In Episode 229 of So you want to be a writer:  Tips for getting into a writing habit and and check out this grammar vigilante from Bristol. Another round of Furious Fiction begins Friday 6 April and discover your chance to win a signed copy of The Book of Answers by our very own AL Tait. And meet Danielle Clode, author of The Wasp and The Orchid.

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Show Notes

Listener Shout Out

Abstract.Serenity from Australia:

A Burger Delight in During a Break in Diet. Take the title with a grain of salt—it’s a reference to the delight one feels when they come across something flavoursome yet hearty, which describes this podcast to a tee. Various episodes tucker into the meat of what it means to be a writer and the various environments we can be found, all while Val and Al engage enthusiastically with the content and each other. Facing a dull plot and unsure of where you might be going wrong? Seeking to break into the fiction/non-fiction market and unsure of the realities of doing so? Look no further. There’s an episode here on any question an aspiring writer could think of. So, if you’re needing a intellectual pick-me-up on the commute/drive to work, this podcast is right up your alley. I encourage anyone with even a modicum of interest in writing to listen. No doubt you will find a hidden nugget of wisdom! 

Links Mentioned

Meet the ‘grammar vigilante’ of Bristol

What I’ve learned after consistently follow the rule of three for a month?

Series Review! The Mapmaker Chronicles by A.L. Tait

(Your) Creative Writing Quest

Furious Fiction

Writer in Residence

Danielle Clode

Danielle is an award winning Australian author. Her writing includes natural history, essays, science-writing, historical fiction and best-selling children’s books. Her books have won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction, Whitley Award for popular zoology and been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards.

Danielle worked as a zookeeper before completing her doctorate in zoology at Oxford University, studying seabirds and feral mink in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. She has been a freelance writer and researcher ever since and also teaches creative and academic writing across Australia.

Her latest book, The Wasp and the Orchid, is a biography of the remarkable naturalist and nature writer, Edith Coleman.

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Competition

WIN ‘The Book of Answers’ with this week’s caption competition

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Allison Tait

Valerie Khoo / Australian Writers’ Centre

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Interview Transcript

Allison

Danielle Clode is an award winning Australian non-fiction author. Her writing includes natural history, essays, science writing, historical fiction, and bestselling children’s books. Her books have won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction, Whitley Award for popular zoology, and been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards. Her latest book, The Wasp and the Orchid, is a biography of the remarkable naturalist and nature writer, Edith Coleman, and is out now with Picador. Welcome to our program, Danielle.

Danielle

Thank you. Pleased to be here.

Allison

All right. So we’re going to go back to the beginning a little bit here. You studied psychology and politics at Adelaide University before completing a doctorate in zoology at Oxford University. And yet, here you are, accomplished author of literary non-fiction books. Where did this all begin? How did your first book come to be published?

Danielle

Well, I think I probably started my writing career actually when I was studying zoology. Because I was really interested in science writing. And I realised when I finished my degree that I was actually a better writer than I was a field worker. Pretty much it started from there.

Allison

Okay. So what was your first book? And how did you decide that that was going to be your first book?

Danielle

Well, I started out writing short pieces for science magazines and things like that. Writing book chapters and various other things. But I very, quite early on, I was really lucky to get a job at Museum Victoria and the job was as an essayist. So it was writing essays about their collections. Which is pretty much a dream job for a writer, in a way. And that ended up turning into my first book, my first published book. The first book that I wrote, which was Continent of Curiosities.

Allison

Okay. So do you think that that strong CV in essay writing helped when it came to having to produce a longer work? Was there anything… What was your first longer work of non-fiction?

Danielle

Well, Continent of Curiosities is a collection of essays, so really, I just put a whole heap of them together. So that was one way of dealing with that issue of getting to a longer work.

But Killers in Eden was actually my first published book. And that came about through talking to a publisher about interesting stories in natural history. And he had been to the Eden killer whale museum and thought it was a fantastic story. And I happen to have been there, too, and actually had had a long-standing fascination with that story. So it was just a shared interest with the publisher.

Allison

Was there anything about that process that surprised you? In a sense of getting that story down and working out what needed to go in, and what you needed to leave out, and all of that sort of stuff?

Danielle

Yeah, I think that, you know… Obviously, I first started out as a science writer, so my focus was more on the content, and on telling the story, the background information, the specialist information that other people might not have access to. Making it accessible to the general public. Because I have to read a lot of scientific papers which are incredibly complicated to read and difficult to extract anything interesting out of them.

But as I went on, I became more and more interested in the actual writing process. And just writing really for its own sake, if you like. Still for the information, but also for the beauty of the writing.

Allison

Okay. So with the kind of work that you do, I guess the information is always going to be the starting point for you, isn’t there? You’ve got to start with the facts, you’ve got to start with what’s known, and then you’ve got to work out how you’re going to create, as you say, an accessibility to those facts for your general reader. Would you agree that that’s the case? Is the starting point always going to be the information?

Danielle

It sort of is. I guess it’s becoming a little bit less so for me as I go on. Because science writing is often very dry, and it’s very factual and straightforward. It might be simple to understand, but it’s not always the most exciting writing to read.

So if we think about science journalism, science magazines, and things like that, it can be very straight forward and clear, but not necessarily beautiful. And I think that to get people to really… And I think people who are interested in science already, that’s a great forum for them.

But for people who perhaps aren’t interested in these things so much, to crack that audience you really need to produce something that’s a little bit extra. So you need to emotionally engage the audience. And I think you do that through the writing itself.

Allison

And is that something that you’ve learned as you’ve gone along? Is that process of emotional engagement something that you’ve obviously – I mean, you’re obviously great at it, because you’ve won a heap of awards and things like that. Or do you think that that’s just a natural part of your own writing process, is putting that stuff in?

Danielle

I think, I mean, I hope I have got better. I hope I continue to get better, as well. I think it’s a process of improvement with writing and learning new skills.

And yes, I think that probably learning how to use different narrative techniques, and especially devices that are usually more commonly used in fiction, but can be applied to non-fiction. All of those sorts of things can really increase the engagement with your audience.

Allison

Okay. So let’s talk about The Wasp and the Orchid, which is your latest and most beautiful book. I have the hardcover edition here on my desk, and it is just gorgeous. Just as an object, if nothing else. And it’s the biography of the nature writer Edith Coleman. Tell me how you came to write this particular story? How did you decide that Edith was a book?

Danielle

Well, it took me a long time to decide that Edith was a book. She was always someone that I was quite fascinated by. I came across the story of Edith Coleman when I was working in the museum. And it was one of the many, many, many stories that popped up during that time when I was working there. But it wasn’t something that I could really do anything with at the time. She didn’t… That story didn’t end up in Continent of Curiosities. So she was just in my filing cabinet as a potential thing to come back to.

And it wasn’t until recently, it was about five years ago or so, that I returned to that project. Because I was looking for funding opportunities, and the Australian Orchid Foundation had a call for grants, for small grants. And I thought, oh, what could I do with orchids? And then I thought, I know, I could do something with Edith Coleman.

So I put in a proposal to search for all of her popular publications. Because I knew that most of her scientific publications were all databased and accessible. Scientists are very good at keeping track of publications. But her popular articles in the newspapers and magazines weren’t really known. I had a partial list but I knew there were more out there. So I used that money to search for all her other articles and pull them all together.

And I had a vague idea of publishing a sort of anthology of her writing. So really, a book by her. But it turned into something else.

Allison

So let’s just go back a little bit there at that process. How did you go about tracking down all of those articles?

Danielle

Well, it couldn’t have been done without… Oh, excuse me, I’ve got a frog in my throat.

It couldn’t have been done without Trove, the newspaper digitisation process at the National Library. Because it’s just physically impossible to manually search through all the newspapers in Australia to find her articles. But because Trove has digitised them and they’re now machine readable, you can search for them. So that made the whole process a lot easier.

There were still quite a few I had to track down by hand. So I knew she had published in… Somebody mentioned she’d published in Your Garden magazine, and so I was able to go to the library and search the early records of Your Garden magazine to find those articles. And same for the Australian Women’s Mirror as well.

Allison

So once you had all of those articles, and obviously you’ve got all of her science stuff which is neatly databased for us, what did you do then? How did you then come from that, to I’m going to put an anthology together, to creating this biography? This very lyrical, really, biography of her life and work?

Danielle

I did actually submit the proposal for an anthology to a few different academic publishers. And they weren’t interested. They said, oh no, that won’t be of general interest. We won’t be able to sell enough copies. So I was actually having a little bit of a complain on Facebook, as you do.

Allison

As one does.

Danielle

Yes, that’s right. Just a gentle one. And the publisher from Picador actually noticed. And said, send it to me, I’m really interested. And I said, no, no, it’s not really your thing. You’re not really interested in this. But he insisted that I send it to him. And he actually completely reenvisaged the project and said, look, this is the kind of way you need to approach this. Do it differently. Do something quite creative and imaginative with it. Do a bit of nature writing, a bit of science writing, a bit of biography, and see what you come up with.

And that’s how it turned into the proposal that went to Picador and they accepted it.

Allison

Fantastic. It just goes to show you, doesn’t it, as a writer sometimes you just do need that slightly different editor approach to get the concept right.

Danielle

You do. I do actually find… I think that’s one of the great benefits of working in non-fiction is that you do get to discuss your ideas with an editor and publisher before you actually start writing the book. So I’ve always found that really helpful. Because they often have a really good idea on how books can work and what will appeal to the market, and all of those sorts of things. So it’s a really nice process to be able to do that; discuss the proposal, flesh out the ideas, get the shape of the book a bit clearer before you actually start embarking on the work itself.

Allison

So once you decided that you were going to focus not just on her writing but also on her life, that brings in a whole new dimension doesn’t it? Because then you’re looking at history, and then you’re looking at family, and then you’re looking at relatives still around, and all of that sort of stuff.

What was your next step as far as pulling the book together? Did you need to approach her family? Or did you just start to find what had been written about her before? Or how did you go about the next step?

Danielle

Well, there isn’t actually much written about her before. There’s a biography in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and that’s about it. So I have written a paper on her before, but there’s nothing else much out there. Just an occasional mention in a book here and there.

And as for tracking down her family, it was a matter of finding them first. Because I didn’t know who her family were. I realised… And of course, she had two daughters, and daughters are problematic because they tend to change their names.

Allison

They do. They’re very problematic, those daughters.

Danielle

So that was tricky. And I knew that one of them, who hadn’t changed her name, Dorothy, hadn’t had any children.

So it was the other daughter. And I was kind of relieved when I finally came across in an archive that Edith’s other daughter Gladys had married Donald Thompson, the anthropologist. Because Donald Thompson is quite a well-known figure. There’s quite a lot of archival material about him. So that gave me some way of finding his wife and his sons, as well.

Allison

Fantastic.

Danielle

Yeah. But even then I had problems. Because his name’s Thompson. And Thompson is a really common name. So trying to trace down the grandsons was quite tricky. But I was fortunate that they followed in their grandparents’ footsteps and had become academics themselves.

And John, in particular, had become a biologist. And so I actually… And he’d been at Melbourne University. And because I had been working at Melbourne University in the zoology department, some of the people there knew him and remembered him and I was able to track him down.

Allison

Fantastic. You must have felt like Sherlock Holmes once you found them and got to them and were able to talk to them and stuff like that.

Danielle

Yes. It’s great. That part of the research is marvellous, when it actually comes off and you work it out.

Allison

Fantastic. So I imagine you must have had – by the time you’ve done all this and you’ve done some family history work and you’ve got all the articles and you’ve got all the various things – you must have had an absolute mountain of research to wade through. When you’re writing a book like this, how do you manage your research?

Danielle

There was quite a lot of research. Although I have to say in Edith’s case, it’s not a lot compared to what other people might have. You know, you sometimes read biographies and they’ve got mountains and mountains of archival material. You know, they’ve given all their personal records to a library or something, and the library’s got boxes and boxes full of material.

Well, Edith didn’t do that. She didn’t leave her material to an archive. So there isn’t a lot. It’s very fragmentary. And that had a strong influence on how I wrote the book. Because there are whole sections of her life that I really don’t have any information on. So you can’t tell a complete story of her life, because we simply don’t have all the material.

For example, I know she used to write up to 20 letters a day.

Allison

Wow. Really?

Danielle

An enormous number of letters. So she was incredibly prolific. And yet I only found about 30.

Allison

Oh wow.

Danielle

So you know that there’s this missing resource that you just don’t know what’s in it. So it sort of puts a completely different slant on how you write the biography, because what you’re writing is always going to be incomplete.

Allison

That’s an interesting concept, too. Because I guess there’s that notion of you as a writer knowing that there’s stuff missing. Do you have that urge to just keep looking, keep looking, keep looking until you find it? Or do you… At what point do you go, I need to draw the line in the sand here? Is it because you’ve got a deadline? Or is it because you know that it’s a dead end, basically?

Danielle

In some cases, you just decide it’s not going to pan out, or it’s just too difficult to find the material. Sometimes you have to travel to go and check the resources yourself.

And a lot of it is serendipity, with research. It’s what falls into your path that gets used. Obviously, you’re looking for it, as well. But sometimes just things turn up that you weren’t expecting. And I guess… So yeah, it’s a bit of a mix, really, between…

There is the issue of the deadline. Of course, deadlines do make it… That’s an absolute. You have to meet your deadline. So that makes you stop. You often find yourself repeating – you’re just finding more of the same. You’re not coming up with new stuff. So I think that that’s always a sign that you’ve probably exhausted the material that’s out there.

Allison

Okay. As an incredibly practised and skilled researcher, as well as a writer, do you try to get all your research material together before you start? Or are you just writing bits and pieces as you go?

Danielle

Predominantly, and with this particular project, I did get most of my raw material together before I started. But I was still discovering new things along the way as well. And I always find that there are little pockets that I realise I need to go and do more work on when I’m writing. And so those ones, I’ll fill in. So it’s a bit of both.

Allison

So there are very comprehensive end notes at the end of this book that kind of made my head spin a little bit, as a non-academic person. But does your background make that very careful annotation easier? Or do you find it painstaking work as well?

Danielle

Oh, referencing is always a pain. But yes, it’s certainly… It’s a natural thing for me to do, I suppose, coming from that academic background.

And I find… I mean, as often… I often try and reference, even if I take them out of the final copy, I’ll do that for my own records so that I can go back and trace the source. If you’ve got a quote or something and you can’t remember where you got it from and those sorts of… That’s a bigger pain than actually referencing carefully as you go.

I guess with this particular one because I wanted to be very clear where I was speculating and where I was drawing on what was known, that was part of the reason for having the references in there.

I mean, not everybody is going to read the references, and I don’t expect anybody to. But if somebody does need to, then they’re useful to have. And there is extra information in there, I suppose, for the people who want… For a different way of reading the material.

Allison

How do you do your referencing? Do you just open up a Word document, call it ‘references’ and dump them all in there as you go? Is that how it works?

Danielle

Well, sometimes. This one, because Edith had written so many papers, I had to have a more organised approach. Because she’s got over 300 papers that I had to keep track of. So I actually used a referencing database called EndNote to keep track of all of those.

And that does actually make it much easier, because you can search the documents all at once. So if I know, you know, I wanted to know when did she mention her childhood? So I can actually search for childhood, and it will search all of her papers for that phrase.

Allison

Isn’t technology wonderful? That’s fantastic. So there’s a lot of responsibility in telling someone else’s story. Like, you’re telling Edith’s story. Do you feel that? Because you acknowledge Edith’s family as integral to the process. How do you manage the process of holding someone else’s family history and then disseminating it for public perusal, so to speak?

Danielle

It is tricky. And you inevitably, you can’t please everybody with what you’re doing, when you’re telling someone else’s story.

I was struck last year, my grandmother died, and I was thinking about, you know, talking to my mother and my aunts and uncles, and how different everybody’s versions of her were. When it came to write a eulogy, they all had totally different views of what was important to her, who she was, what we should talk about.

And it struck me, you know, that if you’re writing a biography, it’s only ever going to be your version of their life. It can’t be somebody else’s version. Because their versions all differ. And different people remember different things that are important to them.

And I find, I guess that’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book the way I did. Which is very much acknowledging the gaps, and the holes, and the speculation in the process. Because I was very uncomfortable with the idea of writing an authoritative biography, because I just didn’t feel I could do that.

Allison

Yeah, fair enough. So it’s more of a life story than a biography, so to speak? It’s sharing what we know about her.

Danielle

Yes. And it’s very much, it is my perspective of her life. So it’s my view of her as a writer and as a person of interest in natural history. It’s her family members’ view of her. It’s not somebody who knew her. So it’s an outsider’s view.

Allison

I really love the last chapter of the book where you talk about how having written the book, Edith changed the way you think about our relationship with Australian nature and our place in it. But also the way that you think about your writing. Can you explain a little bit about that? What did Edith teach you about writing?

Danielle

One of the main things Edith taught me is just to be confident in what you’re doing, and do it well. And not to be particularly concerned about what other people think, or whether you should be a writer.

I suffer from the problem of coming from a science background and yet being a writer. And people saying, well, how do you get to be a writer when you’re a scientist? Because everybody knows scientists can’t write. Which is not true!

Allison

Not true. Clearly not true. It’s funny how everyone has these ideas, though, isn’t it?

Danielle

Yeah. And it’s very easy for you to think, oh, I shouldn’t be doing writing. I’m not really a writer. I didn’t come from the right background or any of those sorts of things.

And Edith did the same thing. She was a housewife with a teacher training background. She had no reason to think that she could just waltz in and do science, and yet she did. And she did it very successfully. And she didn’t…

I think it’s really interesting the way she interacts with people who occasionally would attempt to criticise her. She just put back the arguments to them very clearly, very confidently, and didn’t allow them any room to put her down. She was… She knew her stuff, and she knew she knew her stuff, and that was all that she needed.

Allison

I think we can all learn a little bit from that, can’t we?

It’s interesting you say that, though, about the science and the writing. Because your book, Voyages to the South Seas, which is about Australia’s French explorers, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. So, you know, obviously the science and the writing is coming together quite nicely for you, really. But when you’re writing a book like that, are you thinking about the writing? Or are you just thinking about bringing that story, that information to life?

Danielle

Well, Voyages to the South Seas is a narrative non-fiction. So it is non-fiction, but it’s told like a story. So in that sense, it was very much about the writing, and about the pace, and the character and, you know, the story arcs and all of those sorts of things that you would normally associate with fiction. And that made it a really exciting project to work on.

And to a similar way with The Wasp and the Orchid, it’s very much about the structure of the story and how, how to tell the story, how to make it engaging and interesting, and maintain the reader’s interest as you’re going along.

Allison

All right. So switching gears slightly, you also have several non-fiction books for children which have been short, long listed, won awards, done all of those things.

When you’re talking about those kind of works, where you’re talking about non-fiction books for kids, and your subjects are things like Prehistoric Giants: Megafauna of Australia and Prehistoric Marine Life in Australia’s Inland Sea – we’re talking about big subjects, big massive, like people spend years and years of their lives researching this kind of stuff and writing enormous tomes about it. When you come to make that accessible for children, how do you do that? Is it about choosing which facts are going to interest kids the most? How do you take such a massive subject and bring it down to such an accessible level?

Danielle

It’s interesting that you say that about it being a massive subject. Because those books, despite the fact that they are my slimmest volumes, are actually my most heavily researched books. They’re the ones that take the most work to research. Much more so than the other books. Which seems strange, because the research is almost completely invisible.

Allison

Well, it is. And that’s what I find fascinating about them. Because I think people look at them and just go, oh yeah, you’ve just got to write three sentences here about whatever. And how easy would that be? But I just appreciate that what you’re looking at is the tiniest, tiniest tip of an enormous iceberg of work. So I just wonder how you choose that tip?

Danielle

I think having… One of the things that’s really useful to me is actually going and talking in schools to kids about these books. And that gives you a really strong sense of audience and where they’re at and what their level is and what their interests are. And to be honest, a lot of the kids who are interested in these things are incredibly knowledgeable.

Allison

Yes. No one ever knows more about dinosaurs and things than they do when they’re about six, do they? It’s really… That’s peak key learning area.

Danielle

Yes. So you’ve got to be right on your toes with them. So you can’t over simplify or talk down or do any of those things. You’ve got to be really level with your audience. And be respectful of them, I suppose.

But I really have two audiences for those books. Because I’m also lucky to be able to work with some of the palaeontologists who work in these fields. So I have them sitting on my shoulder as well going, oh, it’s not really called that, and you can’t really say that.

Allison

Oh no.

Danielle

So they’re a lot of work, those books. But I think, you know, it’s the ultimate challenge I suppose, for a science writer to take palaeontology papers, which are incredibly difficult papers to read, and try and convert them into something that’s accessible and engaging and interesting to a young audience.

Allison

That just makes my mind boggle, I have to say. I find that whole process really, really interesting.

Now, you talked about school talks. What other kinds of things are you doing to promote your books? I know you’ve done quite a bit of radio and podcasts. Does that non-fiction specialist subject matter open doors for that sort of outlet for promotion?

Danielle

I think it does. I’ve got, obviously, lots of friends who are novelists. And I know that mine generally tend to get quite a lot more attention than novels do, especially for early writers, first time writers and things. So I’m really lucky in that sense.

Non-fiction just does tend to attract a lot more interest in it. I think because it’s a factual content based thing that people can really connect to, it’s an easy thing for interviewers to talk about and discuss.

Allison

Do you do a lot… You mentioned Facebook before and how you connected with a publisher that way. But do you do any… Are you consciously online doing, talking to people, connecting, networking, that kind of stuff?

Danielle

No, I’m probably a bit rubbish at that, actually. I know lots of my friends have got Twitter accounts, and Pinterest and Instagram, and all these different things. I do Facebook and I have a webpage. And that’s probably about my limit.

I do a bit of Goodreads and a few things like that as well, but not hugely. Yeah. It’s just not my strength, I suppose.

Allison

Okay.

Danielle

To do that sort of thing. So I do a bit, and I quite like Facebook and those sorts of things. But there are limits. You can’t do everything. So I think if you just do a couple of them well, that’s the main thing.

Allison

Well, that’s right, because you’re actually still working at Flinders University as a senior research fellow, is that correct?

Danielle

Yes. I’m not actually teaching there anymore, so I’m really lucky that I can devote nearly all of my time to writing now. So that’s pretty good.

Allison

Terrific. Okay. So what’s next for Danielle Clode? I mean, I know you’re very busy talking about this book. But I’m assuming you’ve got your next one? Or you’re at least thinking about what your next one might be?

Danielle

Yes. Well, they’re sort of stacking up a bit. I’ve got a new children’s book on Australian fossils coming out in August. So I’m doing the final proofing and those sorts of things for that book.

And that one’s been quite an interesting challenge because it is specifically pitched for a younger audience than my previous children’s books which were a bit more multi-age. So we’ve really had to focus on those word counts and how long the words are.

Allison

And how many words are in your Australian fossil book?

Danielle

I’m not sure, exactly. But it’s only a few thousand words. It really is a picture book. And that’s also quite exciting. I quite like doing the picture research, and working on page designs and all of that side of things. I find… I actually find the visual process of creating a text quite interesting, as well. So that’s been a great challenge.

Allison

Fantastic. All right. And we’re going to finish up today with our question that we ask all authors. What are your top three tips for aspiring authors of, I guess, literary non-fiction, non-fiction work?

Danielle

I think probably, the thing I find most useful is to have a plan for what you’re doing. And have more than one plan so that you know, you can have your grand plan of being an international best seller, but also have those littler goals as well, on the list. Submitting to particular places, applying for fellowships, whatever it is. So that you’ve always got something that’s achievable.

I also find that having a regular set time to write is really important for me. So I try to write first thing in the morning, because I find I do my best work then. So having had regular set writing times.

And related to that, I guess, is just to write lots. Because it’s just something that practice makes better. So just keep writing. And you’ll naturally improve.

Allison

Fantastic. All right, well thank you so much for your time today, Danielle. It’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you. And I think that your book deserves to do brilliantly. I just think it’s a lovely, lovely book on all levels. So best of luck with all of it.

Danielle

Thank you very much, Allison. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.