Debra Oswald has a killer instinct when it comes to creating great stories
By Blanche Clark
Published: January 30, 2015 9:00PM
I’VE killed before. I’ve got form. I’ve bumped off characters in my plays, skewered a number of people on Police Rescue and I may have bruised the bananas in Bananas in Pyjamas.
So on the day the Offspring creative team gathered in the writers’ room and planned Patrick’s death, it wasn’t the first time I had conspired to kill someone.
Way back, when I wrote the Offspring telemovie about obstetrician Nina Proudman and her boisterous family, there was no guarantee it would ever become a series.
And I would certainly never have guessed we’d have the chance to produce five seasons of the show. Later, when the decision was made to kill Nina’s great love, Patrick, we expected there would be an intense reaction from some viewers.
In fact, we joked about needing to go into witness protection when the episode aired. Even so, nothing prepared us for the passionate response the story sparked, the social media frenzy and the weirdness of being pressed against walls by friends at parties and interrogated about what we had done.
I found the experience unnerving at times but it was also wonderful to think people cared so intensely about the show.
One of the joys of long-form drama is that the writers have the opportunity to develop characters over an extended period. It can be a tricky process — because of actor availability, the chance that viewers will get sick of people and so on — but overall it’s a storytelling luxury.
The audience has the chance to get to know characters so well and travel with them through all sorts of experiences over five series of 13 episodes.
Nina, Billie and the extended Proudman clan lived in my head for years. As you can imagine, it could get pretty noisy in there. When I’m in the process of writing something, I will even dream about characters. I grow to love them as if they were my family or friends and years later, I still feel responsible for the things I did to them. I killed the main character of my play, Gary’s House, halfway through the story (I told you I had homicidal form).
Even now, almost 20 years after writing that play, I feel bad about Gary. If I’m in the supermarket and they happen to play a song we used in the soundtrack of the theatre production of Gary’s House, I will choke up about what I did to poor Gary and flop against the shopping trolley, weeping.
So believe me when I say the decision to kill Patrick was not made lightly. In the writers’ room, we agonised, crying, and asking ourselves, “Can we really do this?” I often sobbed while drafting the script and would have to ring my writing colleagues Jonathan Gavin or Michael Lucas for a pep talk.
We all felt enormous responsibility to the audience who had come to love, and in some cases lust after, these characters. That doesn’t mean never upsetting anybody but it does mean handling the story with care, respect and authenticity.
I loved working on Offspring. I feel blessed that so many elusive factors and talented people came together to make the show happen. But alongside television scripts, I’ve always written novels for young readers and plays, so when another story started rattling in my head, I decided to have a crack at my first novel for adults.
Whenever there was a spare chunk of time between Offspring series, I scribbled notes for what has become Useful. I was seized by the idea of a man, Sullivan Moss, who feels so useless that he decides to donate his kidney to a stranger, believing it’s the one way he can be useful.
I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of usefulness. How do we justify our existence on the planet? How do we measure our own value and the value of other people?
Working on the novel, I did miss the camaraderie of a TV writers’ room — especially when there might be wonderful colleagues like Jono and Michael sitting in that room.
TV story meetings are often raucous, a bit hysterical and usually rude enough to make you gasp. Writing fiction is more solitary of course — it’s just me in my writing cubby, wearing track pants and ugg boots all day.
I might occasionally emerge from my office and bombard my long-suffering partner with questions. “Hey, do you think Sullivan would say this or that?” “Can you read this new chapter for me?” “Is this book rubbish and am I a talentless fool?”
Then I would have to shuffle back inside to face the process alone.
I reckon writing fiction misses out on some of the fun of TV but there is, potentially, a different kind of satisfaction to keep me going: that my novel might create the intense connection that can happen between a reader and a novel. I love it when I’m immersed in a book that’s grabbed me — there’s nothing else like it — so I wanted to do that, if I possibly could.
When I think back over all the plays, scripts and books I’ve written, I’m astonished at the amount of suffering I’ve put my characters through.
There are sudden tragedies like Patrick’s death, emotional pain and buckets of acute embarrassment. I seem to specialise in excruciatingly awkward sexual encounters and there are a couple of those in Useful. (Let me quickly add that such humiliating sexual scenes are not entirely based on personal experience.)
So yes, I’m guilty of making my characters suffer but I don’t do it out of some cackling sadism. I do it so I can conjure up a story with high stakes and juicy emotional territory. And along the way I also give my characters friendship, food, sometimes love and plenty of chances to laugh their guts out.
What I always want to do is offer the audience or reader a feast — a cracking story, humour, dark moments but also moments of silliness or sauciness or joy. Those things don’t have to come at the expense of intelligence and thoughtfulness.
I’m excited about Useful going out into the world because I’m busting for readers to meet these characters. I love all the people in the novel, even the ones who might seem difficult to love.
As usual, I have tormented my beloved characters and done awful things to them in order to tell a satisfying story.
Meanwhile, if you happen to see a woman sobbing in the canned goods aisle at the supermarket, it might be me — slumped against the trolley, feeling bad about a character I’ve hurt.
If you want to march up and yell at me about killing Patrick, that’s fair enough. You could just maybe hand me a tissue too.
Useful, by Debra Oswald, Penguin, rrp $33
SOURCE: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/confidential/debra-oswald-has-a-killer-instinct-when-it-comes-to-creating-great-stories/story-fnn7ma1h-1227200619412
