An Interview with Lorraine Cobcroft

I’m a small town girl from rural New South Wales, Australia. My dad was killed in a motorbike accident when I was six weeks old. As the only child of a poor widow I enjoyed an idyllic early childhood, surrounded by a big, loving extended family and wonderful neighbours. 

When I was twelve, my mother remarried a fellow she had met years before who had migrated to California and made his fortune. I spent four fabulous years in Southern California. They divorced, and we returned to Australia and I went through a period of trauma and unhappiness, ending when, at 20, I rushed headlong into marriage to a soldier musician and went with him to live in Singapore. Thirty-eight years later, he is my best friend and supporter and I am still madly and passionately in love with him. We’ve raised three beautiful children together, and now have four delightful grandchildren to light up our lives.

I excelled at school, but sadly the untimely change in family circumstances ended my education prematurely and I never got to go to College, but I never stopped learning. It’s a passion. I devour knowledge with a hunger that never abates.

I don’t really remember when I started. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I have a vivid memory of my mum pretending to be a rabbit, trying to get my older cousin to describe what she was doing. He was about nine, I think, and I was only a toddler. She was trying to teach him how to write descriptions. She must have got me started. I won a road safety essay competition when I was in grade four, and about that time I wrote a story about fairies living in a hollow tree trunk that the teacher insisted I must have copied from somewhere, because a kid my age couldn’t write that well. I got serious about writing when we went to California. The teachers there were much more encouraging, and I started writing poetry and articles for the school magazine. Lack of confidence held me back. I never believed I could be a published author, but I used to write articles in response to things I read in magazines. My husband sent one to “Woman’s Day” and it was published. I was blown away! They paid me the princely sum of $70, but the real buzz was the mail from readers. I guess it was a controversial topic, because over 1,500 people wrote to congratulate me on speaking out. I didn’t really do much with my writing, though, until I was over 40. I was importing and selling software, and one great product had terrible documentation. I wrote a 1,500-page self-paced correspondence course in computer programming with a visual tool, and it was a huge hit. I went on to write software manuals and business documents, then gradually moved into freelance business and ghost writing. 

I wish! I find my office depressing, but I do love nature, so I recently bought myself a Neo so that I can sit on the beach or in a park and write. 

Anger at social injustice; frustration at others writing badly or presenting a point of view I disagree strongly with; hearing an inspirational story; or discovering information that can enhance other people’s lives. I’m a fighter for social justice, and I find the pen is far mightier than the sword.

It’s easy to write. The hard part is editing and rewriting. I get emotionally attached to sentences and I find it really hard to delete them, even when I know they don’t work. Getting started is often hard too. Blank pages are intimidating!

Newspaper and magazine articles are good for generating ideas. My husband is also a great source! Just watching people in a public place and trying to imagine their private lives works for some. Why is that girl looking impatient? Who is she waiting for? Why does that man look so sad? Listen to friends. Get them talking about their experiences and the people they know. Ask questions about their hobbies and interests. Simple comments can trigger the imagination and evolve into a great story.

Absolutely. For the most part, early in life, they discouraged me. It wasn’t that they were critical, but rather that well-meaning relatives and teachers told me writing was something you do for fun and I needed to look for other ways to make a living. I guess the message they were trying to convey was that finding a publisher isn’t easy, but they didn’t recognise the wealth of opportunities in business writing, journalism, copywriting, and ghostwriting. The best thing I’ve done for myself is to join a Writers’ Group. My friends at Fairfield Writers’ Group are wonderfully supportive and great at critiquing each other’s work. I’m less serious in my writing now. They’ve helped me relax and write for fun. 

I must have read thousands of books, and I would find it hard to name an author who didn’t influence me. I enjoy reading Wilbur Smith, Colleen McCullough, Bryce Courtenay and Irwin Shaw. I try to read a wide variety of works. I look for books by little known authors. I frequent second hand book stores to find books by unknowns. Even the bad ones are helpful, because they show me what not to do.

When I’m ghostwriting, time is money and I have to get it out quickly. Clients won’t pay for extensive revision. I typically finish a book in two to three weeks. When writing for myself, I struggle to finish at all because I’m never satisfied, unless I have a deadline, and then I can write at lightning speed. When I was writing the course, I was turning out a book (a hundred and fifty pages on average) a month. I once wrote a 350 page e-book on setting up a web hosting business in three days, while my husband was away on a long weekend. I finished it, and then realised I’d hardly eaten and hadn’t slept since he left. Within a week of starting it, eleven hundred people had downloaded it. 

I wanted to convey a message to my grandchildren, without being a lecturing grandma. I was looking for a way to teach them empathy and compassion. I wanted them to appreciate their good fortune and be charitable to those less blessed. My younger daughter was running marathons for charity, and she told me a story about a young leukaemia sufferer and her family that touched me. I wanted to support her efforts to raise funds for leukaemia research, and to help families like the one she had described, and I saw an opportunity to do that, while helping my grandchildren to appreciate how lucky they are to be healthy. 

I’m a little nervous about answering, because everything I read says children’s writing is really hard to do well. I found it quite easy. I find, though, that I can’t just decide to write fiction. It comes to me. I wake up in the morning and I can see the story just as if I were reading a book. Or I’ll “hear” a voice reading it out loud when I’m taking a shower. I have to race to write it down before I forget what I read or heard.

Absolutely! I find it very frustrating to see others taking credit for my work.

Yes. Some clients will agree to this, but interestingly the less capable someone is of writing their own book, the more likely they are to want everyone to think they did! People hate to confess to their shortcomings and inabilities. If they believe they could write a best seller if they wanted to, they are more likely to be quite content to share the credit. There’s also the financial aspect. Many people assume that joint credit means joint profit, and they don’t want to share the proceeds of a book they anticipate will sell well. A fixed up-front fee is much more attractive to most than an unknown profit share.

Often, and I really enjoy doing that. 

It’s fascinating to learn about new things. Last year I wrote a book on body building. It was fun, and I learned a lot about health and nutrition that has been really helpful. 

The hardest part is getting the programmers to answer questions in plain English! I spend a lot of time just playing with the program, trying to get the hang of how it works. Then I’ll make lists of questions to ask the developers. Then I start a tape recorder running and I recite what I’m doing as I work through procedures. Software manuals are hard work because you have to go over and over and over the text to check for accuracy and clarity. You write a set of instructions with one step missing, and no matter how many times you proof read and test, you don’t pick up on the fact that it’s missing because your brain inserts it somehow. Everyone I speak to who has done this sort of work agrees this is normal. 

You have to get someone who doesn’t know the software at all to proof read the manual and test all the procedures. That’s difficult, because your proof reader learns the program, and that disqualifies them as a proof reader and you have to find someone else!

All three in different ways, but my years in the US definitely shaped my personality and thinking. It made me who I am. Perhaps it was because I really grew up there, but I think it was more because I had been a poor kid in a class-conscious society, expected to grow up to do what my parents and grandparents did for a living. Education meant rote learning. In the US, our family was affluent and I lived in an affluent area. I went to a progressive school that focused on building confidence and ambition and teaching kids how to find and use knowledge and to how develop their natural talents. School was an adventure. That’s where I developed my insatiable thirst for knowledge. 

All three in different ways, but my years in the US definitely shaped my personality and thinking. It made me who I am. Perhaps it was because I really grew up there, but I think it was more because I had been a poor kid in a class-conscious society, expected to grow up to do what my parents and grandparents did for a living. Education meant rote learning. In the US, our family was affluent and I lived in an affluent area. I went to a progressive school that focused on building confidence and ambition and teaching kids how to find and use knowledge and to how develop their natural talents. School was an adventure. That’s where I developed my insatiable thirst for knowledge. 

That’s a tough question, because each project satisfies in a different way. I guess I’d have to say the software development course, if only because it was enormously profitable as well as being personally rewarding. It gave me confidence that I could write for a living, not just for fun. That first published article gave me a buzz though, because I was flooded with responses. It’s an amazing feeling when you first realise that people are reading and reacting to what you write. My tag line now is ‘nudge the world a little…’ because writers have enormous power to change people’s thinking and make a difference in the world. 

A writer is someone who writes. Write, write, write and write some more. You improve by practicing, not by waiting for inspiration. Read everything you can get your hands on. If you can find a writers’ group in your area, join it. If not, try to find supportive friends who will critique your work honestly, but kindly. Most importantly, believe in yourself and the opportunities that are out there for you. Anyone with a passion for writing can learn to write well by practising. Anyone who writes well can be a published and paid writer if you master the basics of marketing and develop confidence and perseverance. 

Thank you.