A Quote by Sarah Blasko

I set up this little office space with a piano in it and I thought that would be quite a novel way of writing the album, to make it like a job - a romanticised version of the 9 to 5. I think that was probably my favourite time. I made sure I walked there every day, which took me about an hour.
I don't think I would have been a good architect. Really, I have thought about this from time to time, and I might have wound up like my father, who never did find that which he could devote his life to. He sort of drifted from job to job. He was a traveling salesman, he was a bookkeeper, he was an office manager, he was here, there, there. And however enthusiastic he was at the beginning, his job would bore him. If I hadn't had the writing, I think I might have replicated what he was doing, which would not have been good.
My advice to anyone with writerly ambitions and a demanding day job is to set aside a little piece of time, even an hour a week if that's all you can manage, and make it yours. This is your writing hour. Even if you use it up by staring at a blank screen and daydreaming, so what?
I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn't change that much. There weren't many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn't like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, "Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written." At that point, I didn't realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.
To a large extent: it's about economy of space. You have so little real estate when you're writing a half hour show. It's really twenty minutes. So you have to with a pilot introduce all your characters, set up the premise in a way that shows the potential for a series and make it funny and do it all in about thirty-five or forty pages. It's very hard.
You know what I was thinking about on my way home? How different my life would be if you’d made that gash a little deeper. Or how different yours would be if I’d vaulted myself off a roof nine years ago. Do you ever think about things like that? Like, if either you or I wouldn’t have made it, where would the other one be right now? It was something I thought about all the time: how death changes every remaining moment for those still living.
It’s a job. It’s not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to it. Even if it’s just for an hour or so each day, you have to get a babysitter and make the time. If you’re going to make writing succeed you have to approach it as a job.
We go to the office every day when we're writing - or supposed to be writing. It's not always productive, and there's a lot of procrastinating, just staring at the wall, like any other writing. But we just make ourselves go to the office every day for more or less the whole day.
I think I would never be ready to do a regular job. I couldn’t go to the office every day at the same hour. I love my life. This freedom.
Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.
I wake up fairly early every day, by 8, for sure. Sunday is a lighter writing day than the weekdays, but I still wake up and write for about an hour, beginning right around 8. I definitely have coffee first, and then I start writing. I do think it's kind of hard to get the right level of concentration without coffee.
When I was about 17, I didn't speak. English was like a foreign language. I'd just grunt. The only time I talked was when I said my lines on set. I didn't speak to any of the actors or anything. Then one day Alison from the Corrie press office started talking to me in the green room and I just decided to talk back. She ran upstairs to tell everyone that she'd just had a 10-minute conversation with me like it was the most unbelievable thing in the world. I just woke up one day and thought, 'I'm going to talk today'. I've really made up for lost time since.
I'm a little nervous. Definitely. Especially coming from an album like Biophilia, which was about the universe. This is more of a traditional singer/songwriter thing. When I started writing, I fought against it. I thought it was way too boring and predictable. But most of the time, it just happens; there's nothing you can do. You have to let it be what it is.
When I wrote the opera, I made a deal with myself that for at least an hour a day I would work on it, even if it meant just sitting on my piano bench, staring into space and thinking about it. It's about keeping it regular, like your bowel movements - let's get real: it's your bodily artistic movements! It comes from the same place.
For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.
I guess it was this over-riding feeling I wanted people to get from the album - a kind of positivity. On the one hand it's quite a sad record, but I wanted the songs in essence to be about pulling yourself out of a difficult time. So I thought that the idea of day after a really long, difficult night, would be pretty appropriate... I think the album's about contrasts too - contrasts of emotion - so I thought the comparison was appropriate.
I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time - I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, 'Actually, this is a valid pastime.'
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