The writing process

Interviewer, Christine McGuigan: Alice, what are your writing habits?

Alice Pung: That's a good question. One of the most important things, and this isn't the case with many other writers, is I have to work another job. I can't be a full-time writer, at least not in this stage of my life. If I wrote full time and spent eight hours of my day writing, I'd probably spend seven-and-a-half of those hours extremely distracted. If I sat alone for an hour, and I have done that, and watched my thoughts, 90 per cent of them are about, you know, purely trivial things, making a cup of tea, going to the toilet, you know, what my sister said yesterday. Only ten per cent would have been the good stuff that you put down. And because I work full time, I know that when I get home from work and if I have to teach some students I won't have time. If I have an hour block that's when the ten per cent comes in, you know. So it's a good way to make use of my time as well.

Christine: You've written speeches and you've published short stories, and articles as well as your first book. Do you approach writing for different audiences in different ways?

Alice: Yes, I do, I do. And you have to do that as a writer. You have to really know your audience because, for example, I'm sure you've seen some of my speeches on my website. I wrote a piece for 'The Monthly' magazine recently. 'The Monthly' is a, quite a very learned journal about politics, society and culture. And it was about op shops. So the language there was completely different to a, you know, the language I use in a speech that I did when I was launching a book on op shops, that some members of the Footscray community had put together. You had 80-year-old women who worked in the op shops, you had migrants who had, you know, got all their clothes from the op shops. In many ways, when I talk to people there's more of an earnestness than sometimes when you're writing for a publication. Books, it's different, you can, you know, be entirely yourself.