Masters Series: Margo Lanagan

Margo Lanagan has published two dark fantasy novels (Tender Morsels and Sea Hearts), seven short story collections including the breakout Black Juice, ten teenage romance novels, three junior fantasy novels, two young adult novels and a children’s picture book. She collaborated with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti on the New York Times bestselling YA superheroes trilogy, Zeroes. Her most recent publications are the collections Singing My Sister Down and Other Stories and Phantom Limbs.

Her work has won a slew of awards, including four World Fantasy Awards, nine Aurealis and five Ditmar Awards, two CBCA awards, a Victorian and a Western Australian Premier’s Literary Award, an “Indie”, the Barbara Jefferis Award and the Norma K. Hemming Award. In Australia, she has been shortlisted for the Stella Prize and for the NSW and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. International award listings include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Dublin IMPAC Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (Ireland), the Astrid Lindgren Award (Sweden, twice), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the British Science Fiction Association Awards, the British Fantasy Awards, the Carnegie Medal, the Nebula, Hugo, Bram Stoker, Theodore Sturgeon, Shirley Jackson, James Tiptree Jr (twice), Michael L. Printz (twice) and International Horror Guild awards (US) and the Seiun Awards (Japan). Her books and stories have been translated into 19 languages.

Margo has been a judge of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Australian–Vogel’s Literary Award. She served on the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts for three years. She has been an instructor at six residential Clarion workshops, in Brisbane, Seattle and (with Maureen F. McHugh) San Diego. She has also conducted numerous creative writing workshops both for school groups and for adult writers. You can follow Margo Lanagan on twitter and instagram.

Our audio for this interview is a little muddy at points so we’ve decided to include the full transcript below for you. Links in the transcript. Enjoy!

Transcript

KM: I was a fan of Margo Lanagan, long before I was a writer, but it was her interview with Charlotte Wood in the collection The Writer’s Room, which really pushed her to the top of my wish list. Margo Lanagan has published two dark fantasy novels Tender Morsels and Sea Hearts, seven short story collections, including the breakout Black Juice, ten teenage romance novels, three Junior fantasy novels, two young adult novels, and a children’s picture book. She collaborated with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti on the New York Times bestselling YA superheroes trilogy, Zeroes

Look, I don’t normally list all of our writers awards, and this following list is absolutely not definitive, but it seems to remain that outside certain circles, here in Australia Margo Lanagan still does not get the acclaim she so richly deserves. So, Margo Lanagan work has won numerous awards, including four World Fantasy Awards, nine Aurealis and five Ditmar Awards, two CBCA awards, a Victorian and a Western Australian Premier’s Literary Award, an “Indie”, the Barbara Jefferis Award and the Norma K. Hemming Award. In Australia, she has been shortlisted for the Stella Prize and for the NSW and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. International award listings include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Dublin IMPAC Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (Ireland), the Astrid Lindgren Award (Sweden, twice), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the British Science Fiction Association Awards, the British Fantasy Awards, the Carnegie Medal, the Nebula, Hugo, Bram Stoker, Theodore Sturgeon, Shirley Jackson, James Tiptree Jr (twice), Michael L. Printz (twice) and International Horror Guild awards (US) and the Seiun Awards (Japan). Her books and stories have been translated into 19 languages. I do hope you enjoy this conversation.

Margo Lanagan, it’s such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much for joining us on the first time podcast.

ML: I’m very pleased to be here.

KM: I think I told you, when I asked you to be part of the Master series, I said that I have a very well thumbed, well marked well underlined interview with you. This is the one here I want to show you Charlotte Wood’s, the writers room. And I was reading back over it in preparation with his conversation. And it really is the most perfect interview so much so that I was like, Oh, maybe I’ll just like, tell our listeners to read this. And I won’t need to talk to Margo at all. But of course, I wanted your particular insights. But I really do urge our listeners to go to that interview that you did with Charlotte for The Writer’s Room, because it’s just a wonderful overview of your writing life, but also has such great craft insights as well. So thank you for that, because it has kept me going at low points in the writing process. We always like to begin at the beginning, which is very hard for you. It’s kind of nebulous moment of when you became different types of writers, I suppose. So when do you mark the point of knowing that you wanted to be a writer?

Margo Lanagan
Ah, look, I think I think I had that moment where I thought, well, that is something that I can do. And that might end up being probably won’t be, you know, I don’t think I ever thought that it was really, I was really going to make a fabulous living from it. But I thought, well, if I’m going to make it into second income stream, we think about it in cold terms like that. I was probably thinking about that in the late 80s through the 90s. And I think because I had some experience with editing, and I saw the state in which a lot of manuscripts arrived at their publishers and I thought, heck, you know, I’m doing all this fixing up of stuff I could write as decent a first draft of the scenes and fix it up for publication myself. That was I was mostly editing nonfiction stuff, so I didn’t have to fix up other people’s fiction.

Kate
I love that. One of our other guests and one of my dear friends Penni Russon (interviewed here) and you had a similar first move from editing into writing teen romances for various publications under different names. What did you learn about story and the writing process when you were doing those books?

Margo Lanagan
I think the most important lesson from those was was keeping the motor running in a story, you know, just keeping things moving, keeping pages turning, giving your reader something that makes them want to find out even a little bit more to get them over the next page. Filling up 100 pages with stuff that’s going to make people want to keep on reading was probably the most useful thing. And also that routine that I talked about in the interview with Charlotte, where some some days you have good days and some days you have bad days, and then and then, you know, you go back and you read over your full draft and you realise that you can’t really tell the difference between the good days and the bad days. So there’s this kind of level of okayness that you can rely on. So you don’t actually need to be sitting and anguishing about what a bad day you’re having, because that’s okay. This is just one of those ones where your mind’s getting in the way, so just clear it away, just keep going, plod on and all will be well.

Kate

Because you had also done, you know, kind of the sums to work out how long you could afford to spend on each of those books. I remember Penni talking about the same kind of thing. And that helped to just keep those words ticking over. I think often the space that we allow ourselves to kind of wallow around in our creativity means the words never get on the bloody page.

Margo Lanagan
Absolutely, absolutely. I’ve had terrible, terrible problems with this, over the last several years, when that Zero series gave me enough money to actually stop working for a while and just oceans of space. And it was just the worst time, you know, the most productive time was when I had two young children. And I was just cramming all the writing into the the interstices between, you know, taking care of them and doing anything work and trying to be a good partner, and all those things, running all these other lives at once. And as soon as there is space for the fear to creep in, I think if does.

Kate
I actually went back to your wonderful blog, which is this incredible archive of a writing life. And I’m conscious that we’ve just come out of school holidays here. And combined with, for me additional COVID time my kids have been off school for a month. And on your blog in 2005, I think it was after a period of school holidays, you wrote: sometimes writing is easy. Sometimes just getting the time to write is like trying to fight your way out of a large, wet zipped up canvas tent that’s collapsed on top of you. And I loved that! I was like, yes, that is how I feel. But I think the juggle is real at both ends of the scale. Like what you describe that that time where you are suddenly gifted, I suppose, or you’re suddenly paid to write. And then it’s impossible. What kind of boundaries or strategies have you worked out over time, get you in front of the page or the other screen and get the words down?

Margo Lanagan
Well, I think probably that sort of micro goals thing works for this. So you’ve got the enormous things that need to be fixed up like, these are all my doubts about this character is not coming alive, nobody has a name yet. I don’t know the history of this. I haven’t worked out the magic system. And all these things are just you know, if you come at them first thing in the morning, they’re really hard things to do. So you break it down, you say well, I will make a list of the sorts of names that I like that are sort of like this person, I’ll just throw a few names at and see what happens. It doesn’t matter if I choose one today – I’m working towards this thing. Or I will write this scene that I have been looking forward to. And I will leave the holey bits in, you know, I won’t try and get it perfect. I’ll just put square brackets around the crappy bits that I haven’t written yet that I haven’t worked out yet. But I’ll do the enjoyable bit. And then perhaps some of the some of the imagination that goes into those will leak out into the awkward bits and show me the way to make this thing whole, to make it work.

Kate
I want to ask about inspiration in general because you seem to come at things in in a variety of ways. I’ve been looking at your scrapbooks, pictures of your scrapbooks, which we’ll talk about and I suppose to get specific I’ve just reread ‘Singing my Sister Down’ which had the same full body effect on me this time as the first time I read it. And I thought it was a good spot to start talking about how you build worlds and and where the inspiration for those kinds of stories come from, where you pluck those ideas and images from the world. So with ‘Singing my Sister Down’, where did that come from?

Margo Lanagan
That came from – there was this SBS series a long time ago called Global Village. And it just had these little 20 minute half hour, sort of documentaries about different parts of the world, one of them were French. And I think this was from a place in former French Africa. And it was a story about those tar pits. And there were a lot of things from that documentary that just stuck with me, the fact that you know, the kids went out and warmed their feet on the tar. And every spring the men of the village would go and hoist this old lady’s house back up the hill, from where the tar pit kind of dragged it out of shape. If humans come to this place, and they see this thing doing what it does, it’s not a great leap for us to say, Okay, well, this is where we can get rid of the people in our society that we don’t approve of. And so that was the seed of it. And I had a post it note saying, a family is forced to watch as justice is done while the family member is drowned in the tar. So that was the size of the idea that I had. So I knew that she was going to die. But I hadn’t worked out the family and the relations until I picked that up. And then on the way to my job. When I went back to full time work, after a period of part time, I had this commute to and from work and I said this the idea for this week and of I go and will just write this up.

Kate
And did it come out, almost fully formed, how is that process for you?

Margo Lanagan
Yeah, that was one of the really quick ones, I go back to the first draft. And it’s pretty much all there, you know, there’s just tweaking her and there. And there it was, it was a marvellous thing. That hasn’t happened very often. But that was that was one of them. It was just like, yep I know these people. I gave a class on secondary characters to my Faber people last night, and we were talking about that story. And they said, How did you know to introduce all these secondary characters? And I said, they kind of turned up when I needed them to. I needed a family. And then some of them to be younger than him and some of them to be older and some to be wiser and some to be stupider. And they all just arrived, you know, and I was sort of being carried along by the rhythm of his voice, and the events had a very strong forward movement anyway, moving towards the girl sinking in the tar, the process, which is a horrible thing to witness and to describe, but a fascinating thing. And just all these things, distracting him and also refocusing him on, on what’s happening to his sister.

Kate
We could do an entire hour just on that story. So I’m going to make sure I pull myself up. But so much of your work, I think, the tar pit and the flowers, for instance, in that one, or even the singing and the crab and the tar. It springs from these juxtapositions and collisions of images and ideas. And I wanted to ask, if you actively have writing prompts or activities or strategies to get you into that mode of generation, when you’re, you know, slapping ideas together?

Margo Lanagan
Not to get ideas. I tend to sort of sit and wait for wait for the, the, the activating one to come along, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got lots of notes on story ideas, and sometimes they don’t happen. I don’t think I’ve ever really picked them up and slammed them together. I have written notes to myself saying, maybe if I combine this with that, but I don’t recall many stories actually coming together by that. This is my process for writing short stories: if I need to write a short story I have, okay, this chunk of idea. And so that’s a nice thing. I just like it for itself, but it is not yet enough to be a story. So I just lodge that in my brain and I carry it around with me. And when I have a relaxed moment, a sort of anticipatory moment that I can sit there and think, Okay, what would…? Or if I go on a bike ride and you know, just apply some oxygen to the idea, and then bam, something else jumps in, you know, something else that’s nearby that’s not quite related or just, things start to happen.

Kate
And you just begin with the heat, with the words that come out? Do you plot down a shape or note down a shape, or do you just go with the words?

Margo Lanagan
I’m very bad at complicated structures. So what I need is those, those two ideas that are giving each other energy to make something happen. And I need to have a rough sense of something that will happen at the end, I need to feel that I’m moving towards something else. Otherwise, I can just sit there playing with those two things and they don’t go anywhere. I remember drafting a long part of a novel, where I had two very attractive characters having a fascinating conversation, but nothing was happening. Because I didn’t have that end point, so I just need to have that. I just need something to move towards. But I don’t necessarily need to have the mechanisms by which it’s going to get there – every single one of them. I need to have a feeling that, oh, I can do interesting things with it. I can make interesting things happen on the way to that. But I don’t necessarily have to have them fully mapped out.

Kate
There’s a beautiful line in that interview, where you talk about having ‘fairy tales deep in your bones’. And I imagine across, you know, a lifetime of reading, you’ve got story in general, deep in your bones. Does that subconsciously shape your story as you go along? Things like myth or fairy tale that knowing how a story needs to flow and shape and move?

Margo Lanagan
Up to a point it does up to a point you can rely on that, but this is the planning and pantsing conversation, isn’t it? It’s good to feel free at the beginning so that you don’t close off your options too far. But you want to also want to just experiment with closing them off and saying, Okay, what is this? Is this actually channeling the energy really well, and making it really clear for the reader? Or is this leading me away from the thing that I felt in my gut was what this story was about? So, you know, you just have to follow your mood. And sometimes it’s better to sit back and say okay, well, this will happen and then this will happen and then I can feel there is this kind of wobbly wasteland in the middle where I really haven’t worked out how they’re going to get across to the final bit. Now what would be the most fun way to get there?

Kate
You said before, when I have to write a short story, are there times when the material also only presents itself as having the legs for a short story? You know, you’ve written novels, shorts, you know, bigger extended big novels, how do you know what’s got the legs for a short story or a novel? Does an idea surprise you in having more than you think it does? or less sometimes?

Margo Lanagan
I think well, I’m much more frightened of writing novels. So I suppose it’s got to have that feeling that whenever you prod at the idea, more juice comes out. And more ideas accrete, they sort of come along and glom on to it and offer other possibilities, offer other other whole stories associated with that. like, when I was writing Tender Morsels, I was really terrified, because I had a couple of novels been crash and burn, and they just had not been able to proceed. And so what I took in dealing with that was, I took that Grimms’ story, Snow White and Rose Red, I thought, Okay, I’m not going to write a novel based on this, I’m what I’m going to do is I’m just going to write a bunch of short stories and the only rule that they have is they have to come in towards this story. And they have to make contact with at some point. They don’t have to be united in time or characters, they just have to come and make contact with the story. They can continue along with it as long as they’re back, or they can just have that contact point and then move straight away from it again. So I just wrote a bunch of weird stories around that fairy tale. And of course, the brain is just a pattern maker. It just does these things, making interconnections. So when I went back to all these stories, I did about 12 of them. So I can think of these as a collection. I don’t have to make sure everything works together. Or connects. Or makes a pattern. Because when I’m going back to them, I could see how they could make similar points to each other and see other possibilities for building them into something that was more.

Kate
I love that idea of the brain as a pattern maker and also that trust that you obviously have that that will work. Have you always had that? Or is that something you’ve developed over your career and experience, the trust that the stories will make make their own connections and patterns?

Margo Lanagan
No, I think that trust comes and goes. In the last several years, I’ve had a lot of problems trusting that that will happen. And feeling just feeling cheerful about the enterprise, really, you know. We’ve been stuck away in our little burrows, not seeing anybody or doing anything, not kicking with the real world. And, you know, the world’s just been blowing up in various ways. And, in the middle of that, it’s very hard to keep your spirits up generally. But also, that feeling that every story I start seems to be turning into the same story. So little input now. And, you know, it’s all sort of contrived. And because I’m a certain certain sort of person, I just reached for the same sorts of things over and over again, I’m never surprised by new things coming into my life, because because my life doesn’t go anywhere at the moment.

Kate
That’s really interesting. We had a similar conversation with Sarah Winman, when she was saying that she’s really struggled in the last couple of years to write, as so many of us have, but she identified the same kind of problem that there was no input, there was nothing to push up against to get that tension and energy that you need to write. Because, in times of non lockdown and pandemic, what does your writing week or life involve? Are you collecting stories when you walk and getting energy from other people from being in different groups, from travel? What does that all involve, Margo?

Margo Lanagan
Well, you know, I’m still breadwinning. So I would be commuting to work. And I would be seeing all sorts of things. And I would have music or I would be listening to a podcast, I still listen to podcasts. But you know, that stuff flying past my eyes in the course of the day, and there’d be other people moving around me, so close! Imagine sit sitting between two people on the train!

Kate
I think the train is the greatest loss for so many writers, both the commute that forced time where you can say, Okay, I’ve got forty minutes here to write. But also the observation, that paying attention to people and how they speak and move and interact with the world – I’ve missed that so much!

Margo Lanagan
I was sitting in a train once and the girl opposite me talking to her partner, gave me the side eye and said, ‘someone’s got staring problems.’ So you have to watch it with your writerly observations that you do.

Kate
You do! When I’m working with younger students, I always tell them the trick I have of turning my font to white while I’m on a train, so I just type but no one can see what I’m typing.

Margo, I’m jumping around here because it’s all so interesting, but the most underlined and flagged section of your interview with Charlotte, and the one that’s had the most impact on me, I think, is the one where Charlotte asks you about how to make unfamiliar worlds seem familiar. And you explain how and you use the example of ‘Sea Hearts’. And I quote, you say: ‘you have to surround it, the thing with a little convincing fog of interesting detail that you just make up out of nothing.‘ I have carried this nugget, this kernel of wisdom around and try all the time to think: Don’t explain it. Kate, don’t explain it. Just give it a couple of things. Can you explain how this works, please?

Margo Lanagan
With the sea hearts themselves, that’s an example that I used for Charlotte, I just needed something from the sea. I can’t quite remember, I think I’d seen sea urchins being harvested and there was that whole thing of that sort of hairy horrible outside and their weird sloppy insides with the orange slime. So I wanted something like that, but not quite identifiably that. I wanted that feeling that you would pick up these ugly looking things, but which are clearly alive on the beach and then one of them can be very cold and wet and horrible to pick up and then they produce (unclear). So you just steal some details from the sea urchin. And then well, how do they eat them? Well something has to be done to them. So it’s kind of this ritual or just just boiling them up or picking the right ones, you know, there’s all that ritual of the boys having to pick nice fresh ones, you don’t pick ones that are sitting up on the tide mark and just details like that. It’s like what’s what’s sitting around them on the beach, where the experts are old boys and younger boys and the older ones say, Look at these nice fresh ones, your mums will be very happy with these lovely ones, but those kinds of things like this kind of grow, as you’re looking around this thing, with the scenery and you’re looking with the characters, the things they will notice.

Kate
There’s a great part too, where you go on to describe how, and I’m not sure that you’re specifically talking about science fiction or fantasy, but when you say, your characters don’t go around explaining the world that they’re in to themselves. And I think that that’s something that we tend to do as younger writers, as emerging writers or more inexperienced writers don’t have yet the trust in their reader to fill those gaps, so they do explain everything over and over again. What advice do you give to writers you’re working with about trying to cut some of that out?

Margo Lanagan
Oh, just put it all in to start with so that you know what’s going on, because often, often you’re working it out as you’re writing those explanations down. And then when you go back, and you realise you’ve done that, and you’ve been too obvious, and the are sounding unnatural, then you say, Okay, well, this is just laying it all out in too much detail and too clearly. What ways can I convey this elsewhere, or by a more casual sort of a remark that says the same? Off to one side, rather than directly?

Kate
Do you do a lot of that in drafting and editing, Margo? I imagine at this point in your career that comes more naturally to you. But how much kind of rewriting and cutting do you do in your editing process?

Margo Lanagan
Depends on the story. As I said, some of them and some scenes within a novel as well, you know, some of them will stay will stay stable throughout the whole project. And then others will go through man many re-makings, or you know, and sometimes the whole structure is remade at the editorial stage. With Tender Morsels, that went through two big, big sort of seismic shifts, as two different sets of editors went over it, or two different stages. I remember going over the things that the editors told me, and saying Oh I see why they’ve got that idea wrong, I see where I’ve gone wrong here, and it was really clear to me how I should, how I could remake. Well it wasn’t really clear to me, I remember, my partner had a broken pelvis, and he was stuck for six weeks on the couch in front of the television. And I was supposed to be rewriting, rewriting this novel, I decided the best way to rewrite the novel was to lie on the other couch. And what was really weird was I had this deadline, it was to get it done just before Christmas, and like two weeks before Christmas, I thought, well, I’d better go and do this. And I went, and I sat myself down, and all that time, my brain must have been just cooking quietly away. And I knew that I had these two weeks, and I knew that I couldn’t get done, I thought, well, the best I can do is just sit down and work on it every day. And we’ll see what happens. And the other end in the two weeks ist was done.

Kate
Wow.

Margo Lanagan
It was just insane. You know, so there’s something. It’s sort of like, yeah, I’ve got all this. I know what my story is. I’ve wandered in that land for a long time. It’s inviting. And you’re absorbing everything that those editors has told me. , It’s like, a chrysalis, you know, caterpillars melting and the butterflies forming. And then at some certain point, I know, okay, well I’ve only got this time, I’ve got to start now – here comes the butterfly. And it didn’t feel like a butterfly when it was emerging. I felt like I was just sort of slugging away with it. But in fact, I had a much clearer idea of it and it was much less traumatic, except for all the self flagellation that went on. Much less traumatic than if I’d sat down straightaway, I think and started to try.

Kate
At that point, Margo, because they can be such unwieldy things to deal with, novels and restructures, are you doing that on cards on the floor, or on a whiteboard or you’re doing it on paper or all in a document, how do you do those kinds of big structural move arounds?

Margo Lanagan
Um, I’m better now at using spreadsheets. But I tend, I tend to do it with a printed manuscript. And it works best if I do it as a whole. And then there’ll be places where I cannot, I can’t, I can’t sit within that manuscript and work out everything that’s going on in this section. And then I will have to make a list of scenes and work out what each little bit is. And if it’s in the right order. And I’m doing that with a section of the novel that I’m writing at the moment, and I keep going back and having to say, Okay, well, I’ll poke at this a bit today, then I’ll go away and work on one of the fun scenes that I know is working and that just needs polishing and tweaking and then maybe my subconscious will work. One day, I’ll have such mental clarity, they’ll come at this. And I’ll feel like okay, now I know exactly what to do and I’ll be able to write. And I may actually rewrite the whole thing from scratch, without reference to what I have done before because all the material is in there is not in the right order. And it’s not with the right emphasis. You might just think it’s easier to start at the beginning.

Kate
Like literally recomposing from the beginning?

Margo Lanagan
Yep. For some scenes I have to. Because after all the pegging away at them, they’ll have bits that can never be made to fit together. And so it’s better to do it as a kind of organic reblurt than it is to try and cobble all bits together that exist presently.

Kate
An ‘organic reblurt’ – I think that’s an excellent technical term. And I wanted to ask you about language. Because it’s so thrilling to read your work. I picked up the books that I had around me of yours this morning, just to get some examples. And immediately I had: ‘a smackle of something to eat’, ‘twisting, like being squozen out’. And then you know, a bunch of compounds like ‘mothsignals’ ‘snowlight’, ‘slickthighed’, ‘smokemeat’. I love it, it reminds me of another fabulously clever friend, Zana Fraillon (interviewed here), who does the same thing with language. And it always just thrills me. And so I want to know, how you play with language this way, and how you work out what’s going to fit, how you even create sometimes these – they’re not fully new languages, I don’t even know what you would call them – but how do you do that? What’s going on in the Margo Lanagan brain to make that happen?

Margo Lanagan
I don’t, you know, I think I’m kind of always doing it, you know, I do it a bit in conversation, like the ‘organic reblurt’, you know, so I’m just just not very rule bound about what you can combine, I guess. And you know, there is just that thing of – it’s a bit like like scrapbooking – you know, you put two words together, and they create this energy between them, that is more than more than the sum of their parts. But really, I think those things, it’s really hard for me to say how it happens because it must happen in the flow, and reaching for a word and the word doesn’t quite exist, so I put down something. Sometimes it will be awful, clumsy, over explanatory thing in square brackets and sometimes it’ll be a nugget like that. And, you know, there are certain points of intensity in the story where that kind of thing is permissible. And sometimes some places where it just doesn’t work.

Kate
When you’re working in an extended story, or where there are language choices that a number of characters are making – vernacular – Do you record that? Like I’m thinking of when your editor sends your style guide and your word list? You know, do you do that yourself as you’re writing? Or is it contained within the world that you’ve built? Is it like the rules of magic or any other part of world building that it’s just instinctive?

Margo Lanagan
Yeah, I think it’s pretty much contained entirely in the work. Yeah. And sometimes sometimes it’ll just come back with a little list of words. And sometimes what’s really funny is when you have those words, and they go through the editors and then they get to the copy editors, particularly the US copy editors, these little notes in the margins: I am unable to find evidence of the existence of this lizard in…(laughter) well, no, you wouldn’t I guess, i just made it up on the spot.

Kate
Is that a fun part of it for you? For someone who is playful with language? In that editorial between territories? Is it ever generative in that way where you think oh, that’s a funny or an interesting or new way of language from that particular set of editors?

Margo Lanagan
Well, no, I think it’s just a private source of amusement. I think that earnestness is amusing because having been an editor myself, and being a copyeditor myself, I know that you can just get too narrowed down, and you can just get obsessive about one particular thing at this point of a manuscript. And you can just embarrass yourself by insisting on this thing. You start off thinking is this one tiny change? And then you suddenly realise they’ve done it al the way through and you think am I going to go back and undo those changes? Or am I going to insist on this thing for 300 more pages? And if you make the decision to insist on it, you really tie yourself in knots. And watching somebody else do it is really funny, or watching somebody just not get you is hilarious.

Kate
I remember once doing an interview with Irma Gold, who is both a writer and an editor, and remembering how physically she changed her body language when she talked about her work as a writer and her work as an editor. And I wonder if you have, when you’re writing and in the creative process, do you almost wear two different hats as writer and editor? Do you have to ask the editor self to step outside of the room while you’re in the composition stage? And then invite them back in? Or do you now integrate both together, do you think?

Margo Lanagan
I definitely, definitely have to tell that inner editor to pipe down on a regular basis, and just let things happen. Let me enjoy myself. But I do, I enjoy the editing as well, you know, I enjoy coming back and you get a fresh print out and go through it again. And you see then you can see what’s working what isn’t and it’s there’s a there’s a great pleasure in having a scene that you’ve got the skeleton is good, the bones are good. And, and, and there’s also a particular bit in it where you know that you’ve just hit the nail on the head, and getting everything to lead beautifully to that point. And then to craft a nice way out of the scene again, that leads you on to the next one, is just, it’s just so much fun.

Kate
How do you know when you’re done?

Margo Lanagan
Um, when you don’t hit any of those knots. I suppose if you if you’re really truly (and it’s been a long time since I’ve submitted a novel for publication) but when you read through, read aloud, and there are no hitches and you know you’ve got the language, right. And, and you feel like everything’s working. Yeah.

Kate
I wanted to ask you about your scrapbooks. And I will put up some links to the images which are incredibly beautiful. I know that you don’t have them for every project. Have you got some going at the moment?

Margo Lanagan
I have got some going. I’ve got well I’ve got this wheel, which is something that I haven’t had for other projects. This is my wheel book. Inside it is this little page, which is kind of trying to capture the mood of the girl at the centre. So you know, it’s a selkie story again, I was trying not to make it selkies, but it actually is, I can’t get away from selkies, but it’s also got those see there’s that scraggly looking heart there and then that awful looking round skull. And then it’s got a few you know, experimental titles, which may or may not stick.

Kate
And so this book, what did you describe it as – a wheel book?

Margo Lanagan
A wheel book. I can’t remember which writing advisor wrote about it. It was in some writing book and said you have a wheel book that you just go there and you blurt out everything you need to. So here’s one of us, here’s one of them is chapter plans. I worked on this story for several years and sort of felt that I’d written it into the ground. And then I left it alone for several more years and I’ve just recently, in the last nine months, come back to it. Thinking look, I think I can actually fix this. I wrote out this plan and then as you can see all my ticks, and my tick columns.

Kate
Yes! I’m very impressed by this!

Margo Lanagan
And you know, I just made myself do a chapter a day every day and get that done and now I’m going back and fixing it up, But every now and again, I make myself stick in a picture that says something to me about, about the atmosphere of the thing. And it’s just got all the thoughts that I have about it as I’m going on. It’s not, it’s not ordered, I remember this woman who was talking about the wheel books, you know, you go in and say, Well, I wrote this scene today. And I think it’s going, going well, or whatever. Well, I don’t really do that. I just go in there. And I write any ideas that I have about things I might fix, or ways I might proceed or stuff I might include and when I’m trying to work out the order of a scene I go to this book and I put it in there.

Kate
Like a catch all. You know that anything about the book is in there.

Margo Lanagan
Yeah. But I think I put the pictures in there, simply because looking at pages of notes, is so dreary. And it requires you to make that sort of jump, your brain actually has to clank in to gear to appreciate what you’re saying and to make sense of it. Whereas if you’re just got these little spurts o … You know these things are just instantly attractive to me, they instantly tell me something about what I’m trying for. So they’re little encouragements I guess.

Kate
It’s interesting, I think that, both the information about your scrapbooks, and then also an interview I heard with Favel Parret (on The Garret Podcast), when she was writing her latest book, were both inspirations for the fact that now that I have a space to write in, and I didn’t before (I was in the corner of a lounge room) and so I didn’t have visual images up around me. But it’s one of the things that I’ve concentrated on having in this space. Because I think, exactly that, the gentle effect of what they’re doing behind the scenes, being immersed in those images all the time, or, or the butterfly emerging in the chrysalis, when you don’t even know what’s happening.

Margo Lanagan
Yeah and they’re really useful for just things like characters, you know, if you’ve got several portraits, none of which are quite the person, but put them all together on the same page with a few other images and you can, you can sort of capture the feeling that you want to capture in your work. And when and if you go off track, you always come back to the pictures and the pictures will be pretty much be insisting on what you originally put them together for.

Kate
That’s so interesting that you talk about this book that you’re working on now being one that you know, you’ve kind of come back to because there was another great line that was in one of your blog posts where you talk about having tried this giant fantasy novel, and a YA fantasy series, and you describe them all of having as having ‘fallen to pieces in your hands’. And I wanted to ask you about, what can be done, when that happens? And how to resurrect them. And that’s obviously what you’re, you know what you’re doing now?

Margo Lanagan
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think there’s, every book falls together – falls apart! – falls apart in your hands at some point, and sometimes at several points. So you just, I think there were times when you can handle that, and times when it’s just best to walk away. And you know, having come back to this book, I’m beginning to look at some of those ones, which I thought had fallen apart in my hands and think, Well, you know, if I if I approached them in the right spirit, I could possibly – cause because the ideas at the centre of them are still good nuggets of ideas, and they are still inviting all sorts of things to gather around them in interesting ways. So it’s just a matter of what you can cope with at the time.

Kate
I want to ask a little bit about industry as a whole. We’ve gone granular in your process first. In an interview with the Stella Prize you named Margaret Atwood, as a writer you admire. And you say in past because she’s a cross genre writer who’s not been pigeonholed. And you say: ‘I suspect that comes of winning your adult literary stripes before your YA or fantasy ones. I’ve just done things in the wrong order.’ And I wanted to ask about this hierarchy of literary stripes. Obviously, it totally exists, but who perpetuates it? And do you think that it has changed over your time in the writing world, the hierarchy of where you get your lit stripes from?

Margo Lanagan
No, I don’t think it’s changed very much. I remember hearing a story about how the publishers were trying to decide whether to I think it was whether to publish Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as, I think that choice was between genre and literary work, and they decided they would go for the literary work, because if they published him as genre, he would never escape genre. It was clearly them making that decision. Now I came at it differently because I started off writing the romances – they were my training wheels. And then I wrote children’s fiction, and then I wrote gritty realist YA. And then I stepped over into sort of YA/A crossover fantasy. And then have sat in this uncomfortable space between YA and A ever since. And you know, publishers need to know the market that they’re selling into. Booksellers need to know the market that they’re selling to. Book sellers seem to have a terrible problem putting a book into more than one place.

Kate
In the genre area, or in any of those kinds of worlds, do you find a place where that community of writers and readers is one that is the best fit for you?

Margo Lanagan
Well, I think the I think probably the fantasy genre – the fantasy and science fiction community is more flexible than, much more flexible. than mainstream publishing or mainstream readers, actually. You know, they have, they were the first to actually have separate way divisions in there competitions. And they have always seemed to be very ready to include YA literature with the rest of the books that be concerned with. I mean it’s really hard to say because, I think I’ve said this in lots of interviews that you’ve already read. There are so many books. There are so many things to read. And life is short. And we’re always looking for, and you can hear it in the way people talk about books, we’re always looking for ways to cut down on the things that we feel we ought to read. There are just so many, it’s just handy to have a way to say okay, I don’t need to go over there. Like I can tell when I speak to people, and I introduce myself as a writer and tell them what I have written and I say that it’s published as YA and they say, Okay, my cousin will like that, okay, my son might. There’s kind of this palpable, relief. I don’t have to actually be the one who’s read the thing that you have written.

Kate
Which is such a shame in so many ways! I agree with you – so many books, how do you even begin – but that we, you also then can miss so many! I mean, that’s what, you know, booksellers are so incredible for. How do you work out now what to put on top of your reading list? What do you read? And where do you find those books?

Margo Lanagan
I’m just so disordered. Look, I just, I mean, I just literally find them like, there are straight libraries now. And you can find horrible old yellowed books and you go Oh, my God, I remember when that came out I’ll have a go at that now. So, so I find them that way. And I also listen to a lot of podcasts, and I listen, and I take down things that I think I’ll really like, and every now and again, I rein myself in and make myself go back and read some of those ones that I’ve purchased that way. But really, you know, and then there’s always – one should also read the classics!

Kate
Are there books that you go back to? Are there books that were, you know, touchstones for you as a as a writer and reader that you go back to and read again? Or are you not a re-reader?

Margo Lanagan
I have reread a few recently there’s a there’s there’s this YA duet that Elizabeth Knox wrote called Dream Hunter and Dream Quake.

Kate
I wanted to know, over your career, can you tell us something, maybe one thing you know, you’ve got better at and one thing, if anything, that is still as difficult as it was the first time?

Margo Lanagan
I think I’ve got better at managing the inner editor in a close reading kind of way. I think I haven’t got better at managing at the larger field.

Kate
Like?

Margo Lanagan
Like, just like, the relevance of it at all? And the worth of what I’m doing at all. And then I always come around from these circles of thoughts as well, what else exactly, are you going to do? And you know, remember when these people said that your words helped them through difficult times in their lives. And you thought that was enough reason to write. Well, it’s still enough reason to write.

Kate
Margo. You’ve already given us heaps of wonderful advice. Is there some parting advice that you can give our listeners on on any aspect of writing perhaps, advice that was given to you or advice that you regularly give out?

Margo Lanagan
Oh there’s that nice thing that George Saunders used to tell, they used to tell their children as they went off to school, Joy, not fear! Joy! (laughter)

Kate
That’s exactly it. Thank you, George Saunders and Margo. And Margo Lanagan, can you please recommend for us a debut book, any time or any place?

Margo Lanagan
Okay, I’m going to recommend one that’s from 2010. It’s one of the books that we chose as a Vogel winner. It’s called Night Street by Krystel Thornell. And it’s a fictionalized biography of the painter Clarice Beckett. And I’ve been watching a whole bunch of videos of artists painting. There’s this podcast, the Talking with Painters podcast, which is just got these great, long and short interviews plus also a YouTube channel which she puts all this together. Fabulous. So I’m just kind of, I’m kind of in that headspace.

Kate
Wonderful, thank you so much, and for giving us those extra juicy bits that we can go in and look at with that book as well. Margo Lanagan, it’s such a pleasure to speak with you. I can’t even believe that the time has passed already. But I do hope that we get to chat again sometime. And thank you so much for speaking with us.

Margo Lanagan
Well it’s been my absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Kate
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You’ve been listening to the first time podcast we record this podcast virtually on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, we pay our respects to elders past and present and we extend that to our First Nations guests and listeners. Sound production by Phoebe Ady, who we can employ because of the wonderful support of our patrons via Patreon. Thank you so much for making this podcast possible.