Liminal Spaces: Tina Cartwright

I’m delighted to welcome Tina Cartwright to my next blog about trying to get published. I hope you enjoy reading it.

DESCRIBE YOUR WRITING JOURNEY SO FAR

As a kid I started out writing notebooks and notebooks full of terrible poems. I had the idea that it was important to carefully record your emotions in order to understand other people’s. I guess I was always seen as a writer since I had stories published in the school magazine and had an interest in writing even throughout the years when I wasn’t doing much.

 Now, I write literary fiction and would love to be a novelist. I’ve written around six or seven manuscripts while learning to write novels, but it was only with the last two that I paid for a manuscript assessment and worked them to the point where I am proud of them—something I never thought I’d be able to say.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON?

I have one novel, Now and the Death Knell, out on submission. It’s set in a fictionalised version of Bundoora. I was interested in the old mental institution there, looking at institutions and how they are recorded in the collective consciousness of a community even after the institution is gone.

The second manuscript is called The Krill and the Whale, although I’d like to change the title. It’s set in a version of my hometown in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I wanted to investigate the effects of large events, like a tragic ship wreck, or an oil spill, on the people in the Town. The novel incorporates the flow-on effects in the land, everything from political decision-making to how beehives were affected. It’s a very broad ecological novel spanning from the founding of the Town in the 1850s right into the future.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED WITH YOUR COMPLETED MANUSCRIPT/S TO DATE?

I was very fortunate to have another writer introduce me to her agent who read Now and the Death Knell. It was a collaborate agency and I think they all read it so it was considered closely. The agent said lovely things about it but ultimately didn’t take it. I tried another agent who agreed to read. I waited a long time for a response since I knew response times have been stretched during Covid-19, but didn’t hear back.

The second novel has just been submitted to the first agent. I’m very excited for it.

WHEN THESE ATTEMPTS DID NOT RESULT IN PUBLICATION, HOW DID YOU RESPOND?

With Now and the Death Knell I knew from other writers who are with the agency that the book had come close. Since it took a long time, I must’ve had some spark of hope because I felt disappointed when it wasn’t taken. I had to ride out that initial gut reaction that told me I would never be successful.

Afterwards, I took to Twitter to get some advice. I was fortunate to have so many generous Australian writers offer to answer my question, which was really ‘what now?’ Their answers helped me organise my thinking and make decisions about what to do next. In short, the advice was not to be too discouraged about one rejection and to take time to research and seek out the right agent or publisher.

I wanted to be more strategic. If I did want to pursue getting published, did I need to go back to study? Did I need an agent? I couldn’t afford to devote to writing in the way I had been forever so I sketched out a timeline, including goals, for the next year. A plan to save myself worrying over it.

WHAT MAKES YOU RETURN TO THE PAGE DESPITE THE CHALLENGES IN GETTING PUBLISHED?

 I’m not even sure how much I care about getting published. I’m more driven by how I feel about the work. It’s an absolutely amazing feeling to write something and think, yeah, I sincerely love this. I realise there’s no magic endpoint where you get published and are successful. There’s a lot of work to be done before, after, and during publication. Publication is not some golden bridge you walk across into literary heaven, to join the successful published writers. I think it would help writers who are starting out to love the process as much as possible, to see it as the life they choose, not as something whose criterion of success is publication.

I think now I’ve been writing for so long that I’ve ruined my mind for anything else. I’m constantly knitting things together, recording things, curious. If I don’t write for awhile my mind’s too full and I get anxious.

WHY DO YOU WANT TO BE PUBLISHED?

Of course, I do want some people to read my book, but the main reason is that I want the development that goes along with it. I want to do the line-by-line edit, the structural edit and to learn things from the process that improve my future writing. I want to have stand by my work and discuss the choices I’ve made for it. I want the personal development that publication requires for someone like me, and am very ready to do that.

DO YOU HAVE A SENSE OF WHEN TO GIVE UP TRYING TO GET A MANUSCRIPT PUBLISHED?

I’m not sure that I would. I haven’t tried yet. Though, I think if I truly loved and believed in a book I’d consider self-publishing. Ultimately, I just want ten or so people to read it so that it’s not for nothing.

IN RESPONSE TO LISA KENWAY’S RECENT BLOG, ALLISON TAIT SAID THAT EVERY BOOK YOU WRITE TEACHES YOU SOMETHING. DO YOU AGREE?

Absolutely. In my current book I learnt how to use patterning to create a sense of time passing. Precise descriptions of the landscape and changes to it signalled to the reader that time was passing; in a similar way that some books might use language about seasons to signal transitions.

Writing Now and the Death Knell I learnt about: identifying which threads of the story to tease out and spend more time with, to know which places were okay to leave the reader to fill in, and which would feel incomplete to a reader.

ONE PIECE OF ADVICE YOU WOULD GIVE TO OTHERS TRYING TO GET PUBLISHED?

Support other writers and the industry. Share writers’ events, launches, books, articles. Remember it’s a business. Something an editor said that I always remember was that the writer is the only one who sees it as an art; once the manuscript goes to an agent, a publisher, a publicist they all view the work as a product, asking can they sell this, how do they sell this. A writer should remember that more than likely it’s not a judgement on the quality of the work. (I can never give just one piece—sorry!)

FINALLY, WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY READING? Or FAVOURITE AUTHORS/BOOK?

I love books that surprise, or teach you to read in a new way. I admire Murmurations by Carol Lefevre for that. It’s a book as a response to the art of Edward Hopper. I love the sense of the book as an artwork and how she writes outside of time—something I always wanted to do. That book, I think, showed me that we can, are still allowed to, play with form. It’s beautifully executed.

I want the immersive reading experience. I love the carefully constructed worlds found in Lucy Treloar’s novels Salt Creek, and Wolfe Island. While reading her books I lived in them.

Alexis Wright is a writer that I’m in awe of. Reading her work is a privilege—even just the startling beauty of her prose. I’m so enthralled by what I think she is doing with her body of work; the interpretation of and bearing witness to her people in a very broad sense. Where and what they came from and how they carry that, now and into the future. Her writing creates a unique record that can be understood across culture and time and that adds to how we understand humanity.

Tina Cartwright lives on unceded Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung lands. She has taught English, Creative Writing and Languages in New Zealand and Mexico. She studied Anthropology and Linguistics and sings in a gospel choir.