Everything I need to know about writing I learned from Wife Swap USA

“It all started with WifeSwap USA,” said no-one aspiring to be taken semi-seriously as a writer (or human being) ever. Yet, in a roundabout way, I have an episode of that reality TV show to thank for a lot of what Vodka and Apple Juice is. And a lot more besides.

One explanation, coming right up.

For those not familiar with this particular little guilty pleasure, the premise is that they find two families with some fundamentally different approach to the world and (legal disclaimers safely tucked away), the wives go live with the other family for a week or so. Roll the cameras, pass the popcorn.

I was obsessed with this show for about six months in the latter half of the noughties. I took two things away from it.

The first was from an episode that had a military family in Texas in it, who swapped their mom for a pacifist vegan. They were talking about the up-coming election, where George W was up for re-election. Pacifist mom asked who they were voting for. They said, ‘Duh, George Dub, he’s the president’. She said, ‘sure, but why are you voting for him again?’ They said, ‘Duh, because he’s the president.’ And I realised, this family actually didn’t realise they had a choice, because as far as they were concerned, he was the president, and it would have been unpatriotic not to vote for him.

Bet they thought they had a choice eight years later. But that’s another story.

As is the genesis of my book, which has nothing much to do with this. I just think it’s an interesting perspective, from the kind of people I’ll probably never meet in real life.

The second thing I learned was from an episode where there was a highly scheduled family with, like, a dozen kids or something (and no TV, one assumes – perhaps that’s why they volunteered for this experiment?) They had this giant ledger that they’d put all their kids’ activities into, a line for each of them. Tuesday – Harry was at oboe, Chloe at a play date, Peppy at taikwondo, etc. They said they needed the system to keep track of all the activities of the kids, and so as not to lose any. (They didn’t say that last bit. I’m surmising). But they also said it was a nice memento of the years – later on they’d be able to look back on it and have it as a record of what they were doing. ‘The Brain’, they called it.

Hmm, I thought.

It was 2008 February 11. I know that, because the next day I went to a newsagent and bought a page-on-a-day diary and wrote: ‘Today I went to the newsagent and bought this diary. I’m going to call it the Brain.’ It wasn’t particularly eloquent. It wasn’t everything I did that day. I probably went to work, although I have no idea what I did or who I talked to or what I was thinking about. Let’s face it, most days of your adult life just aren’t that interesting. What’s the point of writing that down?

Over the next 10 years, I did a lot more day-to-day things. I also moved from Canberra to Poland. I travelled to two dozen countries. I narrowly avoided a marriage breakdown. I moved back to Perth, suffered reverse culture shock, changed jobs and careers. I met new friends and reconnected with old ones. Drank a lot of coffee, had a few disappointments, and a couple of big wins.

It’s all written down.

I don’t write every day, but I do write every week. Sometimes there’s not much more detail than that first entry. A quick note about a nice meal I ate, something funny that happened at work, a conversation I heard on the bus.

Some days / weeks / months are documented in every detail I can muster. Joyous conversations with good friends after too many wines, my first days in Warsaw, the ridiculousness of the diplomatic world and the crazy conversations with people I met in it, rediscovering my home city after 13 years away. Little details of my nephew’s life from the age of four to ten.

With 10 years having elapsed now, hubby and I have started going back and reading about what we were doing that night a decade ago. Written when I had no idea that, 10 years from then, I would be reading those entries from a cozy condo in a northern Canadian town, another cross-globe move under my belt.

One of the things that astounds both of us is how much of it we’ve forgotten. There are page-long entries about dinners out with friends. The meal we ordered, the decor, what we talked about, some joke we shared, how we got home. And neither he, nor I, remembers any of it.

More commonly, though, it brings it all back. How the fish – cooked in butter and dill – tasted, the ugly patterns on the thick curtains, how it was so cold outside but so warm inside. And hearing again the words that we said to each other that night brings back the joy of the moment, reconnects us with those people and those times. Some of them are still good friends, and we can relive it together. While a few live on only in our hearts and memories now.

I had no idea of the ways – big and little – that my life would unfold in those ten years. But I do know that, when it came to start and write Vodka and Apple Juice, a couple of years after I’d left Poland, the details were already fading. And (while I fancy myself to have a rather good imagination), I could never conjure up a family in Texas who can’t conceive of having a choice of presidents had I not seen them with my own eyes, and I could never have come up with the conversations, characters and situations anywhere near as interesting – or ridiculous, or sad, or heartbreaking – as the ones I actually heard and saw.  And while I might have tried to remember what these things were like later, having these notes to work from didn’t just make my life a lot easier, it made the book infinitely more real, and much much better.

I very deliberately didn’t think at the time about how, or whether, these observations would ever become a book (I get asked that a bit, you know). I was aware that I never wanted to experience Poland in a way that felt like I was trying to find the story in it, or be a character. I didn’t want to be distracted from the living of it by the writing of it. If that makes sense.

But if anything, the diary writing has had the opposite effect. I pay more attention to little things. Noticing a funny exchange with a colleague. A rainbow on my morning commute. How my nephew’s hand feels against my knee when I read him a story. Knowing I was recording these moments made me pay more attention to them at the time, trying to remember every detail for later so I could write them down.

And that has made me realise that while some days feel like they’re full of ‘nothing’, they’re actually replete with these little moments. I only document a fraction of them, but I notice more of them now. More than I ever would have before. And I can’t imagine not having that record of the ones I have jotted. It saddens me to think that they might have gone unremarked, and therefore been unremarkable. When they were anything but.

So why do I say that this has all helped me be a writer? Because I think that what it means to be a writer isn’t just to write. It’s to observe. To observe the little details, the funny exchanges, the sensation of a passing moment. To watch and listen to people you can’t imagine, and then try to understand them. Because while you can observe without writing, you cannot write without observing.

If you look at it that way, that half an hour of reality TV was probably the best investment in my writing career I ever made.

Not to mention, in some ways, my life. Because now I know that one day, I can sit down with my nephew, and I can read him some of the stories I’ve written about things we did together. A funny thing he said when he was five, a clever trick he showed me when he was eight. I wonder if he’ll remember any of them, or if they’ll be as forgotten as a dinner I had ten years ago? Whatever he says, I’ll probably write about that, as well. As well as – well, whatever else has happened by then. Who knows what that will be.

Anyway, I’ve got to run. The Bachelorette’s on.

Research, you understand.