Robyn Mundy's Blog, page 6

About writing

In this interview link, fellow writer and long-time friend Greg Johnston poses some curly questions about Wildlight and my writing practice.

Source: Words like silent raindrops fell – a chat with Robyn Mundy
Filed under: Wildlight, Words for Writers

Wildlight countdown

Maatsuyker Island Lighthouse

With Wildlight in stores next week, remote lighthouses and windswept islands are fresh on my mind. Wildlight is a contemporary novel set on Maatsuyker Island, the site of Australia’s southernmost lighthouse, located off the south coast of Tasmania.

I was recently interviewed by the lovely Georgia Moodie for ABC Radio National’s Books and Arts. If you would like to hear it, listen to the podcast here.

Also check out the Wildlight book trailer.

Filed under: Wildlight Tagged: lighthouse, Maatsuyker Island

Writing the Wild

Welcome to Writing the Wild, a blog for and about writers and writing, readers and reading, creators and their images. Having just travelled back from the Antarctic Peninsula, still caught in that strange long-haul lag between then and now, it seems fitting to share a recent image of ice, taken at Point Wild off Elephant Island. Antarctica has been a big part of my life for some years but it’s impossible to ever tire of the beauty and art of ice.

Striped iceberg at Point Wild

But to the here and now…

On returning home I was thrilled to receive advance copies of my new novel Wildlight, being published by Picador on 1 March, and in book stores on 23 February. Check out the Wildlight book trailer here, kindly produced by Matt and Heather at Passionfruit Creative.

Filed under: Wildlight Tagged: Antarctica, iceberg, Wildlight

Early Bird Greeting

Welcome to Writing the Wild, a site that showcases writers on writing, readers on reading, images and their makers, and the connections we make through art, nature and travel. The site is under construction and will be active in February 2016. Please come back and visit.

Filed under: Welcome Tagged: Welcome

Colum McCann’s Letter to a Young Writer

Colum McCann, author of Thirteen Ways of Looking (Random House), shares some advice.

Do the things that do not compute. Be earnest. Be devoted. Be subversive of ease. Read aloud. Risk yourself. Do not be afraid of sentiment even when others call it sentimentality. Be ready to get ripped to pieces: It happens. Permit yourself anger. Fail. Take pause. Accept the rejections. Be vivified by collapse. Try resuscitation. Have wonder. Bear your portion of the world. Find a reader you trust. Trust them back. Be a student, not a teacher, even when you teach. Don’t bullshit yourself. If you believe the good reviews, you must believe the bad. Still, don’t hammer yourself. Do not allow your heart to harden. Face it, the cynics have better one-liners than we do. Take heart: they can never finish their stories. Have trust in the staying power of what is good. Enjoy difficulty. Embrace mystery. Find the universal in the local. Put your faith in language—character will follow and plot, too, will eventually emerge. Push yourself further. Do not tread water. It is possible to survive that way, but impossible to write. Transcend the personal. Prove that you are alive. We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate. Become your own voice. Sing. Write about that which you want to know. Better still, write towards that which you don’t know. The best work comes from outside yourself. Only then will it reach within. Restore what has been devalued by others. Write beyond despair. Make justice from reality. Make vision from the dark. The considered grief is so much better than the unconsidered. Be suspicious of that which gives you too much consolation. Hope and belief and faith will fail you often. So what? Share your rage. Resist. Denounce. Have stamina. Have courage. Have perseverance. The quiet lines matter as much as those which make noise. Trust your blue pen, but don’t forget the red one. Allow your fear. Don’t be didactic. Make an argument for the imagined. Begin with doubt. Be an explorer, not a tourist. Go somewhere nobody else has gone, preferably towards beauty, hard beauty. Fight for repair. Believe in detail. Unique your language. A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last. Don’t panic. Trust your reader. Reveal a truth that isn’t yet there. At the same time, entertain. Satisfy the appetite for seriousness and joy. Dilate your nostrils. Fill your lungs with language. A lot can be taken from you—even your life—but not your stories about your life. So this, then, is a word, not without love, to a young writer: Write.

Filed under: Words for Writers Tagged: tips for writers