Fiona McIntosh writes unashamedly commercial fiction, plenty of it, and her books fly off the shelves.
McIntosh is one of Australia's best-selling fiction writers - selling as many books as Marian Keyes and is known for her well-researched and vivid historical fiction.
But this is all relatively new in her life - she wrote her first book at 40.
Fifteen years ago, she was working in the travel industry and raising twin boys.
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Now she has written 36 books. She hosts sell-out writers' workshops which go hand in hand with her non-fiction book How To Write Your Blockbuster - All I've learned about writing commercial fiction.
She tells Kathryn Ryan that place is the key to all her novels.
She says years of research come before she’s written a word - whether it’s picking tea in the Himalayas, learning the craft of perfumery in Grasse or tramping the Yorkshire moors.
“I really do nail it right down, I consider this due diligence for the reader, it’s very important, it makes the experience of the read, so much richer and more powerful because you enable the reader to let go with their imagination.”
She also trusts her editor implicitly, she re-wrote a large chunk of her most recent novel The Pearl Thief when her editor suggested the second half of the book was a little “claustrophobic”.
“So I flew to Yorkshire in January, it was frozen and I found this amazing landscape that I needed and spent three days experiencing it and researching it and finding the right tea rooms and the right train stations.”
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Following that excursion to Yorkshire an extensive re-write followed resulting in a very different book.
“I never panic about the edit, it’s got to be done, it’s where the hard yards are always done with a book and you must trust your editor and do that hard work,” McIintosh says.
When it comes to writing she is a “raging non-planner”, McIntosh says.
“You just have to understand the world that you are toppling your characters into and thus your reader.
“I’ve always done it this way and I don’t have anything to judge it by, but yes I think it gives me absolute freedom, but you do need to be confident in yourself in order you write like me.”
When she’s planning a new novel, she tries to imagine where her readers might like to go next.
“I’ll go there and I’ll start waiting for the story to find me, I know that sounds very arty-farty but that’s how I work, I don’t need a concept yet, I just need to go and feel this place.
“A story’s going to find me, it always does, it comes up and taps me on the shoulder and I think ‘there we go, there it is’, that little nugget that I read in a newspaper or saw in a museum or heard from somebody I can build on that.”
The writing process is an exercise in omission, she says.
“You just have to ask yourself, does the reader need to know this? It’s really that simple, does it make any difference to the read and their experience of it and if it doesn’t, as lovely as it is, it must go.
“My head is crammed with information of which I may only use 10 percent of what I learn, but knowing it gives me confidence to write the book, I can take it anywhere I want to go. The first thing for me is always place, always.”
Her epiphany as a writer came from attending a writers’ workshop in Tasmania hosted by Bryce Courtney where he told her she was already a writer, she just hadn’t written a book yet.
“I came home and wrote my first manuscript in about five weeks and sent it off to a global publisher in the genre and they phoned me within a couple of weeks and said ‘we love this can you write three of these?’ And I thought I could write 20.”
This might seem like a fairy-tale start, there were no rejection slips, but McIntosh says she knew exactly which publishing company would be interested in her adult fantasy genre and she made sure her manuscript reached a specific editor at the company.
“She knew I wasn’t a brilliant writer, but I was a great story-teller I had to learn how to write, but that story to this day, is still selling all over the world - that very first manuscript.”
