I’ve found a new podcast to binge! It’s from the number one Australian online bookseller, Booktopia. Each ep is only about 30 minutes and this morning I listened to the one and only Mr Eric Idle and another with Australian crime fiction author Candice Fox who I had (somehow!!) never heard of!
I know I am obsessed with podcasts, but I absolutely learn something brilliant at least six times a day! Candice Fox is a very entertaining podcast guest for anyone with a heart beat but for writers she drops a lot of useful tips. My fave from this episode was the idea of a writer carrying a basket with them everywhere they go. Not a literal one, although that would be quite the ice-breaker (what this old thing? This is just my Writer’s Gatherin’ Basket!) A notebook is handy (I use Notes on my iPhone but I always carry a notebook when I’m able.) Candice Fox’s figurative basket is the repository for all the little tid-bits of information that we come across in our daily life, snippets of conversation, fascinating sciencey-type concepts, the way someone shifts their feet while waiting for the bank teller…are they a bank robber having second thoughts? God, I hope so…
Lee Child confirmed the importance of your ‘basket’. When you’re writing, you bring your whole self to the table. Even if you are writing a crime novel and you’ve never even had a parking ticket, you bring your whole life’s weight of experience to help inform each character, to put flesh on their bones…or take it off. Child’s last Jack Reacher book had a storyline about ornithology. Surely some day my brain will be vindicated for stockpiling unseemly amounts of general knowledge.
The year that I am writing the book is the tiniest, tiniest tip of the iceberg, and what you don’t see is that lifetime of exposure to other people’s entertainment.
Lee Child on The Booktopia podcast
Feature Photo by Ajda Berzin on Unsplash
One Comment
Comments are closed.