Show Your Working: James McKenzie Watson

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 James McKenzie Watson, whose new novel, gothic thriller Denizen, won the 2021 Penguin Literary Prize. (Read an extract!)

What does your workspace look like?

My workspace currently occupies an entire room which is an incredible luxury. It’s spacious, it’s contained, it’s quiet, it’s got a large window which my housemates’ dog appears at every now and again. I’m lucky enough to have this room because I live in Dubbo, where rental prices aren’t so crippling high that you’d be doing well to have a separate room for bathing, let alone for writing. (My housemate and I share a four-bedroom house. You could easily fit three families in here. Come to the country.)

Like most millennials, I seem to move roughly every eighteen months, and so have occupied a variety of writing spaces in recent years. The best ones have enough room for a big desk, lots of natural light and greenery, and a dog nearby. Last year, I had a relapse of an autoimmune condition and retreated to my mum’s house for three months to recover. Her elderly border collie was my shadow there, forever at my feet as I wrote.

Are you an analog or digital writer?

I know that the idea of being an analog writer is very romantic, but I don’t have the patience, handwriting, or physical stamina for that. Every element of my writing, from note taking to editing, is digital. I only became aware of how reliant I was on digital tools during proof-reading for Denizen, when I had to comb through the printed manuscript with a red pen. By the time I returned the proofs to the publisher, they weighed an extra kilogram with all the whiteout I’d added. (I had to go and buy whiteout, by the way. It’s not a thing people seem to have anymore.) It made me very aware of how much of my writing is rewriting—I formulate sentences on the page rather than in my head. This is great when using a word processor. It becomes seriously irritating when writing by hand.

What sort of software and hardware do you use to get your work done?

I’m a religious user of Microsoft Word. I’m one of those people who, every time Microsoft rolls out a change to Office, says ‘for the love of God, it wasn’t broken, why would they fix it?’ before, three or four months later, quietly conceding that the update actually was pretty useful. If I’d had my way every time an update was rolled out, I’d still be using Office 2000 and arguing with that anthropomorphic paperclip as it said ‘it looks like you’re trying to write a David Vann novel set in rural NSW. Are you sure there’s a market for this?’ (Yes, as it turns out, much to my surprise and delight.)

I know that the idea of being an analog writer is very romantic, but I don’t have the patience, handwriting, or physical stamina for that.

I also would have missed an innovation that’s significantly increased my productivity in recent years: cloud storage. As a baked in Microsoft Office user, I use OneDrive, though I’m sure the various competitors do just as good a job. The ability to work on my writing from my iPhone or a browser was revolutionary. I’m not a Microsoft salesman; I’m just a guy whose family’s first PC ran Windows 2000 and has been neck deep in that ecosystem ever since.

In terms of hardware, I’m one of those people who struggles without multiple monitors. My laptop sits on my desk next to an external screen, and I spread my workspace between the two. I suspect that my partner, who gets through life just fine with her single laptop screen, thinks this is overkill, but she’s far too polite to say it.

Describe your writing practice?

I’m a planner of the most extreme kind. Every manuscript I write starts as a mini-novel of about 3,000 words—a detailed scene by scene description that forms a roadmap for the writing itself. Once that’s done, I tend to bang out a first draft fairly quickly with minimal revisions as I go, before reassessing the completed draft for a comprehensive edit—which is where the work really happens.

I think I need to do it this way because my novels always start out as feelings—or more specifically, shifts in feeling and the catharsis (or otherwise) that comes from those shifts. Usually, there’s some basic premise associated with the emotional endpoint, and those two things become the foundational pillars the rest of the novel is built around. For these shifts to pay off, there has to be a lot of planning and build up.

Every manuscript I write starts as a mini-novel of about 3,000 words—a detailed scene by scene description that forms a roadmap for the writing itself.

That said, my editing process was transformed by working with the extraordinarily brilliant Johannes Jakob on Denizen. I feel so lucky to have been guided through that process by such an expert and to have learnt so much. Moving methodically down through the book’s layers, from structure to scene to sentence to word, was an incredible boot-camp in effective, economical writing.