AustLit

Geraldine Brooks reveals: 'I get many of my best ideas in graveyards. The idea for my very first novel - the story that tipped me off the ledge of factual journalism into the free fall of fiction - came from my habit of communing with the dead'. Brooks goes on to discuss the gravestone inscription in the village of Eyam that gave rise to her award-winning novel Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague.

'A few months ago an article by the distinguished American author and academic Louis Menand appeared in the New Yorker, asking whether creative writing can or should be taught. Now I've nothing against the substance of Menand's question - about the methods and value of teaching - but I'm weary of it almost always being asked only of writing programs. Can music, for example, be taught? Should painting or literature or history be taught? Or, even more unlikely, engineering? These questions are never asked, and as a result writing academics spend a lot of time feeling defensive. Why are people always putting the question, and why do we even both to answer it?' (Introduction)

'Writers matter a little bit, but great stories told well matter hugely. There has never been a civilisation that has managed without fiction, and this is because the best fiction changes us in ways that we often only dimly understand. Biologists now suggest that our need to hear stories is hardwired. Listening to stories exercises our brains in valuable ways, teaching us how other people think, and feel. As Brian Boyd said in August 2009 on Radio National's The Book Show: 'I suggest that it develops especially our ability to process social information, which of course is crucial for human beings, but also that's a kind of individual value for every member of the audience, but also there is a kind of social-level value in that most stories tended to be pro-social, to promote co-operation rather than untrammelled competition.' (Introduction)