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These two very different writers were both inspirational.
Alexa Johnston wrote her first book, a biography of Sir Edmund Hillary, after a long career as a Art Gallery Curator. She wrote it after curating the 50th anniversary show at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. It is a beautiful work that honours this great man's legacy. There are lovely photos and lots of information going back to his father and family. It gave her the standing with her publisher to get her first book of recipes, Ladies a Plate, which was also a book honouring people of another generation; in this case women and their baking. She took all the photos in the book herself and knew exactly how she wanted it to look. She has since written two more and is working on a fourth. Her advice was to write about what you felt passionate about, and to retain control if it was important to you.
Eleanor Catton is a young woman who has had a lot of success with her first book, The Rehearsal, which she wrote while doing the masters course at Victoria. She came to writing, through her hobby of film making.
She is now working on her second novel The Luminairies. It is set in New Zealand in the 1860s, in the Gold rush It will be published next year. She has done a lot of reading of novels written in this period to get a taste and feel for how stories were put together and told. From the small piece she read to us, it does seem to me as if she has captured that sound. She writes about 1000 words a day and reads them aloud to her partner every evening. She says this is a great way of judging the text and getting rid of those errors of style that creep in.
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