The question on everyone's lips: could Gab Williams keep her bio for this website to the word limit? We all know Gab loves a chat (Gab by name, gab by nature) and the restriction of the word count was never going to be easy for her.
We explained first up that she'd have to leave out all the stuff about when she was at school being taught by nuns (the St Trinians-type stories would unfortunately have to wait for another time). We said there wasn't room for her anecdote about the elephant, the spangle circus performer and the drive around Kew Boulevard. And we told her it was a dead cert that she couldn't go into any detail about the years she worked in advertising and recording studios and television (mainly because they passed in a party-fuelled haze and she's not exactly sure what happened herself).
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She wanted to tell the story of how she met her husband, but we suggested that might be considered somewhat irrelevant.
She thought maybe one or two stories about her three kids might be charming. We told her flat out, no.
We said she should stick mainly to the facts. We told her to talk up the two books she's had published; Two canadian clubs and dry at the martini den (a cheeky, flirty tale of love and lies in inner-city Melbourne) and beatle meets destiny (a young adult novel about change, chance and everyone doing the wrong thing). We thought the fact that she got an Australia Council Grant for her current work-in-progress would be of interest. We felt sure people would prick up their ears when they heard that beatle meets destiny has been optioned by an award-winning German film director.
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And then we told her that was just about all she'd have room for.
Word count reached.
Thank you very much.
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Gabrielle was truly wonderful. She kept the boys interested for the whole time around the theme of 'The lazy person's guide to creative writing' using exerpts from her book to illustrate her point. She was both entertaining and educational, and gave the students plenty to think about; making writing seem a manageable and dare I say even fun task and spurred them on to read her book. The tricks she gave them to make creative writing easy and fun were invaluable. 24 hours later they were still talking about it!
Jenni Neal
Head of Library
Brighton Grammar School
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