What is it that prompts a person to take up fiction-writing as a full time occupation and career?

The short answer: financial success, like J.K. Rawlings.

A meandering answer…

Writing fiction full-time isn’t always desirable. Having a job provides the experience necessary to fuel the fiction.

This is because the best fiction is not just fantasy. To grip attention, writing must have enough truth in the understanding of behaviour and emotions that the reader can believe and go along with the story, still wanting to know what happens next.

Pop-fiction is easy to read, feeds the emotions, de-stresses the reader by providing an alternative dream-world, and in happy endings gives a kind of satisfaction that few real lives ever achieve.

It does not raise serious questions that provoke one to think or re-evaluate in a new light. It does not explore the depths of motivations, complexities of characters, or philosophical, spiritual or social struggles. It does not help the mind grow through subtleties of syntax or nuances of understanding. It does not delight the mind’s ear with the sound of its language.

But carve a sharp quill, dip it in indelible ink, scribe on acid-free paper and the result can topple tyrants.

When Salman Rushdie wrote the “Satanic Verses,” he earned a fatwa. The protagonist, who has suffered concussion from impossibly surviving a fall from an aeroplane, dreams of sleeping with a whore who impersonates the Prophet’s first wife. This is what earned this writer a sentence of death – a fantasy of a dream in the mind of an impossible character! Does the intentionally unreal count as blasphemy?

Rushdie discovered that being stranded between English and Muslim Indian culture made him similar to millions of displaced people. So he explores the realities of emotional and cultural displacement. All his writing has this theme. The novels allow him to achieve a depth of exploration that is not possible in the dry texts of history, sociology or psychology, which must gather hundreds of thousands of items of proof and then statistically and qualitatively analyse the data. He immerses the reader in the beauty, pain, and humour of cross-cultural confusion. The reader who might never have been displaced grows a little more insightful about the immigrant sitting beside her on the bus, or about the politics of immigration and votes. And when a century has passed, Salman’s writings will still stand strong, because they scorch that perennial issue the need to belong and to be welcome. This is how fiction transcends pop and becomes high art.

I hope to one day be a writer. I practise at least five hours a day, but when I’m in the zone I’ve been known to go 12 hours without eating, drinking or rising to void. The words pour forth in a torrent that floods my consciousness with such totality that nothing else exists. I am swept along in the river.

Why do I do it? I have a minute private income that is just enough to survive on, so I am not obliged to earn a living. Yet I still need an occupation. The repetition of house and farm work bores me to tears and rots my brain – a slow death by subtle tortures. Tests demonstrated skill with language and insight and recommended that I write, but although I wanted to since very young, I felt I had nothing to write about. How could my tiny life yield anything worth saying?

But what is mundane in my world might be exotic in yours. How would you feel if I showed you how to survive an encounter with a brown snake or a bushfire? Or if I showed you what a joey looks like when it is still a bean-like, blind, pinkie in the pouch of the wallaby that grazes on my lawn? There have always been things to write about everywhere around me. I have only to open my senses and there they are.

Where I live, the descendants of Scottish immigrants have been inbreeding for five generations. They are conservative farmers, lapsed Christians, mostly decent people who vote National (far right, pro-business), mostly very polite, and have limited educations and almost no knowledge of the world beyond what they might see on TV. Into this area, fourteen years ago, came a cult. Secretive. For the extortionate price of a course in alchemy, you too could join them and become an enlightened being. They started businesses in the main street of the village. The prices of coffee and food matched those of CBD’s – but tourists came long distances for the quaint atmosphere and pretty waitresses. It might have brought prosperity to the area, but the money seemed to disappear. The alchemists sold costly potions that depended on the placebo effect, left bills and wages unpaid, and pulled off extraordinary real-estate scams. The problems and resentments with the original locals spread like a toxic infection. Tensions were almost at breaking point…

It looks like a storm in a teacup compared to the world’s problems. But all across the western world in the last 50 years, there have been crises of ethics and faith which have brought strife and suffering to families, communities and countries. The questions arise, how do we deal with the problems of life when so many think the old religions have lost their relevance or are dying of hypocrisy? How do we deal with the problems of sham faiths designed only to brainwash and exploit? How do we deal with the clashes between the needs and beliefs of different people sharing the same environment and resources? A novelist cannot answer such questions, but can explore the different sides of the problems in ways that leave others to search for better answers, or simply to reconsider new angles.

My need to write is born of the need for a meaningful occupation. Others might see my purpose as futile and foolish, and they may be right. My road ahead lasts only until I die, with no certainty that I’ll ever achieve my goals. The only thing I know is that I feel compelled to try.