Coleen Kwan

I always enjoy visiting this Aboriginal cave shelter. It lies in the slope of a hill overlooking a grassy meadow. The stencils along the back wall depict hands and weapons. The roof of the shelter bears the smoke of many fires, while the floor is soft ashy sand. The people who used this cave would have hunted game in the surrounding eucalyptus woodland - wallabies, possums, wombats, goannas, and snakes. For water there's a nearby gully which only fills with water during storms, but a permanent river runs further down the valley.



It’s a peaceful, meditative spot. When I’m here it’s easy to imagine people gathering together in the shelter and lighting a fire to cook their hunt. Afterward, as the night draws in, I can see them sitting around the fire and exchanging stories, perhaps about the day’s hunt or myths about the Dreamtime. From these early beginnings storytelling evolved to become an intrinsic part of our culture. The people who sat around those fires passed their tales on through oral means, while my stories exist as a series of magnetised dots on a hard drive, but I like to think I share a connection with these early story tellers.

Some writers love nothing better than to pop on the earphones and crank up the music while they write. It energises them, gives them inspiration. I’m the opposite. I can’t write with distractions like music or TV on. But sometimes listening to the right piece of music can help set the tone for a particular scene.

 I needed some mood-setting music when I was writing a pivotal scene in my first contemporary romance WHEN HARRIET CAME HOME. In my scene it’s night time and my hero and heroine, Adam and Harriet, are at a quiet lookout, dancing together under the stars. Music plays from Adam’s car. But what song were they dancing to? I wanted something emotional to match the scene and eventually found an evocative song by Melody Gardot called ‘Our Love Is Easy’.


I have to confess straight up that I’m not a fan of jazz, but I happened to catch a TV interview with singer-songwriter Melody Gardot and was intrigued by her story. An horrific accident put her in hospital for a year and left her with serious injuries, one of them making her hyper-sensitive to both light and sound. During her recovery she learned to play the guitar and began writing music. Her music has been described as ‘a blend of cocktail jazz and torch song’, and her singing is rich and soulful.

After I listened to ‘Our Love Is Easy’ several times, it made writing the scene in my book much easier and hopefully improved the emotional punch too. If you like smooth, cool jazz, or even if you don't, take a listen!

Does your character like risotto or paella?

Before I start writing a new book, I like to do a lot of planning. I write a lot of description of my main characters—what they look like, what their childhood was like, what their hopes and dreams are. But it’s only when I start writing the story that I start to find out more about them. Do they like reading? What kind of books do they enjoy? Would they be the kind of person who owns an ereader, or is it dead trees all the way?

The other day I was writing a scene in which the heroine cooked dinner for the hero. In my initial draft I had her cooking risotto, simply because I couldn’t see her cooking a roast lamb, for instance. But when I reread the scene, risotto didn’t seem right, so I changed it to paella. Paella suited her much better, I thought. Paella was spicy, messy, robust. It was her. Now it made no difference to the scene whether she cooked risotto or paella, and the hero would have enjoyed whatever she made, but it made a difference to me. It’s this level of detail I wouldn’t have thought of in my initial planning. Only when I came to write the scene did I realise that she was a paella girl.

By writing the first draft I discover so much more about my characters, their motivations, and their conflicts. The characters, who before were just a list of words in my plan, become real people. My first draft is messy, laden with clichés and mistakes, missing important scenes, lacking the right pace, but it’s also where my characters start to breathe and (hopefully) behave like real people, even to the point of preferring paella over risotto.

VRoig