Tina Cartwright: "I was thinking about creativity as resistance"

We recently hosted the incredible 2024 Fellow Tina Cartwright at the Katharine Susannah Prichard writing cabins. Tina was hard at work on her upcoming novel, an inspiring work of literary fiction, and had some lovely and heartfelt words to sum up her KSP experience. And, we were lucky enough to get Tina's Top 10 tips for amazing writing!

My eyes felt like saucers the entire time at KSP.

I had recently started drawing, for the first time in colour, so the intensity of the light, the way the trees outside my window—acacia, Blackbutt and the silvery limbs of eucalypts—seemed to defy the fine, high skies riveted my attention. The landscape held a sense of colouring in—the shade under the trees strewn with charcoals and russet browns, the blinding spills of sunlight spotlighted with flimsy yellows and greens and the steeped hill ash grey on the surface and vivid paprika underneath.

I was ridiculously excited before I left Melbourne. I’d had various short pieces published in literary journals and online but this was the first time that an organisation had stood behind my writing, for an unpublished novel manuscript that I deeply believed in; it felt like an important step.

On my first day, in my diary I wrote, ‘very hot outside, everything crisp and dry with the pressure of the heat.’ That afternoon, I joined the Poetry Group in the main house and we worked on a prompt from Red Room Poetry. I was heartened by how welcoming and willing to share their work the group was.

Throughout my time I moved back and forth between tweaking the pitch for the novel that I’d applied with and editing the first draft of a new manuscript. The peaceful, stress-free atmosphere at KSP meant I progressed further than I anticipated.

I was able to join in with the Tuesday night writing group and the Novel Writing Collective. I deeply enjoyed hearing about everyone’s ideas and approaches to writing. In each group there was a palpable love of writing and story-telling which I found it inspiring.

Before arriving, I’d just finished reading Sun Music: New and Selected Poems by Judith Beveridge. The title poem, Sun Music, had stayed with me; it was about when her father took up a pair of binoculars and left off drinking for the ecstasy of looking, becoming ‘intoxicated by the sea, the sky.’ It made me think of a friend who, after always living in crowded cities, moved to Australia, got his first garden and backyard, and gardening became the one true love of his life. Another friend, in one of Melbourne’s western suburbs, had replanted his front and backyard with native grasses, in an attempt at re-establishing them. These acts made me think about resistance and change, how both are forms of hope, and how creativity encompasses all three.

Both reading and writing have changed my perspective or broadened my thinking. We often speak of the ‘writing journey’ while understanding that writing has no end point. I thought of the iterative expansion that is reading and writing and how stories with active listeners and responsive readers are never finished, like the story of KSP itself.  

Considering how Katharine fought for her beliefs, it felt apt to me that I was thinking about creativity as resistance during my time at KSP. I mused over the power of words, organisations like KSP that foster them, and how it seems to me that right now stories are resistance.

Tina's Top 10 Tips for writing:

1)      Don’t let anyone rush you into working out who you are on the page. Being yourself is all you’ve got.

2)      Make things happen. 90 per cent of your narrative should be happening now.

3)      Be curious.

4)      Make it necessary – you don’t need to tell a day in the life, but only what’s essential to your story.

5)      Even in fiction holding a sense of bearing witness while you write opens up truer, more authentic possibilities for the work.

6)      Don’t limit yourself. Not sure you can do it? Dream about how you might do it if you could.

7)      Get yourself a focussing tool. Train yourself. Put your headphones on – it’s writing time. Stand up at the kitchen counter with the laptop – it’s writing time. Put your robe on – it’s writing time!

8)      It does not have to be perfect now. It just has to be there. You will always get another pass at it.

9)      Commit to it. Even if you only have 30 minutes a day, commit to that 30 minutes every day.

10)   Every great writer started out less than great. You can read their early work and see their progression. There’s no shortcut; only time spent writing will improve your work.

Thank you Tina. Hope to see you again soon.