So you want to write like Bryce Courtenay?

Who wouldn't?

The man is Australia’s best selling author, with more than 20 titles to his name and more than 20,000,000 books sold around the world.

He may be 76 years old, but he is the pin-up poster boy for aspiring popular fiction authors… and a perfect gentleman to boot.

Despite his hectic promotion schedule for his latest saga, The Story of Danny Dunn, Bryce didn’t hurry me along, sigh or even discreetly Tweet his wife to tell her he'd be late for lunch during our 50-minute interview, in which I picked his brain for his secrets to success.

You see, he figures if his loyal fans are prepared to fork out almost $50 to buy one of his books and spend 30 hours of their time reading it, the least he can do is chat a while and tell them all that he knows.

"Darling, you pay for the privilege of me entertaining you and you think I am not going to be grateful? You bet I am going to be grateful," he says.

Bryce regularly teaches writing workshops around Australia and the world, but I am not going to give you his lecture notes here (you can find them on his website). Instead, I am going to tell you how he writes his books, where he gets his ideas and about his quirky writing habits.

So, let me start with the strange voices in his head - because that’s how his books begin.

The writing process – from the garden to the bookstore shelf

"I might be doing my vegie garden - I am a fanatical gardener - and I hear, 'Gday.' I say, 'Who are you?’ and then I hear, 'I am a figment of your imagination.' 'Well, piss off then,' I say.”

Inevitably though, says Bryce, the voice stays in his head and is soon joined by others in the vegie patch, all of them telling him about themselves and their relationships.

"I get to know the three protagonists very well and when I can talk to them and anticipate them, I am ready to write the next book. That is usually January 29th."

If it seems odd to you that Bryce starts writing his new book on the same date every year, it doesn’t to him.

A man of rigid routine, he spends 12 hours a day, six days a week, exactly eight months of the year sitting in his study with his door shut, banging away at the keyboard to create his next big story.

"People ask me what is the major ingredient for writing a book and I say, ‘Bum glue.’ It’s one of very tight discipline," he says, of his schedule.

"It takes seven months, 29 days and about 23 hours to write a book. I have finished five books within an hour of the deadline, which happens to be the 30th of August. It always happens, I don’t know how, but it does."

Bryce refers to his writing style as a game of ‘sudden death’. Unlike most writers who write a first draft then edit, edit and edit some more, Bryce writes a chapter, knocks out any fancy words that have slipped in, discusses it with the publisher, then sends it off to be printed.

"I couldn’t get a book out in a year if I had to write the book first and then they had to process it. So, I can’t get to page 174 and say, ‘Shit, I have a great idea, I better go back to the first chapter.’ Too late: they’re all printed. So you have to know what you are doing."

Knowing what readers want – and giving it to them

Although every one of Bryce’s fiction titles is backlisted (meaning they are still good sellers a year or more after publication), and although his vocabulary is as sharp as any expert crossword creator’s, he considers himself as little more than the village storyteller perched on a tree branch spinning a yarn.

“I don’t see myself as writing with a quill from an angel’s wing. I don’t have that kind of precocity. I am a storyteller. I am an entertainer," he says.

“I have a good vocabulary, certainly better than most writers I would say, and I will be writing away and I will type, ‘She made a very perspicacious remark.’ (Which, for those of us not au fait with every entry in the Macquarie Dictionary, means clear and lucid.) I will go back the next day and cut out the word perspicacious because there are five English words that are close enough that readers will understand. I am not trying to impress you or the reader."

The same goes, he says, for finding those magical metaphors that might take two weeks for a writer to conjure up, but only nanoseconds for a reader to skim over.

"Keep it simple. Tell the story the way it is. Don’t try and be clever. If you keep the story and the narrative simple, clean, direct and honest and you research it well with integrity and you can tell stories – which, by the way, is a gift - you have got a good chance of selling well." (Ah, so that's all it takes? Sheesh...)

Bryce also laments any writing style that ‘talks down’ to the reader by using long-winded and unnecessary description.

A beautiful woman is just that, he argues, a beautiful woman. Let the readers decide for themselves whether she is blonde and buxom or brunette and bouncy.

“We over-explain, we talk down to people, we make assumptions about them, mostly that they are dumb. Whereas, I accept them as part of the narrative,” he says.

Despite the convention that there are usually three protagainsts in a story, Bryce believes there are four, including the reader, and believes that if writers remember this, they will negate the need for verbosity in their descriptions.

“We have so many other avenues of communication that have educated the reader. Even readers who are in a strict book sense uneducated, are highly educated observers. They have had television for almost two generations, radio, movies... we now have this huge knowledge, almost by osmosis. So today’s writer should allow, but very often doesn’t, the reader’s input.’

Coming up with the ideas for ‘big stories’

Coming up with ideas to write about, says Bryce, is as easy as coming up with a question that you want to know the answer to.

"I am going to be perfectly honest. Writing, for me, is terribly self-indulgent. I just think of something I want to know and I go and write a book about it," he says.

"For instance, with Danny Dunn, I asked myself, ‘Who are we? Who are we as a people? Why are we different? We have the same cultural background as Canadians or New Zealanders, or many South Africans.' You ask yourself a question like that and you have 10 years of research ahead of you." (Mmmm, yep, sounds simple enough.)

Bryce admits you may never find the answers to your questions, but at least you will have had a good journey (and, hopefully, have secured a book deal out of it).

Bryce’s first book deal came with his 600+ page saga of Peekay in The Power of One (a practice book that was used as a doorstop for a year, he admits) 20 years ago, and he has been writing ‘big stories’ ever since.

“I like big stories. What’s the point in a small story? I think a story should be big. People want to know the big picture; they want to see things happening, big waves rolling in, not tiny splashes of water on the sink."

Whether you love Bryce’s books or use them as doorstops as he once did, there is no question that his career is one big wave that he is riding better than any pro-surfer.

The Story of Danny Dunn
By Bryce Courtenay
Published by Penguin Australia
November 2009

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/