Courtenay's crusade

In the publishing world Bryce Courtenay represents the big time. With novels that boast huge sales and a connection with readers that guarantees future commercial success he is in an enviable position indeed. In the flesh, however, it quickly becomes apparent that Courtenay is a man to whom sales figures mean little and that giving his readers what they want in the form of a good yarn is what matters. His latest novel Sylvia will no doubt prove to be yet another success.

A departure from Courtenay’s usual contemporary subject matter Sylvia takes the reader back to medieval Europe and the disaster of the Children’s Crusade. His interest in the Crusade was first sparked during a dinnertime conversation with friends. Weeks later whilst watching the news he realised that what’s happening now in Iraq happened in Iraq 1,300 years ago and that the symbols are the same. ‘Instead of the Pope you’ve got the President. Instead of the Roman Church you’ve got the charismatic Christian church of America. Instead of Christianity you’ve got democracy,’ explains Courtenay.

Whilst researching this period in history Courtenay became fascinated with the Children’s Crusade:
‘[It’s] probably the most remarkable event in European history. Fourteen to fifteen thousand children tried to walk to Jerusalem and most of them died terrible deaths and in any event, in any time, even medieval times, that was a major, major disaster.’

In preparing to write Sylvia Courtenay did a lot of initial reading from which resulted about 800 questions. A story of this scale calls for extensive research so he recruited two ancient history academics from Macquarie University whose job it was to find answers for those questions as well as those that came up whilst Courtenay was writing. He believes it’s the responsibility of writers to tell history accurately. ‘I take an enormous amount of trouble to make sure that I’ve got the history right,’ he says. Not one to rely on Google Courtenay seldom uses a fact unless he can cross-reference it somewhere else. ‘Good scholarship is a part of good writing I think.’

At 73 years of age one would expect Courtenay to be slowing down to relax after a long career. Instead he works a grueling schedule in order to complete as many books as he can. Whilst other writers take several years to write a novel Courtenay produces one a year by working 12-hour days from February through to August. ‘If I don’t write a seven-month book and have five months roughly to myself – or certainly three months with tours – I don’t have a life,’ says Courtenay.

For Courtenay exercise is the key to being able to work such long hours. ‘I just simply need it to keep my body from falling apart because of the restrictions and pressures I put on it.’ A self-confessed fitness fanatic, Courtenay is a veteran of 39 marathons and 12 ultra-marathons and these days exercises for at least an hour and a half every day.

Even before he put pen to paper to write his first novel, The Power of One, Courtenay had already been writing for several decades, writing advertising copy that is. This gave him the skills and practice he needed to produce a novel. For Courtenay copywriting provides the perfect preparation for fiction writing:

There is no better form of practice than something like advertising because you’re eliminating the adjectives, you’re eliminating the adverbs, you’re refining everything down to its shortest possible medium with the most possible emotional meaning. You’re keeping it lean and hard and mean.

Courtenay rejects the label ‘writer’ preferring ‘storyteller’ instead. ‘The craft of writing belongs to everyone; all you need to do is learn it. The art of storytelling belongs to very few people.’ And by the same token being known as a popular writer rather than a literary writer doesn’t bother Courtenay; he has no desire to write literary fiction. ‘I have unquestionably the education and the understanding and the craftsmanship to affect a literary style,’ he says. ‘It’s the last thing that I would do.’ His sales figures speak to the success of his storytelling and affinity with readers. Each book has sold on average 300,000 copies in hardback alone with the exception of The Power of One that has sold a staggering 7.5 million worldwide.

In addition to writing skill and talent as a storyteller, to achieve success as a writer one needs what Courtenay refers to as ‘bumglue’. ‘You glue your bum to a chair and you just persist.’ One of the main reasons people give up writing is because they don’t make the time, explains Courtenay. Clearly he doesn’t suffer from a shortage of bumglue.

What’s next for Courtenay depends entirely on his readers. A favourable response to Sylvia will see him spending 2007 writing the sequel. But whatever the coming year holds it’s certain to involve a ripping good yarn.

Karin van Heerwaarden

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Bryce Courtenay

Latest book: Sylvia
Publisher: Penguin Australia
Price: $49.95 (hard cover)

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