Stories Behind the Story with Better Reading

Stories Behind The Story: Stella Quinn on Her Inspirations From Real-Life Events and Characters

Stella Quinn talks to Cheryl about her journey from accountant to award-winning romance author, her disciplined writing routine, and her inspirations from real-life events and characters. Her latest novel, Down the Track, is out now.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Duration:: 30m
Broadcast on:: 21 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome to the Better Reading Podcast, Stories Behind the Story, brought to you by Belinda Audio. Listen to Belinda audio books, anywhere, everywhere. - Hi, this is Cheryl Arkel from the Better Reading Podcast, Stories Behind the Story. We talk to authors about how they came to tell us their story. (upbeat music) Stella Quinn, welcome to Better Reading. - Thanks, Cheryl, it's lovely to be here. - Stella has had a love affair with books since she first discovered the alphabet. As an active member of romance writers of Australia, Stella has won their Emerald Sapphire and Valerie Parva Awards. And she was also a finalist in the Ruby romantic book of the year award. So today she's here to talk to us about her new novel down the track. It's a feel good, funny, unmissable romance. Do you know, I went to the, you'll remember this, I guess, I went to the romance writers festival for the first time. Was it us, do you think it might have been last year? I was up there and I'm hosting it. And I couldn't believe the engagement and the fun and the camaraderie with all the authors. It was such a wonderful atmosphere. - I first went to conference when it was here in Brisbane because it was sort of an easy, not too big a step to take. And I have met a few people online prior and somebody always organises a newbie event. Some sort of published author that you've heard of gathers you all into a room and everybody has meets each other and has a few drinks and what have you. And really gentle introduction into a group of people that you might otherwise feel a bit intimidated by. So from that moment on, you feel like no questions should be left unanswered. You can just approach people and feel part of the group. It's wonderful. - Yeah, it really did feel that it had the vibe. And you know what I was also really impressed with? The level of outfits people were wearing. Like I saw Tiaras, I saw a lot of sequins, I saw glitter and I just loved it. - There's a couple of women who each year come, they write a historical fiction and they're both into historically accurate costuming. One of the ladies, Bronwyn Parrish, she's in fact just about to start a doctorate in historical costuming during, I think, Australia's Gold Rush era. And they will come in full on like hustles and- - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I don't even know the names of all the regalia they're wearing, and they'll have a different outfit for every day, it's incredible. - Yeah, it's wonderful, really nice atmosphere. Well, talk to me about yourself, because we haven't spoken before, like go right back. So you love the alphabet, so then you just, in a very young age you wanted to be a writer, which is really quite unusual. And now for me, it's always a straw poll from the authors that I've spoken to, but I will say it's, you know, certainly over 500. So it's a good straw poll. But a lot of people tell me that, you know, even though they loved reading, and that's a common thread, right? That they've loved reading, but they never thought that they could be an author 'cause it was so far away. - So my first sort of moment I looked back on was when I was at primary school week, I'm an immigrant, and we moved countries a lot. So I'm getting in with England originally. Then when I was four, we hit Australia, via Hong Kong for a year. Then Australia for four years, and then I spent 20 years in New Guinea, up in New Guinea from the age of nine to 29. - Doing what? - My dad worked as an accountant up there. And then when I finished a study, I worked up there as an accountant as well. And yeah, we all have a great fondness. - So Stella, you're an accountant by trade. - I am. Yeah, where we're not encouraged to be overly creative. - How on earth does an accountant become a creative storyteller? - Well, I think it began when I was little, and I was, we just started at a new school again in Papua New Guinea. And I am terrible at sport. I can't catch a ball. Up there, it should be cool in the classroom. You had to be really great at Elastic. So it's a game where you wrap a long elastic loop around ankles and you do all this. - I loved that. - Yeah, pop scotchy-type movements. So I was useless. I was only allowed to ever be one of the sticks at the end with the elastic around the ankle or the knee or the eye. But we had to write a poem on Jane Class. And I used some, I don't know, ridiculous phrase in there that I must have overheard my mother saying. Something like, "Oh, it was the bane of my existence." And that was a line in the poem. And I was, you know, just precocious, nine or 10 year old, I suppose. And the teacher said to me, "That's a really great poem." And I loved this line. And I thought, "Oh, I feel really good about myself." And I think that glory that other kids were getting at being awesome at Elastics, that was my moment. I thought, actually better than these guys. That's something. And that confidence, that little moment, self-esteem, I think, is built on little tiny moments. Like that. And that, to me, is the kernel of wanting to write. And at high school, I went to boarding school in Toowoomba. We had this great English teacher who would encourage us to write sort of things outside of what our schoolwork was. And he would always read them and give us feedback, which was very generous, 'cause we'd be writing pages of drivel. And he'd just, you know, read them all and say, "This was okay and work on this." But then I went to uni and I was studying creative writing. And I had this crusty old lecturer who was about 140. And I handed something in and he just mocked it in front of this room full of students. And I wasn't an overly confident uni student. So to get mocked in a tutorial setting was crushing. And that's when I switched and became a tax account. And I didn't even think about it for a lot. For 20 years, you know how life keeps mortgage, career sort of takes over, can really take over. So then when my youngest, I've got four kids. When the youngest hit high school, I went back to uni. And fortunately, he was long gone. And there was this amazing group of lecturers there. It was run by, you might have come across Kim Wilkins who's a really fun speaker and a lot of writing festivals up here in Brisbane. And she was in charge. And wow, writing had taken on a whole different angle when I re-arrived. And I've went there to sort of benchmark myself to see, I wanted as all to be doing the same assignment and handing them in and then me seeing where my mark might be compared with these other people. Because it's so hard to understand about your own writing if it's readable or, you know, a lot of garbage. Anyway, the benchmarking, I thought, yeah, okay. This is really worth me devoting a lot of time because it is a massive time commitment. And then, yeah, I started writing pretty seriously. And I'm a total genre tart. I'll write anything anywhere, anytime. I'll love it all. But it's through these rural romances for Harper Collins that I've been able to sort of get. Well, I've got six books under contract with them now. So it's really taken off. But, you know, I still have dreams of getting back into some of those other genres of I've got a year and a full. I was just pondering there because it's the first time, I think, that I've heard a story from an author where you actually knew you were going to be a writer. You were dissuaded and you walked away from it. Usually they'll have their career first up. You know, they'll be a lawyer or they'll be a filmmaker or usually attracted to a story kind of mediums, except for Tony Jordan, who I think became a scientist. But, you know, that's different. There's different fields. And then the yearning for writing doesn't go away and they come back. But you're the first time where I've heard you wanted to be that. You knew you were going to be that and you were dissuaded, went away and now came back. Do you feel that that was wasted time? How do you feel about that? Well, I think if ever my four children were to listen to this podcast, I'd have to immediately say not at all was that time wasted. No. And it's also quite exhausting having four kids all playing sport and, you know, I worked at the same time. So not wasted also because now I feel like I have lived enough life and suffered enough pain and had enough joyful moments to really get deep into characters, which, you know, I'm team character. I'm not team plot at all. I love, I have to love a character in a book. And I think those years are really well spent in terms of building up your, I don't know, you're in a Wikipedia of stuff that you can fall upon when you. And also your experience of stuff. I think there's definitely, I only talked about this this week to somebody, to a young author I was speaking to yesterday. Amy Neff, I think her name was. And, you know, she's so young. And I think fiction, writing fiction in particular, grows with an author. I've noticed that with a lot of the authors that I've admired, you know, when I've been reading them over the years. 'Cause, you know, very often you grow up with an author. You're reading somebody in year 12 and then they're still writing. You're still reading and the mood changes, right? The experience changes. - I was listening to the, just for this earlier today, I was listening to your podcast with Rachel Johns. - Oh, I love that. - And she said, 'cause she's been writing for so long, she said the same, she, her thoughts about what she wants to write about and what's important versus what might not be, have sort of changed, as she's been coming forward in her career. - Yeah. When you were talking about those moments in primary school that really shaped you, and you said, you weren't good at sport or elastic, neither was I. Do you know, and I've had this, obviously this memory in there of nothing. You've just woken it. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, it's come out. I was a good hand writer, right? And I remember this might've happened to you. I don't know what the age difference is between you and I, but you weren't allowed to have a fountain pen until you could write beautifully, or write well. I was the first person to get a fountain pen. - Oh. - There you go. And I chose the light blue one. And I had forgotten that until that movie you talked about it, isn't it? - Well, that's a lovely memory. - Yeah, it's a nice memory. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really nice memory. 'Cause I was, I mean, we were immigrants as well, so I was always playing catch up with so many things, 'cause we spoke Arabic at home, so it was really hard. Yeah, my parents' Lebanese. Yeah, we were always catching up. But anyway, look where we are now. What can I say? What can I say? Today we launched, and you probably haven't seen this yet. I don't know what you call it, a program, a segment called Authors on Authors. - Right. - That we've launched on YouTube. And it's two authors talking to each other on film. And the idea came to me, and it is just going back to part of your conversation, is it's so interesting, the romance festival, you know, speaking or listening to Rachel, John's. Do you know Rachel? - Yes. - Yes, of course. - Of course. - Yeah, so the readers love that. They love the interaction between two authors, I think. Like, I feel as though this is a great medium, me speaking to authors, but I'm not an author. And so the idea came to me because in Australia in particular, and I have been to the US, and there's not the same camaraderie, but here in Australia, you pair up two like-minded authors, or not even like-minded, but two authors that have regard and respect each other. And you get magic, I think. - I did a book tour earlier in the year through Southern Queensland with Penelope Ijanu, who writes in a similar genre. - Yeah, I've met her to me. Although her heroes are always rather more Nordic than minor. And at one of the library events, one of the readers said to us, you guys must have been best friends for years. And I was like, yeah, actually, we sort of don't know each other that well. I mean, we do now after this book tour we want together, and she stayed here at my house. So now we like total besties. But I think we were just, something about the work we both did, gave us a camaraderie that she was interpreting as something that had had a lot of longevity to it. - And therefore, I think readers love that. And what I wrote in the media release today, when I put it out, was that readers enjoy that intimacy of looking on to that storytelling and looking into that friendship. And we launched today with Michael Connolly and Candace Fox. - Fantastic. - Now they had not met before, but Candace has docked in. And it was so cute, you know, and I really love it. And I think the potential in that is fantastic in this country. It's something that I always find very warming. I really enjoy knowing that people like each other. - I'm the library talk rounds. Often it's, if you can find an author who lives nearby or is similarly got a book launch on, sometimes we do them together and the audience does love them. And this weekend, I'm actually going, there's a readers retreat on, Rachel John's organized, in fact, with her friend, Anthea Hodgson, it's not the Gold Coast, 100 readers, 15 authors going. And all of the panels are authors interviewing authors, all book reviewers interviewing authors. They are fun people who are active in the Australian book review scene and they come in and view them. And yeah, the readers really love it. - We all have somewhere we're trying to get to. As the largest energy producer in Colorado, Chevron is helping meet rising demand and we're working to do it responsibly. Our next gen tankless facilities reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of our operations by more than 90% compared to our older designs. Working to provide Colorado with energy that's affordable, reliable and ever cleaner. So everyone can get to where they want to be. You've arrived. That's energy and progress. Visit chevron.com/tankless. - Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At mid mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announce they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. - That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. - $45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees, promoting for new customers for limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month slows. Full turns at mintmobile.com. - So tell me then, so you've had a career of accounting. You've raised a family. So at what point, tell me about the evolution of your first book and how you got it to be published? - Oh, okay. So I started actually writing an historical book, Boy's Own Adventure set in New Guinea because that's an area where I grew up. Spent 20 years and it's got a wonderful, well, so wonderful. It's got a very interesting and intense war history to the town where I lived. So that's still sitting in my drawer because I was sort of teaching myself how to write while I wrote that, I think. So then I started because at the time I thought, maybe I'm also interested in editing. I wasn't really sure that writing was perhaps going to be my thing, maybe editing. And the course I did at UQ was writing, editing and publishing course. So I thought, as a bit of a test run, I'll get myself a pen name, still a clean and write myself some romance because it's the world's biggest selling genre. And I've always had a romance reading habit. So I felt I was well first in understanding what it took. And then I started entering competitions because as you would know, very difficult to get published, Australia were quite a small market. So I entered a competition, it's run by the Australian Society of Authors and HQ fiction and imprint of HarperCollins and it's commercial fiction prize. And so my first book, they had a short list of four and mine was called The Vet from Snowy River and Rachel Donovan rang me. She's a publisher at HarperCollins who looks after me. She rang me and she said, "Oh look, you're not going to win, "but we want to cover your book. "If can you make it 30,000 words longer?" And I said, "I reckon I can." And she said, "You've got eight weeks." So yeah, I was, and before that, I'd just been pottering along in coffees. You know, I've been a really aesthetic writer, I'd needed the wintry son, a dog at my fetch. I was all about the form of it, but not the substance. So then suddenly I had eight weeks to crank out. 30,000 words, that fit with the story. So I had to sort of find a little storyline in it and sort of bring it to the fall. Anyway, she loved it. She took it to an acquisitions meeting and then I got a two book contract and then another two book contract and now I'm on my third one track which has left me with no time at all. And sometimes I think, oh, it's a lot of hard work. I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself, but then the other half of me is that the glory, you love the glory. And I do, I love the glory. After years of hoping and dreaming and wishing, seeing your books on a bookshelf, you just cannot fathom the delight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the delight that somebody is reading and getting pleasure out of it, that's what I think is the most wonderful thing. And people call him in saying, oh, I cried when this happened because that happened in my life and you captured that. And I think, oh, thank you. Yes. Yeah, it is joyous. And how do you approach your work riding day? Is it like you approach your accounting work day? I'm a morning person. And so I'm up early. I will be at a coffee shop at 6 a.m. Rainhales, no. And I type into a Bluetooth keyboard attached to my phone and I will type for about two hours. And that's my really good time. And I don't edit myself. I just sort of blur, blur, blur, blur, blur. And then later on in the day, I'll sort of tidy it up. But I'm pretty, I'm quite disciplined. I have to be quite disciplined to get the work done. Yeah, but I do enjoy that time. Sometimes I get to the middle and I realise I don't even know who my character is, what's making them tick. And I wish I'd gotten grown better at that, but I don't seem to have. So you don't have a whiteboard up there where you've got your characters. Do you do that? Well, I do. Yes. I'm a plotter. I'm a total plotter. Plot everything. But then I get a third of the way through and I've gone so far off my plan that I've forgotten where I started. And then it's sort of I have to re-plot and re-plan. They seem to get develop a life of their own. Or what you think was their deepest fear or yearning actually turns out to be something quite different when you start making them interact with other people. And then I need to be a long way in before I get a true sense of what they really want in life. Yeah, yeah, interesting. OK, so tell me a little bit about Down the Track. Right, my inspiration for this, that two or three years ago on the ABC News was an article about three women in Western Queensland who lived on a sheep station and they were hobby foster cuts. They liked fostering fossils. And they had stumbled upon a site with some fossilized bone in it. They contacted a paleontologist at Townsville who came out and they were there on their property. It was a plesiosaur, so a swimming dinosaur. And the quality of this fossil was incredible. It was one of the best preserved plesiosaur fossils the world's never seen. And I think two of these women might have been cousins. They weren't particularly young women. They were my age, perhaps. And I thought that'd be a great start to a story. So I begin my story with, they call the rock chicks. These three women. So my story is two sisters in this late '70s called the dirt girls. They live on a sheep's fashion in Western Queensland and they have found a fossil some years ago. There was a little bit of a flurry of interest then, but nothing further was found. But one of the dirt girls is unwell and it's her sort of bizarre dream hope to have a dinosaur found on their property because that area is dinosaur rich. She's Australia's richest source of dinosaur fossils. So they send a letter down to a paleontologist in Brisbane and ask her to come out and do another dig. And it just happens to arrive on the desk of my main character, Jo, who's in her mid-30s and she's at rock bottom. She is broke. Her, she's divorced. Her 12-year-old son, which I think is 10, her 10-year-old son, Luke. They're having a cold walk. He only wants to live with his dad. And her career is in jeopardy because, as with a lot of government workers, certainly in Queensland, I don't know about the rest of Australia, they're on contract to contract basis. So job security is difficult. And there's been word that her contract's not going to get renewed when it runs out. So she gets this letter and she thinks, "I've got nothing to lose." And if maybe I've got a lot to gain because if there is something there, that might spin enough interest for me to get a new work contract. Maybe my son might want to be interested in come out camping. I'll have some space from my dickhead ex. So she goes out to Yindie Creek, a little town based on Winton. But unfortunately for her, well, well, it turns out, fortunately, Yindie Creek, she has been there before when she was a student working on another dig. And while she was there, she had a fling with the helicopter master pilot. And she then dumped him and moved off to Patagonia to dig on a Tyrannosaurus rex site all these, 15 years ago. And she's just devoted herself to science stance. But everything in her life has always gone wrong in terms of relationships. So she gets out there, he's still there, he's single, and he's still sort of bearing the torch, holding the torch for her all these years later. For reasons of his own. And she then has to face the fact that, actually, she's got all these burned relationships in her background, including her son, and the common denominator is her. So she's then got to think, I need to actually engage in some pretty deep reflection and work out. Why am I so useless with maintaining a decent relationship with people? And it takes courage to do that. It's taken her getting to rock bottom for her to actually come around to the idea that she needs to start working on some personal growth. Is it a genre you think you'll stay with? I mean, we talked about you want to interested in writing another genre, what would it be? What would something that would interest you? Well, my reading love is, I've got two reading books. And one of them is historical fiction, all sorts. There's some really good stuff out there at the moment. Really great, historical fiction. And the other one is, I like crime fiction, but sort of more like the Richard Osman style murder really old people's home rather than Karen Slaughter, so. Yeah, so both of those are, in fact, if we put those together, we'd get those great books. Did you read the first one? It was called "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie." No. And by Alan Bradley, I think, an English author said, "World War One-ish, point of view is an 11-year-old kid. Her mum was like an aviatrix, like a famous lay, Amelia Earhart, and she's left at home with Dad and her oldest siblings, her hater. And she, they find a dead body on the shrubbery. And she sort of has to investigate the crime, but it's an adult book, not a kid's book. Right. But that's the sort of thing I dream about turning my hand to. But the tone's probably not overly different to my rural romance. It's still affectionate, fun. The characters are a little larger than life. I love an eccentric side character. In terms of research, do you spend as much time researching as you do writing? Is that how it works? I am a great procrastinator, and research is one of the greatest procrastination tools. Absolutely. And I write this toolkit. I can justify it to do anything. Anything, anything. Particularly for this one, because I had a scientist as a main character, and it is complex science, I started reading a few articles. I dragged, I've got one sitting next to me, actually. And this is the sort of sentence I started reading. I'll just read a few words of it. "The occipital surface of the bazacranium "and the bazis fanoid ventral to the occipital condyle "is currently covered in matrix." That's describing a fossil. There's pages and pages of that, I mean. Right. So you have to, to give her credibility, she has to be able to say some scientific things that are true and factual, but also she's not giving them an elector to other scientists. She's delivering them to the community in Indi Creek. But I did have to find ways to understand fossilization. - Yes. - What a gig looks like. That the machinery available to paleontologists like the synchrotron. So all of this did take quite a bit of research. So I didn't sort of say something incredibly dumb. - Yeah, yeah. - 'Cause I mean, 'cause readers know, don't they? They just pick it up so quickly. - Readers do know. And my guy, Hoxie's a helicopter muster pilot, but fortunately one of my, a kid who used to live over my back fence, he's now a helicopter muster pilot in the Northern Territory. So I'll run him up and sit, and he's like this 24-year-old kid up there living alive. He's like, "Crop it all Dundee." And I'm like, "Oh, Nick, can you just give me a help "with my romance?" And he was like, "What?" (laughing) But yeah, he gave me all these grapes that are binocular like the lingo that a chopper pilot can't use when he's taking off. - Right. - Yeah, so it's a lot of fun. - Stellar, it does sound like it's a lot of fun. And that's it from us, but so wonderful chatting with you today. - Thanks so much, Cheryl, and all the Better Readings team I've loved being here. - Thank you. Bye-bye. (upbeat music) If you'd like more information about Better Reading, follow us on Facebook, or visit betterreading.com.au. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Belinda Audio. Belinda audio books are available on CD and MP3 from online booksellers and bookshops everywhere. Or you can download from Audible, Google Play, or the iBook Store. We've also created our own app called Borobox that's available from both the App Store and Google Play. All you need to do to get it working is to download the app, join your local public library, and you'll gain access to the world's best collection of e-books and e-audio books available for you to loan on your phone or your personal device. Belinda, we're here to enable you to escape, imagine, grow, and be inspired through the power of storytelling. Belinda audio books, anywhere, everywhere. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - We all have somewhere we're trying to get to. As the largest energy producer in Colorado, Chevron is helping meet rising demand, and we're working to do it responsibly. Our next-gen, tankless facilities reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of our operations by more than 90% compared to our older designs. We're working to provide Colorado with energy that's affordable, reliable, and ever cleaner, so everyone can get to where they wanna be. - You've arrived. - That's energy and progress. Visit chevron.com/tankless. (upbeat music) - Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. - At the heart of this violent, bloody case is a love story. A very unusual love story. The Ruxton case is different. - Any investigation before the Ruxton case was ancient history. It changed the way that we investigate serious crime. - The odd recognition is a new limited series coming to the Small Town Dicks podcast feed on July 19th. - Don't miss it. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) You