Shop Talk: Jane Harper Makes a Plan for Her Novels…Then Several Hundred Mugs of Tea

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Much like her novels, Jane Harper is a force of nature. 

A former newspaper reporter, Harper’s big break came after winning a first-novel contest in 2015. Since then, there’s been no stopping her. 

Harper’s books have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. She’s won numerous awards, including the CWA Gold Dagger, the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year, the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year and the Australian Indie Awards Book of the Year. 

Needless to say, I was thrilled to talk shop with such a successful and distinguished crime writer. From Jane’s meticulous planning, to the unique restrictions she enforces on her work space, there’s much to glean from this interview. 

Eli Cranor: Let’s start with Australia: How does it figure into your work? And more specifically, when did you start writing about Australia? Did you have to get away first? Was it always what you wrote about? Has it been scary? Writing about Arkansas has been scary as hell for me.

Jane Harper: I feel Australia is such a gift for writers — there’s huge diversity in our landscape and communities so there are always plenty of story ideas out there. All five of my novels have been set in Australia, but they all have wildly different settings — from Tasmania’s rugged island coastline to the vast empty Queensland outback, and then to South Australia’s lush wine country in my latest novel, Exiles. I don’t find it scary to write about my home country, but I agree it’s so important to get it right because the readers will absolutely know if you don’t. I do a lot of research for my books including on-the-ground visits where I get up close with the setting and spend some time with locals who live in that area.

EC: Give me a recap of your journey. How did you get to where you are now?

JH: I’d been working as a full-time newspaper journalist for 13 years when I started writing my first novel, The Dry. I had wanted to write a novel ever since I was a kid, but it seemed such a huge undertaking that I’d really never known where to even start. In 2014, I enrolled in a 12-week online writing course and that gave me the motivation to get the first few chapters down on paper. As a journalist I work well to deadlines, so I then continued working on my novel with the aim of finishing it in time to enter an unpublished manuscript competition held in my state every year. I was just hoping I might get some feedback from the judges about whether it was worth continuing work on the manuscript, but instead I actually won the competition. I still remember that as such an exciting moment. I immediately had people from across the industry contacting me and asking to read my novel, and from there I got my agent and then publishers.

EC: Do you write every day? 

JH: I don’t, but there are long stretches when I will write daily. It depends where I am in the process, but even when I’m actively working on a novel, I think it’s so important to have thinking and planning days. Those days are always time well spent because it makes the actual writing so much smoother. 

EC: When you are working, do you aim for a daily word count? Or maybe you aim for a certain amount of time? How do you know when your work day is done? 

JH: I’m a big planner, so I always have a detailed plan drawn up before I start actually writing the novel. It means I know what’s ahead work-wise in the coming weeks or months and I can break it up into manageable chunks — it doesn’t have to be a whole chapter, it could just be a single scene or conversation if necessary. I have an idea at the start of the week what I’d like to get through each day and where I’d like to be by the end of that week.

EC: What are the tools of your trade? 

JH: I use my phone to make notes during my thinking and planning time — it’s very handy for those middle-of-the-night lightning strikes. I transfer all those notes to my desktop computer in my office, and that’s where I do all the actual writing. Having worked for so many years in a newsroom, I’m pretty comfortable typing thousands of words into a desktop computer, so I’ve never really considered doing it another way.

EC: When do you write? 

JH: I have two children, aged three and six, so my writing days are largely dictated by their schedules. My husband does a lot of the childcare in our household so I have the time to write, but it’s still a juggling act. I usually get about six hours of writing time during the day when they are both at school or day-care. I try to make those hours really count.

EC: Ah, that sounds familiar. My kids are the same age. Do you have any rituals you rely on to get you out of “Mom Mode” and into author brain? 

JH: I find just stepping into my office helps me get into the writing headspace. I don’t do anything else in there — no meetings or even emails — so it’s very closely associated with writing for me. I don’t have any special rituals but I do make what feels like several hundred mugs of tea throughout the day. 

EC: Do you outline your novels? Just dive straight in? Or do some combination of the two?

JH: I know planning isn’t for everyone, but I personally swear by it. I spend more time thinking and planning a novel than I do actually writing it, and my plans for a 100k-word novel generally run to about 40k. When I start to think about a new book, my thoughts are centred around the ending, rather than the start. What appears to have happened in this novel, and what has really happened? I build out the idea from there, working out the setting and which characters I need to tell the story. I start with a skeleton outline of the beginning, middle and end and then continue building on that until eventually I have a chapter-by-chapter plan. I can understand some authors feel that limits their creativity, but I find it allows me to be more creative because I get to try out different ideas without committing to writing thousands of words to test them out.

EC: What does your revision process look like? 

JH: I tend to revise and fix a lot of the problems during the planning stages, so by the time I’m writing a full scene into a draft, I’m pretty sure it’s the right scene and it’s going to end up in the finished novel. I find it easier to work alone, so I don’t discuss the book with anyone or share chapters while I’m writing. About a month before the manuscript is due to be sent to my editors for their first look, I print out the whole thing and make corrections on paper. It feels fresher that way and I can see things I tend to miss on screen.

EC: I’m also a fan of hard copy edits. Definitely makes the story feel fresh. Do you read certain books for inspiration prior to writing? If so, what are they? 

JH: One of the few downsides of being an author is that I find it hard to engage with other novels while I’m writing. I tend to fall back on books I’ve read several times before so I can enjoy them without having to concentrate too hard. My books are crime and mystery novels, but I usually like to read books in completely different genres for a mental break.

EC: Best advice for writers just starting out, especially when it comes to the actual act of writing/developing the habits necessary to craft a novel-length manuscript.

JH: There are only certain things within your control, so focus all your energy and passion on them. Worrying about whether you’ll get a publishing deal or what happens after that can be overwhelming to the point of writing paralysis. Concentrate instead on the things you can do every day to make your manuscript the best it can be — find a working style that suits you, carve out regular time to think and write, do the research you need to do, consider if planning your novel would help you (even if you only plan out the tricky bits!). There will always be room in the world for new books, so do everything in your control to give your manuscript the best chance of joining them. 

EC: Finally, why do you write? 

JH: I actually love everything about it. I love helping that tiny seed of an idea grow into something much bigger and more layered. The feeling of getting a breakthrough in a plot is a great one, and seeing a story come together is so satisfying. I love connecting with readers and realising how shared our experiences often are. It’s an amazing, rewarding job, and one that I hope to be able to continue doing for my whole life.

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