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 Kári Gíslason, whose new novel The Sorrow Stone, an epic and compelling novel that reimagines the fate of one of Iceland’s famous women of history, is out now from UQP.
What does your workspace look like?
I think of workspace as a plural idea, and how different spaces and environments relate and shape a work. For The Sorrow Stone, I spent three weeks in Iceland, at two farms—Helgafell on the Snæfellsnes peninsula and Haukadalur in the Westfjords. Each day, I walked for a few hours, and then for the rest of the day I wrote in the cabins I’d rented, at some point cooked a big meal and ate, and then went for another walk in the evening. Spending this kind of slow time in the landscape of my story helped me to feel that the setting was well-defined, and also that it would inhabit words and scenes that didn’t refer to landscape explicitly. When I came back to Brisbane and wrote in my office at home, the weeks I’d spent in Iceland were still present, but in a different way that was sharpened by the distances of time and place.
Spending time in the landscape of my story helped me to feel that the setting was well-defined, and also that it would inhabit other words and scenes.
Are you an analogue or digital writer?
I think my laptop is my office, even though I do have a nice desk and my books at home, as well as an office at QUT, where I teach. The miracle of a laptop is that I feel like I’ve arrived at my own space when I open it, no matter where I am—at coffee shops, airports, hotels, in front of the TV. It’s a magic carpet bag for writers. I do also have paper notebooks, but these tend to house ideas, individual sentences, drawings, research, and plans rather than extended lengths of prose. I find notebooks are where I solve problems that can’t be tackled in the ‘stream’ of the work as it exists in a computer document.
What sort of software and hardware do you use to get your work done?
Notwithstanding what I’ve just said about laptops, what I most crave is a period in each day when I’m in the right frame of mind to write. If that comes, I don’t really mind what software or hardware I’m using. If I’m walking or having a swim, and an idea or sentence or narrative solution arrives out of the blue, I memorise it by repeating it to myself half a dozen times, or until I have a chance to write it down. Then, memory is the ‘hardware’. What matters in that moment, I think, is the habit of note taking and note making, and of responding to ideas that come unbidden. More seem to come, if you do that.
More words flow late at night; the prose seems tighter in the mornings. But they do seem to need each other, rather like a fast talker needs a cautious friend.
Describe your writing practice?
I don’t try to be an organised writer, or one with a particular routine, but I have noticed that things I write in the evening, especially after a glass of wine, are somehow ‘corrected’ by the writing I do first thing in the morning, when I have a coffee in my hand. I expect each writing time has its own merits: more words flow late at night; the prose seems tighter in the mornings. But they do seem to need each other, rather like a fast talker needs a cautious friend.
Has your writing practice changed over the years? If so, how?
When I was a university student, I’d stop at a cafe on my way to class, usually to read but sometimes also to write—at that time, mainly poetry and observations rather than stories. I’d get distracted or immersed in what I was reading, which unfortunately was never one of the set texts in my subjects. I loved reading if it wasn’t a set text, but as soon as I had to read a book it became a chore. I was often late for class. Once, a fellow student remarked on how I hadn’t been on time once in the whole semester! A generous-hearted tutor smiled and said, ‘Well, at least he turns up eventually.’ I feel there’s still much of who I am and how I write in that moment: writing is a practice of pausing to think and feel, one that occurs outside or between the necessary functions of the day. Fortunately, the important people in my life have been wonderfully supportive of me doing so.
Writing is a practice of pausing to think and feel, one that occurs outside or between the necessary functions of the day.
How do you encourage inspiration to strike?
I can’t remember a time when I had writer’s block or couldn’t find new ideas for stories. The more pressing challenge for me is settling on a project and being fully ‘inside’ it, so that it reaches that point when I know the words are real and keep-able, not just the jottings that hover above. In my case, stories usually have their genesis in earlier works—my own or those by others. The Sorrow Stone, for example, is based on a medieval Icelandic saga that I read and wrote an essay on at university and that twenty years later formed a chapter in Saga Land, the book I wrote with Richard Fidler. A few years on, that response to the saga has expanded into a novel. Perhaps many people discover new ideas this way, that is, in crossovers between projects. Inspiration can be interlinked in nature rather than a sudden revelation.
The Sorrow Stone is available now from your local independent bookseller.