I now live in NSW, but when I was writing the first draft of my debut novel ‘Beneath the Mother Tree’, I was residing in Queensland, in the Redlands on Quandamooka country, where I was lucky enough to grow up. Queensland regional creatives have access to the Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF), in which Arts Queensland partners with local governments to support regional artists. Sadly, in NSW no such fund exists, and no unpublished manuscript awards exist either. NSW writers are greatly disadvantaged in this regard. (The Queensland Literary Awards, the Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award, the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards are all state based categories for unpublished manuscripts. It does make one wonder why the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards doesn’t have a section for unpublished manuscripts).
But back to the subject of this post – because I was based in QLD at the time, I was able to obtain a RADF grant to work with freelance editor Nicola O’Shea. In 2004, Nicola left her senior editing position at Harper Collins to go freelance. Her clients now include Pan Macmillan, Random House, HarperCollins, Allen & Unwin, Hachette Australia, and freelance writers who are fortunate enough to secure her services. She is always booked up at least a year ahead. There is a reason for this. Nicola weaves magic.
She took my skeletal first draft and turned it into a suspenseful mystery. Working with Nicola was a crash course in novel writing. She seized my flimsy story, cut it up into little pieces, repositioned everything and put it all back together again like a spellbinding puzzle. I remember staring in awe at her pages and pages of editing notes, wondering what kind of brain can do that? What kind of brain can hold a story with parallel strands in their head, reposition all the events of the plot and place it all back together without losing a strand, without making one big ugly mess?
I took her detailed structural edit in hand and reworked, filled out, cut, layered, fell in love with my characters and found magic.
I hope to work with Nicola now for the rest of my days, and if she dies before me, I will recommend her brain be dissected and studied, so future generations aren’t disadvantaged, so her wisdom can be passed on…because, let’s face it, every writer needs a Nicola O’Shea in their lives.