SOURCE: "The Thorned Words of Colleen McCullough," in Writer's Digest, March, 1980, pp. 32, 34, 36.

[In the following essay, Cassill offers insight into McCullough's views on writing and the editorial process behind the publication of The Thorn Birds.]

Even though Colleen McCullough has been writing since she was five, she didn't think about publishing her work until she was 32. "I always wrote to please myself," she says. "I was a little snobby about it—that way I could write entirely as I wished. To write for publication, I thought, was to prostitute myself."

She changed her mind at 32 when, working as a teacher at the Yale Medical School, she decided she'd wind up an old maid in a cold-water walk-up if she didn't change her ways. And changing her ways meant writing for publication—and eventually meant her bestseller, The Thorn Birds.

McCullough's scientific training as a neurophysiologist helped her approach commercial writing systematically: "I sat down with six girls who were working for me. They were very dissimilar types, and not especially avid readers. Yet, they were all mad about Eric Segal's Love Story. I though it was bloody awful and couldn't see what girls so basically intelligent could love about it. I asked them what they wanted most out of a book. First, they liked the idea that Love Story was about ordinary people. They didn't want to read about what was going on in Hollywood and all that codswallow, and they wanted something with touches of humor. Yet they enjoyed books that made them cry. That was criterion number one. If you didn't cry the book wasn't worth reading. I said to myself, 'Yeah, that's true, that makes a lot of sense.' The first book I ever read as a child is something called The Green Horse. I was five and loved it. It made me cry. Think of East Lynne, Ann of Green Gables, Little Women. When Beth dies, awhhhh! So, I said, 'That's it, mate. No matter what else you do in a book, don't forget the buckets of tears. If you do, readers won't remember it from one day to the next.' So, every book I ever write will have heaps of buckets of tears."

McCullough—41, 5′10″, big, smiling, in a flowing silk and linen designer dress that "only cost around a hundred dollars, though, and is a bloody nuisance, always pulling threads"—was born in a small country town in Australia's New South Wales. She grew up in Australia, and worked as a neurophysiologist there and in England before coming to the United States to work at the Yale school of internal medicine. She calls herself "a kitchen-sitter," and over a lunch of cold cuts she launches into five hours of straight-on, diluvial discourse, Irish humor, a wee speck of Australian chauvinism (despite her own disavowal of it), spontaneous throaty laughter, teasing and no-holds-barred expletives.

The effect is anodyne. She's as unencumbered by pretention as she is sure of herself, her many talents and the formula behind best-sellerdom.

Icky Wicket

Instead of tears, a sour February day has dumped buckets of slush on the Connecticut landscape as she talks. She admits she doesn't like either The Thorn Birds or her first novel, Tim, very much—despite their buckets of tears. Of the two, she likes Tim least. "It's an icky book." Still, if someone says she hasn't written great literature, just a bestseller, she laughs at them. "Only time tells. If it lasts, it's good literature. If it dies, it's just another book. Very often the books the critics like today are gone tomorrow."

The Thorn Birds hasn't yet died—and it's hardly just another book. Its original manuscript weighed ten pounds, and it has often been called the Australian Gone With the Wind. The book takes place mostly on an enormous sheep ranch in the outback from 1915 to 1969. It tells the woes of the Cleary family and especially those of Meggie Cleary, the heroine, who seems destined to heartbreak at every turn. Her brother she loves most leaves home and ends in prison. Her father and another brother die violent deaths. She loves a handsome priest, Ralph de Bricassart, who loves her but is married to the church. In desperation, Meggie eventually marries a man she doesn't love. She has a daughter, Justine, by him. But her constantly thwarted love for Father Ralph remains the reader's primary concern. Eventually she does manage to conceive the longed-for child—a son, Dane—by the priest. But he just reaches manhood, goes off to Rome to become a priest himself and tragically drowns. "My brother drowned off Crete exactly the way Dane did," McCullough explains. "That's how death with the young happens. You get a phone call and your whole world falls apart."

McCullough has been facing the public and the press almost continually since her second novel hit it big. "Avon Books bought The Thorn Birds for 1.9 million in February 1977. From the first of March, 1977 to the end of November, 1978, I've been back and forth all over the globe."

To the Tuna $50,000

She admits that such book tours are important to her phenomenal success, but they've left little time to manage other matters. So she has a business manager. And she's moved in with her friends, Maureen (Mo) and Eamonn Whyte and their two children. At first it was just a casual arrangement, a place to stay on weekends between speaking engagements. But they've hit it off so well she's now building a house for herself and the Whytes on 35 nearby acres. "I'm traveling so much I'd just have to find someone to stay in it anyway. This makes more sense."

McCullough's success can be attributed to tuna. "I'd been going the ethical route, sending the manuscript out unsolicited, unagented, waiting months for a printed rejection slip. The parcel would come back completely untouched. You could tell it hadn't even been unwrapped, let alone read. I decided I'd be an old lady before I published my first book. I knew I had to get an agent but couldn't since I hadn't published anything. I tried phoning to get one but it was no use. OK, I thought, I'll write one a letter. If I'm as good as I think I am—if I'm a writer—I should be able to persuade an agent to at least read my manuscript simply by writing one a persuasive letter.

"Still, I didn't know which one to send the letter to. Then, one day I was making a friend something special. She'd been on a diet for two years—eating nothing but tuna fish. It was her birthday and the manuscript had just come back for the third time. I decided to make her a cake. Out of tuna fish, of course. And I hate fish. I got a Jello mold in the shape of a fish. I stewed the tuna in white wine and some herbs and things. While it was stewing the smell of fish was all through the house. And the list of agents was on the table. I looked down and the name, Frieda Fishbein, popped up.

"I sat right down and wrote the world's most persuasive letter—five or six pages—and sent it off. Frieda wrote back saying, 'If the manuscript is half as entertaining as the letter, I'll read it.' I sent Tim to her and she loved it. But she wasn't very encouraging. 'After all, it's set in Australia and its hero is mentally retarded and its heroine is this frustrated old maid.' After one turndown, though, Harper & Row took it. It sold over 10,000 copies in hard cover, which was much better than 99 out of every 100 first novels sell. I made $50,000 from Tim. Then, of course, Harper & Row had the option on the next one, which was The Thorn Birds.

"I had The Thorn Birds written in my head before Tim," she says. "But I knew no one would publish such a long book as a first novel. So I wrote Tim."

Both books were written while she was still living in a rambling, ordinary apartment in New Haven. In the Whyte's unprepossessing dark brown split-level ranch in the Connecticut woods she has an L-shaped bed-sitting-work-room on the lower level. She may work 16 hours at a stretch, then sleep for a while, depending on how she feels. She keeps an internal schedule of her own now that she no longer must teach for a living. "I can work anywhere, I don't need anything special around me," she says. "Except perhaps my plants, 'Johann,' 'Sebastian' and 'clinging Ernie,' and a little supermarket music."

The 40-Book Work Week

She has numerous typewriters. The electrics for letter writing are named "Prince," "Rex" and "Spot." "Rover," an old manual, is kept just for novels. "He's getting old, so I don't use him for the menial stuff anymore," jokes McCullough. "When his keys stick and he gets balky, I threaten him with a brand new IBM electric and he straightens right up."

She doesn't write every day. "And I don't find writing agonizing. I don't believe the average writer who complains that every word comes out like a drop of blood. If it were that bad he wouldn't be doing it." She believes "if you're a novelist you'll never be a great short story writer because the two disciplines are so different." She attributes her ability to write a "page-turner" to a life of reading: "I used to read 40 books a week. Four-oh. I've slacked off lately, though." And to her penchant for sitting around the kitchen table and telling stories: "All the members of my family were highly articulate and great readers. I think there are two kinds of writers: those who write because they can't talk and those who write because they talk so much nobody listens to them. I belong to the second group. And it's super. At Yale when I started to talk they'd all groan, 'Oh, Gawd, there she goes again.'"

McCullough claims her medical background came in handy when she turned to writing novels. "Being a trained scientist, one is used to research. I usually know where I'll find my sources. And I do all my own research. I don't believe in employing staff to do it for me." One useful source is her memory, though she sometimes doesn't tap recent memories. For example, she has to get away from a place for about ten years before she is able to write about it. "Material I've used in the first two books was 20 years old or more," she says.

A careful observer, she claims ideas, characters, images and dialogue have a way of "imprinting themselves" on her brain. "I stash them away and don't even know I've remembered them until suddenly they just pop out when I'm writing. One of my English friends said that I was one of the few people she knew who could build a bridge between my subconscious and my conscious thoughts, just trot across and carry back all sorts of goodies.

"I don't consciously do it. I'm not the sort of person who thinks a lot about myself or why I do things. I have a feeling if you think too much about what you're going to do you're never going to do it. You're either a thinker or a doer. I'm a doer from way back. I just sit down at the typewriter and trot across that bridge."

The bridge was used extensively in creating characterizations—Tim, for example: "I've had patients like him for years. The British old maid? I worked with so many of them! Every ward in every hospital in the British Emm-pah is headed by an old maid like Mary Horton—don't laugh—who takes off all her clothes to go to the bathroom. The people Tim worked for were like people in the building trade who were my father's colleagues."

An early scene in this first novel—a brief love story set in the working-class of Sydney—describes a disgusting joke the workmen play on the unfortunate Tim. "But they're just the kind of people who'd do such a thing. In fact, that scene about the turd sandwich came straight out of real life. People ask, 'Oh, why did you put that in the book?' For one thing, it's a saccharine-sweet book. That's probably the only scene that jars. It was a true and shocking way to show Tim's mentality more effectively than any other. It's close to the beginning of the book because it wouldn't have had any impact later on. Once you have established the character and are comfortable with Tim, it wouldn't have worked. It had to come before he was involved with Mary, with this gentler kind of relationship."

Horror Story

She wasn't afraid the scene might turn readers off. "It didn't. But I think one has an instinct or one hasn't, knowing how a scene like that will affect readers. I rely on instinct and my editor is far too smart to gainsay it. Sometimes she tests me. She'll say, 'I don't like so-and-so.' By my reaction she'll know how important that scene is in my thinking about a book. If it's something I'm not going to change or even think twice about, she sees the reaction on my face immediately and she'll back-pedal. If it's something I've had doubts about myself, she'll see that, too, and then she'll push.

"I was so exhausted after writing The Thorn Birds. I thought when I finished the second full draft, 'I'm not going to do eight more drafts of this bloody, creepy book just to have my editor say no.' I sent it to her in all its horrors, to see if the publishers would be interested. If yes, then I'd go ahead with more drafts. It took her five months before she replied, during which time I wrote two more drafts anyway because I'd got over the exhaustion. When she finally broke her silence I talked with her. She had suggestions. A lot of what she said made sense. But it also meant I had to write a lot that I hadn't written before. She talked me into changing the last part of Thorn Birds. I didn't like Justine, wasn't interested in her in the least. She said she didn't think in the early draft the character of Justine worked, because Justine was very selfish and hard-boiled. She felt Justine wasn't strong enough to carry the last of the book as much as she had to and suggested I soften her up. I went home and thought about it. If I softened her she'd become a different person. What I wanted was someone who was a complete foil for her brother, Dane, and I wanted three generations of women who were entirely different from each other. The only kind of softening I could conceive was to give her a man. In a way, the man I invented, Reiner Moerling Hartheim, was, perhaps, the man I always wished I'd met but never did. He had to be a German because he had to be prepared to wait ten years for a woman. The Germans are the only nationality I know with that kind of romanticism and hard-headedness. They are tremendously romantic, very disciplined and patient. After I wrote it I met four different Germans whose life histories were almost like Hartheim's. When I was in Germany the Germans said, 'Who is it? Who is it?' It turned out it could have been Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor. It could have been Willy Brandt. And a couple of others. I didn't know any of them at the time.

"I put Reiner in and wrote two drafts, then sent it to my editor. She loved it. But still I had contented Justine with a kiss. My editor said, 'Reiner is just great, but the last third of the book needs a damn good love scene.' That was hard to do. I find it very difficult to write love scenes anyway. It's one thing to write them red-hot, you know, but another to go back cold-bloodedly with two characters you're fed up with anyway and put them into bed and make it work.

"Love scenes are the most difficult part of writing. They drive me batty. Those in most books are so bad. You know, the Harold Robbins 'he stuck it in her' type. They're just untrue. Sex is a monotonous, repetitive, nonverbal activity. There is a problem translating that into words. The interesting thing about sex scenes are the moods. The emotion involved is very hard to duplicate in print. I put a love scene through about 60 drafts. It will take me weeks and weeks to write. It's mistake to make such scenes physically explicit. If you do, you encounter the reader's sexual preferences. They may not be your own or the character's own. It's wise to steer clear of that—which means you're going to dwell on the emotional content. Still, it has to be highly erotic or you'll lose your reader.

"I have written as many as 30 or more pages of a novel in a night. But, when I come to a love scene, I slow down. All this talk about my writing Tim in three months is codswallow. I did the first draft of Thorn Birds in 30 days. The first two drafts in under six weeks. But then I did eight more drafts! That's what journalists always fail to mention. They make it sound as if I whiz along and am perfectly satisfied with the first draft and just send it off to the publisher. That's just not the case.

"The first thing out of the typewriter is not perfect by any means. A book as long as Thorn Birds takes a lot of revising. It's not that everything that was in the first draft isn't still there. But it's rearranged, mostly expanded."

Mud- and Muck-Raking

McCullough has been criticized for the love affair in Thorn Birds between a Catholic priest and the heroine. "Actually, Ralph was supposed to be a minor character. Yet, when I was planning it in my head I was aware I didn't have a dominant male lead. The minute the priest walked into the book I said, 'Ah ha, this is it. This is the male character I've lacked!' But I had to keep him in the story and, logically, he didn't belong in it. The only way I could do it was to involve him emotionally with Meggie, the only woman available. It worked beautifully because again it made more interesting reading to have a love that couldn't be fulfilled. It keeps the reader going. Are they going to get together or aren't they? The reader has to want something to happen. If he doesn't want it badly enough, then you haven't caught him."

McCullough likes to tackle, big, spectacular, dramatic stories. If she were to choose another's work to have written, she thinks it might be T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. "It's great how they drag this poor old woman's body through the mud and muck all those miles just to bury her where she wanted to be buried. Maybe that's it. Women are tremendously attracted to the life-birth-death cycle in literature."

As if summing up her work—and her self—she adds: "I always write books with peculiar themes. I don't like writing about boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl." And she means it. "If an editor had seen Thorn Birds in manuscript and 'just loved it,' but suggested it would make a better book if I cut it to a nice 300-page love story, I'd have simply said, 'Get stuffed, mate.'"