On the road again

Having written one of the seminal youth novels in Looking for Alibrandi, Melina Marchetta is an instantly recognisable name in Australian literature. Now she's back with On the Jellicoe Road, her third novel. Here, she writes exclusively for The Blurb about her book.

I began writing Looking For Alibrandi when I was twenty years old; when I was just a few years older than Josie. Now I’m older than her mum, so perspective obviously changes your feelings about characters.

When I was a teenager, I was neither rebellious nor compliant. I lay low for most of the time during my teens. I was a bit like Francesca and Taylor. I spent a lot of time being reactive rather than proactive, which sometimes isn’t such a bad thing because people actually use you as a sounding board and you get to observe their world. There was a lot of internal strife going on in my head, but I was the type to keep it under wraps until I had control over it. I’m very different now, which surprises me. I’m pretty confrontational and extremely emotional in a way I never imagined I would be.

I don’t identify myself with wanting to write in one particular genre, but I have always loved stories told out of sequence because I think the rewards are plentiful for the reader, especially when a mystery is involved. More than anything, I was always a Famous Five, Secret Seven fan. With On the Jellicoe Road, I began with Taylor’s story. It’s been in my head for over fourteen years. The story of the kids in the past and the territory war have only come to be in the last two years. But the character of Taylor, being stuck out at a country boarding school and grieving the loss of an important figure in her life has always been there. In the original draft she had conflict with the other Houses at her school and in the final version I pushed that back and introduced outside “enemies” like the Townies and Cadets which helped a great deal with the plot.

Taylor, like the characters of Francesca and Josie, is seventeen. I think it’s an important age when it comes to identity. Too many important decisions are forced on people at this age. From a teacher’s perspective you see it all the time, because the students are forced to work out what they’re going to be and everyone makes it seem as if it is the be all; like whatever choice you make you have to stick to forever. I hate that because, God willing, most kids have at least sixty years left of living. So I think at the age of seventeen you are working out who you are more than any other time in your life and then it happens all over again when you’re more than double that age. If you notice, my younger characters are always around seventeen, and my older ones are always around forty. I do love writing about those age groups. I received some of the most profound feedback when I wrote Saving Francesca and it was mostly from kids her age or people the same age as Mia and Robert, her parents.

I write most of my first drafts (Saving Francesca and On the Jellicoe Road) during extended holidays and then I spend the year re-working and editing after school. I am very undisciplined with my writing. Some days I can stay focused for hours and hours and other days I can’t keep on track for more than five minutes. But I never force it. I’m taking a year off beginning in October and will be hanging out in New York over Christmas, house swapping with Justine Larbelesteir and Scott Westerfield who have an East Village apartment. I don’t know whether I’ll do physical writing, but there will certainly be a lot going on in my head.

I’m going to focus my year writing the film script for On the Jellicoe Road because I haven’t written one since Looking for Alibrandi in 1999. I was torn between writing On the Jellicoe Road as a novel or script and I’m glad I went for the novel, but I am looking forward to adapting it. I have a character and synopsis in my head for my next novel, but I’ll let that float around for a while before I put pen to paper.

I don’t really have favourite authors, as much as favourite novels and aspects of those novels shaped the emotional parts of On the Jellicoe Road. For example, I love Hard Times by Charles Dickens. There’s a part where one of the characters, Louisa says “I wonder” and her father who is a pragmatist says, “Louisa, never wonder!” If you read the first page of On the Jellicoe Road you have a character who stops “wondering” because of a tragic accident. My favourite Jane Austen novel is Persuasion because Anne, like Francesca, is so internal and very different to Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice who is so verbal, like Josie Alibrandi. The out of sequence element of Catch 22 inspires me. I love most novels set in a boarding school because I wanted to go to one as a kid. The great thing about being a writer is you get your characters to go places you always wanted to go.

Melina Marchetta

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Melina Marchetta

Latest book: On the Jellicoe Road
Publisher: Viking
Price: $24.95