Interviews with Creatives: Acclaimed author Helen Garner on writing

Acclaimed Australian author Helen Garner on writing, her court reporting process, the fear that never goes away, and why grammar and daily writing practice are essential for any writer.

This post is part of the Interviews with Creatives series

After decades and twelve published books, does the fear ever go away? Helen reveals a startling truth about starting each new project – why accumulated competence doesn’t help, and the feeling of helplessness that comes with every blank page. But she also shares the specific moments when everything shifts, when she finds that place to stand from which to tell the story.

Why did Helen stop attending court trials after years of this work she loved? The answer is both practical and poignant, revealing the physical and emotional toll of bearing witness.

What happened when Helen encountered a young woman in court who refused to stand for the judge? This moment shook Helen to her core and made her realise something essential about the work she does, and when she’s not fit to do it.

Helen also shares her views on what’s missing from writing education today, why she was shocked by what university writing students told her about their reading habits and the grammar knowledge that’s been lost. Plus, she explains her definition of a short story that’s both simple and profound, and reveals what judges taught her about fear and writing.

Whether you’re a writer struggling with fear, wondering about routine and discipline, or simply curious about one of Australia’s finest literary minds, this conversation offers rare insights into the craft and courage required to write truly.

This interview was originally published on the Creative Momentum with Meg podcast

Catch Helen Garner’s interview on the podcast

Interview with Helen Garner

Helen Garner on Creative Routine and the Fear of Starting

MD: Helen, can you tell me a little bit about your creative routine? How do you approach your writing? Do you have a routine? Has it changed over the years?

HG: I could never call it a routine. I do different sorts of writing. When I’m doing non-fiction, which is usually in my case about a court or something happening in a courtroom, I’m a prisoner to what happens in courts. It happens at a certain time of day, I’ll just go there and turn up and I sit right through it month after month. Then I take a lot of notes. I keep a running journal the whole time I’m going.

When the trial is over, I sit down and read through what I’ve got, which is usually a lot. In the court, I have a notebook in which I take notes of what’s going on. I get a transcript every night when I get home, as the transcript is sent to me. That’s just an arrangement as a writer or a journalist you come to with a court. This means I don’t have to keep up with what people are saying. This means that I can spend a lot of time just watching and listening for tone of voice.

MD: And that’s the kind of thing that you’re taking note of?

HG: Yes, that’s what I’m taking note of, when I’m sitting there, just scrappy notes. Then I just I sit down at night and write maybe for an hour or more about what happened, what I saw, what I thought. It’s quite a coherent, it’s not just notes, it’s a flowing account and that usually turns out in the end to be the sort of spine of the book. That’s how I do that kind of work.

I haven’t written a novel for a long time, so I can hardly remember how I did that.

MD: Do you do most of your writing from home or do you have a studio?

HG: I have a studio. I rent a little place over in North Melbourne, just a room and in fact, for many, many years, I’ve done that, rent a place away from home because I’m very distractible. I have that sort of housewife thing that you never quite lose. You’ve been a housewife or a mother, which means you’ve got to get all the shit work of the house out of the way before you can think about anything else. So, I used to either work in a library or rent a place to work because when I’m at home, I’ll be thinking, I’ll put that washing on and that means in twenty minutes I’ll have to go and hang it out. Life is broken up into little pieces from women who run a household.

MD: When you are deep in the writing at the book stage — you’ve done the research, you’ve gone to the court, and you’ve been making your notes — once you get to that, I’m now going to cobble this thing together, is that when you go to your studio and do you do that every day, like a Monday to Friday or…?

HG: If I’m really flat out on a project, I just want to keep going once it’s on a roll. It’s sort of an obsessive thing and I can’t wait to get to it in the morning. I do get discouraged and scared, of course.

MD: At the start of the project?

HG: All the way through. It’s actually really hard to describe the way I do it. Last year I wrote that book about my grandson’s football team and that was the most fun I’ve ever had of any book that I’ve written and I didn’t find it hard.

The hardest part for me is knowing how to start and I’ve noticed that all through my life that whenever I’m wanting to know what’s on page one, I find that the most difficult part is to find a place in yourself to stand, from which to tell the story that you’ve got to tell. It’s as if you have to – I keep saying you but I’m talking about myself so I’ll say I – it’s as if I feel as if I have no accumulated competence, that I actually don’t have what’s required to write this next book.

I’ve written twelve other books but they don’t have anything to do with this book that I’m trying to do now so I have to, it’s a feeling of kind of helplessness.

MD: I’m curious about that because I know a lot of published authors do talk about how each book comes with its own fear and whatnot and the fact that you are so well published but that fear still sits there at the start of each one. Are there ways that you are able to help yourself through that, this helped me last time to get through this fear stage?

HG: No, nothing from the past helps. I mean, it probably does come up from the past once I find this new spot.

In that book I wrote called This House of Grief which is about Robert Farquharson’s trial for driving his kids into the dam, I had a massive, massive mess of like seven years’ worth of stuff there to try to get into shape and I just really did not know how to start.

I think sometimes when you don’t know where to start and you just fling yourself into it, sort of in a mess and you get it moving. But when you go back to the beginning, the beginning is just this absolute shit heap of stuff.

I almost always have to rewrite the whole front of the book, well at least the first page, but it’s partly because you don’t really know what you’re doing until you’ve almost done it. I suppose there’s some people who make plans. A plan is a sort of complete foreign thing to me. I just have to kind of throw myself into it and thrash around.

I couldn’t figure out how to start the Farquharson book until it occurred to me that it the story was really like a country and western song. When that occurred to me, I thought, oh, I’ll just write that down and I started it like a fairy story. Once there was a man who, that kind of tone, and that allowed me to get on a roll with it. That was an idea I was happy about but I could never use it again and so it just worked for its own project.

But with The Season, I couldn’t get it started. I thought, oh, what is this book anyway? Do I have to write about something general about football or do I have to be polemical or have an opinion on it or write about football and the past or what football means?

I went off on all these really crappy thoughts and ideas that I had and I was writing in past tense and third person and I thought, oh, this is stupid. I’m going to switch to first person and I’m going to switch to present tense.

As soon as I did that, bang, away I went and I could hardly keep up. I just wrote: I pull up next to the, next to the footy ground, whatever it is, I pull up. So, there I am and I’m in the car.

MD: And what do you think it shifted in you, for you by doing that?

HG: I just stopped being scared because I was writing about football, which is bloke’s territory. In my generation, writing in first person was, in Australia anyway, rather frowned upon. It was a very sort of blokey world in the literary world of Australia when I was starting out back in the seventies. There were all these leftover things that men thought and I had absorbed from just living in this society. It was thought that there’s something a bit selfish about saying I. Blokes used the expression the vertical pronoun and they kind of despised it and thought it was too … I don’t know what they did think, but there was a bad vibe around it and you were sort of taking the easy way out, I think is what they thought. And we had to sort of blast our way through that.

I actually love reading first person. I love it. If I pick up a book at random and see it’s written in first person, I think, hooray, I’m probably going to like this book, but that’s ridiculous because there’s not just as much shit in first person as there is in any other person.

Once I twigged that about The Season, I was away.

People have asked me why I put myself into those books about crime, the court books. They say, Why are you in there? Why do you write those books in first person? I do because I’m interested in it. Firstly, I don’t want to try to have the last word. I’m not interested in getting the last word and I’m not competent or confident enough to sort of back right up and take a sort of God’s eye view of what I’m trying to talk about.

But I also particularly want to take the reader into the court with me. I want them to be there and I want them to experience it the way when you’re following something like a trial. Your feelings about what you’re looking at change and change and change. There’s this flow and it’s different every day and some days you’re asking yourself, you think, Oh, of course the person did it. Of course they did. It’s so obvious. And then the next day, some other tiny fact will come, come to the fore and you think, Oh, how could I possibly have thought that? And I think that’s very interesting. I’m very interested in that sort of flow of awareness and thought.

Helen Garner on Finding Stories and Bearing Witness

MD: How do you choose what you want to work on next, or where do you get your inspiration from? Does it find you?

HG: Well, something just crops up. I read the papers and I still read the papers. I get The Age every day mostly to do the crossword, but I also flip through it to see what’s going on in Melbourne. That’s how the court books came about.

I read the paper and I see a report about a certain person who’s been accused of a certain crime. And I think, I wonder what that person looks like. That’s the first thing that comes to my mind. I would just hop on my bike and ride down to the court and just go in, sit there and have a look at the person and see what happened. There were plenty of times I went to a court and saw the person and listened for a while and didn’t have that feeling that it was grabbing my sleeve. So, then I’d just go home and read about it if someone else writes about it in the paper.

MD: You let those ones go?

HG: There are so many. I love courts. I don’t go there so much now because my hearing’s packing up and you need to be able to hear quite sharply as there’s a lot of mumbling and murmuring that goes on in courts. When I realised that I couldn’t really, that was a bit of a sad moment because I really did love that work.

I also don’t know if I’ve got the stamina to do it. I mean, really they are, those sorts of books, are incredibly exhausting and often very distressing.

MD: Emotionally exhausting?

HG: Yes. I miss the courts. Finding out that you could go into a court, just walk in and sit down was this wonderful revelation to me. I had no idea, like most people. Some people, really smart, educated people, say to me, How did you get permission to go to that trial? And I say, Well, you don’t have to get permission because you’re a citizen and the courts are open and this is a democracy and what’s happening in courts is being done in the name of the citizens of the country. You have every right to be there and to pay attention to it.

I used to go to court and sit there and I’d think, well, any minute now someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder and say, Get out. What are you doing in here? What’s your authorisation? Instead of which you could sit there day after day.

MD: I remember I heard you talking at the Town Hall about The Mushroom Tapes. I wrote it down because it struck me, that you see it as kind of paying attention, bearing witness. That it’s kind of the civil duty of bearing witness to this democracy

HG: Well, it’s a right and, I think, a duty. That’s really stating it very strongly because some people don’t want to do that and there’s a lot going on and that’s why good journalism is so important. It needs to be listened to and seen by people who are deeply interested in it, want to understand it and make it comprehensible because everybody can’t go to everything.

The word duty is a bit too constricting for it, I think, but it’s a prerogative and it’s a privilege. It’s a great privilege to be able to sit watching people in court who are having the worst day of their lives, the worst weeks and months of their lives and just even the witnesses, how much they suffer.

I realised that after many years of doing it that I’m very drawn to places where people are in extremis.

My office is quite near the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which has a fantastic kind of cafeteria on its ground floor. I used to go there to get a sandwich at lunchtime. You walk in there and it’s packed. I would get the same feeling when I walked in the door as I get when I walk into a court and I was quite surprised. It’s a little rush of adrenaline and I thought, What’s this?

I realised it was because people there were in pain, some of them who were there, they had splints or bandages or they’d been bashed up and people would talk to you. I’d sit down at a table and I was always by myself and there’d be some guy sitting next to me. He’d have his splint in his arm and I’d go, What happened? He’d immediately tell me.

He’d say, Oh, I’ve come off my tractor or whatever it was. People are sort of more open to each other in places like that.

MD: Have you always been curious about people at the edge?

HG: I don’t know about always, but as my life went on, I sort of noticed it about myself. With the mushroom murder book, it seemed to me like the whole population of the world was divided into two types of people. Some people were saying, Wow, this is the most fantastically thrilling story I’ve ever heard of in my life. Other people were saying, You bastards are sick, why do you give a shit about this? What? You’re going to Morwell? Don’t be ridiculous.

It was that kind of division. I think there are people who find a journalistic degree of curiosity to be almost pathological and a bit disgusting and you shouldn’t feel it. And what are you doing there? Why are you poking your nose into other people’s business? That kind of thing.

I think if there’s any duty involved in this, your duty is to do it with respect and with empathy and to treat the people whose lives are kind of coming apart in front of you with the greatest degree of skill that you’ve got at your disposal and not to toss off smart remarks or not give it your full attention.

There was one time I read in the paper about a young Bangladeshi girl who was a student at La Trobe and she had a PhD grant. It turns out she was a radicalised Muslim and had tried to kill the father of her host family. She’d stabbed him with a knife. I read about that and I thought, I’m going to go down to the court. I mean, what sort of person would that be?

I get to the court and, as it happened on that day, there was another trial where a sentencing was about to happen and all the journalists were in there so there was hardly anybody at the trial of this young woman. I was sitting there basically by myself and they brought her in and she was tiny, like a tiny, tiny, smaller than me, and in full chador niqab, fully robed, and they brought her in and put her in the dock. The judge came in and everybody in the court stood up except this girl and I thought, Oh, she is not acknowledging the authority of this court, she’s remaining in her seat.

At that moment I had this feeling of mad rage. I was amazed at myself. I puzzled over why this angered me so much and I realised it was because the law means an enormous amount to me and I respect it. I sort of love it and I know that it’s just as faulty as any other human phenomenon, but the idea that someone wouldn’t stand up ritually when the judge came in was kind of outrageous to me. I was shaking with shock. At the beginning of the trial the person in the dock has to identify themselves and make sure they’ve got the right person.

The judge, a woman judge, was not impressed. She said, Kindly stand, in that kind of tone. Suddenly the girl was on her feet. Kindly remove your facial covering so that we might identify you. She took off her facial covering and they asked her if she was who they thought she was and she was.

The judge said, You may replace your facial covering and take your seat.

There was an edge on the way she spoke and I realised that for the first time in my life in a court I did not have what I think is essential in this work and that is to have some degree of empathy with the person, the accused person and I thought without that I’m not fit to do this work so I just got up and went home.

It really was a very shocking experience to me to feel that. She got fifty-three years or something because she was only young in her early twenties. I mean it was a really terrible and appalling story of what she’d done. She’d brought this big knife with her all the way from Bangladesh in her suitcase with the aim of killing someone and she didn’t care who. She’s now in Dame Phyllis Frost prison and is the only person in the protection unit who the mushroom murderer is allowed to speak to but I don’t think they speak to each other.

Helen Garner on Fear and the Writing Craft

MD: What still makes you feel uncomfortable when you sit down to write?

HG: Just fear, just ordinary old fear. I guess it’s imposter syndrome, that’s the sort of fashionable phrase for it.

I used to take part in a judicial writing course for judges and magistrates. They used to have local writers hired to work in workshops with the judges. That was a very interesting experience for me. I did it for several years, just once a year and I learned a lot about judges. I learned that they’re full of fear, same as everyone else in the world and that it affects their writing. That’s why their judgments are so often so long and so full of jargon so that the ordinary citizen can’t read them easily. I came to understand that after a few years of doing this work.

At one time I was asked to talk to some judges at a little course that was happening down there in the legal precinct. I got there at four o’clock in the afternoon as court rises around four and into the room came all these judges. I looked at them and they were so tired. You could see they were exhausted. They could hardly drag themselves in there after a day on the bench and I really felt for them. I thought, well, I’ll talk about fear.

I said, Well, why don’t we talk about fear?

Their eyes brightened, and they sat up straight. And I thought, they’re all scared.

I asked them, What are you scared of?

They pointed at the court above because everything they write is going to be torn apart or examined with ferocious attention by a Court of Appeal. Their aim is to write so that the court above knows everything they need to know. They put in everything, so their judgments are really, really long.

After a while, in the course that I was teaching, they decided that they would get in a couple of judges from the Courts of Appeal to take part in these workshops. That was so interesting because they said, Look, we haven’t got time to read these enormous judgments that come up. You have got to digest the material, not just, not just write it down and give it to us. But you’ve got to decide what’s important.

They started basically teaching them what was required.

They said, You can’t just put something in because you think we might need to know it. You’ve got to incorporate it into a piece of writing that’s going to make sense and be a bit easy to read, because we’re working fast.

And I was thinking, oh my Lord. There’s something in the Bible where they say, I can’t remember who says this and maybe it’s in the prayer book, about how when you read something, you have to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. And by mark, they don’t mean mark with a pen, they mean notice.

Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.

It was so useful to me in that context of hearing the judges being told they had to sort of think differently to get their head around what they were saying and instead of just hauling these great loads of stuff and dumping them into the judgment. They had to stride through it, saying, I’ll have that, I’ll have that, I’ll have that.

And that’s what you do when you’re writing non-fiction. You’re striding across the territory.

Once you’ve read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, then you’ve still got a mass of stuff but you’ve also got a sense of the possible shape of how you could tell it. That’s when you stride and gather as you pass and don’t think, well, I’d better put that in there because maybe they want to know what colour shoes he had on or something like that.

The guy who ran this course was an American academic and he was actually fabulous. He was very witty and hilarious, and a warm guy. He said, What you have to do when you’re right at the beginning of a judgment is you’ve got to answer this question: Who did what to whom? Instead of saying, In Section four of the … and talking in legal language, he said, just think, you get home from work. You’ve come from court. You’re tired. You walk up the drive and your neighbour is hosing his grass and he goes, Oh. Good day Jim, what did you have to do? What did you have to decide on today?

And the American academic said, Do you say in Section 49 of such and such a law, or do you say, oh, it was a bloke who’s, um, uh, who murdered his wife in order to get the money that she had? And he tried to break it down and put it all in human terms. It was so exciting to watch.

Helen Garner’s Writing Beginnings

MD: Did you always know that you wanted to write?

HG: Yes, but I didn’t know how. I knew I liked messing around with sentences, but I never imagined that I would write anything that could be published.

MD: Do you still remember the moment where you realised, hmm, I’ve got something here?

HG: I do. It was when I was writing Monkey Grip, and I thought there was a story there. I looked at the stuff that was in my diary about what was going on in my life at that time and I could see that it was interesting. I mean, it was interesting to me. It wasn’t boring crap about, why doesn’t he love me, kind of shit, but I thought, I’ll just start writing. I’ll take the diaries down to the library with another notebook, an empty notebook, and I’ll write the interesting bits. I’ll copy the interesting bits into the notebook. 

I did that, I just sort of blindly did that. After a while I thought, oh, I can see this is coming around in a sort of a curve, and what was happening in my life was coming around in a sort of a curve, and I could see it was going to fall off a cliff at the end.

So, I remembered that a little light goes on, and I think there’s a curve in this. That’s what I think a short story is. A chunk of life with a bend in it. That’s how I would define a short story. It gives you a surprise, and it can be early in the story or in the middle or right near the end, or it can be something you don’t put in.

Helen Garner’s Wisdom for Writers

MD: If you were to be chatting with someone who is maybe at a transition stage of their writing or creativity or they’re at an early stage, what piece of wisdom would you want to give them to encourage them to keep going?

HG: I’d tell them to read more. Keep reading. Everyone should be reading. I mean, anybody that’s a writer should be reading all the time. I’m often surprised when I go to people’s writing classes to find that they hardly read at all. There are some people in those classes who aren’t even interested in reading. I remember once being in a writing class at a university and I said, What was the last book you read? And they all go, I think I’ve read one in HSC, and this was 20 years ago, but I was shocked. I wanted to say, What the fuck are you doing here? If you’re not really interested, why don’t you go and do something else? Be a nurse or something useful.

It’s disappointing to me that they don’t teach grammar properly in schools anymore. I think that’s actually quite tragic because if you don’t understand how sentences are formed, how can you edit your own work? How can you analyse what you’ve done and make it better in any sort of knowing way?

In that same class, I don’t know if it was an extra kind of terrible one, but I saw that when I would criticise somebody’s work and say, See, the thing is that your clauses are all back to front in this sentence, and all that phrase does, it’s not fixed on properly, they would just looked me blankly. I said, Does anybody know or remember any grammar from school? Around the room went this whisper, A verb is a doing word, which is like Grade Three grammar.

MD: I think that’s potentially the last grammar that we were taught at school. Yeah. It was when I went to RMIT and did the writing and editing course was the first time I understood why it worked the way it did.

HG: It does help to have learned other languages as well. ,In my generation, we were taught not to speak them, but to write them and to read, so there was a lot about grammar and I loved it. I found that the most fascinating thing about school was learning grammar, in various languages, and in English. I just loved it. I couldn’t exactly say why, but I just never got bored with it.

I still read the paper with a pen in my hand because people don’t know the order in which to put things so that they make sense. So, they have a little phrase or a clause, which is kind of tacked on at the end, and it means the opposite of what they think it means. If you try to explain this to someone they think you’re being pedantic, which is enraging.

MD: Language matters.

HG: Yeah.

MD: So, people need to read more and work out how to string a sentence together, properly?

HG: Yeah, and practice. You’ve got to practice every day. Your skill is trying to develop, you’ve got to do it every day for an hour. I’m making a rule, yeah?

MD: I love a rule.

HG: People love a rule. You should be writing for an hour a day if you’re wanting to be a writer, which is a strange thing to do, so let’s put it this way: if you want to write.

MD: And writing every day, I know from myself and with the people I work with, helps keep the fear away as well.

HG: Yeah, it does.

MD: If you’re not writing every day, then…

HG: Yes, it sort of gangs up on you. That’s why I’ve written a diary all my life since I was a teenager. People say, Oh, I don’t know what to write about. There’s always something to write about. Didn’t something happen during the day? I think people think they’re supposed to write deep analysis of their psychological state or some shit like that. Really, you just need to say: When I was at the cafe, I saw, three kids in long robes, or a man spoke to me on the tram and this is what he said.

The tiny things of daily life, that’s the raw material for your practice. Then after a while, you get to enjoy noticing things. Trying to write down a dream is really good writing practice, because you’re trying to seize onto a mood that’s so subtle that if you don’t do it straight away, it’s gone. By lunchtime, you’ve lost it.

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