Deans: For Australian kids, the bush is a primordial place – a place with different rules, just down the end of the street. We would virtually live down there – exploring caves, hunting animals, following creeks, riding foam surfboards through the rapids during thunderstorms, riding extremely dangerous rope swings off cliffs and generally being free. Parents these days would probably be horrified at the kind of stuff we used to get up to but the mortality rate was still comparatively low. And you learnt from an early age to protect your parents from the truth.
II
Deans started school at Normanhurst West in 1965 where he met some of his closest friends – Raftl, Pete and The Ha. Late morning, on his first day at school, his mother was surprised to see him walk in the back door:
Mother: What are you doing home?
Deans: I’ve finished school.
Mother: No you haven’t. You have to keep going or all the other girls and boys will learn more than you.
Deans: I already know everything.
Those who know him well would be amazed that Deans could display such arrogance. In fact, he did not know everything, and one thing he didn’t know about was the duplicity of adults. He was about to learn. The headmaster arrived shortly afterwards in a car that might have been described in those days as a Black Mariah – a large and threatening vehicle which embodied the vast, implacable authority of the state. In front of Deans’ mother, the headmaster was kindly and gentle; amused by his precocious truancy. But as soon as Deans was alone in his car the headmaster rounded on him viciously and he learned that adults were deceptive and dangerous creatures.
Reflecting on his school days, Deans said:
Deans: Unfortunately, I was regarded as a gifted child – which pretty much spelled the end of my academic career. Everyone was telling me how clever I was, but what I actually heard was: Adrian, you are such a fucking genius that you won’t ever have to try at anything. You’ll still be absolutely brilliant at it, and in fact, let’s start rewarding you right now!
That attitude, combined with his inherent laziness and hedonistic nature, meant that his schooldays were a bit of a disaster. It doesn’t matter how smart you are: you still have to actually be exposed to facts if you’re going to learn them. By the time he reached sixth form (as Year 12 was called in those days) Deans, and most of his friends it must be said, regarded classes as optional:
Deans: On the days I did show up (probably because there was football that day), as often as not I’d go to first period and think: Where the hell is everyone? Then I would think: Bugger this, I’m going to Raftl’s.
This presented a bit of a tactical issue. Raftl’s was three doors down from Deans’ house, which meant he had to approach it from the opposite direction to avoid being spotted by his mother – which meant going about a kilometre out of his way and having to walk up a steep hill past several vicious dogs.
Deans: And sure enough, when I arrived, half of sixth form would already be there – playing pontoon, drinking cheap wine pilfered from parents’ cellars, mulling up or playing Dungeons and Dragons (Drunkards and Drag Queens as I called it). Raftl himself would usually still be asleep, and how he beat me in the HSC I will never know.
[Favourite music during this phase: Slade; David Bowie; Alice Cooper. Most significant love interest: Virginia.]
III
The HSC introduced Deans to what he regards as his magic number: 242 – his final mark in the HSC exams of 1977. He recognised it immediately as being somehow special, and beautifully symmetrical, but his parents (and the rest of the world) were impressed only by its remoteness from 500.
Deans: I am a comparatively rational fellow these days, but it really is uncanny, the regularity with which 242 has cropped up in my life. You can certainly understand how repeated coincidence in a life can become imbued with supernatural qualities, and then in the hands of a charismatic individual can become a “key” to perceiving the mind of god (or opening the wallets of fools).
Despite his crap HSC mark, Deans managed to get into a course in Applied Geology, and the Geology part of it he really liked. The Maths, Physics and Chemistry part of it, he did not like. The worst part of it was second semester when he had to attend a four hour geological mapping class on a Tuesday night from 5.00 to 9.00. The fact that the tutor exuded all the personality and style of dusty cardboard was bad enough, what really did his head in was an electric clock on the wall whose hands did not move evenly. Instead, every 60 seconds the clock would emit this loud click, and then a second later the minute hand would move to the next notch – one sixtieth of an hour.
Deans: God I hated that clock. Like Pavlov’s Dog I’d hear the click, and look up to see the hand move – every 60 seconds. It was torture – I couldn’t just get absorbed in my work and let the time flow by. For me, that class meant 240 clicks and 240 minute movements. Was it any wonder I left to become a rock star?
[Favourite music during this phase: David Bowie; Jethro Tull; Pink Floyd, Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, Lindisfarne. Most significant love interest: Maree.]
IV
Being a rock star may seem glamorous, but for Deans it was endless rehearsals and unrelenting poverty. Fortunately, he had something else to distract him from the mind-numbing tedium of trying to get decent gear, trying to get gigs and beating off hordes of non-existent groupies. That something else was the Dartford Town Sewer Pigs.
He’d always played football and, like most of his friends, was moderately good at it. A year or so after school they banded together to create a new team in which nearly everyone had played representative at some level. That team rapidly acquired legendary status on the upper North Shore, not least due to incidents like the following:
Deans: In our very first season we were two nil down with fifteen minutes to go in a trial game against state league opposition. It had been an incredibly frustrating game in that we had largely dominated, but still found ourselves trailing. In fact, we’d nearly gone three behind except for an utterly sensational piece of cheating from The Ha (where he managed to make a handball off the goal line look like a diving header). Still time ticked away, and I suddenly had this vision of us all back at Raftl’s place, celebrating a win, and from that moment I knew we’d get a result. But even I (who was later to become the High Priest of Sewer Pig lore) could not have foretold the final outcome: 7 – 2.
Seven goals in less than 15 minutes of the most sparkling, impossible football the world has seen. No matter what they tried, it turned to goals – including the greatest strike ever seen at any level. The Pigs had just equalised and were utterly rampant when the opposing goalkeeper punted out from the edge of the box. The ball landed about three metres inside their half, where it was met on the half volley by The Ha. The ball nearly took the keeper’s head off and was still rising when it hit the back of the net...from 45 metres.
Deans: There are some who will try to tell you that swearing is an excuse for a lack of eloquence. Well, they can get fucked. They should have been there when I shook hands with their rather shell-shocked keeper after the game. He just shook his head and said: “Fuck!”, and never have I heard such an infinity of emotion packed so profoundly into one syllable.
Over the next 20 years, the DTSP carved a legend into the hide of the Gladesville Hornsby Football Association but it was the philosophy as much as the football that made their mark. Some of the basic tenets of Sewer Piggery were as follows:
Deans: Everyone knows that the Sewer Pigs are not the greatest team in the history of the planet, but you’re not a Sewer Pig unless you believe they are.
The Sewer Pigs would rather cheat and lose than play fair and win.
Playing for the Sewer Pigs is a 90 minute orgasm.
And as their team song Best on Paper suggested:
Gladesville Hornsby learned to fear the approach of trotters and the smell of beer
V
But life can’t forever be about beer and hubris.
Eventually, your mates start getting married and taking their jobs seriously, and you realise that serious decisions do have to be made. Deans devoted about three years of his early twenties to really trying to make it as a rock star, but in the end he had to concede that he wasn’t good enough – or at least that he wasn’t prepared to give it quite as much single minded dedication as it needed (for his level of talent).
Deans: Having said that, my friend Brett and I, to this day, speculate about what might have happened if we’d given it one more year. We were probably a bit ahead of our time because the style we were playing in the early to mid 80s (I used to describe us as a more rocky version of Pink Floyd) really took off in the late 80s and early 90s.
Alas, by that time, Deans was a lawyer.
[Favourite music during this phase: David Bowie; Jethro Tull; Pink Floyd, Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, Roy Harper. Most significant love interest: Karen #1.]
VI
By the age of 24 Deans had realised that if the rock star thing didn’t happen, life was going to be fairly shit – working crap jobs with mediocre tossers for bosses and never earning enough money to be able to enjoy life. About that time, his friend Pete dragged him along to see a movie: Educating Rita. It changed his life.
Deans: I had never ceased my own personal education and had been ploughing through Carl Sagan’s books at the relevant time, but when I began to appreciate the “journey” of formal education via Rita I knew I was ready for that journey – really desperately wanted that journey – because god knows rock music and crap jobs were taking me nowhere.
He had to do the HSC again, as his magic number wasn’t good enough, even as a mature age student to get him into a decent course at a reasonable university. He wanted to do English literature because he had decided to get serious about writing novels, but his other motivation was simply to finish something.
Deans: I felt like I’d never really gotten to the end of anything and it was time to acquire some discipline. So – English literature then. But when I went to fill out my University application form, a strange thing happened. I put down law.
Arts as well. But law? It was a sudden whim. Deans was fairly confident that he was going to get a reasonable mark, probably enough to get into law, so why not see what it was like? He could always revert to just Arts if he didn’t like it.
Deans: Almost to my disbelief I found the intellectual challenge of studying law quite exhilarating. Truly! For the first year or so it felt like my brain was being carved up and put back together in a strange and alien fashion (I think most first year students feel that way), but when I really started to “get” it in 2nd year, I knew also that I was becoming a different person.
That’s not to suggest Deans was somehow abandoning his roots. He was still creative and if anything more so.
Deans: It seemed like the creative side of my brain had really shifted up a notch – possibly because I had to be disciplined most of the time – and when I did get the opportunity to wallow in self-indulgence I had to make the most of it. The other benefit was that my creativity was being combined with a newly ordered sense of discipline. My thoughts were organised and so were my creations. This meant, among other things, that it finally occurred to me how to conceive and finish a novel.
[Favourite music during this phase: David Bowie; Jethro Tull; Pink Floyd, Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, Roy Harper. Most significant love interests: Maree, Karen #1, Cathington.]
VII
Deans had always wanted to be a story-teller. Identified at an early age as a lying hound, he was a natural inventor of sketches and scenes, and it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world that his life’s vocation was to write. All he had to do was turn those sketches and scenes into stories, right?
He had tried several times – fired with inspiration and great premises, he’d start writing but would always peter out by about page 50. Why?
Because he’d been trying to write the whole thing out in one go from beginning to end.
Idiot.
Deans: It occurred to me one day, with all the momentous epiphany of Newton’s Apple thudding into the turf, that you didn’t have to do that. You could, instead, just jot down notes in point form about what happened and basically plan the story from beginning to end before you started generating actual prose.
Immediately, he started planning the story that would become Rites: his first finished and published novel. Rites was based on a song Deans had written during his rock star phase called The Tribe on Ladbroke Grove.
Deans: It was just a whimsical little song about a suburban family who lived like cavemen and I realised that there might be an interesting story in how they got to be that way. It took me about a year to map out that story and another couple of years to write it. I remember the last month or so, writing the last two or three chapters were totally exhilarating – living in the story. I’d mapped it all out, as I said, but there were still plenty of surprises along the way, including a massive twist at the very end, which I hadn’t seen coming even though it was pretty obvious looking back – hard-wired into the story’s DNA.
The ideas behind the story were pretty complex (it turned into a darkly comic story about economics at its most esoteric and savage levels) and the writing was incredibly dense, but he’d done it! He’d actually finished a novel.
What Deans didn’t realise, at the time, was that what he had finished was a first draft. There was some interest in the book by publishers, especially Text and the agent Anthony Williams, but they all passed until he ran into a small publisher (Bobby Grahame) at a conference who was starting up an ebook/print-on-demand publishing company. Was he interested in letting Rites become one of her first titles?
Deans: Why not? It didn’t sell too well in that experimental medium, but a writer needs an audience to develop. I was incredibly proud of Rites when it was first finished, but these days it embarrasses me. It was the book I had to write to become a writer – I’d learnt how to map out and finish a story, but there were two really important things I was yet to learn.
[Favourite music during this phase: David Bowie; Jethro Tull; Pink Floyd, Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, Roy Harper, Rush, Elvis Costello, Crowded House. Most significant love interest: Helen.]
VIII
The first was “voice”.
Deans: A writer needs to find his/her voice, by which I mean your natural story-telling style that allows your original personality and perspective to shine through. I suppose it was there in Rites but I was trying too hard. By the time I started Them I’d relaxed into something much closer to what I now regard as my natural style. I’d also learned (towards the end of Rites) how to pace a story and keep a reader intrigued and interested.
Accordingly, Them was a far more readable effort and, while still about a pretty heady subject (the vague paranoid belief that there are people out there who really know what’s going on and are secretly pulling the strings), it was much lighter in style.
Deans: Some of my friends complained that you needed four degrees and three dictionaries to read Rites – I would have said two degrees and one dictionary. Some of my friends exaggerate.
Deans knew Them was a far superior (and much more saleable) effort to Rites so determined to hold out for a mainstream publisher.
Deans: Once again there was interest from agents, especially one in particular who, out of respect I will not name, because would you believe he died? Finally, someone from the mainstream had really liked my work and wanted to push it to the next level, and how does the cosmos respond?
It was scary stuff! Deans was starting to have deeply paranoid thoughts himself, and was constructing a story about this brilliant writer who is a plaything of the gods, cursed with a profound talent that no-one else could appreciate. Anyone who did was immediately killed.
No doubt, that same paranoia afflicts many rejected writers.
Them went pretty close at Scribe and was championed by the agent Mary Cunnane, but after Scribe did eventually pass Deans lost interest in novels for a while – all that work for no reward. He needed something that was quicker to create – that wasted less of his precious life in getting to a rejection. The answer was screenplays.
In fairly short order he rattled off three screenplays and a stage play, and learned a lot about pacing a story, the hero’s journey, character arcs etc.
Deans: But I think, for me, the good thing was that I didn’t have these techniques imposed on me – I discovered them naturally within my own style. So much Hollywood or TV writing is depressingly formulaic – once you know the standard techniques you can predict every step of most films or telly shows. That’s not entertainment. Entertainment is about being surprised (not just shocked).
But there was still one really important thing he was yet to learn.
[Favourite music during this phase: David Bowie; Jethro Tull; Pink Floyd, Midnight Oil, Roy Harper, Rush, Elvis Costello, Crowded House. Most significant love interest: Karen #2 (Kazzie).]
IX
When Deans returned to writing novels in late 2007 he was equipped with a strong story-telling voice. He knew how to plan and pace a story and keep the reader’s attention. He had naturally synthesised into his style the rudiments of character development, and of course, he still had his original capacity for coming up with good, original premises. Accordingly, he rattled off a first draft of Mr Cleansheets in 13 months, and the first fiction publisher to whom he showed it (Vulgar Press) was keen to take it on as a project.
That didn’t necessarily mean they were going to publish it. That’s when Deans started to understand the final lesson – which in some ways is the hardest. When you get to the end of a first draft, that doesn’t mean it’s in a publishable state – it must be refined, usually over several drafts, until all the rough edges are knocked off, stray threads deleted and all padding pared to the bone. This will entail you identifying the spine of the story and going back through again and again removing anything which departs from the spine – no matter how good it is. This requires ruthless dispassion. The more you try to accommodate a good “bit” which departs from the spine, the more you are saying to a publisher: I don’t have the discipline and judgment for you to bother with my work.
Deans: This can be painful to learn. There was a section of Mr Cleansheets which was probably the funniest part of the book. I was literally howling with laughter (on the train) when I was writing it, but it added nothing to the story in terms of plot or character development and it took eight pages to set up. Eight pages for nothing, except a major chuckle. It had to go. Especially as the publisher was telling me the book was too long and had to be reduced from 220k to 160k words. (I eventually got it down to 190k.) I might put that deleted section on the website as an out-take.
He also began to understand why so many publishers and agents in the past had said that his work showed promise but he hadn’t quite put the work in to make it as good as it could potentially be.
X
So what now?
Mr Cleansheets is hitting the shelves as we speak and Deans has started writing the sequel (if the first book is successful, there will be two more to follow). He has almost finished the draft of a completely different sort of book (straitjacket) about a very evil lawyer haunted by a serial nightmare, and he remains hopeful that Them might one day be published in the mainstream.
Only the readers can make that happen, because there is one thing a writer can never truly know about their own work: could anyone give a rat’s?
Deans: You can have all the originality, style and technique in the world, but unless people actually want to read your books, you may as well forget it. I think they’re pretty good, but I wouldn’t have a clue whether people (by which I mean lots of people) want to read my books.
I guess I’m about to find out.
[Favourite music during this phase: David Bowie; Jethro Tull; Pink Floyd, Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, Roy Harper, Rush, Elvis Costello, Crowded House. Most significant love interest: Karen #2 (Kazzie).]
XI
For this interviewer, one question remains: what drives someone to spend so many hours in the proverbial garrett? Why do you write? It is, after all, a lonely and mostly thankless activity. And trying to get published is essentially long periods of waiting punctuated by occasional humiliation. So what’s the attraction? What’s the point of wasting literally decades of your life for the almost impossible hope that you might one day make a living out of writing?
Deans: George Orwell (my greatest writing hero) once wrote an essay called: Why I Write. It was a personal investigation of his motives and philosophies regarding writing – and something I think about often. In my case – it is The Urge. I am not consumed with dreams of money or fame (at least, I don’t think so). I am compelled to write by some creative well-spring which I couldn’t turn off if I wanted to (and I have occasionally wanted to). When I was younger, The Urge was a form of torture that fired my ambition like a skyrocket set off inside a locked room. (You really can understand why so many young writers, artists and musicians destroy themselves.) But as I mellowed, with an acceptable Plan B to keep my life on an even keel, I found that writing was just something I naturally do. I enjoy writing simply for its own sake – irrespective of whether it ever makes me successful.
This is the only attitude to have if you want to stay alive and out of asylums. Writing is an art form which you must love for its own sake and enjoy your creations even if they are only for an audience of one.
Deans: I would dearly love to have a large audience, which means either that I must plug into the Zeitgeist in a way that makes my work impossible to ignore, or be prepared to restrict myself to the accepted Hollywood formulas and trot out the kind of mental cud you see in airport bookshops and best sellers lists.
Twocastle: But don’t you want to see Mr Cleansheets on a best sellers list?
Deans: Of course I do, and my last comment was a bit of a cheap shot really. There is much in the way of fine literature in airport bookshops, and to be brutally honest, a book about footballers, skinheads and Irish mafia all beating fuck out of each other while occasionally bonking pop stars hardly qualifies as literature in the manner of Tess of the fahkin’ D’Urbervilles, yeah?
Twocastle: In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell referred to “the fine scorn of the unpublished” – that scathing derision for the works of the famous born partly out of the certainty that the derider could do better given the opportunity, and partly out of envy. Now that you are published, are you still scornful of popular writers?
Deans: I’m scornful of so-called celebrities being trotted out as writers purely as a means of crowbarring cash from the pockets of punters. And I have little respect for writers that simply copy the formulas of those who have gone before. But most popular writers would have my deepest regard. It is really hard to get published and harder still to make a living out of it. Anyone who can come from nowhere to carve out their own literary niche and have lots of people craving for more is living my dream. Bastards!