"White-hot Passion: Living & Writing on the Edge"

(Keynote address at the opening of the 2006 Salisbury Writers' Festival)

They say you should always start a speech with a joke. Well, I put "White-hot passion" into Google and received a number of very questionable suggestions. And there went several hours of valuable writing time, instantly.

Luckily I have two topics to talk about tonight. I'll dodge immediately to the safer one right now. "Living and Writing on the Edge" certainly seems safer. It's a very resonant concept, judging by the number of publications that exist with that title. Everyone uses it: creative writing courses, web designers, scientists, politicians; you name it. The notion of the, or at least an, Edge seems to exert a hypnotic pull over anyone who puts pen to paper.

Why? Well, there are probably lots of reasons. Kurt Vonnegut, for one, once said, "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the centre." That's a valid notion. If you need to find a new perspective on the familiar, that can mean moving to a point about as far away from it as you can get. Once you hit the edge, you can see the centre in an entirely new light. But out on the edge, you face the risk of going too far. One step more and you'll tumble. Tumble where? Who knows; that's why it's the edge. Seeing the known in a new light and dancing with possibility of the unknown are intimately entangle with this idea of the Edge. And writers, like anyone, will take every opportunity to make their work sound edgy and dangerous.

But I guess when I chose this topic I was thinking in more mundane terms. We all live in Adelaide, which has a clearly defined centre; it's called the Central Business District, just in case we forget. There's no official Central Cultural District, in name, but in practise that's what we have. The Festival of the Arts, Writers' Week, WOMAD, the State Library, the Entertainment Centre, the Universities of Adelaide and South Australia, they're all in or near the CBD-- and that makes sense, I guess, in an administrative sense. All buses lead to Rome. But by focussing our attentions on the centre, we as a culture are in danger of forgetting the exciting things happening on the fringe. Like the Salisbury Writers' Festival.

I may live in the centre now, but I've spent a significant chunk of my life in this wonderful section of our city. I lived for five years in Para Hills, as a young lad, and in Elizabeth Downs for a year or two in my late teens. I've put in more than a few hours commuting back and forth along Main North Road-- a journey during which I had plenty of time to think about the stories I wanted to write. I wrote my very first short story, as a matter of fact, while at Para Hills Primary in 1977, and was rewarded for the effort by having it read out to my entire class. I can't remember the name of my teacher, but I'd like to thank her for giving me my first taste of what it was like to put my work out into the public domain.

Like fractals, which replicate shapes over and over again, from the scales of the very small to the very large, this sense of being away from the centre has haunted me my entire life. I guess it started before I lived here, having been born in Whyalla and spent most of my pre-Para Hills childhood flitting from one country town to another. After Para Hills, I lived in Darwin, which is about as far away as you can get from anywhere in Australia and still have access to a public library stocked with science fiction.

The notion of the edge haunted me through high school, which I attended, ironically, at a boy's school in the Adelaide CBD. My teachers tried to make me respectable, but it didn't quite stick. I wasn't interested in sport; I liked musicians no one had ever heard of; I wrote books rather than do homework or date girls. My path through life followed a trajectory that took it anywhere but the centre.

Still, I tried to be respectable. I went to uni to study Economics, thinking I'd go through life the normal way, then retire as soon as I was able to do what I really wanted to do...which was write. That was my plan. And the idea of the centre is seductive, even if it's nothing more than an artefact of statistics, or a comforting illusion to those who imagine themselves inside it. I really did want that house with 1.76 kids and the regular hours and the salary. To my mind, it seemed very simple and well-defined, a path with clear signposts and a fixed goal. Like getting on a train at Central Station and getting off at Elizabeth. It couldn't be easier. Your only uncertainties lie in the people you're travelling with, and sometimes you can't choose them.

That's what my head wanted. The train trip to retirement, straight through the metaphorical centre of town. My heart, however, sang a different song. This song was something of an ear-worm, like when you hear a Kylie Minogue song on the radio and you can't get it out of your head all day. No matter what I did, my heart kept pulling me off-track. It didn't want to sit in an echoing lecture hall and hear one more discussion of Economic Theory. It quailed at the thought of twenty years working in the perfectly sensible field I had chosen. It frankly rebelled at me putting off what I really wanted to do even one day longer-- because life is about more than doing the safe thing, following the usual path, obeying the signposts and watching your long-anticipated destination hove into view. It's about passion, a topic that's difficult to find jokes about, but finally makes a reappearance in this speech.

What is passion? I've been pondering this for weeks, while thinking about this talk. The first thing that struck me was that passion is value-neutral. People can be equally passionate about good things and bad things. Murder and love-- two powerful themes we'll be visiting many times throughout this festival-- arouse and are aroused by passions without reference to morality. Passion is like gravity, acting on all of us at various times in our lives, to good or ill effect. Gravity doesn't stop to wonder if someone deserves to live another year before tugging a clumsy climber off a cliff. Neither does passion. They are both forces of nature.

Another thought that occurred to me was the assumption that to lead a passionate life is better than leading one that is drab and unremarkable-- but I think there's a lot to be said for a quiet life. Sometimes I wish I could've been content with Economics, and the safe, well-trodden path. That I was not has caused me considerable poverty and discomfort down the years. My passion for writing is entirely to blame.

Passion takes you to the edge, because sometimes that's where you need to be. I spent two and a half fallow years while I was at uni, trying to be normal, but you can't keep a good passion down. Once I realised that, for all my sensible plans, I would be better off within myself if I resolved to be happy rather than rich, I chucked in uni, bought a computer, and started tapping away. Sixteen years later, I still don't have a regular salary; I don't have a company car, mobile phone, or expense account; I don't get sick pays, mental health days or leave loading (or even leave!); and I am unlikely ever to get a mortgage; but I've never been happier. In my heart, in the centre of my being, I am complete.

It's not easy, sometimes, standing on the outside looking in. Anyone who's lived in the Outer Suburbs would know that. We're a lot more mobile these days than we were in 1975, but it's still a hassle getting parks in town and negotiating the crowds. That inconvenience works both ways. It works for Adelaide as a whole. There are still bands who don't tour through here because we're off the beaten, East Coast track. Major businesses rarely set their national headquarters here. When I started out writing, the question I was most asked (after "Why science fiction?") was "When are you going to move to Sydney?" Or Melbourne. There was, and to a certain extent still is, a perception that one stayed in Adelaide only so long as it took you to save up enough money for a fare elsewhere, to the centre of things, where it's all happening, where you were supposed to want to be.

I get that feeling sometimes, writing the kind of stuff I do. From my little science fiction ghetto looking out, there's a big, diverse world of fiction and non-fiction that I'm very much interested in, but doesn't always return the sentiment. Still, that big, diverse world doesn't often have the views I receive from my position at the edge. Through my mind's eye I explore vistas never seen before: the far reaches of time and space; humanity in varying shapes and guises; knowledge stretched and twisted into shapes new and strange. Balanced on the lip of the unknown, I send back postcards from the possible in the hope that they'll enrich everyone, as they've enriched me.

Even those of us living in a distant fringe of the publishing industry can write full-time in this genre, in Adelaide. Once, people like me were few and far between. Now we have more best-selling fantasy writers living here than anywhere else in Australia. I don't take credit for that, except maybe to have led a little by example, and I'm sure it can't really be the water that's to blame. Adelaide is full of wonderful dreamers, inhabitants of the edge surrounded by flat, arid landscapes that spur the imagination higher and higher. The need to dream is strong in us here.

Some writers make a pretty good living from their craft, but there's much more to the vocation of writing than making a living, just as there's much more to a city than its Central Business District. If it was only about money, there'd hardly be any writers left in Australia, because on average it's one of the worst-paid jobs around. Safety isn't entirely good for writers, I think. Our vocation calls on us to observe from outside, at every level, and to be at least partly ruled by the heart instead of the head. How often do we see writers become successful and suddenly lose their spark? Often enough for it to be more than just an urban myth. Life on the edge isn't supposed to be comfortable, and the best stories aren't told from the edge of a pool, sprawled out on a banana lounge-- as attractive as that notion can be sometimes.

Writers may live on the edge, but every story, ultimately, is about the centre. There's no avoiding it, just as a planet can't stop going around the sun at the heart of its solar system. We have a love-hate relationship with the centre, as I did with the idea of a normal job-- and this is as true of science fiction and fantasy as it is of romance or literary fiction. Every story holds a mirror up to the present, to ourselves. Some of our mirrors are twisted in order to show the truth, or to reveal that which isn't normally seen at all. That's our job, as authors, poets, lyricists, and playwrights. And we reveal our own face in the process, whether we want to or not. We reveal our own passions.

Someone once said (I don't know who) that a writer should write from the edge of her emotions. It took me a while to work out what that meant, and longer still to have the courage to put it into action. Writing raw, emotionally vital fiction is like standing naked in front of a room full of people. It's as bad a streaking at the Grand Final. Who in their right mind would do that? But good writing costs more than just time and thought. It takes feeling too. It has to. A discerning reader can tell when an author's heart isn't behind his words. That's why cynical attempts to tap into publishing trends rarely succeed; potential riders of the bandwagon forget that the person who created the bandwagon wasn't doing it for money, but out of love, or anger, or joy, or some other fundamental human emotion. Without emotion, without heart, you might as well be writing an annual report for BHP.

Writing from the edge of emotion is writing from the heart. Even, perhaps especially, a broken heart. Writers need to visit that edge in order to remind themselves what makes them, and other people, tick. Writers also need to push their skills and craft to the very limit every time they sit down to write. Good enough is not good at all. Aspire to excellence and we might just make exceptional. Aspire to average and we might not even make it that far. There are too many ways to fail in this industry. The last thing we should do is trip ourselves up at the first hurdle.

As a writer, I could probably cruise on pretty much as I am right now, churning out novels containing all of my favourite themes. Some of them haven’t changed terribly much since that first story I wrote in Para Hills. Instead of sticking with the usual, however, every novel I write is different in small or big ways; every venture is a challenge on personal and professional levels; there's a story behind every book that the reader will probably never know, and that's the way it should be. Writing is supposed to look effortless, like figure skating, brain surgery, or networking, when in fact it's very hard and takes a lot of practise. The ability to write isn't a numinous urge handed out to only a few. I believe that everyone has the capacity to do it well, if they're willing to go the distance.

So...the limits of our craft, the frontiers of emotion, the outposts of possibility, the fringes of society... that's an awful lot to ask of someone. "The Edge..." Hunter S Thompson once mused. "There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." I have no intention of following in his footsteps. I intend to keep on balancing as best I can, as long as I can. While the passion lasts, I know the view out here on the edge will be as wonderful as ever.

So here's to death and romance, two fascinations that are more powerful, perhaps, than food and wine, and intimately entangled with the concept of God. Here's to a weekend celebrating the written word with those who write it, and those who read it. Here's to remembering that both edge and centre have important roles to play in every aspect of human endeavour. And here's to you all for being so patient with a fellow whose passion for old, bad jokes sometimes gets away with him.

To whit:

Jeff Kennett, Bill Clinton and John Lennon are standing before God at the throne of Heaven.

God looks at them and says, "Before granting you a place at my side, I must first ask you about your beliefs."

Addressing John Lennon first, he asks, "What do you believe?"

John looks God in the eye and states passionately, "I believe in giving peace a chance, that beauty is something deep within the soul, and that nothing is beyond our reach if we work hard enough for what we believe in."

God nods approvingly, and offers John the seat to his left.

He then turns to Bill Clinton. "And what do you believe?"

Bill stands tall and proud. "I believe courage, honour, and passion are the fundamentals to life, and I've spent my whole political career providing a living embodiment of these traits, particularly passion!!"

God, moved by the speech, offers Bill the seat to his right.

"And you, Mr Kennett. What do you believe?"

"I believe", says Jeff smoothly, "that you are in my seat."

Thank you.