Lismore’s Bette Guy is a prolific writer of short stories, plays and novels who also has experience on stage and in the director’s chair. With the Lismore Theatre Company gearing up to stage her play Soft Murder later this year and her newest book under consideration with a major publisher, Guy shared her own story with the Lismore App. 

My husband and I came to Australia from the UK in the late ‘60s, really just for an adventure. We had two small children and we planned to stay for two years but ended up never leaving. We settled in really well and loved it. 

It was something new and exciting and so different. Australians speak English but, my God, what a culture shock. Such a totally different attitude and mindset. There was so much new stuff to see and my imagination just went off.

We lived in Melbourne for a short time, then East Gippsland, Brisbane, outside of Brisbane, near Coffs Harbour and then, Armidale, where I went to university.

At school I was always good at what we used to call English composition and I realised at an early age that I loved telling stories. I was one of five children, so you learn to tell stories to your parents about what you kids are all doing - cover stories. I was always good at that and I was always imaginative. I could pick anything up and make a story out of it. 

So I guess I've always been a storyteller, but it was university that really got me into writing. When you're doing a degree of any kind, you have that space, you have the stimulation, you have the research, and the library is just there. 

I did my first degree at the University of New England in English, Drama, Theatre, French and Psychology. I was a mature age student. In ‘83, I think it was. I was working at the uni and at the same time doing bits of theatre. I was acting, directing, writing, getting bits and pieces I’d written on stage here and there - in Armidale,Tamworth, Brisbane, Sydney, down in Victoria and Tasmania. 

You don't make a living from writing though - not unless you’re Stephen King. I did other jobs or bits of tutoring. That's what I've always done. I should have been a high school teacher, but when I went into the system in the '80s, I decided it wasn’t for me. 

A friend of mine, she's self-published 12 books now, and sells a lot of ebooks in America, but she has to teach as well. She makes probably half the amount of the dole from her writing and then the rest she has to make up somehow.

In Armidale in around 2000, I felt like I'd reached my limits. That's the problem when you're a writer and you have imagination, you need to be stretched and challenged all the time. I felt like I'd gone as far as I could with it and wanted to change. We looked everywhere for where to go next. We were going to Newcastle but they had just had that earthquake.

We moved to Lismore because we wanted to live somewhere there was a university, because you have a broader cultural community, and this is a good area because you're not far from the bush, you've got small businesses, a few big businesses, you've got the hospital ... you've got everything here and it was near the coast so it was warm. It has quite a few things going for it.

This area is great for creativity, and the people are open to everything, which is really great. The gallery here, every time you come there's something that sort of hits you in the face and you think, oh my god. And then there are other things that you might not like so much, or that you hate or that you love. So there's a whole range, which is great. You don't have that sort of one track mind type of a culture here. 

When the Queensland Theatre Company put on my play Well You Can’t Win ‘Em All I thought, ‘well, I'm off now’ with my career, but if you're living in a country town, whether it's Armidale or Lismore, Ballina or whatever, it's not the same as if you're in Sydney or Melbourne. You've got to be right by the theatre and working with the theatre company to really make a go of it. 

So that's when I started going into the short stories more and the books. After about four rejections I decided to publish myself, which is hard because you've got to sell them yourself then, which is really hard. Rejections really mean nothing. You keep reading about people who have had 30 or 40 rejections before they get picked up. But I don't have that much time left. I can’t wait around for another 20 years. 

I've self-published two books so far. One was a mystery set with the backdrop of the Aquarius Festival and a collection of short stories. Some of my short stories have been published in anthologies and various newspapers, magazines and things. 

I do like the mystery I wrote. It's called Day and Knight - The Case of Missing Things and is available on Amazon. It was set here and I've put a lot of myself into the lead character. It's humorous. It's a mystery. Because I could refer back to the Aquarius Festival, it involves criminals from then and right up to date when it was written, but there's always that humour and it's really my kind of humour, and I love the character.

I've got a book now that Penguin are looking at but who knows. I’ll keep trying. I will try with this latest book, which is sort of part memoir, part creative fiction set in England and Australia. If Penguin reject it, I'll try somewhere else.

The Lismore Theatre Company is currently auditioning for a production of my play Soft Murder. It was one I wrote as part of my Masters Thesis about a decade ago and got on to the long short list for the Queenland Premier's Drama Award.

It’s about war propaganda. The main character is a woman who gets a new job working in a government office, which turns out to be the propaganda department. She enters this world of spin doctoring and learns of the terrible things, the dreadful lies that the public are being told, and she decides she wants to do something about it. I can't say too much. You don't want to give it all away.

There's a lot of farce in it. There's a lot of innuendo. My thesis was about political satire and how Greek playwright Aristophanes comedic conventions are relevant today. I went through several centuries of plays including Shakespeare right up to contemporary playwright Dario Fo and pointed out that a lot of these comedic conventions were still used. 

I can look at sitcoms on television and see they're using farce here, they're using witty dialogue there. Whatever. So that's what Soft Murder was built upon, political satire, and it's about bringing the bad guys down, or at least exposing the truth. That's the centre of it. 

These days I've got no job, as such. I'm semi-retired, but I'm involved in the Labor Party, I'm involved with U3A and the theatre, I'm involved with some younger people who sometimes want a bit of mentoring. So my life is full. There are still days when I think 'oh, I'll get to stay home today. Wonderful'.

You know, fame and fortune, it's not gonna happen. I realise that now, although that's what you hope for originally. What I would like is just recognition from the industry and my peers. I mean everyone who reads my books loves them, but that's not enough. I want a few thousand readers at least. A million would be nice. But we'll have to see. Every year I say, oh, I'm going to stop writing, but within seconds the ideas are always there and that's what you can't combat. 

Just seeing someone walking down the street in some sort of strange headgear or clothes, and you think what's their story? And I'm off. Where can I put them? What are they doing? It's crazy, but that's what writers have: imagination and they just go off. Whether you can make a good story, is another question, but that's the skill of it. The craft.