Cristos Tsiolkas / Features / Untitled Books

"I see what I do as an apprenticeship, but one that will last all my life."

Cristos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas's fourth novel, The Slap, won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been on the Australian bestseller list since it was first published in 2008. He lives in Melbourne.

Where are you right now?

In Cove Park, which is on the Loch Long peninsula in Scotland. It is a three-month residency on one of the most beautiful spots on earth. I have discovered the Glaswegian accent makes me swoon.

Where do you write?

In my study at home but also in coffee shops near home, or at the local library. I have notebooks and a journal and they always travel with me. Three years ago I started writing in long-hand again, to escape the tyranny of the digital age.

How do you write?

I wake up every morning, I make my coffee, slip into my "slug-suit" (i.e. T-shirt and shorts in summer, hoodie and track pants in winter) and I begin to write. I set a limit of at least 1500 words a day. I'll make lunch and then take go to a coffee shop or the library and work some more. This is the routine I need. But there are times, usually when a new idea comes or I have a deadline, when I am writing at any hour. It is one of my favourite moments, the arrival of a new thought, surrounded by the ghostly murmurs of the middle of the night.

What keeps you writing?

I see what I do as an apprenticeship, but one that will last all my life. I want to become better at my craft. There are moments where I am prey to the same self-doubts, narcissism or despair that affects most writers, but when I am excited by what I am writing, when I am in that state, it is joyous and I cannot believe my good fortune.

Who do you write for?

The first draft is always for myself. The others are for the best reader I can imagine.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?

I have long-standing collaborations in theatre with the playwrights Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves; with a composer, Irine Vela; with a filmmaker Spiro Economopoulos; and with a photographer, Zoe Ali. I meet regularly with the writers Angela Savage, Jeana Vithoulkas, Anaya Letter and Jessica Migotto. (They all were quick to tell me where I got women wrong in initial drafts of The Slap!) I have the best editor I can imagine in Jane Palfreyman. And I always show my work to my partner, Wayne van der Stelt, who is an excellent reader.

Writing does require spaces of solitude, the "room of one's own" but I think we also need the communication of shared passions, critical engagement with the questions of our craft, and to be reminded of everything that is going on in the world, artistically and politically. All of this feeds into my work.

How do you know if your work is good?

By not boring myself. I read it back aloud and I have learnt to trust my ear. I try to avoid the literary equivalent of the interminable guitar solo.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

Yes, they are hidden in old notebooks, old files on three-inch floppy disks. Sometimes you take them out and it is like looking at old photographs, you think, I forgot about her, I want to something with him.

Which book do you wish you'd written?

Nikos Katzantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ. I recently read David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and though I grew up on the other side of the world, it perfectly captured what it was to be a teenager in the early eighties.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?

Agatha Christie. I can reread them again and again. But with some of them you do know she was phoning it in. But at her best - Five Little Pigs or Mrs. McGinty's Dead - there is nothing to feel guilty about.

Which writer made you want to write?

The Russians, especially Dostoevsky, Carson McCullers, Norman Mailer and Pauline Kael. Bret Easton Ellis, Colm Tóibín and David Peace keep me wanting to be better writer.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?

David Peace

If you weren't writing you'd be...?

... bitter.

What next?

I'm going to walk to Kilgreggan along the Barbour Road, looking down on Loch Long, thinking about how to convey the Glaswegian accent in the new novel I am writing.

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The Slap is published by Tuskar Rock.

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Friday, 25 June, 2010