Q&A with Lili Wilkinson

Does it feel weird talking about Scatterheart which you wrote nearly two years ago now?

Yeah, nearly three.  It is very very weird.  Because it takes so long for a book to come from one country to another, I did all of my talking about Scatterheart back in Australia in 2007 now we’re talking about it again and I’ve written three books in the mean time.

Do you go back and read a book once it’s finished?

I try not to once it’s been published because you’re always terrified you’re going to find a mistake. There nearly was a really big mistake in Scatterheart where I realised the night before it went to press – one of the characters, Molly, only has one eye  but I had said throughout the book that “Molly closed her eyes”, so I had to go through at four o’clock in the morning and find them all and cross out the ‘s’.

The characters in Scatterheart were what really made the book.

I spent a lot of time trying to make them feel like real people because I think that’s often why there’s a problem with historical fiction - they just don’t feel like people that you might meet, they just feel like constructions.

Some of the settings were really amazing; did you travel to all the places?

I went to a lot of the places. I wrote all the England stuff without ever having been to England although I did go to England between the first draft and the second draft, but most of that was from history books and paintings. There are a couple of tall ships in Australia, there’s one in Melbourne and one in Sydney so I did go on them and I went on a bit of a sailing around the harbour in Melbourne and that really helped to get an idea of what it would’ve sounded like and looked like.

Do you like working in historical fiction more than writing about the modern world, do you get more out of it?

Its hard to say, I really like both.  I’d quite like to try writing some historical fantasy, like taking a historical period and adding some magic to it. Although I do really, really enjoy the freedom of writing contemporary teenage stuff, and just being able to play more with the language and being able to use a lot more humour which I enjoy as well.

I think the research must be quite hard

It is hard but it’s also really interesting.  I’m a bit of a nerd so I enjoy all that side of stuff. I do a lot of my research online which makes it a lot easier and I work in the library

The website you work on – Inside A Dog – is that a Groucho Marx quote?

Yeah, we didn’t really know what to call it because we were designing a website for teenagers about books and reading and we knew that if we called it ‘readingiscool.com’ or ‘awesome.com’  then no teenager would go anywhere near it because it would’ve sounded like it was trying too hard so we thought we’d just call it something completely random. And everyone upstairs at my work said, ‘You can’t call it Inside a Dog, it’s not about dogs, you can call it inside a book’, but we did anyway and it seems to have worked pretty well because it’s easy to remember.

Can you tell us more about Inside A Dog?

It’s a bit of everything because when we did it we noticed at that time there weren’t many places for young people to find out about books online so there are about 5000 book reviews online and they’re all written by young people. We also have a Writer in Residence every month. We have authors from all over the world. The great thing about being a Writer in Residence online is you don’t have to be in Australia to do it. We also run a literary award called the Inkys which is Australia’s only teenage book prize.

Your mother’s a children’s author as well, is there any rivalry or competition?

Not really, and she writes for middle years and I write for teenagers so we’re a little bit different although having said that she is starting to write for first year and above. We’re very supportive of each other there’s certainly enough room on the block for both of us. And I was published first so..

Is it useful to have another author in the family?

Yes, really useful. When I was still living at home with mum we used to have our writer desks next to each other and ask each other questions – I’d be researching convicts and I’d say ‘Do you think the convicts did this?’ and Mum would be like ‘Do you think they have daffodils in China?’.

It all sounds very relaxed

Yeah it is apart from deadline time, it’s not. And I’m always the first person to read mum’s draft and she’s always the first person to read mine.

Do you find it hard writing to the deadline?

I’m pretty good with deadlines I like the pressure. I’m very bad at writing without the deadline I really, really struggle if I don’t have a date that it does have to be done by. I always got my homework done on time at school so it’s kind of like that.

When you’re doing the editing, do you feel a bit sad if it’s got to be changed?

Sometimes, a lot of the time you have quite a few fights with your editor, but I tend to take on board what they say a lot of the time but then if I feel very strongly about something I will fight for it.

Is it worrying when it’s just been published if anyone will like it

It is a bit stressful at first and then when the first few reviews start to come in you can relax a little bit and it’s ok.

I don’t mind negative reviews, I haven’t had very many but I don’t mind a well filled out negative review, what I really hate are book reviews that aren’t well written where they spend 3 paragraphs on summarising the plot and then two lines on ‘and it was pretty good’. 

Do you find that people tend to over-analyse so that they tend to see things in the book that you didn’t.

Yeah they do. And I really really like it when they do, I don’t think the author’s interpretation of the book is the only way that a book should be interpreted -  I really like the idea that once I’ve finished a book and it’s published it doesn’t belong to me anymore it belongs to the readers and they can draw whatever meaning from it they like.

Do you think you have improved as a writer?

Absolutely. Yeah I do, and hopefully I will continue to improve because I think the worst thing a writer can do is think they can’t get any better that’s why I really like the editing process because it’s always about making it better and you could edit forever really. And that’s the really great thing about it is continuing to improve your craft and make it better and keep being a writer

You can read Amy's review of Scatterheart in our Your Reviews section.