Interviews with Creatives: Author Lauren Novak

Author Lauren Novak on mum rage, debut books + journalism instincts that shape her writing. In this interview Adelaide journalist turned debut author talks about turning a personal problem into a researched book and why curiosity matters more than being good at English.

This post is part of the Interviews with Creatives series

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Lauren Novak, Debut Author

LN: My name’s Lauren Novak, and I suppose I’m speaking to you because my latest creative pursuit is releasing my debut book, which is non-fiction, but I think probably what people might call narrative journalism, so there’s a little bit of creativity, but not to the extent of fiction. For my day job, I am a journalist at the newspaper in Adelaide.

MD: Do you also write fiction, or …

LN: This is interesting. I used to really love that when I was a kid. I am that person who you do hear on the podcast who, from when I was 8 years old, specifically wanted to be an author-illustrator. Turns out I’m not so great at drawing, at least not to a professional standard, so that’s slipped away. I was that kid who was writing fiction stories all through school with my friends, and then we’d perform them as plays and all that really cringey stuff that you think about when you’re a small child. Then I got this impression that I needed to get a day job that was going to pay the bills in the meantime, and so I got into journalism. I did this because I’m really interested in the real world and how it works, and learning things I didn’t know, and then telling other people things they didn’t know. That’s been a fabulous career. I love it. But I think it’s probably taken that creativity in the really fictional, imaginary sense out of me and so I’m trying to work to get that back now.

Creative Routine

MD: Do you have a routine for your writing? And did you have a routine for writing this non-fiction book?

LN: Yeah, I definitely had a routine. So, the book is called Meltdown, and it’s about my experience with mum rage, which I’m not sure if you’re familiar with.

MD: Oh, yeah. I feel like every mum that’s listening is just shaking, nodding their head, going, yeah, yeah, gotcha.

LN: Well, and this is why I had to write the book. It wasn’t something that I had certainly ever read about, let alone really been spoken about properly, while I was having children. My kids are 6 and 4 now, and I wrote the book when they were about 4 and 2. I went looking for a book on that topic when I thought, well, is it just me? Do I need to sort myself out? And realised that there wasn’t really much out there, but everyone I started talking to about it said, Oh, yes, me too! As soon as you raised it. So, I was like, okay, I think I probably have to put my journalism skills, my professional skills, to this very personal problem, and that’s where that book came from.

But as far as the routine, I had to have a routine, because having a 4- and a 2-year-old, I couldn’t just write in the cracks. I know a lot of people talk about that as 20 minutes here, 10 minutes there, but I just found that quite frustrating, because I’d just get into it, and then I’d be interrupted by, I need a snack or a nappy change. Or you’d think they’d gone down for a nap, and then they wake up earlier than expected, and I found that was just adding to my mum-rage.

MD: Adding content, really.

LN: Exactly. So, for me, I had to find a way to really block out some time, and make that a priority, probably at the expense of other things at that point in my life. I was very, very lucky to have the support of grandparents, so my parents and also my partner’s parents, who would pick the kids up from childcare or just have them for a few hours so that I’d get a bit longer. We worked out that one day a week, I could block out after drop-off and most of that day for writing, so that I could get deep into whatever I was doing. Then I could do other things in the cracks. I could listen to a podcast that was about the topic I was thinking of, or I could read some research on the couch after they went to bed at night. I could do those things in pockets, but the thinking and the writing, I really needed time.

MD: Did you lean on the routines that you already had as a journalist?

LN: Yes, it’s interesting that you say that, because one of the first things you think about once you realise you’re going to write a book is, oh, how am I going to get to 70, 80,000 words, when the most I’d ever had published was about four and a half thousand? When I thought about that, I thought, well, if each chapter is kind of like a four and a half thousand word, or 3,000 word, whatever, magazine piece, then I can do that. That is how I approached it. Each chapter had a particular focus of either something that triggered anger in motherhood or explaining something about it. It was interesting when I got the structural feedback. One of the key things was that I wasn’t linking those chapters enough. In fiction, that’s essential, you’ve got to drag people through to the next chapter, and I can see that as a reader. But I found that fascinating that I’m so trained to finish things nicely at the end of a magazine article, because they don’t have to then go to the next page for that story. That was something I had to fix in the second round.

MD: That is quite interesting. The whole mum rage thing is big and I’m so glad that you’ve written this. When I had my kids, which was like 100 years ago, no one was really talking about it. I ended up asking my maternal health nurse if there was any course I could do to manage my own rage. It was a taboo topic back then.

LN: Yeah, well, good on you for raising it, because I think that was part of the issue. I felt like it was a personality thing initially, and it wasn’t something I could ask a medical professional for help for and it turns out that’s entirely wrong. But it was one of those things where there wasn’t really anything in book form. There are podcasts, definitely now, they’re excellent, and there’s a lot more social media and that sort of thing. But there’s something about having all of that together in one place. And I know mums don’t have a lot of time to read a physical book, I’m very aware of that, but there’s something about having something you can come back and reference, and I tried to structure it in a way that, because it doesn’t have a beginning-to-end narrative, you can jump in and out of a chapter. You can say, oh, my issue’s sleep at the moment, and you can jump to the sleep chapter. But again, that’s probably a symptom of the way I was writing it in those discrete magazine-type pieces.

But yes, I do lean on those journalistic tendencies and definitely for this to be my debut, it felt much easier to be doing that kind of writing. I’m very familiar with interviewing people and turning those stories into something that hopefully is entertaining to read. What I’m confronting now is that I’d love to do fiction, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

MD: Do you have a routine now, or are you in that liminal space?

LN: That’s a nicer way of describing it than I was thinking of. I think, to be honest, I’m in the slightly beating myself up phase at the moment, like, I should be looking at a book too.

MD: Should. That’s such a dirty word isn’t it?

LN: I know, isn’t it? So, I’m in the thinking phase. I have ideas. I think probably my biggest issue is commitment. There are some people who say that coming up with the idea is the issue, and then once they do, they’re off. I’m the other way around. I almost have too many ideas, and I’m not sure which one to commit to. Then, because we’re all so busy and time is limited, it becomes a question of, is this idea worth committing to? And that probably is keeping me in a bit of a state of paralysis.

MD: I wonder if it might be helpful to just time-box that decision, and go, alright, I need to decide in the next month, and I’m going to decide where the heat is.

LN: Yes, I have heard that phrase. And that was the thing about Meltdown, the mum-rage, the heat was there. I couldn’t not do that. Maybe I just haven’t felt that yet about whatever comes next. But the thinking is still there, and spotting ideas that might inspire me, that’s kind of where it’s at the moment.

Creative Process

MD: Do you have a process? You must have a process with your journalism, with your magazine pieces. Can you tell me a bit about what your process was with writing Meltdown? You go from the idea of mum-rage, and now it’s a book. How did you get to that?

LN: Yeah. That’s also something I had to think about: is it a mag feature, or is it a book? Is there enough in it to be a book? And thinking about what would be of value to a reader that would compel them to go out and buy this thing and invest the time to read it. The subtitle of the book is Why Motherhood Makes Us Angry and What to Do About It, and I think the ‘What to Do About It’ is the driver of that. Basically I approached it as my own little research project. I went, well, I’ve got mum rage, what’s causing it? What experts can I talk to who will tell me more about that? And just talking to other mums, that was my main focus to start with.

So, I put out a survey and about 200 mums from all over the world answered. I fondly refer to them as my Angry Mums Club now. That survey is still open on my website and all are welcome to complete it. I needed material to work with. By the time I had that survey and had interviewed specific mums who had specific issues to talk about, and then interviewed experts, such as neuroscientists as I wanted to know why sleep was such a big thing and dietitians as I wanted to know why do I get angry when I get hungry? Then some eminent experts in the social structures, people who really understand our childcare systems and our paid parental leave systems and where the sticking points are in there. I think that’s really where it’s almost hard for me to explain the routine because that’s so second nature as a journalist that I applied all of that skill. Then it was about bringing that into a story that was not just a news report. That’s where I say narrative journalism. I do hope that it is entertaining even though it’s true. It’s written in a way that maybe if you picked it up and you didn’t know, you might be reading about a character, as opposed to me.

MD: So when, and how, did you make that decision to go from, this could just be a magazine piece, to, no, this is bigger?

LN: Hmm. I’m not really sure. I think every journalist thinks we’ve got a book in us, right? At some point. But you just reminded me, actually, that there was a book that I had read at the time, which was on a totally different topic, but it had a structure. Now that I think about it, that was probably a bit of a lightbulb moment where I went, if I were to write something on this topic, that’s how I would do it. The book was called Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. It had a really big moment a few years ago, because it was all about how none of us can pay attention to anything anymore. It’s an excellent book. It wasn’t at all to do with the topic I was looking at, but the way he structured it. He started with a personal story and his connection to this issue, then he took it through the reasons why we can’t focus, and what the experts say about it, what we as individuals can do, what we as a society can do. It fell into place for me as being really applicable to the issue of anger in motherhood in the same way, but then obviously I had to ask if that would be a book. As you know, having an idea and pitching it successfully are two different things. I’m lucky that with non-fiction, I don’t have to write the whole thing and then pitch it. So, I could pitch a sample chapter, and a proposal of what are the other things I would look at and how would I bring it together.

MD: And that’s when it was picked up?

LN: That’s how I pitched HarperCollins, yes. My sample chapter was about 5,000 words, and if you look at the first two chapters of the book, it’s basically that in a slightly more condensed form, but that’s where I started. And then I said, well, this would be the style I would approach it in, and here’s what else I would tackle, and here’s how I’d bring it all together at the end. And then once they said, sure, I had to do that.

MD: Had to deliver.

LN: Yep.

MD: I find this quite fascinating, because I’m not a non-fiction writer as such, other than Substack, etc. But I have been working with some writers who are writing in this space, almost like episodic essays. So, when you had that 5,000 words and the rest of it mapped out, did you know that was solid? How did you work out what to include and what not to?

LN: I think there was a research phase. There was a period where I actually did basically no writing, and was just collecting. The women’s stories, particularly, were what started to inspire the retelling of their experience, and then that lead into a particular issue. I didn’t know how I was going to finish it, but it turns out there is a little bit of a narrative in the sense that it follows my initial reaction to this anger in motherhood, and then my journey to fix it, and then where am I now? I had this question in my proposal of, Am I still angry? That was kind of the last chapter. The answer is yes, but I know so much more about it, and I feel so differently about it now and I view things differently. I have so much more knowledge. That’s kind of how that story comes full circle. So, I tried to have a little bit of a through-line. But you can dip in and out of it, because each chapter is a particular topic.

MD: Did you write each chapter and bring that to a polished stage? Or did you write it all out and then ripple through and do the whole lot as the next draft?

LN: I think the way that I write generally, and I think this is from journalism training, is that you have to start at the beginning, because most of the time you’re telling people something that’s happened, and that’s the top of the yarn. And for each chapter, once I had my opening anecdote, or once I had where I wanted to start with it, I would go from there, and then that could change. One of the chapters opens with me stuffing my face with a muffin I’ve microwaved in the middle of the night because I’m breastfeeding, and I’m starving, and I’m hangry. Quite often it would be that I’d sit down and think, okay, this chapter’s about hunger, let me think about a story, whether it’s from me or a mum I’d interviewed, and then be in that. And that’s probably the most creative part of it, because it’s almost like it is remembering something that happened, but it’s also a little bit like writing a story about a character. From there I’d start to hang the facts and the experts off of it, and try to bring it to some sort of helpful conclusion.

MD: Oh, you’re making me want to read this so much. I also think that mum-rage goes through all of it, it changes over the years. Is yours more based on when your children are little, or forever?

LN: Yeah, I certainly made an effort to speak to parents of kids of all ages, because I think what I realised was there are factors when they’re little, but then those factors are going to change as they’re older. Like, teenagers being rude to you, I’m sure, is as aggravating as a toddler that won’t put on their shoes. And if you’re dealing with postpartum hormones, or you’re dealing with perimenopausal hormones … So I wanted to try to reflect a lot of that. It’ll be interesting, because if I am able to write Book 2, it will be in quite different personal circumstances. I’m getting almost double the amount of sleep now that I was getting when I wrote this book and it is easier to carve that time out for myself. But there is still that cost-benefit analysis of, if I spend time writing, is it quote-unquote worth it, because I’m taking myself away from family, or from sleep, or from something? And I think that might be a bit of a hangover from having written as a journalist most of my career, where, as long as you’re doing your job, you’re pretty guaranteed to get published. Your editor has said, yes, I want that story. If they say no, well, you go and look for something else. So, there’s something in that psyche that I’m going to have to get around, where there’s not going to be a guarantee that I get published, and I’m gonna have to figure out why that’s worth doing anyway.

MD: Which is so interesting, especially if you’re going to write fiction.

LN: Yes, yeah.

Creative Inspiration

MD: Tell me, Lauren, what catches your eye? What’s your inspiration for writing, whether it’s writing for magazines or writing this book? But also, what’s inspiring you for writing now?

LN: People are so fascinating. I’ve just finished a magazine feature on one of the other authors in the 2026 debut crew for Australia. She’s got a memoir coming out, it’s called Solo Mum by Choice, Lorena Otes. Her experience is so different from mine, and when I heard about her book, I thought, oh, I want to interview you for that. She’s written a whole book about it, I’ve interviewed her for about an hour, and then retold a condensed version of that. I find that an interesting art form, that’s one way of doing it.

Then as far as fiction, news can be really weird and quite often. I’ve heard other fiction authors talk about this, they’ll see a tiny little snippet in the bottom of the paper about someone who found a foot in a bin in Chicago or whatever, and that’s where their next novel comes from. I find stuff like that all the time. I’ve got a notes app that’s full of it. I think that’s my problem, is I don’t know which one to commit to, but that’s certainly where the inspiration comes from.

MD: I love that, because that’s also me. The weird things you hear in the news, or you see in the paper. I’ve got a little case of clippings and odd things I’ve seen, because people are weird and fascinating.

LN: Yeah, and it can be a link to a news article or something you see on social media. That’s the start of something, it makes you think, oh, I wonder where that could go. And what I know is that if and when I do fiction, I’m going to have to be a plotter, because I’m going to have to know that it’s going somewhere to keep persisting with it.

MD: I have heard from other journalists that they have to plot, because it’s embedded in the way you work.

LN: Yeah, and that could change. I understand that you plot and then you pants, but I would have to know, okay, so they found the foot in the bin, whose foot is it? I’d have to know that to then write the story.

Creative Wisdom

MD: If you were chatting with someone who was at the beginning of their creative work, or thinking about doing some journalism, or writing a non-fiction, what wisdom or advice would you want to share with them?

LN: I think something that a lot of people think when they go into either journalism or a related field is that if they really liked English at school, and they’re really good at English, that’s the key. But it’s not. The key is curiosity. The hardest part as a journalist is finding the yarn. You can get help with the writing. Obviously nice writing is excellent, and copy editors appreciate clean copy. But you can learn and practise those things. I think curiosity is the key thing, and whether that is, as we’ve been talking about, being curious about people, and turning something you hear into a story, or specifically for journalism, you have to want to know stuff, you have to want to ask questions to do the job. That is the key element.

Home for Creativity

MD: What feels like home for you and your creative work?

LN: I love newsrooms. If I was going to do another type of writing, I’d almost have to consider going to one of those hub working spaces, because I can do it at home, and it’s good to get in the zone on your own and not have distractions. But I’ve just been in a newsroom for so much of my adult life that I just love being around other people when you can hear that they’ve just got onto a good yarn, or they’ve just published something, or you can hear the conference table and they’re thinking about what the headline’s gonna be for the next day. And there are very few elections, either state or federal, that I’ve not been in a newsroom for at some point. I love that buzz. And then everyone standing around afterwards at midnight eating cold pizza, hashing over what’s happened. So, when you use that phrase, feels like home, that does, in the creative sense, feel like home.

MD: Oh, I love that. Needing that buzz around you.

LN: Yeah, and you’re around other people who all feed on that too. And it’s the same if we’re able to get together with a bunch of other authors. Everybody’s speaking the same language, you’re excited about the same things.

MD: That actually makes me think, as writers we’re very quiet by ourselves, but put a bunch of writers together and it’s incredibly loud.

LN: Yeah. That’s probably the one writing stereotype I really don’t identify with, the quiet writer in their cave who doesn’t want to deal with other people. That’s definitely not me. And I get that, but I think my writing is so much about the world and interacting that, I get the uninterrupted time, and the wanting to be in a quiet space, and I do need that sometimes. But I have just as much fun interacting with other people about it.

MD: So do I.

LN: That’s why you have a podcast about it. Because you’re so curious about how people do their things.

MD: Do you have a studio or a writing room, or do you write wherever you can?

LN: I wrote Meltdown in our previous home, which was open plan. We didn’t have an office you could shut the door on, so I had to be home alone, basically, to write on that day. I’m now in a new house, and I’m sitting in an office where you can shut the door. But funnily enough, I often find that I pick the computer up and take it out into the kitchen anyway, just to be in the hub of the home. Not necessarily if there’s lots of noise. But maybe that’s a bit of a Stockholm Syndrome thing from the newsroom, I feel like I have to be writing around other people or noise.

MD: Yes, that’s what Stephen King found as well. When he got his big room and his big desk, and then he just had to go and sit in the hub.

LN: Yeah, and the risk with doing that with kids of a certain age is that they will interact with you, so I want to be around but I don’t want to be interrupted. It’s a fine line.

MD: Mummy’s in her bubble. Do not disturb.

LN: You have to shut the door if they’re under a certain age, the bubble has to be physical. But I definitely have other things too. There was an album I listened to on repeat while I was writing Meltdown that in the end I didn’t even hear it anymore, and it was probably a bit of a Pavlovian response that I would turn it on and it would feel like this is writing time. And it was quite mellow music. It did have lyrics. I found instrumental was actually more distracting for me, for some reason, whereas that blended into the background.

MD: Maybe that’s the newsroom.

LN: Yeah, maybe. And as long as there’s that and coffee, then I’m good.

MD: I love that. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and chatting about your creative work. I’m sure there are going to be many people who are trying to cobble together a bigger non-fiction piece, and I’m sure they are going to appreciate your wisdom and the conversation.

LN: Thanks so much for having me.

MD: My absolute pleasure. And there’ll be links to your book, and the survey.

LN: Yes, the Mum Rage survey. Come join my Angry Mums Club.

MD: Are you thinking there might be a sequel in some way?

LN: Well, there’s a little sneaky thing there. If you go to look for the Mum Rage survey, you will see that I’ve put another one up there about a different topic, and that is dipping my toe into the first question of whether this might be an idea for Book 2. I’d also be keen if people would click on the other survey.

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Connect with Lauren

• Lauren on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/laurennovakwrites/)
• Website with survey links (https://laurennovak.com.au/)
• Meltdown (https://laurennovak.com.au/meltdown/)

Books Mentioned

• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
• Solo Mum by Choice by Lorena Otes

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