Author of Comes the Night, Isobelle Carmody shares the creative process of her latest novel, from the inspiration for the setting to questions about love, loss, and the power of fear. Isobelle also shares Hope Flies, a charity auction to raise funds for families dealing with childhood cancer.

What do you love most about writing?

The freedom of it. No one tells me what to write or when or how. All those 'how to write' books and I can do it without ever referring to one. Because doing it is how you get better. I don’t have to talk to another human being in the whole time if I don’t want and when I am writing hard, I like to be alone and away from people, preferably by the sea.

What inspired you to write Comes the Night?

Books usually come about because of a group of questions or matters that interests me, and that I want to think deeply about. That for me is the purpose of writing. It is how I think about the world and my place in it and what troubles me. With Comes the Night, the thing I noticed was how much fear was being weaponised in the media and being used as a means of political and societal control – like a cattle prod, and where is it herding us? I wanted to think about that and the fact that we surrender a great deal to feel safe, until one day we discover that safety is a kind of prison. It keeps all the scary things out, but it keeps us in, and you are not in control of the walls fear built. You might not even notice them until something – usually love or imagination, pushes you against them.

Do you have a usual process when creating new stories?

I find myself asking the same raft of questions over and over – posing them in different ways to people, until one day a character steps out of my imagination shaped by and for those questions. And I set them off on the story road to find some glimpses of truth, ideas and most of all, things that will allow me to hope that humans as a group are actually capable of growing and getting better. Growing ethically and morally. Once I begin to write, I want to be alone and allowed to work non-stop.

Comes the Night centres around themes of love and loss. What was it like to write on these topics in this particular story?

Life is about losing things and people and ultimately ourselves, and to that extent, all books negotiate these things one way or another – even avoiding them is a way of negotiating them. But Will is the focussing eye that processes these questions in this novel, and because he is unique, his journey and discoveries should be, too. He is not Elspeth or Alyzon or Nathanial, so his discoveries have a different form. This is how writers return again and again to themes that interest them and yet do not write the same book over and over. Each narrator takes us on a different path.

This novel is set in a futuristic Australia. How did you go about building this alternative world or what inspired it?

I did some post-graduate research on the Western Downs as part of the Creativity and Human Flourishing Project run by The University of Queensland, working with young people to write stories about the future of their towns/region as a way of thinking about their own questions and concerns. I was fascinated by the depth of their ideas, but it was also interesting to see how much they had done in a practical way – 7 year olds could drive a tractor – but they were also quite conservative in their views and they had a very strong sense that the country was safe compared to the city, and they really valued that highly. There were so many interesting ideas that came out of our conversations that fed into the book in one way or another, and then the other big aspect of the creation of future-Canberra was that I spent a month being ACT Writer in Residence and was shown a great deal that people do not normally see. I went to glittering events at Parliament House and saw how intimately the super-wealthy and celebrity world are connected to political circles. I saw Marion Mahoney Griffin’s silk plan for the new capitol – a planned city where trying to guess what people needed and would do was built into the design, rather than simply growing around people, our of need and activities. In a way such plans are about trying to predict and control people. All of that fed into the future Canberra I was imagining.

You’ve written over 40 books throughout your writing career. How has your approach to worldbuilding and writing changed over that time?

I think I pretty much do it the same as I ever did, though as time passes, you do feel more confident that this journey in this work is a worthwhile one, and that helps your engagement with your ideas. You are not distracted by doubt. By you – I mean me, because of course other writers do it very differently.

Were there any particular scenes within Comes the Night that you found most challenging or meaningful to write?

The final scene between Will and Adam was very important to me, perhaps because that scene engages with the biggest question of all. The action scenes are always hard, though often after the struggle I find I like them very much, or feel they are strong. I think this is because I am interested in why people do the things they do and what they feel after doing them, more than the doing of them, but the struggle to write something always engages you deeply in the end, and these struggles grow me as a writer.

What do you hope readers will take away from this story?

I don’t have a mission or a message. The journey and the questions are mine. What I hope is that they really enjoy the story and find it lingers in their mind, provoking their own questions and ideas. But first and foremost it is a story and I hope they enjoy it.

Do you have any other projects in the works?

I am working on Darkbane, the final book in the Legendsong Saga, and in the wings is a graphic novel I have been working on for over a year about Little Fur.

I have also organised Hope Flies, a charity auction of 30 kites decorated by award winning illustrators, artists and graphic novelists, to raise funds for Redkite, which is a charity that takes care of families dealing with childhood cancer. Aside from being a lovely cause, I want those generous creators to be recognised for the work they put in.