Hayley Scrivenor had to embark on a PhD to get the push she needed, but the writer is finally about to release her debut crime novel.
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Dirt Town will hit bookstore shelves on May 31 published by Pan Macmillan, with an early version of the book already receiving acclaim by being shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Prize and winning he Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award.
It's set in the fictional small town of Durton, where a girl disappears and the townsfolk want answers. The aim to "pull the reader out of daily life and into my story", according to the author.
"I actually didn't set out to write a crime novel because I'm a big wuss," Scrivenor said. "I don't read a lot of crime, I do most of my reading before bed and I didn't have the guts."
Although the writer grew up in a small regional town in the NSW Riverina, she said the characters from her fictional dusty town are in no way imitating life in any way.
She has never personally known anyone was vanished, nor anyone like the nasty characters that do pop up and admitted she is just "someone who is really in love with making stuff up".
The author has come a long way since originally sitting down to write a novel set in space, with every major publishing house throwing an offer at the now NSW Illawarra based writer after reading Dirt Town.
If it wasn't for her PhD at the University of Wollongong the book may never have happened, as without that "external deadline" Scrivenor envisaged herself endlessly writing but never completing a story.
"I didn't think that I would be the kind of person who could write a novel," she said.
"I had a couple of short stories published, and I didn't actually study creative writing as my undergraduate [degree], but I somehow managed to talk my way into doing a PhD in creative writing with Dr Shady Cosgrove."
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Dr Cosgrove is credited for encouraging Scrivenor to enrol and commit to writing a book after leafing over some of her previous works.
"That confidence really helped me be confident and she recognised I really cared about writing," Scrivenor said.
It took more than four years to complete the novel and a 40,000 word thesis to accompany it with her PhD submission, and another two years to be transformed into a paperback form. No wonder Scrivenor is excitedly counting down the days until its release.
"It's not up for debate that I can write a book anymore," she said.
"I am happily working on my second book. I learnt a lot of tactics from book one, and ... anytime I doubt my ability to write a book I now have this bound copy in front of me to go 'well, you did it once'."
Scrivenor will be part of a panel discussion on crime writing with Andy Muir and Dinuka McKenzie at the upcoming South Coast Writers Festival, which runs across June 3 and 4 at the Wollongong Town Hall, on NSW's South Coast.
For more details on the festival, visit: https://southcoastwriters.org/