Write on, Leonie

Time and her writing group are precious to Eaglehawk author Leonie Hall.

It was only when the last of her six children was about to leave home that she finally developed her passion for reading into a serious focus on writing.

Then, when she joined a local writing group, she was hooked.

“When I look back at what I did when I started, the pad and pencil, I see how much I’ve learned to sharpen up my writing,” she says.

“Now, I will put a draft away, sometimes for a couple of months, and then bring it out to see what needs to be done.”

Mrs Hall meets each month with a group of half a dozen people in a writing group. They each bring a piece of writing on a set topic, and read it out for comments by the others.

“It’s a varied group, and it’s mostly to encourage others to have a go, but it’s also very useful for ideas on what you might do to improve it,” she said.

Born in Quarry Hill, Mrs Hall is a fifth generation Bendigonian. 

She remembers being a bookworm as a child, when she would escape up the plum tree with a novel. It was reading Anne of Green Gables, she says, that cemented her love for reading.

“I was just an ordinary girl, but I liked to dream,” Mrs Hall says.

 “I’d be a pirate on a ship or a cowboy,” she says. 

“There were always stories being told in my family, too.”

It was stories about her grandmother’s life that started her writing; the first novel was loosely based on the life of a wilful woman brought up by a strict man, who once horsewhipped her for daring to take off in the hunting hack.

“These are the things that trigger my writing,” Mrs Hall says.

Her first books were published as e-books, but since she found Equilibrium Books, she has published in paperback two novels, Issy (about a 1950s factory worker living in Fitzroy) and Chasing Lucy, set in 1920s Paris.

“It’s all in here,” she says, pointing to her head, “and I just like to get it out. My characters tend to go their own way, so I never really know where a book will finish.

“I remember waking up one morning and thinking, I can’t wait to see what happens next … then I realised I hadn’t written it yet.”

Mrs Hall says she loves the feel and even the smell of books, and can’t walk past a bookshop without getting her hands on one.

She is concerned that her great-grandchildren (two already), will miss out on the pleasure of books, with the advent of e-books.

“I have a friend who told me she woke up one night thinking it was dawn because there was a blue glow, and she turned over to discover her husband reading his Kindle.

“E-books are fine, but they’re not the same as a book.”