Sonya Hartnett breaks all the rules - yet is still an international publishing success

If Australian author Sonya Hartnett were to teach a class on fiction writing, she’d probably start by throwing out all textbooks and guides. By her own admission, Sonya is not an author who writes to order. If she were, how could she command respect?

“My loyalty is to the book. Not to the reader, not to the librarian, not to the teacher, not even to me,” she says unapologetically. “If the story wants a theme or a word, or a sentence or an act, then the book will get it. I have no concern, whatsoever, as to how it might affect the reader.”

Whilst Sonya’s loyalty may be to the book, there is not a lot of love lost for her characters these days. She admits that she once invested her ‘heart and soul’ into her characters; but not any more. “As you become more professional about it, and I guess more jaded, the characters are just tools… they are just collections of words designed to get the story from one end to the other,” she says.

“People hate hearing that, of course, particularly when you talk about a character like Adrian in Of a Boy. People have really become quite devoted and fond of him. But even he was, in the end, just a tool to hold the book up.”

Even when it comes to conforming to rules of writing for particular genres, Sonya resists. In her latest book, Butterfly, (http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9780143203056) Sonya has gone against popular theory by writing an adult book through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl; Plum Coyle.

“People, again, make the mistake of thinking that if a book has a young character, it is young adult fiction, or when you have a teenage protagonist they think it is a book for teenagers. But it is not,” she says bluntly.

So how is it that an author who makes a habit of bucking publishing protocol has managed to publish 18 books and earn the reputation of being the finest writer of her generation?

“I’ve had a lot of luck. The timing was always very good. In a lot of ways I have been seen as a special case,” she says of the fact that being published at age 15 opened myriad doors for her.

But there is there no doubt that there is more to Sonya’s golden path of success than just luck.

Firstly, whilst some critics will argue that there is a limit to the number of similes one can use in a novel, others believe it is Sonya’s sharp, succinct descriptions and metaphors that make her writing so vivid and poignant.

Then there is her passion, determination and unwavering quest to stay true to her own beliefs. “By the fourth book (Wilful Blue), I was in my 20s and Penguin said ‘no-one reads books about 20-year-olds, you need to write a book about teenagers for teenagers or adults for adults’. It took me 18 months to convince them that that was a ridiculous and absurd argument,” she says.

Sonya even had to fight for 13-year-old Plum, whose snippy, sooky, needy ways aggravate like a fingernail on a chalkboard. “When I first handed Butterfly in, Penguin said they were not so sure about having such a disagreeable main character. I said ‘Why not? It shouldn’t make a difference to the quality of the book. In fact, it should make the book a lot more interesting’.”

She was right. In the few short months since Butterfly was released, Plum has been well received.

Plum’s appeal, Sonya says, is that she is so real and that she is simply doing all that she can to make the best of her life: something Sonya believes we all do throughout our lives. “Every woman who reads that book says ‘I hate her, but I recognise her’.”

If you ever meet Sonya in the street, don’t ask her what she is writing next, unless you are prepared for rolled eyes and a sigh of frustration at the cliché. “(This) is a career where you never get to the end. No matter how many books I write, people will say what are you going to write now?”

So..?

Sigh. "I have just finished one called the Midnight Zoo, which is going to be another children’s book along the lines of The Silver Donkey.” But before Midnight Zoo is published in August 2010, Sonya is testing the waters in a genre she has never dabbled in before – picture books.
Called The Boy and The Toy, that book is set for release in March 2010.

It is not so odd that Sonya has gone for an even younger protagonist than usual. She laughs with earnest when it is suggested that perhaps her attraction to young characters is akin to Peter Pan’s attraction to Neverland.

“I find that the older I get the younger my characters. I spent so much of my life being made much of because I was (a young author) and then suddenly I became middle-aged and people stopped making a fuss over how young I was,” she says, admitting that this left her ‘shell-shocked’.

“You can’t blame me if I am still trying to hang on to my youth.”

So Sonya may have thrown out all the textbooks on how to get published, but she has shown that if you mix a little bravery, conviction and luck with articulate prose, you could have a winning formula on your hands.

* Sonya Hartnett lives in Melbourne and has won numerous literary awards such as the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, The Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelists of the Year and CBC Book of the Year. In 2008, she became the first Australian author to win the world’s second richest literary prize, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

* Sonya Hartnett photo by RedFive Studios

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