Show Your Working is a regular column exploring how some of our favourite writers get things done. This month, we take a peek into the writing routine of author Ashley Goldberg, whose debut novel Abomination, which was shortlisted for the 2020 KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award, is out now from Vintage Australia.
Ashley’s ‘library’ workspace. Image: Supplied
What does your workspace look like?
My place is pretty small—a two-bedroom terrace in the inner-north of Melbourne. We don’t even have a kitchen table so most of my writing is done either on the couch or in our spare room/library/my partner’s yoga studio. We splashed out on a very comfortable leather armchair and that’s where I can often be found, laptop on my knees and noise-cancelling headphones over my ears. Actually, who am I kidding? I say I use the spare room ‘often’, but I just like the image of myself sitting there, whiskey in hand, passively absorbing genius from the spines around me. Truth be told, there’s likely to be a couple of full clothes horses in the ‘library’ that I can’t be bothered to move, and I’ll be on the couch, in a chocolate-stained hoodie, hunched over my glowing screen and complaining about back pain.
Are you an analog or digital writer?
Strictly digital—I know there’s that saying that handwriting engages more of the brain than typing, but my handwriting is almost completely illegible, and I can’t imagine what I would miss when eventually transferring the written words to a computer. Sometimes I think back to my frenetically scrawled high school and university exams, and a part of me is convinced that after failing to make heads or tails of my hieroglyphics, my examiners simply shrugged their shoulders and wrote ‘PASS’.
When it’s time to write, I write slowly… Of course, there will be revisions down the line, but I try to get it as right as I can the first time around.
What sort of software and hardware do you use to get your work done?
For years I wrote on Microsoft Word only, saved the documents to my desktop and stubbornly refused to acknowledge the passage of time and innovation, but eventually I heard stories about the losses of others—USB left on a bus, hard drive fried by a glass of wine, spontaneous file combustion. Now I write everything on Google Docs, and I make daily offerings to the cloud and reassure myself that the only way I could lose my files would be if Google’s servers were to go down, and surely for that to happen I’d have bigger problems than the loss of my writing because the world would obviously be ending.
Describe your writing practice?
I listen to music pretty much all of the time, but it has to be something I know well so that I’m not distracted by some damned catchy hook. And though, thematically, I think my work can sometimes be a bit heavy that means it has often been drafted to pop-punk from the late 90s and early 2000s.
I work four days a week, leaving the fifth as a dedicated writing day. I need structure—there’s wiggle room but, largely, every story or chapter will be plotted out in dot points. When it’s time to write, I write slowly. Whether it’s short fiction or a novel, at the end of a writing day around three hundred new words will be on the page. I don’t rewrite much. Of course, there will be revisions down the line, but I try to get those three hundred as right as I can the first time around. The whole day isn’t spent agonisingly squeezing out those words—whether it’s a shootaround at the local basketball court or a YouTube rabbit hole on lockpicking, I’ve come to understand that leisure time is an important part of the process.
Has your writing practice changed over the years? If so, how?
I went to England a few years ago and did a master’s in Creative Writing. The course itself was fine but what I got the most out of were the relationships formed outside of the classroom. Once a week, a small group of us would get together and drink wine, eat cheese and critique one another’s work. And because of the friendships we’d already developed (and probably the wine too) the feedback was often honest, candid and spot on. Back home, I haven’t been able to find a workshopping environment like that, and I think my work is missing out on the benefits from that kind of frank critiquing. A handful of friends read some early chapters of my debut novel, but I didn’t want to burden any of them with the entire thing, so I really wasn’t sure if it was any good until I started to get feedback from agents. I’m working on new projects at the moment, and I’m hopeful that I’ll find a place to workshop them.
My writing is strongest when I’m able to live in a story for days on end.
How do you encourage inspiration to strike?
Ideas come from a lot of places but more likely than not from reading other authors. There are obvious comparisons to be made between my book and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen—and he was, of course, a great source of inspiration. Short fiction, on the other hand, is a little different. There isn’t the space in a short story for the kind of narrative detail you find in a novel. For me, a good short story evokes a particular feeling, one that lasts and leaves the reader perhaps a little breathless. The best short fiction works I’ve written have been those where I honed in on the feeling I wanted to evoke, and managed to keep it in mind the whole way through.
If I’m tripped up by a plot point or the cadence of a sentence isn’t quite right, long showers work best. Overall, I think my writing is strongest when I’m able to live in a story for days on end, but those opportunities are few and far between these days.
What’s next for you?
I have some upcoming events at Melbourne Jewish Book Week on 29 May, and 30 May at the Wheeler Centre. Then in June I am in conversation with Irma Gold at the Book Cow in Canberra on 9 June, and with Fiona Robertson at Avid Reader in Brisbane on 16 June; In Sydney, I will be in conversation with James Bradley on 17 June at Better Read Than Dead, and then at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival on 19 June.
Abomination is available now from your local independent bookseller.
