I become a terrible friend and son and brother and partner. I get up early and write for 90 minutes before I go to the office, and when I get home I keep writing until my eyes hurt. But when I get further into it and figure out where the work is headed, everything goes to hell.

It’s okay in the early stages of a book-I fit an hour of writing in after work here and there, half-hour snatches on the weekends. How do you balance having a full time job with writing books? I cobbled the heron together, idea by idea, description by description, until I had a creature I was happy with. I was influenced by totemic, mythological creatures, but I also wanted to write about a natural world that held no regard for the self-importance of people. The conception of the Rain Heron came gradually. Sorry to be asking ‘ where do you get your ideas’ but how did you come up with this creature? Was it all at once, or gradually as different elements came together? The Rain Heron itself is a rather extraordinary creation. I just ask myself: how does this feel? Does this piece of imagination enhance the text, or get in the way? Is it enjoyable, or is it confusing? Is it heavy-handed, or does it fit into the narrative with a degree of neatness? If it feels right, then I lean into my imagination. In both The Rain Heron and Flames you walk a thin line between the real and surreal. I don’t know why, but if two or more characters are sitting at a table the whole process of describing what they’re doing and saying nearly paralyses me.

But not as difficult as writing a scene where characters are indoors. I find violence pretty distasteful, so some parts of the book were quite difficult to write. I hoped I could capture this in my writing-that the way we treat each other bleeds over into the way we treat the world.

That’s where the core idea of the book began. I was interested in the mirroring of the violence we commit against each other and the violence we commit against nature. What conversations do you hope the book might prompt? And as someone who clearly loves nature, how difficult was it to write some of the more brutal scenes? The complex relationship between humans and nature is a key aspect of The Rain Heron. Reviewer Elizabeth Flux called the novel ‘not only a compelling, original read, but one that delivers hard truths that urgently need to be heard’. Rain Heron (Text, June), Robbie Arnott’s follow-up to his 2018 debut Flames, blurs the line between reality and myth as its isolated protagonist is drawn to a soldier on an impossible mission.

The rain heron book