Margaret Balderson writes . . .
Sea Bird (due to be released early 2002) is the first book I have written for a long time. It is also the first book I have ever co-written with another person. I always thought that sharing the writing of a book would be very difficult. But in the case of Sea Bird it was surprisingly simple.
It all started one day with a group of us sitting around a table out in the open having morning tea. We were all volunteer workers at the Merigal Dingo Sanctuary in the Southern Highlands of NSW. As we sat there watching the dingoes and dodging the cheeky noisy mynah birds who bombarded us continually for biscuit crumbs, I asked everyone to write me down a word. It was for a game I often played with budding writers—especially children. In order to write a story all I wanted was a personal name, a place, a colour, a feeling, an object and an animal or bird. My good friends obliged (no doubt secretly thinking I was a trifle batty) and I took the six bits of paper home with me. Over the next couple of days I looked at the six words now and then, and thought about them a little. Then I wrote an opening paragraph. Just for fun I pushed it across to my friend Elizabeth and said to her, ‘Now it’s your turn’. So it began, and so it went on for a couple of weeks, then a couple of months as we passed the story from one to the other. Gradually a story-line took shape and characters emerged and developed. Of course, we galloped ahead of ourselves sometimes and I had to do a lot of pruning along the way. This is always painful because often you have to cut out your very favourite bits of writing, or else they get in the way of the story. But finally we ended up with something that seemed to work.
I call my word games ‘spark plugs’ because they are just little prompts to think about when you get stumped for ideas. The words can be important to the story or hidden away so that you hardly notice them at all. The words I started with for Sea Bird were ‘Isobel’, ‘under the jetty’, ‘comb’, ‘suspicious’, ‘turquoise’ and ‘ostrich’. They are all there but they aren’t important to the story at all. And yet if my friends at Dingo Sanctuary hadn’t given them to me that morning, Sea Bird would never have been written.
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