From Farming To Fiction
You know that saying, “If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person?” If you want something done twice as speedily, hand it to Australian author Fiona Palmer. She writes at a cracking pace, producing one novel per year. And that’s not counting the work she does as a farm hand on a 2600 hectare working farm – or time spent with her “supportive” husband and two teenaged children (who have lately been at boarding school).
So when does she find time to write? “I’ll do two to three days of writing work a week, but sometimes it’s after dinner when there are no distractions. I aim for 2000 words a day.” That’s around 25 per cent longer than the average magazine cover article, every day.
Looking out of her office window – she can see the gum trees on her land – she sometimes finds it hard not to be distracted by the physical work to be done. “Yesterday, I did a full day of picking rocks from the paddock after seeding, so I was pretty physically tired and couldn’t write. But then, I got up early this morning.”
Home is in the small (five-house town!) rural community of Pingaring, 350 kilometres from Perth, in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. She sets her books close to home. At the beginning of her career, she was best known for writing rural novels including Matters of the Heart, a re-telling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice set in modern-day Western Australia.
Her latest book, Tiny White Lies, veers off course slightly: it centres around a family that heads to a farm retreat to short circuit the impact technology has on them all. “[The idea] started with raising two teenagers and thinking about the fear of bullying as well as what can happen on social media – the interaction and sexting. There’s also gaming, which my son loves. He could sit on his games all day and all night if I let him. Sometimes I wish the internet would blow up and we could go back to where we were.
“When we went, in January, to [WA coastal town] Bremer Bay, where the book is set, it was the one time that my kids put down their phones and we all got to connect. So I used that in the story and created Ashley and her friend Nikki who have their own problems they need to sort out.”
“I’ve always written a strong female lead. I love having women that I would like to be like – strong women, who have a go and are not afraid to try something new.”
At its heart, it’s a story about what goes on behind the layer visible to the outside world. “Everyone has something that they probably don’t show people. They say you can live with someone for years and not know them, or not know what’s happening behind someone else’s closed doors.”
Palmer has 16 books under her belt – both adult and young adult novels – but didn’t always know she’d become a writer. For seven years, she was a speedway driver, and also worked as a CEO’s secretary, teacher’s aide, roustabout and store manager. Although she remembers writing stories at school that entranced her friends, “it never occurred to me that writing was an option. I thought I just loved telling a story.”
So what changed? “In around 2005, I had this idea for a story. Even though I was very busy with two little kids, it was my escape. I kept thinking about it to the point where I had to start writing it down, and after three years I ended up with this book. It was crazy.” Her parents’ credo was “to just have a go. That’s the kind of person my dad is. And everyone who read it said I should try to get it published.”
She ended up being one of 10 winners in a writing competition whose prize was to be mentored by a published author “and I had a lot of teacher friends proofread it because I know what my spelling is like. Then I read Jillaroo [by Rachael Treasure] and I thought, mine is a rural book, too. I sent it off to the same publisher and they signed it up.”
Whenever she’s promoting her latest book, she gets to meet her readers, “which is so nice. At that point, you’ve read it yourself so many times, and it’s just nice to meet the people who love your work and are supportive. It inspires you to write the next one. A lot of them come up and say how much they love reading about the places they’ve been to, and the relatable characters that they feel like they know.” And although her books might change location, “I’ve always written a strong female lead. I love having women that I would like to be like – strong women, who have a go and are not afraid to try something new.”
What’s next? Palmer would love to see her books on the screen – “I visualise them as I write them, and then it’s like I transcribe that into words” – but some of her big moves will probably be personal ones. “I’m at the point where my kids are nearly off my hands and I feel like I’ve got a second life, the world is my oyster. I could go back to study and I’ve also [recently] learnt how to weld. I love having access to other possibilities. I don’t have to be this one person, you know?”
Words_ Rachelle Unreich
Images_ Supplied