Garth Nix was born on a Saturday in Melbourne, Australia, and got married on a Saturday, to his publisher wife, Anna. Garth used to write every Sunday afternoon because he had a number of day jobs over the years that nearly always started on a Monday, usually far too early. Those jobs included being a bookseller, an editor, a public relations consultant, and a literary agent. Tuesday has always been a lucky day for Garth, when he receives good news, like the telegram (a long time ago, in the days of telegrams) that told him he had sold his first short story, or when he heard that his novel
Abhorsen
had hit
The New York Times
bestseller list.
Wednesday was important when Garth was a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve, because Wednesday was a training night. Thursday is now particularly memorable because Garth and Anna’s oldest son, Thomas, was born on a Thursday afternoon. Friday is a very popular day for most people, but since Garth has become a full-time writer, it no longer marks the end of the workweek. Friday did, however, mark the birth of Garth and Anna’s second son, Edward.
On any day, Garth may generally be found near Coogee Beach in Sydney, where he and his family live. His novels include
Sabriel
,
Lirael
,
Shade’s Children
, and
The Ragwitch
, as well as the books in The Seventh Tower series. He has won the Aurealis Awards for Best Fantasy Novel, Best Young Adult Novel, and Best Children’s Novel—all in the same year.
Q:
Where did you grow up? What was your family like?
A:
Though I was born in Melbourne, Australia, we moved to the federal capital, Canberra, when I was about one. So that’s where I grew up. Canberra is kind of like a miniature Washington, DC, in many ways, full of government buildings and most of the population working for the government in some capacity. It is a new city, established in the 1920s but with most of its growth happening after World War II. It was very much a strange mixture of small city and national capital when I was there, having a population of only about 250,000 people. It’s also surrounded by the bush (forest), so had that extra dimension as well. From the time I was about ten years old, we lived in a house that my parents designed and had built, only a few hundred meters from a nature reserve but also still very close to the city centre.
My father is a scientist and my mother is an artist, so we always had an interesting combination of things going on and interesting visitors of all kinds, though only in retrospect did I realize that it’s probably slightly unusual to spend Christmas Day with a crowd that might include a Russian agronomist, a famous poet, several American biologist/zoologists, a sculptor, and so on. I’m the middle son of three boys, so for at least the first ten years or so, I had immediate friends right there at home. From ages ten to twenty or so, we had a lot less to do with each other, and fought somewhat amongst ourselves, though fortunately once we managed to become reasonably adult we’ve all been good friends.
Q:
What were you like when you were Arthur’s age? Are his gym-class experiences based on your own?
A:
It’s always hard to say what you were like back whenever. I think from what various friends have told me and my own recollections that I was an odd combination. I wore glasses from about age eight, but I was large and strong and had a temper (that I have worked on for many years), so I was never bullied or picked on. I didn’t particularly like team sports but I did play rugby union for a while, and I have always been a keen fisherman from when I first started fishing with my dad at about six or seven years old. I loved reading from the very first, learning to read before I started school. I also liked making up stories and games, and I remember that with a group of friends in primary school we used to invent games and playacting that were really precursors of the role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons I played a few years later.
I also suffered from bronchitis and asthma, usually only in the winter. Arthur’s experience at the beginning of
Mister Monday
is drawn from life. We had a cross-country run every week at school, and when I could feel that I was having trouble breathing, I used to just walk it or even sit out if I had to. But one frosty morning I thought to myself, “I am having trouble breathing, but maybe this time if I just keep going it will somehow get better. I’ll break through the barrier that is constricting my lungs.” So I just kept running and running and my breathing got shallower and shallower and then the next thing I knew I was looking up at the clear blue sky wondering what was going on, and a friend’s face loomed into view and he said, “What are you doing, Garth?” which wasn’t very useful. Even when it was clear I was in trouble he just sat there, but fortunately after a while lying on the grass, I recovered enough to walk back to school and I was basically okay by the time we did that. I never told the teacher that I passed out, nor my parents. My mother was horrified when
Mister Monday
came out and I told her Arthur’s experience on the run was based on my own.
Q:
You spent several years as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. What did that involve?
A:
The Australian Army Reserve is like the U.S. National Guard, in that it is part-time military service. I joined at age seventeen while I was still at school, because I was thinking about a career in the army, applying for the Australian equivalent of West Point. I went away for two months’ training at the end of the year, with a week off in the middle, and by the end of that, I knew I didn’t want to be a professional soldier. But I enjoyed the Army Reserve, particularly a bit later when I did my specialist training as an Assault Pioneer (basically the equivalent of the American combat engineers) and joined an assault pioneer platoon. Then for the next three years, I spent a weekend and a few evenings a month and between six and eight weeks a year doing all kinds of things that were sometimes very tough and sometimes very enjoyable, though rarely both at the same time. We built bridges and other structures and then blew them up (we spent a lot of time blowing stuff up); we drove assault boats at sea and on rivers; we cleared trees with chain saws for helicopter landing zones; we ran gas training tents with tear gas rolling out of them like a fog…all kinds of stuff that is fun when you’re in your late teens and early twenties and still think you’re immortal. I left after four and a half years of service because if I stayed in I would be commissioned as an officer and have to leave the assault pioneer platoon and go back to the normal infantry, which I didn’t want to do. Also most of my best friends had left, some to go into the regular army (one friend eventually got into the Special Air Service) and others just out.
Q:
What inspired you to write The Keys to the Kingdom series? Which piece of the idea, or of the kingdom, came first?
A:
Unusually, because I normally begin a story with a little scene that pops into my head like a still from a movie, these books started with seven names. I was working on something else when all of a sudden the seven names of the trustees just appeared and I wrote them down. I didn’t know who they were or what the names meant, and over the course of the next year or so. I began to expand on those names, work out who they were, what the story would be and so on. Arthur came along after I had worked out the basic “big” story about the Architect, the Will, and the ignoble Trustees.
Q:
When you finished writing
Mister Monday,
did you already know what would happen in the next six books?
A:
Even before I began
Mister Monday
, I knew the shape of the overall “big” story, as I’d been working on it for over a year. But my notes for books are never much more than a rough map of where I want to go, with lots of blank space and nearly all the detail needing to be filled in as I travel through the story. Many things also change as I write the book, though the big landmarks usually don’t change, although they may get shifted around.
Q:
How did you become a storyteller? When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
A:
I’ve liked telling stories and making stuff up for as long as I can remember, I have a vivid memory of leading a team of friends through a pyramid when I was only seven or eight: the pyramid being wholly imaginary, with all of my friends walking in a line behind me on the school oval as I described where we were and where we were going. It must have looked (and sounded) pretty strange to anyone who saw us. I also enjoyed writing stories, and there are a few pieces of my early work still around, including a tiny stapled chapbook I put together at age eight or thereabouts, and a picture book I wrote and partially illustrated at perhaps age ten.
I didn’t consciously decide I wanted to try to become a writer until I was about nineteen. By this time I’d decided not to pursue a career in the army and (after working for a year to raise the money) I went on a long holiday in the UK and Europe. On that trip, I read a huge number of books and reread many of my old favorites, particularly when I was in England and Scotland. I was driving around the UK in a beat-up old Austin 1300 with a trunk full of books, and somewhere along the way I bought a Silver Reed metal typewriter and started typing up various bits and pieces. I also wrote most of a novel longhand, a novel that I should have finished—it would be some years before I learned the chief lesson of the professional writer. You need to finish stuff.
Once I’d made the decision that I wanted to try to write books, I then had to work out what else I was going to do to earn a crust and keep myself alive. I’d read enough about writing and publishing to know that a day job or another career is pretty much essential, one of the great advantages of writing being that you can do it in addition to anything else. I decided I should get a degree because that would lead to better-paying jobs and other opportunities, and fortunately I was able to do a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing at the University of Canberra, which not only gave me that useful undergraduate degree essential for ticking employer’s questionnaires but also allowed me to spend three years in the company of many other writers. I wrote half of my first published novel,
The Ragwitch
, as part of the requirements for that degree. (It took me about another two years after leaving university to finish the book, as I was then working in the publishing industry after a stint in a bookstore as a way into the field.)
Q:
What is your writing routine like? Do you write every day? Do you write in a special place?
A:
My writing routine has varied enormously over the years. For a good decade or so, I only wrote on Sunday afternoons and the occasional late evening, because I had very demanding jobs in either publishing or IT marketing/PR, and I wasn’t making much from writing, so I couldn’t afford to neglect my daytime work.
Since 2001, when I have been a full-time writer, I basically spend office hours (nine-ish to five-ish) in my office, which at first was at home but for several years has been a separate office ten minutes’ walk from where I live. At the office, I spend anywhere between an hour and five or six hours writing, depending on what else is going on, where I’m up to in the current book, and on interruptions. At the beginning of a book, I probably only write for an hour or two a day, Monday to Friday. Towards the end of a book, when the momentum is really rolling, I might write for six or seven hours at the office and perhaps an hour or more at night at home, and probably a few hours on Saturday and Sunday, too. I used to do much more writing at night, but haven’t for several years, since I have small children now who get up early in the morning!
Q:
Any advice for aspiring writers?
A:
There is a ton of advice around for writers, but I often repeat or paraphrase Robert Heinlein’s wisdom: read a lot, write a lot, revise a lot, submit a lot.
Reading is the foundation of writing, but you do need to read widely and across all genres and categories. If you want to be a fantasy writer, it’s fine to read fantasy, but if that’s all you read, you’ll only ever be able to copy what has been done before, and probably not as well. You need to fill up your head with story ideas and information fragments from nonfiction and all other genres and categories of fiction, and you will best learn how to put together words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and chapters from reading great authors whose work has stood the test of time. Classics don’t stay classics without reason.
Similarly, the more you write and the more different kinds of stuff you try to write, the better you will get. Writing is both an art and a craft, and the craft part can be learned, practiced, and improved.
Revision is also a basic part of writing and is always necessary. Re-reading your own work is the first step to proper revision. Sometimes reading aloud will reveal the flaws that need fixing. Sometimes leaving a work for a few days or a few weeks will also reveal what needs to be done.
The only way to find out if your work will reach a larger audience than yourself or immediate friends or family is to submit it. Research the potential places your work might be published and send it to the appropriate publishers or editors. Don’t take the rejections personally. Send the material somewhere else and get to work on something new as well. Think about retiring a piece after twenty to thirty rejections and forget about it for the time being and focus on your new work. If you get reasons for rejection, wait a while and then think seriously about them, to see if that editor might be right and whether you should be doing something different.
Q:
If you could add an eighth day to your week, how would you use it?
A:
It would depend on whether anyone else also had this secret eighth day. If it was mine alone, I would spend it reading, because I have far less time to read than I would like. If it was shared, I would spend it with my family and hope for some time to read in that day.