Black teeth by Zane Lovitt: 16 March, 2017

"Lovitt was the Ned Kelly Award-winning author of the collection The Midnight Promise, and this full-length novel is another testament to his skills as a storyteller. The voice of Jason, an ungainly tech-head who would righteously mock me in online forums for using the phrase ‘tech-head’, is clear and true: a man shrouded in anxiety and embedded in the world of his laptop, infrequently surfacing under a new identity to face the world and stitch someone up." – Fiona Hardy

Zane Lovitt was a documentary filmmaker before turning his hand to crime fiction. His debut novel, The midnight promise, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction, and led to Zane being named one of the Best Young Novelists of 2013 by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Zane will join us for a Q&A on Thursday, 9 March between 8 and 9pm. Please leave any questions you have below. (And discuss his writing at your leisure!)

Want to buy Black teeth? Receive 10% off when purchasing it from Readings at State Library Victoria. To receive the discount online, enter the promo code BOOKCLUB in the promo code box during online checkout. To receive the discount at our State Library bookshop, simply mention the Thursday night book club at the counter.

← Currently viewing a single comment. Back to the whole discussion.

Hi Zane! How did you find the transition from film making to writing a novel? Was it difficult to translate your storytelling skills from screen to paper?

Greetings, Sarah

The transition was massive for me because I had to accept that writing and directing movies is not something I'm cut out for. The reasons are extensive, but suffice to say that a director thrives on self-confidence, while writers thrive on self-doubt. There's very little overlap in those two kinds of personalities. While self-doubt has its difficulties, I've always found it helpful, in that it prompts you to question every decision, every character, every word you put on the page. A filmmaker can't do that - it's a matter of machine gun decision-making while interacting with a hundred people and self-doubt can leave you for dead.

As for translating skills, my assumption at present is that there's a lot of cross-over. Some of my favourite books started out as screenplays (I used No Country for Old Men as an example at the bookclub today - McCarthy wrote it as a screenplay before it became a novel), so for now I'm happy to apply a visual approach, one that is action and dialogue based, to prose writing, rather than sticking with the traditional dominance of internal monologue.

All the best!
z

Thanks Zane, as an amateur doco maker I'm inspired to try my hand with the pen