Fleur Beale on writing

Award-winning NZ author Fleur Beale wrote the guest introduction in the latest edition of the New Zealand Library and Information Management Journal (Vol 51, Issue no 3, Oct 2009)

"It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning and most people are heading off to work or school. I’m sitting at my computer trying to work out how the last third of the current book will sort itself out.
I have friends who get their stories almost as a dream from the mysterious repository of story. I live in hope of one day receiving such a gift but until that happens I scrabble around, grab the thread of a story and follow it until it wanders off. When I come to recognise that it’s wandering I take a long bath because that’s where ideas drift and float. I’ve learnt that I can’t let the story toddle off on its own because when it does it meanders, burbles and mucks about indulging itself.
There seems to be a balance between leaving enough rope for a story to unfold and surprise me, and keeping it heading in a forward direction along the lines I’ve envisaged for it. Sometimes writing a story feels like hacking a sculpture out of marble. It’s a process of discovery; chipping away at the rough rock until you find the shape lurking inside. Other times writing feels much more ephemeral, insights come when I’m not looking for them, a what if possibility wings in out of nowhere and makes me see a character, scene or plot from a different perspective.
Sometimes a sentence will appear on the computer screen, I’ll look at it and say, ‘Damn! Didn’t know that was going to happen.’ Such sentences are gifts with prickles – usually pointing to something that the story needs, but which is also going to mean going back and weaving in the implications.
Those books aren’t comfortable to write – they are the walking-on-ice books where I slip and slide, and where at any second the ice could break. Those are the stories whose wanderings fill up the Bits Bin on my desktop. The Bits Bin is where the out-of-control passages get sent. It’s comforting to know they’re there just in case I was having a bad day and banished a scene when it didn’t deserve it.
Writing is a strange sort of job, it’s the thrill of living in another world, of creating your own movie in your head. It’s also probably something of an addiction, for which if we’re lucky, there is no cure. "