Q & A with Ann Packer, author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier (Piatkus, $29.95), which has been selected as The AWW Great Read in the October issue. (Turn to the magazine for a discount coupon and save heaps on the Great Read and other books reviewed in The Weekly).

The Dive From Clausen’s Pier is the story of a young woman who is torn between living her own life and looking after her childhood sweetheart, after he is hurt in an accident. Eventually, she flees to New York where she starts anew, but her conscience and the judgement of family and friends are ever present.

Q Ann, congratulations on your book – I loved it, put my life on hold for two days to finish it.

A Thank you, I’m so glad.

Q Your book took 10 years to write, why so long?

A It was not a matter of putting it aside for long periods. It was a matter of revising and revising and revising. In the course of those 10 years, I rewrote the book nine separate times. The interesting thing is that when I first started writing it I was writing it in the third person. I did four drafts like that in the first five or six years. Then I finally thought I should do it with the main character, Carrie, telling her own story and I tried writing it in the first person. Boy, that made all the difference.

Q Were you confident when you presented the finished manuscript?

A Not really, no. I was hopeful and it took me a long time to find an agent who wanted to represent it. And then, once I did, she found a publisher for it in a week.

Q Is it difficult to get that first manuscript read if you don’t have a high profile?

A Oh, it is. This is not my first book. I wrote a collection of short stories that were published about eight years ago.

Q Did you have a big celebration when they said, ‘Yes, we love it’.

A Oh sure, I was thrilled.

Q Were you prepared for the fuss your book would create?

A No. When the early reviews came through I thought this could go pretty well, then suddenly it just took off very positively and it was everywhere. I think the moment that really counted was when The New York Times Book review put it on the cover and then I went into another dimension. I was over the moon. I said to myself, ‘Ooh, this was never supposed to happen!’

Q Did your difficult childhood (paralysed after a series of strokes, Ann’s father committed suicide), enhance your feelings of pleasure at this singular success?

A I think so. It had a particular quality to it because of the events of my childhood. I kind of made certain assumptions about what could happen in my life and it was very nice to discover that I was wrong. I had assumed wrongly what could and couldn’t happen. What I’m saying is that when you’ve had a difficult childhood, unconsciously, you think that’s what life is like. It was kind of a nice discovery that life wasn’t like that.

Q Do you have brothers and sisters?

A I have one brother and he’s also a writer. He’s published four books, two non-fiction, two fiction. Q A lot of people with difficult lives see it as an impediment to achievement. What you’ve done is inspiring, it says anything’s possible.

A I suppose it does. I’ve had many privileges. Essentially, my background is one of a lot of privileges, but some emotional difficulties. There are all kinds of different ways to overcome something, trauma, illness, so many different possibilities.

Q The book reminds you of how vulnerable we are and yet we keep on living as if we’re not.

A If you allowed yourself to think about how vulnerable you actually are, if you lived with that knowledge all the time, you’d never be able to stand it. You’d really go crazy. It’s self-protective not to dwell on what can happen. If you went the other way you’d be completely helpless, totally paranoid.

Q Knowing how things can suddenly go wrong, do you live your life to the max, appreciating every day?

A No, I don’t think so. I’m subject to forgetting that kind of thing. I’m capable of falling into worry or despair as much as anyone else, even more, perhaps. I think it’s a struggle for me to be hopeful.

Q What did your father do for a living?

A He was a Professor of Law at Stanford University.

Q The ending is a little bit open ended – any thoughts about writing a sequel?

A No, I really haven’t. I am writing a second book, but it’s not a sequel. I feel like I’ve done that story. I feel satisfied with where I left off.

Q Working title for the new book?

A No, It’s very early.

Q Have you had other jobs as well as writing?

A I have taught writing here and there. I’ve worked in publishing. When I first got out of college, I had a job working in publishing for about five years, before I went to graduate school.

Q What did you do?

A I was actually a sort of bunny – a paperback blurb writer. I wrote the copy on the back of paperbacks.

Q That would have honed some of your writing skills?

A It did and you know what else? It was a great thing for someone who wanted to be a writer, because I learned a lot about the business. And the illusions that are particular to it. I did that for five years, then I went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Q You also lived in France for a year.

A When I first started writing the novel I went there, in the autumn of 1990.I had a grant and went and lived there for a year, near Nice in the south.

Q In a lovely stone cottage or an apartment?

A Somewhere in between, it was part of a not very lovely villa.

Q You chose France for a particular reason?

A We had gone to France on our honeymoon and we had always wanted to go back.

Q How long have you been married?

A Thirteen years.

Q What is your husband’s occupation?

A John is an architect.

Q A theme in your book was how to stay true to yourself and yet be loyal to the people you love, and I thought as the mother of two children, you must experience that problem on an almost daily basis.

A I think so, for this seems to have hit a nerve with people. The book looks at conflict between loyalty and being true to yourself on a kind of grand scale. What do you do? I think that we all face that conflict on a daily basis, from putting the newspaper down and listening to the children, or I need the break for 10 minutes. It matters because I really need it. It’s not an easy call to make – it’s so easy to slip over from ‘I need this 10 minutes’ to being selfish. How do you decide where one starts and the other ends? But on the other side of that is the ‘I have to do this for so and so’, until you’re ragged and not doing anyone any good.

Q When you’re concentrating on writing, do you have set hours or do you write in bursts?

A I do it when I can. I work around my children’s schedule. The hard thing for me is to say no to people. Asking me to help in the classroom. Or friends saying, ‘Let’s have lunch’. It’s hard to say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that I need to write’. But somehow I balance it all, I put it all together in a way that works. I fit in what I can. Some weeks there’s no writing and some weeks are full of writing.

Q I was reading recently that family is the enemy of art.

A In a way, one aspect drags you away from your work, the other enriches it, absolutely. I am the writer that I am, who is also the mother and the wife and the friend. It is an interesting way of life, because no one thing is separate from another.

Q Are you writing full time now?

A Yes, in terms of my work life, I have been writing for the last few years. And the question is, whether it becomes full-time. I have to grab as much time as I can.

Q Is your husband encouraging and supportive, or does he get sick of it?

A No, he’s been encouraging and supportive. I have a wonderful group of readers, a writer’s group who have read the book several times and they have been of great help to me. They’ve been instrumental.

Q Have you sold the movie rights to the book?

A We’re working on it. I have an agent in Hollywood.

Q Where were you born and raised?

A In Stanford, California.

Q Describe where you live?

A I live in a house in a suburb about half-an-hour from San Francisco, about half-an-hour from the Pacific Ocean.

Q Do you have pets?

A No.

Q With children, how did you manage to escape that?

A I just said no.

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Q & A with Ian Bone, author of The Song Of An Innocent Bystander, the September Book Of The Month in The Australian Women’s Weekly (Penguin Books, $18.95). The plot takes off like a runaway train, when nine-year-old Freda Opperman is separated from her parents at a fast food outlet and is caught up in a terrifying siege.

Q Am I correct in saying that this is your first adult book, having written, about 13 books for children and teenagers?

A In writing the book I wanted to push the boundaries as it were, towards writing for more of an adult audience. I have to say, I also believe that a lot of young adult books have a lot of appeal for adults as well.

Q You’ve had 13 books published?

A It’s probably more like 20, but because that includes four Bananas In Pyjamas and four Wiggles books, it sounds like a bit of a brag.

Q Did writing for television come before writing books?

A Yes. Television was my first love, although as a kid I read a lot. I was a bit of a sophisticated reader. I was reading people like Herman Hess and people like that. I went to the Australian Film and Television School, and graduated from there.

Q What was you first job in TV?

A First, it was making little educational films then I went straight into Playschool. And I did Playschool for over three years, when Noni Hazlehurst was still doing it.

Q So did you start writing books while you were still in TV?

A Yes, I was making TV for the ABC, working on this show called Swap Shop, dramatising short stories and with the arrogance of ignorance, I said “I can do this” and I had a go at it. And everyone said, ‘Well, these are pretty good.’ As much as I enjoyed working for the ABC – I was there till 1993 – I found I was spending all my nights writing these books. I wrote five that never got published. I realised that something had to go and I was even starting to think television was beginning to take away from my writing.

So I made a decision, either brave or foolish, to go. I had an enormously supportive partner, I must point out. So I left my job at the ABC and became an author. It was huge because I’d won national and international awards for TV programs. I’d reached a point at the ABC where I would either have had to go into middle management or change direction in some shape or form, but that wasn’t the move I wanted to make.

The popular story is that it happens overnight. For most people it doesn’t. I have a nice collection of rejection letters.

Q Did you keep them?

A I have a little box in my garage. It’s gathering dust, but there they all are.

Q You didn’t perceive it as a great setback when you were rejected?

AIt spurred me on actually. For half an hour or so it felt like…’Oh, God, this is horrible’. But it would actually spur me on and make me think I can do better. The first time I really wrote for myself was when I wrote a book called Fat Boy Saves The World, which was published by Lothian. I put aside all notions of what would make a good book. In fact I looked at all the books for young adults and teenagers and said, ‘I want to write something completely different.’

What was important about it with regards to my writing was that in the book I asked things about what is the value of life? What is love? I explored the other side of life other than getting on with work or boys or girls or whatever, I went deeper and addressed the spiritual aspect of life. That book appeals to a lot of adults as well as to younger people.

Q The plot of The Song of An Innocent Bystander is fabulous – how did you come across the idea?

AIt came from a few areas. I had been talking to someone a few years ago about parents who exert a very powerful influence on their children, to the point of almost brainwashing them. Around the same time there had been a siege in an aeroplane where people had been held hostage for quite a number of days. And I remember reading one of the accounts of one of the Australians involved, talking about the various reactions of the people on the plane and how some people had fallen into the Stockholm Syndrome, which is where a person being held captive will start aligning themselves with the person holding them. It’s a documented and recognised response. Then I remembered the Patti Hearst story, which I grew up hearing and I re-read her book. But really the initial idea came form that conversation about children and how they can be so taken in by the strong world around them or by any strong ideology. How they need to cling to something. It can be anything because they are not as discerning as we are. So it grew from that.

To me a nine-year-old girl is the perfect person, because she was old enough to look after herself, but young enough to be taken in by what was being said and what was going on around her. To be affected by a whole lot of messages both said and unsaid.

Q I was impressed by the rising tension and terror you re-create during the siege. I found it very gripping and found myself wondering if you’d ever been a hostage – or did you get someone to tie you up in a room for three days?

A There have been brief moments in my life where I have experienced fright, but no, I’ve never been a hostage. I remember one incident when my wife and I were chased by these young guys, who chased us to our car and smashed the windows as we drove away. So you draw on things like that. I read first-hand accounts of people who had been involved in sieges. I might be old-fashioned, but I think authors, good ones, can imagine themselves into any situation. I wanted to recreate that real feeling of the stale terror of the place, of being held by this capricious madman. And the responses people will have that are not always predictable.

Q How did you choose the name Freda?.

A I can’t write a book until I have the character’s names . Not a word, it’s crazy. So I sit, sometimes for days, wondering and fiddling around with names. I can’t tell you anything logical about where that name came from, but when I got it I said, ‘That’s her, that’s her!’ Once I get the name right, the character starts to form in my mind. started writing the book about three years ago. I do a lot of other writing as well. I still write for TV, I can’t get away from the monster. Believe it or not, I write Here’s Humphrey. I also write a lot of video scripts. I have been working for a production company on a pilot of a TV min-series about a mass murderer, with a twist, but I can’t say any more about that right now.

Q By writing for Humphrey, who doesn’t speak a word, do you mean that you set up scenes for him?

A No, everything is fully scripted. Then the actor interprets it as Humphrey. He acts out the lines. I do talks about Humphrey to school kids and the best question I ever had was from a kid at Coober Pedy who asked: “Have you ever been inside Humphrey?” And there was just this beat and then the whole room erupted in laughter. I said, If you’re referring to his suit, I’ve never been inside it.

Q So Humphrey is your bread and butter while you’re writing books?

A Yes, but it’s also enormous fun writing Humphrey. I really love writing Humphrey, I really do. It’s just Laurel and Hardy for pre-schoolers. He has simple motivations really. He just wants to sing and dance and have fun.

Q What about the book’s title?

AIt took me a while. I can write without my title – but I do like to get my titles tied down fairly early. It was always going to be about an innocent by-stander.

Q How did you get the book published? Did you send early chapters, or a finished manuscript or what?

A I approached Penguin Books. I took the first few chapters to Laura Harris at Penguin Books. And I hadn’t had anything published with Penguin at that stage. I asked her what she thought of it and she fell in love with it straight away. It was about the first 50 pages of the book, really.

Q Are you writing another book for the adult market?

A Most definitely, I have one in mind already. Called Love Cuts. It’s about six characters all in their early 20s and it’s told as six short stories, from each of the character’s perspective. So there’s a continuing story through it. They’re all friends and they all know each other. It’s an exploration of the different forms of love, which has been done before, but it’s something I want to try. There’s fidelity, devotional love, devoting yourself to one person through really tough times, romantic love and unrequited love. So that’s what I am going to work on next.

Q Is Penguin publishing that one?

AYes, I have a two-book deal with them.

Q You were born in Geelong.

AYou can take the boy out of Geelong, but you can’t take Geelong out of the boy. I grew up there, did my paper rounds as a lad.

Q So you’re still a Cats supporter?

A Oh yes, absolutely.

Q What did your parents do for a living?

A Dad was a factory worker at Ford. My mum was a secretary. I come from a family of five. I have a twin sister. We were the last, so I have two older brothers and an older sister.

Q Does your twin sister write?

A No she’s a legal secretary. I’m the only one who writes. I was always regarded as the crazy one.

Q Why did you move from Victoria?

A I went to Sydney to go to the Film and Television School. And graduated there in 1982, after three years. Then I worked for the ABC. Left it in ’93, but in that time we had left Sydney in 1989 to go to Adelaide. Sydney was getting tougher and tougher. We loved it, but we felt it was a place for young people, unencumbered with kids. My wife is from Adelaide originally. Adelaide is such an easy city to live in. Every time I go back to Sydney, it reminds me of how easy we’ve got it. Everything’s there, but on a much smaller scale.

Q Educated at?

A Belmont High School, then Rusden Teacher’s College, then three years at the Film and Television School.

Q How long have you been married?

A Oh gosh… my son is 16, we got married after he was born, so for about 15 years, I guess. I have a 16-year-old son, Jack, a 12-year-old daughter called Elinor and a six-year-old daughter called Bridie. And a golden retriever called Louis.

Q Describe your living surrounds.

A We live in suburban Adelaide, in a sandstone bungalow which was built in the 1920s. The ghost of the original owner used to come and visit us, but he seems to have left now.

Q A real ghost?

A Yes, we used to see him in his pyjamas and dressing gown. He was wonderful. The garden is beautifully done by my wife, Liz. I dig holes now and then, that’s my only contribution.

Q Tell me about your wife?

A Her name is Liz. She’s a social worker. She works 3 days a week, and on those days I do the pick-up and drop-offs of the kids to school.

Q Where do you write?

AI work in a shed down the back garden. I’ve had it for a year now. Prior to that, I was in a corner of lounge-room and that was a bit tough, I can tell you. So I built a little shed, but it’s got everything I need. A perfect little quiet space away from everything that goes on.

Q Do you have a view?

A No, I don’t want a view. I liked to be totally locked in my own little cave, in my own world.

Q Do you have set hours for writing?

A Usually, if I’m not doing the school drop-off, I get out there about 8am and come in around 5.30-6.00pm. For lunch, I just grab a sandwich and keep going. If you’re working on something like this book you can’t just turn it off. So often, at night, I’ll write in a note book or if it’s winter, I’ll continue working on my laptop.

Q Are you a distracted father and husband when you’re working on a book?

A My family say that when I’m working on something like this, I can be. But mostly, I can’t be. I go every Thursday to my younger daughter’s violin lessons and I do all the talking to the mums at the pick-ups and drop-offs. I get distracted when I’m working, but I much prefer that people know me as Bridie’s dad rather than that Ian Bone who was in the paper. My dad was a shift worker so he was actually around during the day and worked at night, but he was always the one at home when we’d arrive from school and he’d get the meals, so I grew up with him as a role model.

Q How old are you?

A I was born in 1956, so I will be 46 in October.

Q Star sign?.

A Libran. But I don’t know if I’m typical because everyone says theyre indecisive and I’m the most decisive person I know.

Q Looking back on leaving the ABC to become a writer, that was a huge gamble, wasn’t it?

A It was enormous. Around the books that I write I do a lot of freelance work, Humphrey etc. And I always try to keep that sustained because I do have a family. I keep emphasizing that I couldn’t have done it without my partner. I just think I’m the luckiest person around.

Q Her regular income helped?

A Well, that too, yes, but to have someone who would say then if that’s your dream, then go for it. Her attitude was that we could make it happen. That was wonderful, because a bloke’s programmed to be responsible.

Q Were there lean times?

AOh hell, yes. I nearly gave it away twice. When I wasn’t getting published, there were times when the financial stuff was difficult, like we’ve learned how to stretch that noodle. But other times, especially earlier on when I was getting manuscripts rejected and I wasn’t getting what I wanted to happen in terms of a breakthrough in getting a book published, I thought, ‘I’m just wasting my time’. It was ‘93 when I started writing full time, but it wasn’t until ‘98 that my book Fat Boy was published. To me, that’s when I started to feel like it was really going to happen. There were about four years there when I just kept at it and at it and at it. I wasn’t starving, but it wasn’t happening. I set myself goals and I felt I’d failed in the sense that I hadn’t achieved them. So I had to overcome that sense that I’d failed. That I hadn’t done what I’d said I’d do, that I was wasting time. I had to continually struggle with that voice in my head for quite a long time. Since ‘98 I’ve had high success.

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