Writers, me included, are frequently asked at conventions and workshops: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Although the question in itself is mere curiosity, it carries a kind of reverence or belief that writers experience and imagine a different world than mere mortals, but that’s not strictly true.
 
Most of us live seemingly ordinary lives and while we might hope to be involved in something grand or inspiring, something that makes us famous and rich, most of us never have that happen. And yet, every aspect of our seemingly ordinary lives is potentially extraordinary and the stuff of which stories are made. We think we are born, grow up in our families and go on with our lives in ordinary ways. But reflect on that. Even before you were born, there were people who shaped how and where you were born, even why you were born, and that makes you both familiar to readers and potentially unique. Your parents might be farmers struggling to eke a living out of a barren land, people who escaped a troubled land and tyranny to establish a new life elsewhere, creators of extraordinary things that brought wealth into being, humble people committed to a quiet and uneventful life, survivors of a great catastrophe. And all of the above might not be true of your parents, but of your grandparents or even earlier ancestors, and all that has a bearing on who you might be when you enter the world.
 
And then there is you. Maybe you were born with a challenge. Maybe you were exceptionally bright at school, or the kid who was bullied, or a sports star, or all of those. Maybe you had friends who did amazing things, who took risks, or disobeyed the rules. No one is singularly perfectly normal and uninteresting. But even if you find nothing in yourself you believe worthy of writing about, you will now and meet and observe many other people who might provide that spark of inspiration.
 
Like all creative people, writers live, listen, observe, read, view and think. When I’m asked, ‘Where do I get my ideas for writing?” I answer, “From everywhere, everything and everyone.” And that’s the truth.
 
I observe people – family, friends, colleagues, strangers, even myself. I listen to their voices and their expressions. I analyse their features, their dress style, their mannerisms, how they walk and laugh, what they eat and how they eat. I note what excites them, what makes them annoyed or angry, what saddens them, what they wish they had and what they are grateful for having, and how they express and react to emotions and events. I look for quirks, obsessions, behaviours that seem specific to individuals.
 
I soak in the colours and sounds and smells and sensations of places, the rich complexity and uncomplicated simplicity of textures and structures and light and atmosphere and composition and position. I look at the subtle integration of architecturally beautiful buildings and the stark vulgarity of aggressive designs. Whether I am walking along a gentle curved sandstone cobbled alley in Medina, shadows crouching against the cream and brown huddled buildings to avoid the sharp blue glare of summer, or pushing through the morass of shoppers beneath criss-crossing strings of multicoloured bulbs in a Mumbai market, my senses wrapped in the jarring fragrances of spices and human sweat and the plaintive cries of stall hawkers, or running on a ragged concrete path, bordered by green lawn beside the brown and silted waters of the River Torrens, my sneakers padding out a painful rhythm in sync with my frantic breath, while brown and black ducks quack annoyance at my passing, I am aware and taking note of what surrounds me and in what I am immersed, because at some point, for a story or poem or article, these things will become writing.
 
So, specific examples of where ideas germinate?

When I had my fifteen minutes of fame in the 1990s-2000s and had novels published by Pan Macmillan and HarperCollins, I was frequently interviewed and asked many questions associated with writing, but one question that was rarely broached is this one: Why do you write? It’s a key question to ask all writers – and if you want to be a writer it is an essential question to answer for yourself.
 
Anyway, why do I write?
 
Firstly, it is an obsession, an addiction, a passion that was ignited in Grade Three Primary School when our teacher introduced us to poetry. She coaxed and encouraged us to write our own poems and I was lucky to have my piece of Australian-themed doggerel published in the annual school magazine. I fell in love with creative written language and the idea that what I write could be read by many other people. I fell in love with seeing my ideas and words in print.

From that point on, I wrote hundreds of poems, short stories, articles, cartoons for school magazines and stories and jokes to share with my friends on the school bus trips to and from home. I guess I was writing then also to connect with people and to make friends.

Writing translated into essays and more poems in high school and university, and song lyrics at one point, and then it morphed into creative lesson plans and resources for students when I became a teacher. In fact, my second favourite part of teaching – the first being seeing students engage and grow in understanding – was creating resources. I didn’t show students examples of writing and ask them to write, I wrote the tasks with them to show how poetry and prose and scripts could be developed. I wrote them because it fulfilled the first of my needs: I write because I HAVE to write. In fact, if I don’t do a burst of creative writing on a regular basis, I become unsettled, grumpy even, as an addict does.
 
Another reason I write is to express my thoughts, ideas, understandings, interpretations and questions about life and people and politics and society and religion and all the things. My earliest poems, even as a child, embraced issues of survival and suffering and injustice and observations and love. I have poems from my teenage years that reference the El Salvador and Vietnam wars and cruelty, corporate and banking abuse of ordinary people, and quiet individual moments of suffering in an uncaring, disconnected world.

When I eventually found the courage and capacity to write novels, I explored a variety of themes, for example: the impact of marriage breakup and adult unreliability on early teens (Joy Ride); the crisis of identity and conflict between traditional role expectations and passion to learn for young women (The Last Wizard); racism, sexism and political domination and struggle for freedom (The Ashuak Chronicles); the struggles between wanting a simple life against shouldering the responsibilities of the ‘bigger picture’ (The Amber Legacy); protecting family versus embracing social law (The Need); personal identity and the courage to face challenges that can potentially change who you think yourself to be (In My Father’s Shadow). Those examples are only part of each novel and each one has more to it than a single theme, but that is why I write – to explore, question, challenge the small and big questions of life.
 
I write to give voice to the people represented by the characters in my work, to enable their experiences and views to be expressed. An example I’m extremely proud of is the novel Joy Ride in which a 16 year old juvenile is relating what happened to him and a friend when they were 13/14 and why. Caught in broken homes, and angry and frustrated by the failure of the adults they thought they should/could trust, the boys lash out and go on a drunken, drug-fuelled binge that ends up with them stealing a public transport bus and attempting to make a run for Melbourne. Based on an actual incident, the novel gives voice to disaffected youth. The reader reaction was almost priceless and the feedback and mail/email I received reflected the novel’s impact because the readers over 25 were angry and did not like the characters or their story and the readers under 25 were full of praise and engaged in the characters and story.

I could argue that Girlie came into being because I wanted my mother’s younger life and voice to be recorded and shared.

In a current project, yet to be published, I am endeavouring to give voice to people in our community who are meant to remain invisible. I feel a responsibility as a writer not to simply serve up fantasy or impossible characters, but to also challenge readers to know and understand why some members of our community are angry or isolated or hated or viewed with disgust, and why they are who they are, and how they feel as a consequence.
 
As I wrote earlier, I want to make connections and begin conversations with the people who read what I write. I like to think that I engage with readers in multiple and useful ways – to entertain, to challenge to think, to reassure and also to make uncomfortable over certain matters, to enlighten and maybe, with some issues, to embolden them to act. It is incredibly good to receive emails and messages from readers, obviously especially the complimentary ones and the ones that want to know more or pursue specific topics raised in the novel they read.
 
Do I write to make money? Well, I don’t make much money at all, although I do hope that a work I create will attract enough attention to generate a handsome profit. If it was for money, I would have stopped writing a long time ago, maybe not even write at all. Money is about luck: luck to be writing the right material at the right time in the right place to attract the right attention by the right people to your writing; luck that someone is willing to back your writing with money to kickstart it; luck that you make sales or it gets taken up as a movie or similar production. Some writers have ‘made’ their luck happen because of their connections in the industry. Some writers have been lucky that people in the industry like their writing and can market it successfully. I’d certainly like to strike it lucky, seriously I’d love that to happen, but that is not WHY I write.
 
Like all artists I know, I write because I love to create stories for others to enjoy. Everything beyond that is a bonus.