Sue Miller

I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking.