The Comparison Games

Attending literary events can stir up some green-tinged emotions for writers

Jessica Kirkness, Shankari Chandran and Susan Johnson at Byron Writers Festival

It’s a warm winter’s afternoon. Wrongly warm, like a lot of the world. Coat left at home, sweater and scarf scrunched in my bag, straw hat on, the sun is beating down on my back. 

Up on stage is Shankari Chandran, winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s biggest novel prize. Smiling at her son and parents in the front row Chandran appears assured and relaxed. Then she reveals that at the time of writing Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens she had let go of hopes for an ongoing writing career. Publishers were not seeing a market for stories about race, immigration and inequalities in multi-cultural Australia. But Chandran wrote the book anyway.   

How we continue as writers is a perennial, deeply personal question. How do you define success? How do you cope with slow progress, failure? How much economic insecurity will you endure? My impression of Chandran is of someone who sets high targets and carries on towards her goals. But it’s a challenge when your goals and ways of making a living don’t align. What would you rather do? Give up or carry on as best you can? 

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Long ago: I’m at a job interview for a writing/marketing job. Meeting in a bookshop cafe we appear to have rapport - maybe this could work. 

‘Of course, I’d rather be writing novels,’ says my interviewer.

‘If you’d rather be writing novels, you’d be doing that,’ I say.  

I will not get the job. 

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On stage with Chandran are Jessica Kirkness, and Susan Johnson. When Susan’s turn comes to read an excerpt from her latest book, she rolls her eyes and says she might as well go home, that her work is frivolous after the rest. I smile, well, it’s more of a wince. Even now with several books published, Susan goes through the same feelings as me. It’s ridiculous. I’ve read almost every one of Susan’s books. I’d already read the first two before we met at a mutual friend’s party in London in the mid-1990s.  

A few weeks ago, I started reading Susan’s latest book, Aphrodite’s Breath, a memoir about Susan’s return to the Greek island of Kythera, a place she adored since her first visit as a young woman. In Aphrodite’s Breath Susan returns to Kythera to live there with her 85-year-old mother, Barbara.

First, I would never contemplate doing a journey like that with my mother. What does that say about me? Nothing.

Second, and pertinent here, is that Susan Johnson’s writing is beautiful, observant. Alongside it, my work feels - wait for it - frivolous. My recent silly topics: an imaginary race to buy eggs, the Barbie movie. 

Beside Chandran’s novel and Kirkness’s memoir about growing up as a hearing person with deaf grandparents, my work-in-progress, a tropical island rom-com with an environmental twist, seems light fare. 

How easily we slip into the comparison games. 

The late Clive James wrote a poem about writer rivalries - The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered. He described the poem as vengeful. I suspect envy was part of the mix, and James would have known his books ended up on remainder piles too.

James’s comparisons were set against peers, other established and well-known writers. I don’t feel vengeful. Nor envious. I feel annoyance and frustration with myself that another event or year has passed without a book out. Another year of not being on stage, not being part of the conversation when I know can contribute. 

If I gave the green monster more play? Is loosening his leash the push I need? 

For a time, I stop:

• No entering competitions, tiring of paying entry fees, being on the shortlist again, watching family and friends be awarded their third sojourn at the writers’ retreat.

• No attending literary festivals, until it’s me up on stage with my book.

Not that being on stage is the be-all buy I enjoy it now whereas before I feared it, a fear I was forced to face when my work-in-process was selected for a pitching event in front of a live audience.

A book was recommended to me, and it saved me - Speak Without Fear by Ivy Naistadt. Working through a series of questions I traced my fear to Year 11 in high school, the year I was demoted to the B English class which transpired to be a lucky break because the class was taught by the most inspiring teacher of my school career, Mr. Ursich, the first person to see me as a writer. So strong was his belief in me that he assigned me the role of third speaker in a debating competition. Neither of us foresaw that I would die on the stage that day, my attempts at wit meeting with crossed arms and expressions of derision and boredom by a brutal audience of student peers. 

At last, I got to the bottom of my fear. I was the third speaker, the worst possible spot for me. Had I been first or second speaker I’d have been fine. 
Understanding this changed me. I followed the visualisations in Naistadt’s book and rehearsed my pitch and blitzed it at the event. For two days complete strangers turned to me to congratulate me. 
Suddenly I loved public speaking and wanted to do more. I’ve rarely spoken in public since. It’s the book that’s always missing.
But when the chance comes now to speak I enjoy it.

Reading an excerpt from my story The Flood at the launch of the 2022 Furphy Anthology

After Susan’s session, I run into her at the festival bookshop. She’s dashing between appearances, but we spend a few minutes. And then comes the question, the one that every writer between books dreads. ‘How’s your writing going?’ says Susan.

‘Oh, you know, in the middle of things.’

She knows. 

I’d love to say that my book is coming out in the spring or autumn. And I could. Just don’t say which spring, which year.

I tell Susan how much I enjoyed one of her other books that I’d read since I saw her last. I tell her I wrote a very similar book, but she had found the best way to resolve the very problem that stalled me. I think afterwards of seeing Elizabeth Gilbert on a stage telling us that an idea for a book set in the Amazon jungle came to her then left her, yet the same idea came to Ann Patchett and stayed long enough for her to write the book. 
And so it was with Susan’s book when the idea came to her and stayed, yet the same idea left me. It happened before when the idea Helen Fielding had for Bridget Jones’s Diary came to me but left me. 

What if an idea never stays with me long enough? 

The glare is blinding from the late sun, even when wearing sunglasses. If I tilt my straw hat any lower, I won’t be able to see the path in front. Someone calls out my name. As they near me, I tilt my hat enough to clear the glare and see that it’s X a writer friend.

We hug. It’s been a few years. ‘Good to see you.’

‘How’s your writing going?’ we chime. 

‘You first,’ I say. 

‘Really well,‘she says. ‘Look I can’t really say too much yet, not until everything’s settled but I’ve just signed a deal with a publisher. For two books.’

‘Oh wow,’ I say. ‘That’s brilliant. Congratulations! I’m so happy for you.’