Fourteen years in the making
Melina Marchetta
I tend to remember small details from books I read. Usually a sentence I thought was poetic or adjectives I liked that were used to describe a scene. With On the Jellicoe Road, the new book by Melina Marchetta, it was the name of a character.
The character is Ben Cassidy, and if you read my by-line above you might start to guess why. It got me thinking, how do writers come up with character names? Are they people they know or do they ever flip through the telephone book, close their eyes and drop their finger onto a random page? I decided to ask Marchetta, who recently took time out to talk to Articulate, when she was a guest of the Brisbane Writers Festival. And she told me she hadn’t tried the telephone book trick yet.
"It’s interesting because names are so important. Sometimes you’ll have a character, like Ben Cassidy is a classic example - and I can’t even remember what I called him in the past - but it didn’t work. And it wasn’t until I named him Ben Cassidy that his character worked for me. I actually think that Ben is a very important character in the story, I think a lot of them are important but I think when you don’t believe in them because of their name, you find it very difficult to write about them … So I can’t even tell you where that name came from, but it’s a good name."
But saying the character of Ben is the only thing I remember of Jellicoe would be a terrible disservice to the story. Marchetta has proved her ability in the past to inhabit young voices and realistically bring them to life. And Jellicoe is no exception - it's a powerful story and extremely well written. It begins with what appears to be a string of different stories, but as they progress they come together to weave part of the one intricate narrative. Described by some as a much "darker" novel than her first two efforts, the never-forgettable Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca, Jellicoe does have its moments of uncomfortable-ness. There’s a hint of a serial killer, drug use, suicide and a paedophile. But Marchetta says creating a "darker" story wasn’t her intention.
"No, because the story comes first, the decisions come after the story for me. And it’s interesting because it starts with a very dark scene and I think I really wanted to convey this sense of tragedy, but the characters ... are so full of hope. I think that sometimes what happens in your life is there’s grief and there’s tragedy - it’s a dark world, but I find people are very full of hope and very optimistic in a way. That is what I wanted to convey. I think there’s a lot of hope there through the characters and that was important for me. I can’t write in total darkness, I can’t write a story about a couple of kids who don’t have hope in their life."For me this is a story about community and my last two [books] were about communities. The first one was about total community that you’re stuck with and you love and you have to learn how to work within, although sometimes it stifles you. But the second one, it was about an already existing community, within a certain degree, that falls to pieces, and having to create a new one. But with this one, there’s just no community at the beginning – they’re operating on their own and I just love the fact that they start building it, and it’s not about - I mean to a certain degree, some of it’s about blood-ties - but it’s not about that and it’s not even about friendship. It’s about something stronger than that, what holds people together. The people you collect in your life along the way, who weren’t there to begin with. So I hope that kind of lightens up the dark that’s in it."
Some 14 years after Alibrandi was first published, Marchetta says she’s still getting feedback on it. She began writing about Josie Alibrandi when she was "about 20", and while she says she’s still a bit shocked at how long it’s been, she remembers vividly when it all started. The film, which came out in 2000, prolonged the experience in a great way, she adds:
"I always love the fact that, say with the film ... I was just so happy that Josie made it in to the 21st century. That stuck in my head because to me that’s a book about the 70s, that was written in the 80s, it was marketed in the 90s, the fact that it’s still being read now – I love it."
And despite all the awards won for Alibrandi, both for the book and the film, she says she wasn’t daunted about the process of writing, just the ideas to get it all started.
"I was probably more affected by, I didn’t know what to write. I was never worried about, I’m going to write something and it’s not going to be as good as Alibrandi. I so know that my writing now, Jellicoe and Francesca, is better written than Alibrandi. But that doesn’t mean that its popularity is going to match the writing. I suppose that was something, like Alibrandi, it’s beloved – it’s beloved because of the film as well."It wasn’t a worry, I think I used to get worried that I had nothing to write about. I don’t do a lot of, this is what I want to do next year and this is what I want to do this year. Francesca came to me like that [snaps fingers] one weekend, although I’m sure that character lived in my head for a while because I had written about a Francesca in the past, Jellicoe’s been in my head for 14 years, I’ve tried to write it over the 14 years – this was the time to do it. So it’s kind of sometimes more about where’s the next book?"
Marchetta says she thinks she knows where the next book is now, but this time round, she’s going to have some time off to think about it, rather than have to fit it all in with work. Marchetta is an English teacher at a high school in Sydney and she says for the first time in 11 years, she’s going to have a year off – but mainly to write.
"Writing has to be the focus of it. It’s the reason for taking the year off because I do love my job... Probably the main focus will be Jellicoe because when I first started writing this version of it, I didn’t know if it was going to be a film script or a novel. And I hadn’t written a film script since really, 1999 with Alibrandi, so I decided to write it as a novel – and I’m glad I did. I’ve been really lucky because even the way my agents reacted to it... they were saying, this could be a fantastic film. I always knew I would do something with it, so I think I’m just going to make it a goal to produce the first draft of the film script."They're two different worlds [scripts and novels]. I know that as much as I wrote Alibrandi, I can’t go into it raw and I know I’ll have to go back to AFTRS [Australian Film Television and Radio School], do some bridging courses. This is a different story, this is a story that incorporates the past, it’s surreal, it will be difficult to do and I don’t want to give myself six months to do it, I want to give myself one year to do it. And I want to have fun along the way as well."
Of course, being an English teacher means Marchetta passes on all her wisdom and experience to her ever-grateful class. (Excluding the times when there's a rolling of the eyes.) But she says mostly her classes do respond well to having a writer as a teacher (or the other way around), and the best advice she gives them is the best advice she ever got about writing.
"Probably two [points], and they are what I push to death. Show not tell and write what you know ... I’ve never lived in the country, I’ve never gone to boarding school, I’ve never experienced the tragedies that some of these characters [in Jellicoe] have experienced, but I do know what they want, and I do know how they feel and it’s what I want and it’s how I feel sometimes – and that’s about writing what you know. People don’t understand, kids don’t understand - you could set your story in outer space and it mightn’t be your world but a good sci-fi story and a good fantasy story will still convey the human experience. Writing what you know has worked for me anyway."