No other high like it: How Catherine Chidgey gets a book out a year
Sunday, 4 May 2025
Also from the Sunday Star-Times: see what Catherine Chidgey has been reading lately.
Catherine Chidgey is what book people might call a ‘productive’ writer.
This month she releases her third book in four years: The Book of Guilt is the Cambridge author’s ninth novel - it’s a dark but often funny read about three brothers, triplets, living in a boys’ home in England after the war.
Vincent, Lawrence and William are so alike their carers, other mothers, don’t know them apart if they aren’t wearing their assigned colours. But they are different, in their own ways - just how different, the reader will have to find out for themselves.
At the outset of her career, Chidgey published three books in six years, before a 13-year gap where she and her partner grappled with infertility.
She was still trying to write, she says, but it wasn’t happening for her. That combination of being unable to naturally conceive a child and write her next book, was too painful to want to repeat.
Happily they had a daughter, Alice, with the help of surrogacy. And her next book, The Wish Child, was released in 2016 with the help of a strict writing regime Chidgey continues using to this day.
“When I'm writing brand-new material and just trying to get a decent draft finished, then I'm very regimented and very strict with myself,” she says.
“I set myself a daily word count, which varies book to book, but it's usually around 300 or 400 words a day.”
It may not sound like much but they’re not to be any 300 or 400 words, but the best, most important and lyrical words she can offer that day. And if she goes over that word count, does she get a lighter day the next day?
Absolutely not, she says: “The counter resets to zero each day.
“These days, I find that I can work quite well writing in bed with a magic triangular foam pillow that I put my laptop on, and then in the evenings I'll come back to it, especially if I haven't met my word count in the morning, or I will do a bit more polishing, honing and thinking about where I want to pick up again the next day.
“It's really vital for me to leave the writing at a point where I know I can find my way back into it, without too much scrambling to refind threads that I've dropped.”
Using that method, and having not missed a day except for in emergencies – like when Alice broke her jaw – Chidgey has managed to release a new book almost every year since: The Beat of the Pendulum in 2017; her first children’s book Jiffy, Cat Detective in 2019, Remote Sympathy in 2020, The Axeman's Carnival in 2022, Pet in 2023 and now her latest, The Book of Guilt.
“I'm quite superstitious these days about keeping up the momentum and being quite hard on myself, in order that I don't fall into a period of not writing.”
Even if life gets in the way, like that chaotic day her daughter broke a bone?
“Then, again, I'm really hard on myself, and I make myself do double the next day, so I don't fall behind.”
Contemporary wisdom about self-care suggests being too hard on yourself can cause more bad than good. But Chidgey is so laser-focused on the outcome, getting her next book out, that she thinks maybe she’s addicted to writing.
“That's what I want, and I need to keep producing to get that high of having written something that I feel satisfied with and proud of, and that I hope will bring pleasure to readers.”
“Trashy” television shows like Married at First Sight help her relax after a full day of writing, teaching, parenting and everything that comes with those parts of her – there isn’t much room for hobbies or relaxing activities, Chidgey laughs.
And don’t call writing a hobby, either. It’s not only a job, but something in her life she would be bereft without.
“While it takes a huge amount of my energy, it also is the thing that feeds me as well.
“It is a drug, and I cannot match in any other way the rush I get when I finish a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book that I feel proud of.”
To figure out if her stories are done, she’ll read them out loud, which lets her make sure they have the rhythm and musicality she is aiming for.
And sometimes, without really noticing, she’ll read aloud to herself but in an accent that isn’t her own, she admits for the first time.
“It’s just to make it slightly strange to me, so it doesn't sound like me reading my own work,” Chidgey says.
“It's not always the same thing… sometimes it will be really posh British, sometimes it will be Scottish, sometimes it will be Irish, I don’t know, sometimes it will be Australian, just whatever pops into my head.
“Sometimes it’s German, sometimes it’s French.”
There are no shortcuts, either. Once, one of her cats accidentally typed out a combination of keys on her laptop that made the computer start reading her novel aloud in a “creepy, unpoetic robot voice”.
“Yeah, that didn't sound great. It has to be me.”
The Book of Guilt follows the triplets through their strange lives in the boys’ home, separated from the rest of the world. Their mothers record every dream and nightmare in The Book of Dreams, and they have studies during the day out of The Book of Knowledge. If they do wrong, their misdeeds are recorded too: in The Book of Guilt.
Chidgey says part of the story was inspired by the question of nature versus nurture - how much of us is inherited, and how much is learned?
“I wanted to make sure that I developed each boy as an individual, and so made Vincent, the main narrator, someone who's quite thoughtful, who absolutely adores his brother William, but William has a habit of treating Vincent quite cruelly.
“I built William into this quite cruel character who has a bit of a sadistic streak, and then Lawrence, the third brother, is much gentler and loves animals and nature.
“I built them up to be really different, and to talk about the way that sometimes in families, we love people who aren't kind to us and who don't love us back, for instance. The book is in some ways a reflection on the consequences of that kind of family dynamic.”
And while none of the boys are directly inspired by someone she knows, there are pieces of her own self in each of them.
Writers who say they don’t inject themselves into their characters are lying, Chidgey laughs.
“I think that's key to making them feel like three-dimensional human beings.”
To get those 300 or 400 words done each day, Chidgey writes early, before taking her daughter Alice to school then heading off for her day job teaching creative writing at the University of Waikato.
For her, it’s a thrill to be among writers-in-training from undergraduates through to PhD students, some still finding their voices just like she had to do some 30 years ago.
“I love being around their energy and their excitement for the projects they're embarking on.
“It’s such a thrill for me to see a student crystallise the idea of the book, and then to carry that through over the process of many months, and sometimes many years, to reach the finish line and produce the manuscript of a book.
“To have played a part in that is hugely rewarding.”
It’s when they realise they don’t have to sound like anyone – not their favourite authors or Chidgey herself even – to be successful, and that voice finds itself on the page, that the magic happens.
It’s not uncommon for writers starting out to be semi-autobiographical with their work, and Chidgey was no different with her debut novel, In A Fishbone Church (which swept up best first book awards at home and abroad when it was released in 1998).
Perhaps when you don’t stray too far from home, you can find your own voice that bit easier, she suggests.
Though she’s dabbled in autobiographical-inspired fiction and even written a found novel - a collage of conversation, newspaper articles and other writing - Chidgey isn’t prepared to let her whole self be revealed in print.
“I would never want to write a collection of personal essays, for instance, the way that my dear friend Kate Camp did,” she says.
“That book is amazing, but very exposing, and I could never, there's no way.
“I far prefer hiding behind fiction so that readers are never quite sure which are bits of me and which aren't.”
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, is out May 8. RRP $38.