I'll be really proud of it. And then no one else will like the premise. And I think, oh, I thought that was really good.

Whereas the ones that start as an inkling, often the premise seems to have more appeal. Hang on, let me give you some sort of concrete examples. So I had a book where I came up with the idea. I kind of had to force the idea. So I was like, okay, what is a good setting? Zoo who what it could be a good mystery severed head found in the hyena enclosure.

And then and i sort of put together what i thought was a really clever outline with lots of really good twists at time of recording i have not yet found a publisher for for that book even though i still remain convinced that that it you know had it but on the other hand there was another book that kind of started as an inkling and it was to do with augmented reality and the way the the way that in the future we might you know those sort of google glass type things that you've

seen around facebook has habits whatever i i was kind of interested in not only people wearing those so they could see people that weren't there but also people at home wearing them so they could travel to places that they couldn't go then i i built. And because it started as an inkling, it was kind of a catchy premise and a publisher actually made me an offer on it. But then I started writing the manuscript and it just wasn't working.

So in the end, I ended up having to turn down the offer because I went, look, I'm sorry, I just can't turn this into a good book. So you can end up in trouble either way, whether you're kind of forcing the idea or just letting it come to you naturally.

But I do know that other things have happened like in the case of the danger books so 300 minutes of danger was prop was the book that meant that I could quit my day job it was you know I smash it back in 2015 and it was the publisher's idea they just said a book of short stories in real time and I said okay what are 10 horrible ways a child could die falling a really long way freezing to death radiation poisoning poison poisoning and then I kept going until I had 10 and then

that became like my outline for the book and it.

Was a smash hit it worked really well even though that was kind of the forcing of an idea thing so i guess what i'm trying to say is that maybe like the idea behind the book whether it comes to you naturally or or whether you're forcing it it's quite a small part of the process really it is important but not nearly as important as people act like it is so you could have a really good idea and it could fail you could have a pretty bad idea and actually make it work so um yeah so the execution can

make the difference as well yeah definitely and i think we we talked about harry potter a minute ago but i it's interesting to me to think of how many ways harry potter could have failed like you hear the famous story about how jk rowling sent it to all these publishers and they all rejected it and then someone else took it on and then made it billions of dollars so weren't those other publishers foolish and then you kind of look at the imagine her sending it to another publisher who gives

it the title of Wizard's School, Voldemort's Revenge. And you just can't picture it working.

So, yeah, every book I think is balanced on a knife edge. So you've just got to take your chances. And at this point in your career, if you had written an outline which you couldn't get any interest for, if you were still in love with that idea, would you still sit down and write that? Oh, that's an interesting question. I think I have learned to trust my agent and my publisher.

Like when they tell me something won't work, there have definitely been times in the past where I've given them an outline and they've said, no, that's not going to work. And then I have said, look, I know it sounds stupid on paper, but trust me, I can pull this off.

And then i write it and if i pull it off it ends up even if so often i don't and even if i do it feels like pulling teeth like it just it's so much work for so little effort i've learned instead to just kind of trust them so if they tell me that won't work i just don't do it and concentrate my energies on other things maybe i would feel differently if i had one project that i was incredibly passionate about and that the and

that my my agents and publishers and stuff have outright rejected but i haven't been in that situation yet the closest i've come is one book where my my agent kind of hem-hawed and then said she thought the timing's not right i am still keen to write that book. But yeah, I think it's not as solitary a profession as it seems.

You end up working with quite a lot of different people, not just the agent and the publisher, but the structural editor, the copy editor, the proofreader, all the marketing and salespeople. So it's just my name on the cover, but there's a lot of people involved and they're all very good at what they do. So if I don't let them do it and if I reject their advice, I know that the readers are likely to suffer for it.

So, I try to do what I'm told whenever I can. Amazing. Thank you so much for that. Now, just listeners, I'm apologising to Jack because when we started chatting on Skype, my office had sunlight and it's getting slowly darker and darker and I'm feeling very creepy at the moment. Isn't it earlier in Queensland? So, poor Jack is looking at me sitting in the dark. I look like you're about to tell me a campfire story.

Now, I've got a few quickfire questions that I ask all my guests so that our listeners can get to know you a little bit better. So, my first question is, what was your favourite book growing up? Oh, The Ghost of Raven Hill by Emily Rotter, probably. Yeah. That was the book that got me into crime fiction. It was the first one of the Raven Hill mysteries or, as they were known back then, Teen Tower Inc. stories. Amazing. And if you could be any book character, who would it be?

Oh, man. There's a guy named Will Blackwater from a series. The first book of the series is called Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. So he's just this guy who is impeccably dressed and sees every conversation. He's clearly like five steps ahead of the person he's talking to. And in conversation in real life, I feel like I'm about five steps behind most

of the people I'm talking to. Even if it's someone I'm talking to, well, my wife will be the first to tell you that I'm a bit slow on the uptake. So I would love to be Will Blackwater from the Zoe Ash series. The new book that he's in is called Zoe is Too Drunk for This Dystopia. Jason Clark is the author. Now, what are you reading right now? Have you got something on your bedside table? I am rereading. Oh, man. I often have a few things on the go at once.

So there's a non-fiction book called cabin fever which is about one of the cruise ships that was left adrift during covid like unable to dock anywhere that's been really interesting i am halfway through rereading the first 15 lives of harry august by clear north because it was a wonderful book when i read it back in the day and it's wonderful again and maybe even better the second time so that was really good now oh and i'm i'm also

partway through wolf hall by hillary mantel i'm aware of it again i'm slow on the uptake but it's really good well i love the miniseries as well i'm not sure if you've seen it no yeah it's good yeah i'm a big medieval fan so yeah you've now now i'm like yes jack heath and i read the same book.

Now if you could invite five literary people to dinner who would they be, Oh, man, it's interesting that I've had the opportunity to meet so many wonderful authors that I'm tempted to just kind of pick some of my friends. I once had dinner with Matthew Riley and Brett Easton Ellis at the same table. There was some really interesting discussions happening around there.

But if they could be any in the whole universe, irrespective of whether it's physically possible or not, they would probably be Mary Shelley, Philip K. Dick, and oh, you said five, didn't you? I've got three more. You can have five, yes. Three more. Okay, up to five. So Mary Shelley, Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg. Oh, man, I've picked all sci-fi ones so far. That's all right. I'll roll with it. Joyce Carol Oates. And as a last one, oh, man, it's hard to go past Stephen King.

That's a cliche I know, but love to miss him. He would just sit cranky in the corner. Well, I read an interview with him once where his response to one of the questions, I forget what even the question was, but his response was, oh, I don't know, man, and then he kind of speculated a bit. But I was like, gee, that's refreshing to hear a writer admit that they don't know something instead of pontificating. Now, a very important question. Which Hogwarts house are you? Hmm.

Interesting. And it's always interesting that people say, are you, not would you be? So, I have not done the test that I gather exists, but I feel like via a process of elimination, I'm probably a bit of a Hufflepuff. I am a Hufflepuff as well. I really want to be Gryffindor. Maybe it's a house for writers. Yeah. It's mainly because I don't like the colour that I'm like, no, I don't want to be a Hufflepuff. My husband is definitely a Slytherin, but he embraces it.

Now, if you could go back to the beginning of your writing journey, what advice would you give yourself? I think I would say, so firstly, I would be like, don't do anything differently because you've ended up in a really good place.

So and you've had a lot of strokes of good luck so don't don't mess with the timelines you definitely want it when you're 37 you definitely want to be able to write full-time and have all these books behind you and stuff like that but having said that i would tell him to appreciate the journey of that first book more i think when when my first book came out it was in retrospect a big success and i kind of didn't realize just how special that was like i knew that i was excited

about having the book come out but it was only later in my career when i wrote books that flopped and then met a whole bunch of other debut novelists who had the much more typical experience of their debut flopping that i was like oh actually what happened to me was really really special and i took it for granted so i would tell my my younger self like hey what's happening to you is kind of a massive deal.

Enjoy it and don't let yourself believe that you earned it. You've actually been really lucky. What I really love to see, Jack, is you out giving back to other authors. I've sort of met you, if I wasn't too shy to do it, at the Rainforest Writers Retreat, and you really are very engaging and kind to the attendees that come and chat to you and ask for advice. And like, I think that's really great to be giving back to other authors so they can follow you on the journey.

Oh, that's very nice of you to say so, but I'm really just paying it forward because when I was a debut, and again, probably a pretty insufferable one because I was acting like I was just getting what was my due, there were some other much more well-established authors who were incredibly generous with their time and wisdom. of them. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to name a couple of them. There was Justine Lavalestia, Scott Westerfeld, Michael Pryor.

Now, those are all Australian authors. Simone Howell, Scott's American originally, but also David Levithan, this wonderful American author. And many, many others who I'm sure I will feel bad about not mentioning as soon as we stop podcasting. But probably they had people that they looked up to who gave them good advice as well. So So, I think the trick is that over the course of a writing career, you're going to learn a whole bunch of things and you're going to learn most of them too late.

So, the least you can do is just try to pass them along and hope that the younger authors or the emerging authors will be able to dodge some of the pitfalls that you yourself walked right into. I think there's always things that you get wrong when you're learning because there really isn't an ABC of becoming an author. Out there, but we all kind of help and share each other along.

But yeah, I really, part of my podcast is if I hadn't met some people who were like, just do it, I wouldn't be doing it. And so for me, just if a listener out there is like, oh, I'd really like to write, I've listened to this episode, now I'm going to try, that makes all the difference to me.

So thank you for being a guest. I forgot to say that this is my 50th episode. So I'm really excited, Jack, to have you on because, yeah, I should be like popping poppers and streamers and terrible at my own promotion. But it is, Jack, you are our 50th guest. So thank you very much for being on. Thank you for having me. And the podcast doesn't look a day over 49 episodes, if you ask me. It's the Botox.

Thank you, Jo. Totally lit is an independent podcast you can help support us to continue to chat with wonderful australian creatives by leaving a review on itunes or sharing our socials with your friends you can also make a contribution at www.buymeacoffee.com backslash totally lit this will also help with equipment and podcasting platform fees i love to interact with our listeners so feel free to say hello either by email or social media.

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