Inside the Mind - Peter Morris

I’d wanted to write a novel since I was in my twenties, but for most of my life I never really believed I could do it. There was always work, family and everything else that gets in the way, and writing a book remained one of those things I thought I might do ‘one day’. When I reached my sixties, I realised that if I was ever going to do it, ‘one day’ had probably arrived. The real inspiration for *The Long Grass* came from two places. The first was a childhood friend of mine who had passed away a few years earlier. He’d had an incredibly difficult life and I wanted, in some small way, to pay tribute to him. He became part of the inspiration for one of the novel’s most important characters. The other inspiration was Far North Queensland. I spent time in Weipa in the mid-1980s, when the novel is set, and it was an extraordinary place. It was remote, isolated and sometimes pretty wild, and I witnessed some things up there that stayed with me for the next forty years. Eventually those two things came together. I began imagining a murder mystery in which the victims weren’t necessarily innocent, and the killer wasn’t simply a monster. I wanted to explore what might drive someone to kill, and whether understanding why they did it could change the way we felt about them. Once I had that idea, I finally had the story I’d been waiting all those years to write.

The Long Grass is a crime novel set in Far North Queensland in 1985, and the story is told in three parts. It begins in the remote mining town of Weipa, where three men sleeping rough in the long grass near a local beach are murdered in three very different ways. A team of detectives is flown up from Brisbane to investigate and they quickly discover that Weipa is a very different world from the city they have left behind. The investigation takes them from Weipa to Cairns and eventually back to Brisbane. Along the way we get to know the detectives themselves, particularly Detective Sergeant Annette Mollison, who became a much more important character as I was writing her than I originally intended. I became very fond of Annette, and judging by the feedback I've received from readers, quite a few of them did too. She'll return in my next novel. But The Long Grass changes considerably in its second part. Once the detectives have worked out who committed the murders, the perspective shifts and we begin hearing the killer's story in his own voice. We go back through his life, his childhood and the trauma that shaped him, and begin to understand not just how he became a killer, but why he believes he had to do what he did. In many ways, the murder investigation in the first part of the novel is the vehicle that takes us to that story. What begins as a question of who killed these men? gradually becomes a much more difficult question: if we understand why someone became a killer, does that change how we judge them? The final part brings the detective and the killer together again in the Noosa Everglades, where those two sides of the story finally collide.

Some of my characters began with people I had known or encountered over the years. I would take certain characteristics, mannerisms or personality traits that I remembered and use them as the starting point for someone in the book. But others really did seem to create themselves as I was writing. The detectives are probably the best example. When I wrote the scene where they are flying into Weipa, I realised I needed to tell the reader something about these three people. The problem was, at that point, I didn't really know who they were either. I had decided that my lead detective would be a man in his forties, but beyond that I was largely making him up as I went along. Then I decided I wanted the second detective to be a woman, and that was the beginning of Annette Mollison. When I started creating Annette, I found myself thinking about two very strong women in my own life: my youngest daughter and my older sister. Annette isn't either of them, but she has elements of both. She's staunch, independent and uncompromising. She doesn't take much nonsense from anybody, particularly men who think a woman's opinion should somehow carry less weight than their own. I liked her almost immediately. What surprised me most as a first-time novelist was what happened after that. Once these people had personalities, backgrounds and beliefs of their own, they began influencing the story. I would put them into a situation intending the plot to go in one direction and realise that the character I'd created simply wouldn't behave the way I needed them to. So I had to change the story. That was probably one of the great discoveries for me in writing *The Long Grass*. You think you're creating characters to serve the story, but at some point, if you've created them well enough, they start telling you where the story needs to go.

My typical writing day starts at about six in the morning. The first thing I do is make breakfast for my wife and take it to her in bed. I've done that pretty much every morning I've been home for the past 33 years, since I got sober. I think of it as a small daily amends for some of my behaviour before then. After that I feed the dog, make myself a coffee and some toast, sit down at the computer and start writing. Sometime during the morning, I take the dog for a walk for about an hour. In a Queensland summer that has to happen fairly early, before it gets too hot, but in winter I can leave it until later in the morning. Strangely enough, that walk has become an important part of my writing process. Some of my best ideas come to me while I'm walking. I'll think about whatever part of the story I'm working on, play different possibilities through in my head and quite often come up with a solution to something that's been bothering me. I'll make a few notes on my phone as I walk, then come home and start turning those ideas into the story. At the moment, I usually write until around lunchtime because I still have other work that actually pays me money in the afternoons! I'm retiring at the end of this year, though, so I'll soon find out what a writing day looks like when I no longer have an excuse to stop at lunchtime.

The first reward was simply proving to myself that I could actually write a book. I'd wanted to do it for such a long time without ever really believing I could, so there was something quite extraordinary about finally typing the words *The End*. I'd taken this idea that had existed only in my head and turned it into an actual novel. Then, of course, there was the first time I held a paperback copy in my hands. That's a pretty special feeling. But I think the most rewarding part has been hearing from people who have read it and enjoyed it, particularly when something in the story has genuinely affected them. One response that meant a great deal to me came from my sister-in-law. Some of the parts of the novel dealing with alcoholism, recovery and Alcoholics Anonymous resonated very strongly with her because of experiences in her own life, and she told me that parts of the book had moved her to tears. That affected me more than I expected. I'd written something fictional, but somehow it had connected with a real person's own experiences and emotions. As a first-time author, realising that words I'd put on a page could do that was incredibly rewarding. And then there are all the smaller moments: someone I'd never met asking me where they can buy my book, receiving a good review or watching another sale appear on Amazon. I'm still new enough to all of this that I get a kick out of every one of them.

There have been plenty of challenges, but one of the biggest surprises was discovering that writing the book was only half the job. While I was writing *The Long Grass*, my biggest challenge was maintaining momentum. I found that the less time I left between writing sessions, the easier it was to stay inside the story. If I left it too long, I had to find my way back into the characters and remember exactly where my head had been when I stopped. So I learned fairly quickly that, for me at least, writing regularly was important. Then I published the book and discovered an entirely new set of challenges. As an indie author, you're suddenly not just the author. You're also the marketing department, publicity department, website manager and social media manager. I've had to get my head around Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, building an author website, advertising, book competitions and all sorts of things I knew very little about when I started. And then there are the emails. I probably receive ten emails a day from people offering to market my book, promote it, review it, turn it into a film, introduce it to thousands of readers or otherwise transform my literary career. The challenge is working out which ones are genuine, which ones are simply trying to sell me something and which ones should go directly into the bin. So I've discovered that being an indie author involves a lot more than writing books. But I'm learning as I go, and despite the occasional urge to throw the computer out the window, I'm still enjoying the journey.

I write in Microsoft Word, but probably the most useful tool I've discovered has been ChatGPT. One of the things that had always intimidated me about writing a novel was the amount of research involved. I've been an avid reader all my life, and I'd often find myself wondering how on earth an author knew all these tiny details about a particular place, profession or period in history. The thought of doing years of research before I could even start writing was one of the things that probably stopped me from attempting a novel earlier. Because The Long Grass is set in 1985, getting those details right became particularly important. ChatGPT became a research assistant that I could constantly interrogate as I wrote. What firearms were Queensland police carrying in 1985? What vehicles were they driving? What could forensic investigators realistically determine at the time? What aircraft would have flown between Cairns and Weipa? Would this particular technology have existed? Was this expression actually being used in Australia then? Sometimes the questions became incredibly specific, but that's exactly what I needed. It allowed me to research as I wrote rather than spending months researching everything I might possibly need before starting the book. As a first-time writer, I've also found it useful as an editing assistant. If I'm unhappy with the structure of a sentence or paragraph, or I'm unsure about grammar, spelling or whether something flows properly, I can get another set of eyes on it immediately. I still make the decisions and write the story. In fact, I'm quite protective of my own voice. But having an endlessly patient research and editing assistant sitting beside me has made an enormous difference. It removed one of the barriers that had stopped me from attempting a novel for many years.

Start writing. That would be my biggest piece of advice. Don't convince yourself that you need to have the entire novel mapped out before you begin. If you've got an idea that excites you, sit down and see where it takes you. If you're writing a crime novel, for example, you really don't need much to get started. You need a victim, you need a killer and you need somewhere for it to happen. It certainly helps to know why the killer did it — that was particularly important with *The Long Grass* — but you don't necessarily need to know every twist and turn that's going to get you from the first page to the last. I certainly didn't. Once I started writing, I found that the story developed almost organically. Characters I hadn't completely planned began developing personalities of their own. Those personalities affected the decisions they made, which in turn changed where the story went. New ideas appeared simply because I was writing. So don't wait until you think you're ready, because you may never feel completely ready. Just start writing. You might surprise yourself with where the story takes you. More importantly, you might surprise yourself with what you're capable of.

Annette Mollison rides again! I don't have a title yet, but I'm currently a couple of hundred pages into the next novel and Annette is very much at the centre of it. She was a character I really fell in love with while writing The Long Grass. What I hadn't expected was how many readers would feel the same way about her. I've had some wonderful feedback about Annette, so when I started thinking seriously about another novel, bringing her back seemed an obvious choice. The new book is set in Far North Queensland again, this time primarily in 1987. Annette has relocated to Cairns, she's now married to John Maguire and her career has moved forward considerably since we last saw her. The story actually begins ten years earlier, in 1977, with a prologue that sets in motion events that won't fully emerge until a decade later. Then we jump forward to 1987 and Annette's story begins. I don't want to give too much away, but there are missing people, a possible serial killer, political corruption, property developers, some fairly nasty characters and plenty happening out in the Far North Queensland bush. Somehow, all those different threads are going to become intertwined. I'm also planning another section told in the first person, as I did in *The Long Grass*, although this time it will be from a very different perspective. I'm definitely not going to say whose. So that's what's next. I'm well into it, the story is growing in directions I didn't necessarily expect and, most importantly, I'm having an enormous amount of fun writing it. As for the title? I'm hoping the book will eventually tell me what it wants to be called.