Stories from the heart

Photo: John Selkirk

Thom Conroy, who was second, Emma Gallagher, third, and Sue Francis, the winner. Below, Jim Mora gave an armchair reading from the best entries.

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SUE FRANCIS'S winning story popped into her head her one day when she was out moving the cattle.

"I was out on the farm one day and I'd been writing my novel and getting pretty bogged down, and two stories actually came into my head. I was moving a break fence – an electric fence you move across the paddock to give the cattle a new line of feed – and Big Blondie, as one of my friends calls her, just came into my head."

Francis, who runs a 165ha property in South Canterbury with her husband Cliff, fleshed out Big Blondie as the blousy minor character and wrote the first draft of The Concentrators pretty much straight away, but don't get the idea she just wrote the story and posted it in.

She set it aside, then did four more drafts over a few days, then left it for six weeks. At the end of that time she took it out and did another five drafts. "It's kind of a long time to bake something, or a short gestation, I'm not sure."

Francis finally struck gold with her third entry to the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards. She describes her story as a mix of "myth and memory and imagination and experience. I did work in Temuka, so there's a semi-autobiographic thing there, as there is in all writing." What did she change over those nine drafts?

"It was word economy; it's all those things you do when you're writing news stories to try to get to the nub of the story and working out for myself what it was really about. It was things like words you like. You know that [journalistic] saying 'Kill your darlings'? I took them out. Because one of my readers said, 'I hadn't heard that phrase before. What does that mean?' I thought, 'that has got to go'. So I was quite lethal in that way. But then it was amazing, because what came out was that the bones of the story were still there. Maybe there was enough space, more space for the reader."

Francis, 47, began her working life as a journalist. Or as this straight-speaking farm girl prefers, a reporter. "Journalists are the ones who wear nicer clothes, I think." The paper was the Timaru Herald. Over the years she had two sons, Theo, 22, who's in London, and Henry, 16, and in time moved to the Oamaru Mail.

"When we were first married, there was a shocking drought, so I had Theo and went back to work very quickly, because we were absolutely broke."

She greatly enjoyed the social side of journalism. "I just loved reporting; I still really miss all the people. Because now my life's quite different – it's relatively isolated, but then that probably works quite well with writing. Being out on the farm's a good balance too." When she says relatively isolated, she means it. The couple's farm, where they breed Simmental beef cattle, is at Waihao Downs, out of Waimate – that's halfway between Oamaru and Timaru for urbanites.

After the Mail, she did a bit of freelancing, contract work for the likes of the Lottery Board, then tutored in journalism at Aoraki Polytechnic in Timaru. She started entering writing competitions about 10 years ago, but had been writing stories before that for her boys. Cliff got a farm-mapping business going about 10 years ago. The company, Farm Mapping NZ, measures how much productive and non-productive land farms have, based on aerial photographs. The plan was for them to swap over when that got going and she would farm but also really get into the writing. It paid off, in terms of visible success, three years ago when she won the Press summer fiction competition. That was with The Quince Cafe, which has just been published by Random House in Best NZ Fiction #6. The story was read on Radio NZ National last year, described as "a gently comic story" about the quirky characters at a cafe.

Francis has always used humour in her fiction, she says. "A lot of the competitions I've entered has been the dark, brooding [material]. I've got that out of my system now, I think," she says with a chortle. There is still a bit of darkness in The Concentrators. "As there is in life," she says. "Our local librarian, he often says, 'Oh why is all New Zealand writing so dark?', and I don't know that that's right. But Katherine Mansfield, what she said about the dark, brooding bush – there is that threat, isn't there. Is it our psyche? I don't know."

Perhaps we are lightening up, I suggest. "We have good reason to. We're so lucky."

Last year Francis studied creative writing at Massey University under Thom Conroy, who was second in the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards.

"That [course] was absolutely amazing, just in terms of the poetry and short fiction – I just think you can never stop learning. And probably because of living in such an isolated place, not a lot of writing friends right there, it's really good to feel part of that writing community. And then this year I've been studying in Dunedin, writing a novel." It's another Aoraki course, Creative Writing for Publication. "There are novelists, short-fiction writers, poets, creative non-fiction – there are some amazing writers there. And we're really well supported by Diane Brown, our tutor. We get together once a week and workshop each other's work."

Creative writing courses can teach technical details, she says, but writers have to have that passion and drive.

"You have to have the core of that creative story, that compulsion to tell the story. The courses can certainly help with the mechanics and with analysing your work. Certainly being with like-minded people, that helps keep you going, helps your motivation. Because it validates... like for reporters, or hairdressers, or cooks – or farmers – they're all around each other all the time, but writers, we're often just tucked away doing our thing. And it's very important to get together. And that has really helped me a lot this year."

She says winning the Short Story Awards is a wonderful spur.

"I have to go home and work even harder now. It's just such a privilege to get this prize. For writers, you do have to believe in it and do it for yourself, all the time, but to have other people enjoy your work and to get it into the world, it's your dream."

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