Everybody loves a bit of romance and Australian author Karly Lane has made a living out of writing about it. With nearly 30 books to her name (and several more in the pipeline) Karly has become one of Australia’s best selling authors of rural and women’s fiction. Many of her most recent books have sold more than half a million copies.
Karly lives on the Mid North Coast of NSW in the valley that her family has called home for five generations. She’s a proud mum of four children and considers herself extremely fortunate to be able to be a full time author.
Australian Rural and Regional News contributor, Serena Kirby, recently caught up with Karly to chat about her journey to becoming an author and why she chose romance as her genre of choice.
ARR.News: When did you start writing in earnest and was becoming an author something you had always hoped to be?
Karly Lane: I always loved writing and loved English at school. I was married quite young and when we moved from the country to Newcastle it was like moving to a massive, big city. I didn’t know anybody and wasn’t working at the time so I was at home a lot. To fill the time, and give me comfort, I’d go to the second hand shop and buy a whole lot of Mills and Boon romance novels. They were 20 cents each and when I’d devoured them I’d take them back and exchange them. It was pretty much all I’d do. It was quite depressing really when I think about it.
When I ran out of books I thought I’d try and write my own. That was sort of the first time I thought, “I’m going to write a book”. I was probably around 20 years old and I didn’t finish writing the book but that was the first inkling I got of becoming an author. It was another 12 years before I went back to it and actually finished it.
ARR.News: And how did it come about that you got your first book published. Did you have an agent at that stage or did you go direct to a publisher?
Karly Lane: In around 2009 I joined the Romance Writers of Australia and went to a few of their conferences, which were brilliant as I got to listen to publishers and learn how to do it properly. That was where I learned that it’s really a kind of a business in a way as you’ve got to know what they’re looking for. I’d been rejected by Mills and Boon but what I picked up from those conferences was that there were other publishers out there and I found Allen & Unwin had a thing called the ‘Friday Pitch’ where anyone can submit a manuscript. I’d been writing fiction that had a rural slant which turned out to be exactly what they were looking for. I was very, very lucky. It just all fell into place at exactly the right moment and I published my first book with Allen & Unwin in 2010.
ARR.News: Considering you write about romance, do you think you’re a romantic at heart?
Karly Lane: Well, I think so, even though I’d be horrified if I was ever proposed to with some fancy romantic gesture. And I don’t like being the centre of attention or anyone looking at me so not really to that extent am I romantic. But I definitely want romance or some sort of relationship in a book to make it a fulfilling read.
ARR.News: And where do you get your story ideas from? Are they triggered by something you’ve heard or seen?
Karly Lane: I’m triggered by a lot of things. I might have been watching a movie or a TV series and I sit there and think, “Oh, that was really cool, but what if instead of that happening, this happens”. Or I might meet someone or read an article about someone who does something that interests me and I just think, “I really want a character that does that”. Then I have to figure out how they can take that ‘something’ to a country town or rural location.
ARR.News: And what about your girlfriends? Do they give you fodder for stories when they’re going through a romance?
Karly Lane: Well, the book that’s coming out in December was actually triggered by my own divorce. You could say writing it was more like therapy and it was actually the whole online dating thing that just blew my mind. I was thinking, “This is just too horrific. This has to be a book”. So sometimes real life tends to trigger a book. But the book is not as traumatic as it could’ve been and I’ve made it more lighthearted than my other books usually are. It’s more a comedy of errors really.
ARR.News: Do you consider yourself a fast writer or do you labour for hours over various aspects of characters or plot?
Karly Lane: Oh, no. I tend to have a very limited attention span. I kind of have a couple of books on the go at the one time so I often jump between books. If I come to a major problem that I need to resolve I tend to just leave that for a while, go onto something different and write a bit more of another book, then come back to it later. I find things tend to then work themselves out once I’ve given it space to breathe. I think if I sat there and tried to stress over it would just mess with my head too much.
If it’s all flowing along well I can write a book in around four months. Mainly they take around seven months to write but that’s not working on the one book for that entire seven months either.
ARR.News: And do you find that writing energises you or exhausts you? Do you finish a writing session and go “phew” or “yay”?
Karly Lane: Again, it depends on what I’m writing about. Sometimes, in really emotional scenes, it can be quite draining. There’s also scenes where I’ve had to work myself up to writing them and I’ve purposely stepped away from writing them for a while because I know what’s going to happen here and it’s just too sad – and I don’t want to be sad today. But then there’s other times where I’ve written and written and felt totally great about the process.
ARR.News: And last but not least Karly… as a writer, what can’t you do without?
Karly Lane: Coffee! Definitely coffee!
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This interview is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
