On Novel Writing ...
- Jock Serong
- Jul 31
- 13 min read
Speech for ANZ Bank – Melbourne, 23 July 2025
by Jock Serong
I’d been wondering what to talk to you about – what it is that we might all have in common.
It’s possible to feel a little daunted in this room, given the skills you bring to your work – the strategic and tactical thinking, the people skills and the mathematical ability – all things I lack. I imagine most of you work in office towers with key-pass entry and excellent coffee machines. I imagine your feet clack professionally on gleaming tiles, and when your IT misbehaves you can ring a guy called Jarrod who immediately comes and fixes it.
I work in a garden shed - slowly, ponderously trying to out-wait the clouds of unproductive thinking. I’ve done it for 12 years now. But it wasn’t always like that: I practised law for a while. That work, largely in criminal justice, was a strange blend of story instincts: listening, trying to imagine, trying to convey – and also harder analytical skills. The thing about it was, I was selling my time to people. Time became incredibly important as a result. Now, it’s almost irrelevant. I can go for days without talking to anyone. Sometimes I have to walk the dog to encounter the outside world. I can only pick Monday from the other six because the bins go out. I’m good at Saturdays because the kids have footy gear on. But Tuesdays? Thursdays? No idea.
Our children, incidentally, find my job completely baffling. It’s work that takes an indefinite amount of time and will make an unknown amount of money. My wife is a nurse and an ambulance driver – she saves people’s lives. That they can understand. My youngest daughter came into my shed the other day and told me with a straight face that my job sounded like a nightmare because it combined the three things she hates the most: sitting at a desk, public speaking and airports.
So. To come back to this idea of where our working lives cross over. There are some parallels, I think. Your decisions in business are based on instinct and experience. So are my much smaller, storytelling ones. We’ve each seen patterns before, so we know how to respond. And that response is our creativity.
What follows is a little bit about the decisions I make when I’m writing a novel.
The first thing to say is that EVERYTHING goes into a novel. Everything. Starfish feed by a process called gastric eversion: they tip their guts inside out onto a food source, which is roughly how novels are made.
When I release a book I’m reminded of every lemon tree I’ve ever tried to grow: it puts on a stunning display of fruit and flowers and green shoots, before it turns up its toes and carks it. It’s the experience of total depletion, of having poured everything inside yourself into an idea. Nothing more can be drawn from the soil or the sunlight. Releasing a book can be a time of dark emotions: it leaves behind creative emptiness, which somehow has to be
refilled.
The novel is the longest form of cultural product we have. Generally, but not always, it takes the longest to make. And it definitely takes the longest to consume. We humans are good at long stories – we have the patience and the intellect for them. We love them for their imperfections and their digressions. AI might be able to make novels in two minutes, but those will only ever be imitations of us and our inconstant hearts, no matter how “smart” it gets. Why? Because generative AI seeks logical links between disparate elements. Storytellers are looking for chaos and mess. If we applied Occam’s Razor, if we took the most direct line between two points, we’d never make a story worth telling.
So everything goes in. It should be possible for the book to achieve everything in the world. If everything went in – why won’t everything come out? To take this idea further, it’s sometimes said of making literature, or music, or poetry – whatever - that the minute you commit the original inspiration to paper, it’s already become imperfect. But you chase it, nonetheless, to its conclusion. This sounds like a downer, yet it’s not.
Falling in love, when you think about it, can only end badly – and I don’t just mean for the couple at the Coldplay concert. I mean for all of us. There’s no other alternative: a break-up is statistically the most likely outcome. It’s that, or the eventual death of one or other of the lovers. But we do it anyway. We risk it, over and over again. Writing novels is a bit like that – it feels brilliant. You’re there for the exhilaration, the feeling of aliveness that you can only get from living like a hermit in a garden shed for a couple of years with nothing but a keyboard full of breadcrumbs and a bunch of daddy-long-legs for company.
When I’m thinking up a story, I don’t make a plan. I don’t follow a formula. I sit there late at night, wondering if one thing can spark with another, and whether any of those things feel universal to other people. After seven novels I know that eventually, the gears will start to turn if I’m patient enough. This is not the advice that people want to hear in writing workshops: they want to hear that there’s a method, a technique. But there isn’t: there’s only patience. So with all those caveats in mind, here are the things that went into my most recent novel, Cherrywood.
Cherrywood is two stories, wrapped around each other. The first is the story of a man named Thomas Wrenfether, the heir to a family fortune who comes from Scotland to Melbourne in 1916 in pursuit of a quixotic scheme: he will build a timber paddlesteamer to take the well-heeled on weekend excursions from St Kilda to Williamstown to the city. String quartets, a three-course lunch. Lovely.
The paddlesteamer is going to be built from a huge stash of beautiful timber that has come into his possession via questionable sources. Needless to say, things don’t go according to plan.
Thomas’s story is a historical novel about history that never happened. Why wouldn’t there have been paddlesteamers off St Kilda? I took the evidence of history, and instead of following through what did occur, I carefully chose what didn’t. So that’s one story…
The other story is about a young woman called Martha. It’s set in 1993, for the specific reason that 1993 is the last year I can think of when you couldn’t just look things up on the internet. If something mysterious happened, it was a long and intriguing process to find an explanation. Something mysterious happens to Martha. On her way from her workplace - a commercial law firm in the CBD - to a boring dinner party in Northcote, she realises she’s forgotten to bring a bottle of wine. We’ve all done it, right? So as her taxi passes through the dark, rainy streets of Fitzroy, she asks the driver to stop at a pub so she can duck in. He does so, in a side street, and Martha walks in. Instantly everything is weird. Everything’s made of old timber. There are no straight lines. All the bar-stools are piled higgledy-piggledy in one
corner. There’s no-one around. And the cash register is inexplicably stuck at $1:43. She rings the bell on the bar, a young man appears from nowhere and she immediately falls in love with him.
The two stories, as you might have guessed, have an important common element – the timber. They’re told in alternating chapters and ever so gradually, they start to draw towards each other, and to merge. Martha has to solve a riddle, set in motion eighty years before by Thomas, and that riddle goes to heart of Fitzroy and Melbourne.
I was exploring a few things in this book: in particular, I was interested in the slow death of enigma. We’ve lost our patience with mystery.
An example: does anyone recall the Somerton Man? This was the true story of a dead man who was found on the beach in Adelaide in 1948. All of the labels had been removed from his clothes. He was clean shaven, his shoes were polished, and there was no sign of violence. A forensic pathologist found he had strongly-developed calves, and suggested he might have been a ballet dancer. In his pocket he carried a slip of paper, on which was written the words Tamam Shud – “It is finished.” A rare copy of The Rubiayat of Omar Khayyam was soon found with a matching piece torn from it. Impressions in the book from writing on other missing pages revealed an extremely complex code which has never been deciphered, even to this day.
In short, this was the perfect mystery for 73 years. Nobody, not the best minds in the land, could figure out who he was, or why or how or where he died. Then in 2021 they exhumed the body, DNA tested him, and found a match. He was an ordinary man named Carl Webb – he wasn’t a spy, and his death was a sad and unexceptional thing. Technology in that case made short work of our human wondering. Sometimes this is a good thing: there are plenty of mysteries that should be resolved. But some should be left there to remind us to wonder about things.
But I’m digressing again: I wanted to tell you about the things that a novel is
made from.
Cherrywood started with a dream. Like a lot of writers, I collect dreams, hoping for that one in a million moment that Keith Richards got, when he (allegedly) received the riff for ‘Satisfaction’ in a dream. The problem with dreams is that while they’re full of imagery and emotion, they rarely carry any narrative sense at all. But the dream that started Cherrywood was an exception.
I dreamed I walked into a pub in the back streets of Fitzroy, and there was every element of the scene: the strange curved timbers, the unnatural swaying of the whole building. Stairs leading nowhere, the stools piled up in the corner. This dream had enough structure that I felt I could build something with it.
There was another dream that turned up halfway through writing the novel. Now this is a thing you don’t get to do very often in novels: I just lobbed it in. I just had one character say to another one, ‘guess what – I had the strangest dream last night.’ Editors generally hate this: they will scrawl all over it – why is this here? I completely assumed someone would, but I have a policy of including every strange thought I have, in the hope that some of them will escape the editors. And this one did. It sailed through. I couldn’t believe it was still there when they sent me the finished book.
The dream is this: imagine all the tram-tracks in the Melbourne CBD – all gone. In their place there are aqueducts, with beautiful glazed green tiling. The aqueducts are filled with warm water, and you travel around the CBD by jumping in and being gently pushed along by the pumped current. There are attendants with bikes who take your things – your clothes, your shopping, your briefcase – to the stop where you want to go. You get out, jump in a little booth to dry and change, and you’re on your way. People would float along chatting to one another. In the book, Martha, who is a skeptic (or who represents me in my waking hours) says ‘Hang on – imagine how much energy it would take to pump water up the hills.’ Joey, who’s a dreamer, responds ‘Sure, but it takes a lot of energy to get a tram up a hill too.’
Another big ingredient is music. There’s so much character to be had in lyrics. I named Thomas’s wife after Nick Cave’s very sweet ballad called ‘Lucy.’ Joey, the mysterious bartender of the Cherrywood Hotel, is named after the Concrete Blonde song of the same name: it’s a wild saga - melodramatic, histrionic, perfect. I took fragments of seduction and doomed romance from the bands I remember from uni days, like the Cranberries, Suede, the Clouds and the Falling Joys (I maintain ‘Lock It’ is the most romantic song in the Australian pub rock canon). On the topic of lyrics, by the way: every single Cowboy Junkies song is a perfectly miniaturised crime novel.
I threw in some geography. I learned how Melbourne is a grid that’s exactly a mile long and half a mile wide, but it doesn’t lie squarely on a north/south axis. It’s actually tipped quite a long way to the northwest so it faces the Yarra more squarely. Fitzroy’s grid is exactly the same size as the CBD, only it tilts northeast to account for where the magnetic poles were in the 1830s.
I went to an exhibition of modern First Nations artists and found out that the city sits on a basalt plug, surrounded by river silt, and down through that plug, going down for hundreds of meters, there are lots of rivers, criss-crossing in every imaginable direction. The Yarra just happens to be the one lying on the surface. There are the remains of other watercourses underneath Flinders St Station, and running down Elizabeth St, bricked up into mysterious drains that no-one ever sees. I discovered that there was a lake in Elwood called Washington Lagoon. It disappeared at some stage: nobody can remember why.
Another thing that went in the pot was personal history. I went on a date once, during my uni years, at a place called the Café Bohemia. I can’t remember who my date was, and I’m sure she doesn’t remember me. The night was uneventful, but the place…the place is seared in my psyche for some reason. The Café Bohemia was up the top end of Brunswick St, Fitzroy, and my memory of it is that it had a glass frontage like a shop, but that inside it was filled with beautiful timbers and indoor plants - so many plants that you had to duck and weave through the foliage to get to your table. We were seated inside a huge old fireplace.
For years afterwards I looked for the place every time I went past and I could never find it. The simplest explanation, of course, is that it closed down. That’s the one that AI would reach for. The more interesting idea is that the restaurant got up and moved, and now it’s somewhere else.
The Cherrywood Hotel is mostly based on the Napier Hotel in Fitzroy, where I worked while I was at uni. The Napier had dark spaces and staircases that went nowhere. It was full of romance – I suppose everything’s full of romance when you’re 23. I went back there while I was writing the novel, expecting to be disappointed. It was a rainy, cold winter’s night – in effect, a Cherrywood night – and to my absolute amazement, when I came through the door the front bar was exactly as I’d left it in 1994. Not a single thing had changed. Every single item in its place…all the pictures, the furniture – it was brilliant!
I walked up to the bar and ordered a beer from a young woman who appeared to be about my eldest daughter’s age. As she poured the beer I went through that thing of don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it... and of course I said it. I said, “Do you know that 30 years ago I was standing exactly where you’re standing, doing the same job, and this bar has not changed one tiny bit in all that time. And she pushed the beer across the bar towards me and said, “Amazing. That’ll be eight bucks."
I added some experiences, verbatim, from a strange six months I spent in the offices of one of Australia’s largest law firms. For reasons which I’m sure are very clear, I won’t be naming the firm. We went on a litigation team bonding weekend to Werribee Mansion. Litigators, as you know, eat their young. The idea that they might bond is both an oxymoron and a terrifying prospect. So Martha goes on such a weekend, and winds up drunk, in an armchair, surrounded by other neophyte litigators, listening to the big boss expound his theories about ruthlessness and winning. In the book, Martha gets up and walks out, having accidentally pocketed the boss’s credit card: when it happened to me in reality I didn’t steal the Amex, but I did sit there, enduring hours of this bloke’s social-Darwinian nonsense.
The other thing that I worked into Cherrywood was other books. There’s been a bit of media lately about a new survey of Australian reading habits. The news isn’t good: men especially aren’t reading, and if they are reading, they’re not reading novels. Clearly, I have an existential stake in this. One of the best reasons to read stories, I think, is the way that stories speak to each other. Like music does. You can follow threads in storytelling, across continents and centuries, as you might follow chord progressions or lyrical themes or vocal
stylings.
So for Cherrywood I mimicked the hyperactive detail of Charles Dickens in my paddlesteamer story. The idea of the dream of building this beautiful thing, the boat, came from the glass church in Peter Carey’s Oscar & Lucinda. The notion of a timber building that climbs into the sky and offers a portal into other dimensions is a re-telling of The Faraway Tree, which Enid Blyton pinched from Norse myth, which itself goes back to the biblical idea of the Tower of Babel. There’s a story in there about Jospeh Stalin’s early days as a bank robber, which comes from a Martin Amis novel called Koba the Dread. And lots of the thoughts about Melbourne came from Italo Calvino: he wrote a brilliant book about Venice, called Invisible Cities. Calvino’s idea is that there is no such thing as a singular city: if five million people live in Melbourne, each of them is having an individual experience of the place, and therefore it cannot be a unitary thing: there must be five million Melbournes.
What that means for stories, is that there’s wiggle room between my city and your city. Our perceptions never quite line up – so there are cracks, into which things can disappear. Like pubs.
All this stuff is irrational: it’s a bit mad. I’m selling my dreams to people, on the off-chance that the thoughts rattling around inside me are somehow universal; and that they might harmonise with the frequencies inside you. There’s a creative risk in that – maybe they won’t.
I find myself back on Nick Cave again, even though I’m not a particularly big fan of his. There’s a clip you can find online which is the last seven minutes of his 2014 biopic, 20,000 Days on Earth. It’s beautiful, tingle-inducing. I often watch it before I start work, as a kind of warm-up, or a reminder of some important creative truths. Every time, I feel like my heart’s leaping out of my chest. In it, he says –
“Sometimes an idea can be the smallest thing in the world: a little flame
that you hunch over and cup with your hand, and pray will not be
extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold onto
that flame, great things can be constructed around it…all held up by the
tiniest of ideas.”
Thank you for listening to me ramble away about my tiny ideas. - JS
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