Meeting Melina Marchetta...

Melina Marchetta. Photo supplied.

AT 20 years of age, Melina Marchetta was working at a bank and secretly writing a book on the side.

That book was the Australian best-seller Looking For Alibrandi, which has been dubbed the most stolen library book in Australia.

Nearly 20 years later, Ms Marchetta has just released her fifth book, The Piper’s Son, which is a tribute to families, grief and love.

The Satellite’s Kylie Triggell met with Ms Marchetta last week to talk about her inspiration behind The Piper’s Son, and why she had to give up teaching.

Written as a sequel to her second novel, Saving Francesca, the idea for The Piper’s Son began from the desire to continue the story of one of the characters, Georgie.

But after watching a segment on Australian Story about the bodies of six Vietnam veterans being brought home, the idea for the main character came to her.

“That was when Tom came to me, it was almost like ‘that’s their family story’, and so all of a sudden it started making sense,’ Ms Marchetta said.

Dealing with many dark issues, including the Vietnam War and the London bombings, Ms Marchetta said The Piper’s Son had been emotionally difficult to write.

“I cried a lot,” she said.

“I think that what made it easier for me was at the end of the day Georgie and Tom were such funny characters. They were a lot of fun, having them in my head. I liked their personalities, they weren’t dark people on the inside.”

Ms Marchetta began her writing career juggling writing Looking For Alibrandi with her work as a secretary in the legal department of a bank.

“Oh it was a way of surviving, I think I was brain dead,” she said about why she began writing the novel.

“I was in the legal department and I was a secretary, it was boring. When you’re typing and you’ve got these dictaphones in your ears you’re not going ‘oh that’s so interesting’. You can’t, you’re just typing so I was pretty brain dead.

“I really would do a lot of writing because I was not brain dead when I was thinking.”

Ms Marchetta eventually re-trained as a teacher, and it was this career change which nearly sidelined her writing.

“I think with teaching I had 10 brilliant years, the 10 best years. They were just great and I loved it,” she said.

But a decision had to be made about which career to choose, and a comment from a colleague decided it.

“I think with teaching both jobs got so much bigger. It was no longer about walking into a classroom and teaching, it became so much bigger than that and I could not have written a novel like Finnikin of the Rock and taught –I travelled for it (the book). It just would not have been possible, and the same with The Piper’s Son,” she said.

“I always remember her (a colleague) saying to me in a very critical, but in a very ‘I kind of knew where she was coming’ from (way) because it was her view, ‘what are you doing?’.

“It was basically ‘what are you going to do about your writing?’ I felt as if I would be chastised for letting my writing down.

“In actual fact, although I wrote two novels while I was teaching, I was letting it go. Teaching was much bigger for me than writing was, and I did come to terms with the fact that if I wanted to give writing a go then I would have to give up teaching.”

When asked what advice she would give to aspiring writers, Ms Marchetta quipped that they needed to stop talking about writing and just do it.

“I just find that a lot of people talk about the fact that they want to write, the thing is that there’s nothing more frightening than getting that first line on the page because you actually think it’s never going to be a book,” she said.

“I think people want it to be as perfect as it is in their head and they’re reluctant because they put it on paper and it’s just blah, it doesn’t work.”

• Keep an eye on our entertainment pages in the coming weeks to see a review of Melina Marchetta’s latest book The Piper’s Son.