riday 19th October 2001
"Youth Arts/Meet the Authors" with Matthew Reilly and Brigid Lowry

This session of the Brisbane Writer's Festival saw action-writer extraordinaire Matthew Reilly and teen fiction author Brigid Lowry discuss just how they got started in the writing business. By around five minutes before the session started, the Auditorium along the Brisbane River was absolutely packed with school students from no less than ten different schools around Brisbane.

On the dot of 9:30am, Matthew Reilly and Brigid Lowry walked in through the backstage door and took their positions at the desk on stage. After the customary introductions and applause for the accomplished writers who had graciously given up their time, the BWF coordinator left the stage and the session began.

Brigid gave her speech on how she became a writer through government grants and short novels for Dolly magazine, and then Matthew stole the show. Brigid said it best when she passed the floor over to Matthew and said that he's "really famous and makes a s**tload of money." After this blunt but accurate introduction of his current career status, Matthew followed by saying that it wasn't always that way.

He recounted the time when he wrote short stories for Cleo, under the pseudonym Melissa Reilly. The magazine rang Matthew to write more stories, and when he answered the phone they asked to speak to Melissa Reilly. To which he replied, "That's me." After the light laughter of the audience died down, he went on to say that he is a huge advocate of reading, for the reason that it gets you thinking for yourself.

He said that the difference between movies and books is that a movie has someone telling you how to think - the director. In a book, however, the reader decides how to perceive a scene, and directs the story for him or herself. For that matter, he continued, books can be better than movies for the fact that you can do anything. "Hollywood can't match my books, because they can't afford to" was one of the quotes that stuck in most peoples' minds.

On that note, Matthew went on to discuss the structure of his books, and how when he wrote Contest, he endeavoured to create a new type of thriller. All previous thrillers had a basic structure of action-rest-action-rest, like spikes on a graph. What Matthew wanted to do was eliminate all the rests to create non-stop action thrillers the likes of which the world had never seen.

But this was a new and risky style of writing, and was the reason that no publisher wanted to publish Contest, he said, holding up his original, self-published copy of the novel. He had to pay to have the books printed and took them around to bookstores, hoping they would sell them, and that publishers would see them. It was only then that Pan Macmillan saw Contest and signed Matthew up. This, he said, was the theme of his talk. To chase your dreams, because "no one is going to hand them to you on a silver platter."

In the next segment of the session Matthew talked about the editing of his books, and how he had many arguments with his editor. The example that he gave regarded a dash at the end of one of the chapters in Ice Station (page 488 to be exact), where it says:

But the killer just kept coming. It came at him fast - frighteningly fast - and soon Schofield could see nothing but its teeth and the closing yawn of its jaws and then -
After that, a new chapter starts, and his editor thought it was a mistake; that the two parts should be joined together. But no, Matthew said, it gives more tension this way. In the end, Matthew bargained to change something else, later in the book, as long as he could keep his dash.

The last topic was of what Matthew's ambitions were for the future. When he gets home, he said, he will be starting a new book, and after that, he would like to direct his first movie. He has written seven screenplays, and he said that one of them was set during the 2000 Olympic Games. He knew that no one was going to give him the finance to make the movie then, so during the Games he hired a helicopter, a pilot, and a cameraman, and set off to Stadium Australia. The pilot got on the radio to air traffic control, and because the pilot regularly flew helicopters for movie shoots, they allowed Matthew and his crew to do a pass over the stadium at a certain altitude. As they flew across the huge Olympic complex, camera rolling, the Goodyear blimp hovered below them, just above the stadium, making for the best video footage of the entire Olympic Games. He had his footage for his movie.

And if after his next book he decides not to make the movie, Matthew said as he leaned back in his chair, then he'll sell the footage to Sydney Tourism.

aturday 20th October 2001
"Imagining the Odyssey" with Matthew Reilly, Ian Irvine, Paul Brandon and Sophie Masson

In this session, four action and fantasy writers discussed how they create the thrilling and amazing journeys that are their novels, from landscape to pace to characters. It was much more light-hearted than Matthew Reilly's previous session, and the authors really seemed to have a good time discussing how they constructed their fictitious worlds and situations.

The first topic was that of Atmosphere and Place. Matthew commented that he liked to set his books in harsh, out of the way places. He said that at the back of each of his novels the blurb starts with (putting on a deep voice-over voice) "At a remote ice station in Antarctica…", "Deep in the jungles of Peru…" and "It is America's most secret base, hidden deep in the Utah desert…" When you set your book in a far-away place, Matthew said, fewer people can prove you wrong.

He then said that the location of Ice Station was actually story-driven. There is the discovery of a metal object under the ice in Antarctica, where the location belongs to no-one, meaning that it's a free-for-all chase to secure the object. It is an escape to read, he said, and also an escape to write.

The next subject regarded "The Journey"; the journey that the hero of the story embarks upon. The Hollywood Formula, Matthew said, has the hero in an ordinary world to start off. Then, the hero is called to a problem in an extraordinary world. He then meets enemies and allies, and does what he has to do to save the day. The hero defeats the villain, and gets out of the area, and is changed by the whole experience. Examples of this is seen abundantly in movies. Star Wars, The Matrix, The Wizard of Oz, the list goes on. Luke Skywalker is pulled from his mundane life on Tatooine into the Rebel Alliance to save the day. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy starts out in Black and White, and jumps into a technicolour world, defeats the Wicked Witch of the West, and returns home deeply changed; "There's no place like home."

Then Matthew leaned forward across the desk, lowered his voice and said that once you know these rules, you can break them, and take it to the next level. And the basic structure of all stories is to start with order, make it chaotic, and bring back order at the end. What you do in the chaotic part of the story is up to your imagination. Following this was a five minute quarrel about what was wrong with Star Wars: Episode I in these respects; there were only clean-cut characters, with no conflict or moral dilemmas. Therefore there was no breaking of The Hollywood Formula, and no real unpredictability; you knew how people would react to the situations.

Next the discussion turned to action, and Matthew was in his element. Paul Brandon, in describing Matthew's action writing style, said that in twenty pages he (Paul) had just finished an action scene, but in twenty pages Matthew Reilly had blown up several aircraft carriers and destroyed half a continent. The audience laughed at that, and Matthew followed on by rehashing what he said the day before; that he wanted to take all the rests out of a thriller, and just have non-stop action. He believes that you can have a good plot while taking the reader on a roller-coaster ride, but it is a huge challenge.

The final topic saw the four authors discussing the hero of a story. "Action only exists if you care about the characters," Matthew said. If you care about the characters, then each scene has you in suspense, hoping that the character will make it out alive. He then said that he uses this in his books, and by killing off a few of the good guys, it creates uncertainty about the hero's survival.

Matthew and the other authors also noted that they enjoy having unlikely heroes in their novels, who don't know what they're getting into. "The hero is the person who doesn't have the sense to run away," Paul Brandon said. And that's what can make a story interesting; a hero who is against all odds, but triumphs nevertheless. Of course, there are the other characters in the story, and when the conversation turned the their character development, Matthew reminded everyone in the room of the reviewer who said that the characters in a Matthew Reilly's novels don't live long enough to warrant any character development.

A. Wakeley

"I think a that character which you care about affects the story best when they die."- Matthew Reilly

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