James Bradley : fitting the pieces together

I’m always a bit wary of the idea of careers, mostly because it doesn’t recognise how much of what happens to you as a writer is personal and creative, and has almost nothing to do with the things the public sees. So although it looks like you write one book and then another and then another, the reality is much messier than that, and the books are really part of a larger process that’s surprisingly difficult to understand when you’re in the middle of it. But I suppose if you wanted an outline of my writing life it would begin when I was about 22 or 23, when I started writing and publishing poems. That came pretty much out of nowhere – I’d always read a lot but it never really occurred to me I might write until I was in my 20s, at least partly because growing up in Adelaide it always seemed like books and culture came from elsewhere. At some point pretty soon after that I decided I wanted to write fiction, so I wrote a few stories and then wrote Wrack, which did well, and opened a lot of doors for me, and then, very quickly, managed to write The Deep Field, which did well as well. After that things went off the rails a bit: although I’d found it relatively easy to write The Deep Field I had a very bad time writing The Resurrectionist, at least partly because I placed a lot of pressure on myself, and although it did well (and I’m very proud of it) when it eventually came out I was in such a mess by the time it came out I wasn’t sure I could keep writing.