Chris Womersley

The thing I often start with, with writing short fiction and novels as well, is sort of atmosphere or a setting.

Like, I find it very hard to embark on a story if I don't have a setting in mind.

And it doesn't even necessarily have to be a real place.

It has to be, you know, I might have seen a photograph of somewhere, or it might be a sort of an amalgam of houses or landscapes that I've kind of visited throughout my life that I kind of can assemble.

And so that's always a really big starting point for me.

It's about...

I guess as a reader, I really enjoy the immersive experience of reading.

And as a writer, I seek to convey that to my readers as well, this sort of sense of being in the story, as it were, and sort of being sort of very sensory experience.

I think my writing is very sort of earthy.

It's not kind of cerebral in that sense.

Yeah, I mean, ending's always kind of incredibly difficult of any narrative project in the sense that it has to be both inevitable and surprising.

It needs to be unexpected, but at the same time, if they go back and reread the piece, it seems that there could be no other way that the story would end.

I mean, often I don't really know the endings myself when I embark on the story.

I'll often start, as I sort of said, with a mood or a voice of a character as well.

A lot of them are written in first person.

And it could take me a couple of years to figure out how the story ends.

I've got a story sitting in my computer that I've been working on for about a year now.

It's like 9,000 words long or something.

And it's pretty good.

I think it's an okay story, but I just don't know how to end it.