KRIS ASHTON

It’s common for authors to write a short story and later develop it into a full-blown novel. ‘Old Secrets’ is something a little more unusual: a novel that turned into a short story.

 

The idea came to me in my mid-twenties, well before I had published anything. I don’t remember what provoked my muse, but it was such a powerful concept – one of the best I’d ever come up with – that turning it into a novel seemed like the only choice.

 

I began to write. I got 120 pages into the fucking thing before I realised it wasn’t working.

 

So it sat on my laptop for years, unfinished and infuriating. Now and then I would remember it was there, open it up, and try to convince myself to pick up the thread again. But Lightning Rod (as it was called then) was unfixable, with a whiny twenty-something protagonist thrust into an unlikely situation where he was forced to care for his senile grandmother. It also took too long to get going – too much scene setting, not enough action.

 

Then in late 2008 I opened it again, just out of curiosity. Nothing had changed; there was no great desire to bring the book to its conclusion. But a few years’ extra maturity as a writer helped me see it from a different angle. Perhaps as a short story…

 

The old lady and her talent are really the only things that survived from that ‘first draft’. Watching Hollywoodland during an overseas flight gave me the notion to include George Reeves. The old protagonists are a hodgepodge of all the older people I’ve met during my life – although my grandfather did indeed own the fateful tomahawk described in the story.

 

Lastly, ‘Old Secrets’ was a landmark in my career because it was the first thing I had published in an Australian magazine.