Copyright © Carmel
Bird October 2000. All rights reserved.
Because I always reckoned I was going to be a novelist, my parents gave me a typewriter for my seventeenth birthday. It was an adorable little Olivetti portable letter-writer, bright red. I was between high school and university, and I was working at two jobs - the ice-cream factory in the daytime and a café at night. I couldn't type. So when I came home from the café at about midnight, I used to teach myself to type from a Pitman's manual. And I began to write a novel. This was not the first novel, but the others had been written in school exercise books. This was writing and typing.
Now the script of that novel, along with the hand-written ones, has disappeared long ago. I was conscious at the time that it was not exactly great, but I realised recently that several threads from it are surfacing in the novel I am writing at the moment. (People often ask novelists how long it takes to write a novel - well sometimes it takes about thirty or forty years - not a very encouraging answer to the question.)
The first short story I had commercially published was written on the Olivetti. This was a short romantic story, and I wrote it in the garden, lying on a banana lounge, with the Olivetti perched on my knees. Very hot summer day in Melbourne, beside a banana passionfruit vine. Knowing no better (or worse either), I submitted the story to the Australian Women's Weekly. About a month after submission I got a letter from the magazine saying they would like to publish the story, and offering me a fee, and asking me to sign an agreement. (Yes, I notice the banana motif in this paragraph. It came from life - and the banana lounge was yellow too. I am trying to tell it as it was.)
When I read the letter from the editor I felt faint. I felt shaky. I wept. And these were tears of joy, but also of a strange kind of fear which I had never known before. You can sit in the garden in the sun tapping away and dreaming that your story will be published, and as long as the dream remains a kind of warm hallucination, it and you are safe. That's a lovely state. But get a big magazine saying they want to turn that particular dream into reality, and dark panic and a spinning terror can take hold of your heart. You are at one of life's crossroads, if you like. Do you dare to be exposed?
Of course this exposure is what the exercise is all about, but there is a strange moment there, as dream crosses into reality. Maybe I seem to be making too big a deal out of a very small event. But that's how it felt, like a big deal. Anyhow, I signed the agreement and the story was published. But the big moment, the one I recall most vividly, was when the acceptance letter came. By the time the story was published I had more or less adjusted to the reality of the idea of publication, and I knew that this was what I truly wanted, and that I probably had the courage to carry it through.
I used the little Olivetti for a few years, and then graduated to an electric typewriter, then to a primitive electronic machine that printed out pages, then to a PC and then to a Mac and then again to a PC. Whatever next? I left the Olivetti behind in London a long time ago. In memory it is forever resting on the knees of another me as I out the story under the passionfruit vine.