Glass Fiction Week is an annual celebration of QUT students writing fiction. As part of Glass Fiction Week 2022, we sat down with Lilian Martin, author of Tuned In, for a discussion about her writing practice. Read Lilian’s story here, and submit your details here if you would like a (free!) hardcopy of Glass: The Fiction Edition, which includes all five stories published during the week.
Tell us about your writing practice.
In the simplest terms possible, I want you to get an emotional reaction from my writing. Something as simple as a laugh or a tear will suffice. But I also want to broaden people’s minds and see things in new ways.
Where do you do your writing?
Everywhere I don’t intend to. I have two desks at home, and do I ever use them to write at? Heck no! I write in cafés, on trains, while waiting for appointments. I finally put words on paper after a whole day staring at my computer ‘writing’.
What inspired your Fiction Edition piece?
With Tuned In, I wanted to tap into the fear that comes with tiredness. I’m sure most people have spent too many late nights curled up on the sofa, staring at the television half asleep. I wanted to pry on that feeling of not quite being awake enough to discern what is and isn’t real.
What influences your writing?
I also like to ponder how things came to be. If I’m lucky, these answers to these questions make for interesting stories.
Best (or worst!) writing advice you’ve received.
The worst writing advice I’ve ever been given, you ask? That writing is fun, or at least, *good* writing is fun. It’s not. It’s one of the most painful things to string a bunch of words together into something that people will *want* to read. But the best writing advice I’ve received is don’t be too hard on yourself.
What’s your biggest, craziest writing goal?
Create a new genre. I want to create steampunk but with hippies dancing a field instead of neo-Victorians prancing about on zeppelins. Hippiepunk? Hippunk? Bohopunk? Come back in a decade when I’ve figured it out!
