Nick Earls

My latest book is The Thompson Gunner, and my next is Monica Bloom (due out in July).

The Thompson Gunner is about an Australian comedian on tour, and the week in her life when her repressed childhood memories from Northern Ireland surface and can't be ignored. Monica Bloom in set in Brisbane in 1980, and it's about the first few months of its central character's last year at school. He meets a girl at the same time as his father loses his job in a public way.

The best thing about being a writer is that making up stories can actually be a job. Ultimately it's as simple as that. I'm a sucker for the travel, the free meals and the flattery that occasionally come along - bring it on, please - but the best moment is still the time when a new idea sneaks up on you, works its way into you and demands that you write your way out of it. I still love the puzzle that every new novel sets me. And it's a great feeling when sometimes the end result means something to someone.

If I wasn't a writer I'd be a psychiatrist, or a suburban GP. Both options with plenty to commend them, but being a writer is hard to beat.

My first published work was a limerick in the Sunday Mail in Brisbane when I was about twelve. It earned me five bucks - a dollar a line, and in the 70s too. I felt outrageously wealthy for days. I knew I was onto something.

Morning person or night-owl? Still struggling to find my optimum time of day. I hear the morning folk jog past before I drag myself out of bed, and I wave good night to the night owls and stagger home early. My father tells me how invigorating early mornings are, and my friends have on at least one occasion stayed silent at dinner while I've fallen asleep and my head has sagged slowly down onto my meal (years ago, steak Dianne, peppercorns lodged above my hair line, sauce smeared across my forehead).
I'm often at work before 8am, but I think I peak mid-morning. For around twenty minutes.

My first job was as a junior hospital doctor. The first thing that earned me money (other than the limerick in the 70s) was acting in a short film as part of a government teen anti-drinking campaign. I played the nerd who didn't drink and who, in this perfect world, therefore ended up with the girl. (The drinkers, who thought they were cool, ended up chucking up a lot of tomato peel into the toilet.)

On a quiz show, my special subject would be difficult to choose. I actually had this very conversation in the car with friends the other day. I know an insane number of factoids, but I don't know that any of them could clump together to constitute a body of knowledge about any one thing. I see myself as a generalist. In conversation I can cover a lot of bases, and I'm not afraid to make things up. A quiz show might find me out though.

My last holiday was at the Sunshine Coast, just after schools had gone back and most of the tourists had left. Beautiful.

My perfect Saturday is climbing a mountain or catching waves, then eating something excellent with friends in the evening (and reminiscing about our heroic deeds on the mountain, or the waves).

The last CD I bought was the next CD by Women in Docs. I pre-ordered, having heard some of the tracks live before they recorded it. I'm already a fan, and I think their new album could be their best yet.

I'm currently reading Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. Yes, years after many other people, but I wanted to see how she handled a particular kind of character.

Big Brother or Australian Idol? Big Brother. No contest. Idol seems to be mostly a bunch of people grappling with uninspiring arrangements of songs I'd be happy not to hear again. As far as I can see from the ads, no one pashes anyone in a hot tub, so how does that get to be a show?

Favourite film/tv show is Almost Famous, Lantana, American Beauty, The West Wing, Frontline.

My favourite book is even harder to define than film/TV, where I could have gone on at length but stopped myself. Every year or so a new book comes along and adds itself to the list. The most recent additions are probably Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and Michael Redhill's Fidelity. (I find this question so hard, I can't even name only one favourite book by an author called Michael ...)

The book character I would most like to meet is ... hmmm, see 'least'.

The book character I would least like to meet is ... well, most of them, frankly. First I thought this was some misanthropic streak in me, and that maybe I thought I knew enough people already. Then I thought, if it's a first-person novel I've already spent maybe 80,000 words in their heads and maybe that's enough. Maybe the best books have given me just the right amount of them already, and by the end I'm ready to step away. Or maybe it's just that I think they've been going on at me with this 'I did ... I said
...' etc story for three hundred pages and there's no way they'd let me get a word in edgeways. Okay, I know that doesn't reflect well on me. I should be a better listener. But they've all got such issues, haven't they? They've gone through some crisis big enough to write a novel about. I think they're best left alone, until they've had some therapy to put it all in context.

The worst thing I've ever written is some pretty dire poetry about various girls in the 80s (the worst aspect of which is that I'm not confident it's all been destroyed).

When I was growing up I wanted to be a rocket designer, a test cricketer, a novelist. When I was about ten it seemed feasible that I might be all three, decades later I think I'm very lucky to have ended up being one of them.

My heroes are people who stick with things, and people whose focus isn't always themselves. A friend of mine, Jessica Adams, is a good example of both. Years ago she decided she wanted to raise a million pounds (ie, more than $2.5million) for War Child, and she got together with some friends and
started a series of anthologies that did just that. It's a lesson to me that we should be bold sometimes, and tenacious, and that we all have the capacity to make a genuine difference where it's needed.