On this searing, wind-blown day, the diner is almost empty. There’s a TV set up on the counter, a pressed tin ceiling, and rock’n’roll dancers painted on the walls. It’s all a distraction from the police caravan camped across the road. Though I wanted to meet them, I’m kind of glad Billy and Adam aren’t here. Today, I’m meeting their creator, multi-award winning Australian author Honey Brown. Join me as we chat about Honey’s gripping soon-to-be released psychological suspense novel Through the Cracks.

NEWS FLASH: Through the Cracks is nominated for the 2015 Ned Kelly Award and the 2015 Davitt Award!

RH: Honey Brown, welcome to Writers’ Block. Thank you for joining me to share your thoughts about writing and your wonderful book Through the Cracks. I thought you might prefer to avoid Adam’s former home so I’ve recreated the diner – the scene of a significant moment in Billy and Adam’s story.  Can I get you a coffee or juice? Something to eat? Remember, the food is virtual so the calories will be too *wink*

HB: Thank you for inviting me, Rowena. If we’re at the diner I think I’d like a chocolate milkshake and hot chips drowned in vinegar, please. So glad we’re getting together here and not in Barbary Street.

RH: I agree. Too many unhappy ghosts there. On a more pleasant note: vinegar and chips – yum!

RH: Your latest novel, Through the Cracks, is due for release April 23rd. Congratulations. It is certainly a fitting companion for your previous books, which have been nominated for a range of literary awards. Red Queen won an Aurealis Award; The Good Daughter was long listed for the Miles Franklin and short listed for the Barbara Jefferis Award; After the Darkness is a Women’s Weekly Great Read and one of Get Reading’s 50 Books You Can’t Put Down. That’s quite an achievement. Early reviews suggest similar accolades may be in store for Through the Cracks – an average of 4.5 stars on Goodreads! Tell us a little about your latest novel and how it feels to have received such great early reviews.

HB: Through the Cracks is the story of two young men escaping their abusive childhoods. I wanted to tell an abuse survival story from the survivor’s perspective, not deviating from their experience, not shying away from their inner turmoil. I believed if we stuck with the survivors throughout, we’d get to know them beyond the bad things that had happened to them. We’d be able to properly see their personalities, their intricacies, their mystery, beauty and grace. I also wanted the story to be as page turning and gripping as any other survival tale. It felt to me that these two characters deserved the same heightened tension and heart pounding pace any “normal” survival story would get.

As for the early reviews, they give me waves of relief and excitement. It’s a shame the feeling doesn’t last. Doubt creeps in again. I fret I could have done better or that the next critic will slam it.

RH: Well, I for one could not put it down, though you certainly took on a tough subject. I think it is the humanity each of the boys reveals that really make it compelling (I’m thinking about the dogs and the toy tiger, but won’t give anything away about them). And of course I had to keep reading to discover the truth.

RH: Your fifteen-year-old protagonist in Through the Cracks is called Adam. The novel begins with him standing up to his abusive father, Joe, who has grown weaker with age. Yet once he vanquishes this demon, Adam isn’t quite sure what to do. He is bewildered by his freedom. You give us a strong sense that there is so much more to the situation than what we see, indeed more than what Adam himself knows. As narrator, Adam can only tell us what he understands. How difficult was it to stay in Adam’s point of view and still provide enough clues to hint at what was really going on?

HB: Just on a general level I struggled to stay in Adam’s head for the entire time while writing the novel. It wasn’t always easy to see things the way he’d see them. And it was difficult to portray what was happening when all I had at my disposal was Adam’s limited view of things. Halfway through the book I stalled. I started writing the second half from Billy’s point of view. That didn’t work though. Looking back now, I think I was desperate for a break from Adam’s introverted, dark world. There were so many times when I was convinced the book hadn’t worked. I’m glad I pushed myself and fixed the mistakes and never gave up on it.  And with regard to clues, I tried to immerse Adam in them, I made whole settings and scenes clues in themselves, so that the reader could see the revealing aspects everywhere, even though Adam didn’t perceive them in the same way, or understand them. It was a good exercise for me as a writer, having to ‘show’ so much of the information needed. I couldn’t be lazy. I had to get creative each time when a plot point was needed. I think you’ll probably remember that unsettling scene within the shed with the caged pets; all that had to be created to further reveal vital links within the story.  

RH: That is a compelling scene. And I was struck how that scene spoke to Adam’s internal fears. I can understand he would have been a difficult character to stay with for so long during the writing, and Billy is certainly intriguing with this mix of hurt, street smarts and humour. He is also central to the truth about Adam. So let’s talk about Billy.

RH: Not long after he has subdued the old man, Adam meets Billy. It is the older, more worldly Billy who encourages Adam to leave the house and whose street-smart ways help Adam navigate a world he knows nothing about. As you’ve suggested, we only come to know Billy through his actions and Adam’s trust in him, yet right from the start there is a connection between Billy and Joe, and a sense that Billy knows something about Adam he is afraid to share. There were times when I feared more for Adam when he was with Billy. Tell us a little about where Billy’s character came from and why you decided to make him Adam’s guide.

HB: Firstly, I love the way you refer to Joe as “the old man”. It makes me happy to think you see him as nothing special. I also considered him to be exactly that – flat in all his weakness, an exposed uninteresting abuser. But back to the question – I always planned on putting an equally strong character alongside Adam, someone who’d also been abused but whose experience was completely different. Billy was my way of showing how sexual abuse, trauma, and abduction, crosses all borders and happens to children from all different walks of life. I wanted to show the ways abductors use disadvantage, poverty and tough home lives, as walls and doors, locks and chains, to trap children like Billy.

Before starting the story, and while writing, I imagined I’d make Billy more threatening than what he turned out to be. I’m glad you feel he’s still maintained a degree of it, because someone who’s been through everything Billy has would have some dark streaks. And he has. But the more I wrote the more I began to learn how Billy is also a funny guy. His irreverent nature kept shining through. I think he came out of my time living in Kalgoorlie W.A and Gove in N.T. While working in those places I met disadvantaged kids and young men, and they’d always have me in stitches with their wicked sense of humour. But, like Billy, they were also capable of criminal acts. It didn’t stop them being golden too though.

RH: I’ve grown up with similar boys (and girls). They are always more than their actions suggest. One of the most outstanding things about your novels is how you play with perception and expectation. Through the Cracks is no exception. In fact, you also use it to great effect within the story – Billy and Adam are judged on appearance and because of how they’ve been treated they won’t seek help from authority. Much of the suspense comes from what is not said and what you allow the reader to infer. Tell us a little about why you settled on this approach to storytelling and how you decide what to leave out and what to suggest. Do you know right from the start what is really going on, or do you have a ‘Eureka!’ moment as the novel progresses?

HB: If I pick up a book and everything is spelt out for me, I get frustrated. I like finding out things for myself. Especially when it comes to characters. I don’t want to be told an important character is a teacher, or their marriage is on the rocks, or they’re from a broken home. I want to discover those things on my own. I also believe we don’t get all the facts in real life, so I like my novels to reflect that. One of the joys of writing for me is not knowing what’s going to happen in a story and not knowing what a character is capable of until I’ve written a situation in which I get to see the way they act. That’s what draws me back to the computer. It’s why I keep writing tense scenes and putting my characters in tight spots, not because I want to see them suffer, because I want to see their strengths and weaknesses, what they’re made of. I always have an idea of what ending I’d like in a book, but how I get there is up in the air. It’s the risky, exhilarating part of writing, and there are plenty of ‘Eureka’ moments.

RH: Writing without a parachute! I suppose exhilaration is the pay-off. *wink*

RH: To me, there is a strong theme of ‘trust betrayed’ in Through the Cracks. Billy in particular has been betrayed by those entrusted with the care of minors, and you allow the reader to surmise what Adam endured by the way he reacts to certain people (such as the priest). Adam and Billy’s world is believable and never sensationalised. Can you share with us how you researched this world and what resources were most useful to you to paint such a vivid and sensitive picture? How do you come to understand the mindset of someone suffering trauma? Was Through the Cracks informed by current events?

HB: The inquest into the abuse of children by church and state run institutions was a driving factor for me. I was struck by how interesting the survivors were. They were, each one, every bit as compelling as a landslide survivor telling his survival story, or trapped underground miners telling their harrowing tale. It seemed unfair to me that the subject matter stopped these people from talking. Sometimes creative writing can be a way to bridge these sorts of gaps. Through fiction we get to gauge the moral temperature of things and test society’s responses. We also get exposure to the hurt and brutality of something with the safety net of knowing it is only fiction and these characters aren’t real. Fiction, and art, and film, can smooth the way for the true stories to follow and hopefully it provides a cushion for the real survivors.

When it comes to research, I don’t like to crowd my mind too much with someone else’s experience. I take key pieces of information from real life survivors – for example, I remember reading how one of the women imprisoned in the house in Cleveland was too frightened to leave the room she’d been kept in; she had to be gradually coaxed out by the police – and I let my imagination take it from there. I ask myself what it might take to push me to that state of fear. I put myself in that position. I don’t rashly believe I could know the magnitude of what an abuse survivor might have gone through, but I also don’t assume something equally extreme could never happen to me. I know it could. And because there is no set way to suffer trauma, I look with honesty inside myself, I rely on those core emotions hardwired into all of us to make the story as truthful as fiction can be. The way through trauma is unique to each individual, but the feelings we experience are universal. If the emotions and responses in the novel resonate with readers, it’s because abuse survivors aren’t off in their own corner, separate from us, they feel the same things we feel, we feel the same things they do. 

RH: That’s a beautiful answer. Thank you. As with your other novels, we only know Adam through what he chooses to reveal. Adam rarely asks questions and doesn’t offer opinions. He is very removed from the everyday world, and what he does tell the reader is quite minimal. Compared to your earlier novels, the world in which they travel is quite sparse. I found this added another layer to the characterisation, something I would not have considered previously, and was fitting for a character who had been sensory deprived for most of his life. Was it a conscious decision to pare back the description and detail because of the subject matter, or was this more to do with letting Adam narrate the story and being true to his character? How did you manage to balance the believability of a traumatised and disassociated Adam with the need to show the world he and Billy inhabit?

HB: I think about each novel stylistically before I start. I need challenges with each new book and like to test myself in terms of the craft of writing, as well as with the story. I knew I had to be true to Adam’s character. It meant I had to write in a certain way. In the past I’ve stopped reading a book because the language didn’t fit with the character. Adam isn’t sophisticated. He’s not verbose. A pared down style is what I’m more comfortable with anyway. Narrating through Adam also meant I wouldn’t be dwelling on details of the abuse. Adam does everything in his power to forget the things that happened to him in the backroom. He’s looking forward, not back. If I’d told the story through a detective’s eyes, the abuse details would have naturally been more of a focus. If I’d told it through Adam’s parents, the abuse would have been dealt with differently again. And if I’d told the story through the eyes of the abuser, it would have been a very chilling illumination into abuse (a vastly different book). This is Adam and Billy’s story, and Adam shows his intelligence and compassion just by being able to relay as much as he does to us, especially when it comes to communicating Billy’s side of things. Some of the hope we feel probably comes from the way Adam describes Billy: he can see the beauty in Billy and the good in him, Adam just sees it starkly and without a lot of emotion. On my desk is Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. I admire the simple brush strokes he uses to paint a scene. His writing, along with Graham Greene’s writing, were good for clearing my head and getting me back on track if I ever found myself getting too wordy. But with all that said, I wasn’t sure I’d achieved what I wanted or got the balance right until my team at Penguin gave me feedback on the first raw draft.

RH: I’m a huge fan of Graham Greene. And you’ve inspired me to pick up Cormac McCarthy again, who I haven’t read since school.

RH: I understand that your previous novel, Dark Horse, (a startlingly brilliant novel) is in the process of being translated. Congratulations again! It is clear that you take considerable care over choosing just the right word and creating the rhythm of your prose. So how do you ensure the translator does your writing justice? Can you share with us a little about the translation process and how involved you may be as the author?

HB: All I can say is – thank you for your congratulations and how does a translation work? I’ve often wondered it myself. A translated novel must lose its cadence, either that, or translators are the unsung heroes of the literary world. I’m afraid I can’t shine a light on the process. All I know is that my novel is off doing its own thing in a foreign country, and I can’t wait to see the cover.

RH: *chuckles* I suppose we have to let our fledglings fly on their own eventually. By the way, I hope they do a great cover, because I love the Australian one! You manage to write a book a year, each quite varied in subject matter and setting, you have a family, and I’ve heard you keep a very tidy desk (something I aspire to but never achieve). Tell us a little about your writing process and what a typical writing day looks like for you.

HB: When writing the first draft, I write everyday. I get up early, try and get all the housework done before I drive the children to school, then I speed home, have my metered quota of dark chocolate, make a strong coffee, and type until school pick-up time. I sometimes sneak back into my office to write some more in the afternoon and evening. Left to my own devices I’d write all day and half the night. I’d also have no friends, no family, no life outdoors. I’m a little more relaxed during the rewriting and editing phase. Sometimes I even take the weekends off!

RH: Well, I was impressed before. Now I’m speechless! *laughs, while secretly feeling guilty abut all the ignored housework back home.*

RH: As mentioned, Through the Cracks is due for release on 23rd April 2014. I imagine you will be hectic in the next few weeks and that your publisher is eager for your next book – I know I am! So what’s next for Honey Brown?

HB: The new book is constantly turning in my mind. I don’t like to jinx it by talking about it. The most I’ll let myself do is write the blurb. I’ve found that writing a blurb before starting a book is helpful for honing the theme and concept of a story. If I can’t condense my ideas into a few short punchy paragraphs, well maybe I’m not onto a winner. My working titles are notoriously bad, so I’ll keep that under my hat too.

RH: Okay, I promise not to try to snatch your hat and get a peek *wink*

RH: Well, this has been a Masterclass for me, and thank you so much for sharing your writing world and your new novel with us. *raises hand to order obscene quantity of dark chocolate* I hope you still have some energy left, Honey, because it’s time for your …

RH: What is your all-time favourite book/movie?

HB:  Brokeback Mountain

RH: What are you reading now?

HB: The newspaper

RH: *chuckle* What is your favourite word?

HB: Smitten

RH: What is your worst writing habit?

HB: Misspelling split/spilt and silver/sliver, … and making many other dyslexic errors.

RH: What is the best bit of advice you ever got (about writing or life in general)?

HB: “Take my advice and please yourself.”

RH: Thanks for joining us today, Honey. Where can we find Through the Cracks and all of your wonderful novels?

HB: At all good booksellers, online and in store!

Booktopia, Angus and Robertson, Amazon

If you’d like to connect with Honey Brown check out her facebook page

About Honey Brown

Honey Brown lives in country Victoria with her husband and two children. She’s the author of the critically acclaimed novels RED QUEEN (winner of the Aurealis Award, shortlisted for the Australian Shadow Awards, short-listed for the Davitt Awards, Highly Commended in the Christina Stead Award), THE GOOD DAUGHTER (longlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award, shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferies Award), AFTER THE DARKNESS (Woman’s Weekly Great Read, 2012 Get Reading “Book You Cant Put Down”) and DARK HORSE. Her fifth novel THROUGH THE CRACKS is due to be released April 2014.

Honey began writing novels in 2000. Before settling down she worked and lived in various remote places throughout Australia. She spent her childhood in Tasmania, growing up in a convict built house. In her late-twenties she was involved in a farm accident, and now lives with the challenges of a spinal injury. The film rights to her first novel RED QUEEN have been sold.