getting away from the desk....

....for me, it's bike riding. nothing like a bike ride along Melbourne's exciting main roads (look out! a taxi!) or beside the Yarra to get thoughts that were all tangled up loosened enough to see the individual threads. Of course, one needs to stop for water breaks and the jotting down of thoughts.

For Tony Birch, it's jogging. His biggest writing tip to a first-year creative writing class at Melbourne Uni (all 400 of them!) was to "run five kilometres a day" (or maybe ten, I can't recall exactly). It was tongue in cheek of course, but his point was that you have to find what works for you, and often it is not sitting at the desk, but moving about in the world. For Chris Wallace-Crabbe, walking is the key to poetry - he was quoted in The Age last month as saying "walking often gives me the first few lines, the shape and preoccupation of the poem"

And in her lecture on "writing around Melbourne" last month, Sonya Hartnett talked about tramping up and down the banks of the Merri Creek between writing stints while she lived in the inner north.

So the landscape of books set in Melbourne is likely to have come from the writer's personal excursions...a nice combination of an inspirational routine and a research trip...and sometimes, getting away from the page/screen is the best way to find something to say, it seems.