Josephine Emery

The writing world has changed a lot since I was a lad. (Well, I’ve changed a lot, too!) I first got published by reading lots of men’s magazines and working out the story formula they liked. The mags. were published by the KG Murray Publishing Company. They had titles like, “Man”, “Man Junior”, “Adam”, “Pocket Man”. They each published at least 3 stories a month = 144-150 stories a year. I wrote detective and crime stories for them on my Olivetti portable typewriter.

I also tried Readers Digest and Australian Women’s Weekly but didn’t get the formula right. My background had conditioned me to issues of sex, violence and the expression of male power through those avenues. Romance and Optimism didn’t come naturally to me. There has to be a resonance between your instinctive concerns and the market’s audience. Or, if you like, your psychopathology has to match that of your readers.

Along came a Welshman , Gareth Powell, and his magazines – “Chance”, “Squire”, “Pol” (for the ladies) – were far more sophisticated than the KGM stables. I found my style suited his formula.

Two things killed that market. One was the liberalisation of censorship laws which meant we had to compete with “Playboy”. Besides “Playboy’s” cleavage, we were also competing with Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, et al. 

The other thing was local television drama production. Crawford Productions became the KG Murray of television and I was now pitching story ideas to ‘Homicide”, “Division 4”, “Bluey”. I wrote regularly for “Possessions”, a short-lived attempt at creating a sophisticated, glamorous crime and high-life series by Grundy’s. But Australians like their TV drama to be low-life. Glamor still doesn’t cut it on the local small screen. 

The lesson? If you want to be a writer, find out where the market is. How do people engage with stories? What sort of stories do they engage with?

I set up “The Story of the Future” at the Australia Council because I believed, in 2005, that digital games and online stories were the way of future stories. Some major publishers said that my secret agenda was to destroy book culture. It wasn’t. I wanted writers to have a reasonable income stream and I was convinced that the way forward lay with the digital world. I clashed with literary purists who regarded digital – as one literary publisher said at a SOF seminar – “as nothing but crap!” 

There were some great projects came out of SOF. But we also engaged with the problem of how to make a living as a writer in the digital world. And it’s this I want to share with you. Here’s the roadmap. Here’s the terrain. Go for it!

No one can make it in the 21st Century without their own personal Art Director. The world is now visual, not verbal. It’s how we look that determines how we will be heard (and read). I could have chosen to whinge about this and set up a site with a glum photo of me in a brown cardigan and no make-up. But, hey!  I want to be read. (Well, read in the original sense of the word – not in that darker sense that women like me fear.) So, here is Rose Moxon, my Art Director. She set up and directed my photo shoot with photographer Roberto Duran. She did the visual design for this site. She is an amazing 3D Visual Artist. He is a cool snapper. Click and see.

When Ralph Kerle pitched me the Creative Leadership Forum and the Creative Skills Training Council he resurrected my own dormant world of business-focused creativity. The passion I have that grew from my commitment to a world where art and commerce, science and culture are all one world. Work I did in the 1980s where I used my ability as a writer, a creator of myths and stories, to transform business cultures. The latent power I discovered waiting to burst forth from Renaissance masterworks and old Hollywood movies. The 1990s, though, saw the barriers go up to words like ‘creativity’, ‘ethics’, ‘personal development’ in the corporate world. But now the barriers are coming down again.

The strength that being a creative artist in my field gave me was the strength to live with uncertainty and ambiguity. To set sail not knowing the final nature of the destination: just knowing that it was out there and I would find it. The strength to go with a hunch and make it happen.

These are the strengths needed right now in the business and corporate world. These are the places where you can learn those strengths.

I walked into the room to hear the pitch. I wasn’t expecting much. I had come to be polite, really. A tall female dynamo was surrounded by cables and USB connectors, totally unfazed by the rigmarole of making her computer talk to our government-issue system. She got it running and I was spellbound. Michela Ledwidge: film-maker, musician, Veejay/Deejay, systems architect, writer. She was the leading edge of the digital wing of the future. I got her funding for digital jam session at the ‘Remix My Lit’ project at the Melbourne Writers Festival. I introduced her to The Picture Tank crew and we all got moving on Terri & Azim. When I needed advice on making this site I turned to her.

I went to see the movie The Jammed as word of mouth about it spread. I was astonished at the virtuosity of the direction and the passion and the power of the story, the performances, and the fact that it was made for less than half a million dollars and yet never showed it. When I met the director/writer, Dee McLachlan and the producer, Andrea Buck I was so impressed with their vision, their talents, and their slate that I invested in one of their pictures: Terri & Azim. Their company is, The Picture Tank, and they are in Melbourne.

People talk a lot about ‘supporting the local film industry’ and how to go about it. Guys, here’s how you do it. Put your money where your mouths are.