S2E12: Author Susan Green on finishing the crap first draft

Season 2: The Home Season

The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work.

Episode 12: Susan Green, Author

Susan Green is a children's and adult fiction writer with a career spanning nearly four decades. Best known for the Verity Sparks series, which began with The Truth About Verity Sparks (a CBCA Awards runner-up in 2011), she has also written picture storybooks, non-fiction, one adult novel, and five teenage romances under the name Susan Lennox. After nearly a decade away from completing projects, the writing bug has returned, and Susan is now deep in a 1950s espionage novel and preparing a submission for a Varuna residency.

In this episode, we talk about:

- How a walk through Melbourne’s grand Victorian architecture sparked the first Verity Sparks novel

- Why having a contract focused her writing life, and what happened to her routine without one

- Her pantser approach: starting with a character, worrying at a first sentence, and trusting the story to find itself

- The breakthrough she had in her 20s for dealing with the voice that says this is crap

- What a great editor taught her about killing your darlings

- The Little Bo Peep theory of creative problems, and why she no longer worries too much

- Why she stopped thinking about publishers and markets, and what that freedom has meant for the book she is writing now

- The grief that comes when your characters stop speaking to you

Whether you are a writer finding your way back after a long break, stuck in the middle of a draft, or wondering what the point is without a contract or a deadline, this episode is for you. Susan is funny, generous and disarmingly honest about the messiness of creative life, and her story is a good reminder that beingness, including creative beingness, is enough, and that the characters always come back wagging their tails.

Connect with Susan

* Susan’s website

* How Bright Are All Things Here

Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley

A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/) and Instagram.(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/)

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