Books: Wait until it's right

Australian writer Tim Winton. Photo / Supplied

Success has given Tim Winton, one of Australia’s best-loved authors, the luxury of time to craft his books into their ideal form, writes David Larsen.

"There was great doubt over whether I'd written the poem myself." Tim Winton had written the poem himself. He was 10 years old. He had just mastered what he describes as "the rumpty-tumpty-tumpty meter", and he felt pretty good about it.

"I wrote a faux-ballad, full of all the cliches of Outback Australia. I remember finishing it and feeling that I'd got it right, that it actually worked - even though everything about it was bogus. I felt swept up emotionally by having pulled it off. And then this trainee teacher singled the poem out in front of the class, and the kids in the class said I must have got my dad to do it. Which rather amused my father."

Winton, now in his 50s, is decades into a career as one of Australia's best-loved and most celebrated writers. He tells me the poem story when I ask if he remembers the first time he wrote something that mattered to him. I often ask writers this; the usual response is a long pause for thought. Winton's conversation is full of pauses and qualifications - "maybe", "if I'm remembering right", "that's probably what happened" - but on this he doesn't pause long enough to blink. If you imagine being told a poem you're proud of can't be your own work, you can see why the memory has stayed fresh; but as he tells it now, the experience was not so much upsetting as eye-opening.

"That feeling that I'd got it right, followed by discovering that the poem was good enough for its veracity to be doubted, and then feeling the class turn on me - that's when I knew it was real. If it was good enough to excite me and upset them, then I was on to something. I think that was the point at which I planted my flag in the soil and said I'm going to be a writer."

The older Winton gets, the more bizarre this sudden sense of vocation seems to him. "I didn't know what a writer was, I never even met one until I was at university. I don't know what I was thinking."

And yet books were important for him growing up, perhaps partly because they were in short supply. There were not a lot of books in his house. "Modest, I suppose, is a fair way of describing our working class circumstances." The family lived in one of the rawer outer suburbs of Perth, where, in the 60s, there were no civic amenities to speak of.

"We had to drive 20 minutes to the nearest tiny little library, many suburbs away. That was a weekly ritual we got so hooked into. I was the oldest, and it was a big deal to go to the library on a Thursday. You were only allowed to take two books out, so I'd sit around in a corner for the rest of the hour while the younger kids were sorting themselves out, reading something I couldn't take with me."

What sort of books did he grow up on? Anything and everything, but especially ones which offered adventures featuring real, recognisable people. Robert Louis Stevenson. Mark Twain. "Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn! Books where the world had an interior life and an exterior life, if you know what I mean. On the west coast where I'm from, in the mornings you can be outside and by lunchtime it's just too hot, and the wind comes in off the sea, and the sand's flying, so you have an active outdoor life in the mornings, and then you retreat to the shade of the verandas or the hammocks, and you read. With Twain, in particular, I think I was recognising the vernacular language honoured and made into art."

Every year for four or five years, the family would take a summer holiday at Winton's aunt's old beach shack - "you guys would call it a bach, I suppose" - five hours' drive up the coast. This was the one time of the year when books weren't rationed. "The amazing thing was, there were only about three rooms in that house, and one of them was literally floor-to-ceiling with books. It was a collection that went back to Edwardian days. Everything was in there. Mein Kampf, I read in there. One Thousand and One Nights. The Decameron. I've still got some of those books, I inherited some of them later on.

"But to go in there and see this whole room devoted to books ... it was great. As long as I could get past the stuffed eagle. My mum used to have to go in and put a beach towel over it. I guess mentally you've still got to get your mum to put the beach towel over the sentinel at the entrance to the library. There's always someone riding the boundary fences of the world of letters. The gatekeepers."

Though to hear Winton tell it, the person who watches him like a hawk these days, waiting for him to slip up, is himself. He's conscious, having reached the point in his career where anything he writes is liable to sell, of the terrible ease of repeating himself. "There's the temptation to knock one out." Especially since our culture seems geared towards reliable, reproducible pleasures.

"People expect evenness of delivery, evenness of product. No one wants an apple that's a funny shape, no one wants a divot in the side of their pear. So in a sense you're writing against that expectation and that communal civic instinct, and you're writing against that in yourself - your instinct for ease."

The largest single part of finding the right form for each book - which is always its own thing, he says, different every time - is learning to be patient. "I guess if you've been in the game long enough you do learn to trust yourself and wait for it to come right. And if you've had some material success, you do have the luxury of waiting. I vividly remember in my 20s there was constantly that risk of jumping too soon, just to keep the wolf away from the door. It took an enormous amount of nervous energy to resist that, when I was poor. I learned a lot from that. If you don't have the chance to wait, you still have to wait. You wait until it's right."

Tim Winton will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival next weekend at the Aotea Centre.

- Canvas