5 Things I Learned While Writing Two Wolves / On the Run

Excerpt from Two Wolves. Calligraphy & photography by Claire Atkins, words by me. Excerpt initially featured in ‘Slow’.

My book Two Wolves (On the Run in the US) is shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award to be announced in coming weeks. I thought I’d take this chance to reflect on the story, characters and process in a series of short blog posts. Here are five key things that writing this book taught me:

1. Be Afraid
It felt good to be out of my depth, to write something that I didn’t know if I was good enough to write. This is what drove me to keep going with Two Wolves through its five-year development period. The not-knowing created Flow for me. It was a a challenging project that kept me engaged and fully absorbed but not so overwhelming that I wanted to give up.

These three images were key to me understanding what the story was about.

2. Wake Early
My sons would wake at 6.00am and I could never get back to sleep, so rather than toss and turn for an hour I would begrudgingly get up and write. I accidentally discovered that waking early was the best way to engage my unconscious mind. In that half-sleep state the most interesting, raw and surprising ideas would occur.

I wrote the book in dozens of different locations but the feeling of the story travelled with me. Pic by Amber Melody.

3. ‘The Best Thing You Can Do is Write a Stunning Manuscript.’
This was a piece of advice from my agent Catherine Drayton. I cut and pasted it at the front of my manuscript and read it regularly. I’m not sure I wrote a ‘stunning’ manuscript but I wrote the best book that I was able to write at that time. I didn’t abandon it when it was just good enough. I kept going and going and wrote nine or ten drafts instead of my usual six or seven.

Writing outdoors made me write more honestly. Nature doesn’t seem to lie.

4. Tone is Everything
Once I knew the tone of the story it started to write itself. Some writers say that they need to hear the voice of the narrator and then the story writes itself. I discovered the musical key that my story needed to be played in by finding songs, visual images, movies and other books that resonated with me. I started to understand the posture and smell and feel of it, which made the writing come more easily.

Gotye’s album Making Mirrors  was vital to me finding Ben Silver’s loneliness and growing sense of self-awareness.

5. Make it Yours
I wasn’t abducted by my own parents and taken on the run when I was a kid, which is a shame because it would have made writing the book a whole lot easier. But I always knew that this story was about me somehow. Ben Silver’s life is very different to mine but I know exactly how he feels. It  takes a long time to find an authentic personal connection to a character but I think you owe it to the reader and yourself to make the journey.

You can read the first three chapters here 🙂