Helen Garner’s advice on writing

Helen Garner spoke on candour: writing, aging and seeing without being seen, at a literary event in Perth supported by the Forrest Research Foundation in 2025.

I’ve just come back from seeing Helen Garner in conversation with journalist and academic, Dr Merve Emre at UWA in Perth. I took my notebook along and whipped it out when Garner was asked to talk about the best writing advice she had been given early in her career. She said, “I’ll spill my guts,” which sounded promising. I jotted down as much as I could given I have appalling shorthand skills and I was more interested in listening.

1: “I don’t like passages of exposition.”

If your writing is clear, and you trust yourself, trust the reader too, don’t “lecture them with passages and passages of exposition.”

2: “It’s really good practise to write down dreams.”

Helen Garner said she can’t understand why people have such an aversion to hearing about dreams. She is fascinated by them and writes hers down. She talked about the value of writing dreams and also the “inexplicable behaviours,” you might notice in the everyday. She recounted an observation about a professor she interviewed for The First Stone. There was an open tin of biscuits on the coffee table in his office and she took one, and then, because it was delicious, she took another. The professor pointedly replaced the lid and then assured her he hadn’t done so to prevent her from eating anymore biscuits. She didn’t believe him. Notice “dreams, slips of the tongue and inexplicable behaviours, and put them on the page, without explaining them.”

3: “Once you learn free association – bingo. A whole world opens up.”

Helen Garner said both Jung and Freudian psychoanalysis techniques have helped her writing, especially, ‘free association.’ It was developed by Freud to access the subconscious by speaking or writing without self-censorship and without editing anything that might flow naturally into your mind.

The works of essayist and journalist, Janet Malcolm has been hugely influential. Malcolm wrote frequently on psychoanalysis and, as New York Times reviewer, Joseph Edelson noted, also had a “keen eye for the surfaces – clothing, speech and furniture.” Garner herself began to write more freely, less constrained. “Up until then, I felt I’d been writing with the brakes on.”

4: Dangling modifiers “drive her mad.” Just so you know.

5: “I read everything out loud, even the shittiest piece of journalism.”

6: Helen Garner on the best writing advice she was ever given, “You use too many adverbs.”

Helen Garner’s latest book is The Season, published by Text Publishing.