Emerging Writers Series: Jordan Prosser
“It’s taken me years to embrace the kinds of stories I want to tell. I wasted so much time when I was younger thinking I could be a chameleon, thinking I could make a career out of replicating other people’s successes. But the shittiest creative experiences of my life have inevitably come out of trying to flog something I didn’t believe in, but I thought might sell. It’s liberating when you realise: I’ll never be able to do what that other person does. And that’s okay. Because by the same token, they’ll never be able to do what I can do.”
Jordan Prosser’s debut novel, Big Time (2024, UQP), is an epic, innovative, time-travelling, genre-bending adventure of a read that will surely be a big hit with a wide range of readers.
I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a copy ahead of its release in early July and even more fortunate to have Jordan agree to be quizzed for our interview series!
We chat more about his journey to writing his novel (ten years in the making), the artistic comparisons between writing for the page versus screen, and some of Jordan’s authorly learnings on his way to publication.
The best place to start is by learning a little more about you! Can you share more about your background as a writer and when you knew writing was something you wanted to pursue?
How far back would you like me to go? In the first grade, I wrote an unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz, printed it, bound it, did all the illustrations, and insisted on reading the entire thing out loud to my class. So, I guess you could say Big Time is officially my *second* book.
I’ve written short stories and play scripts my whole life. During high school, I got hooked on filmmaking and screenwriting. That occupied me for most of my 20s, and that’s what brought me from Canberra down to Melbourne to study writing and directing. It wasn’t until 2021, when the film industry was at a standstill that I picked up an old idea for a novel I’d started in 2014 and decided to follow through on it.
Big Time (2024) is a wildly innovative read. I loved the bold blend of speculative fiction (which didn’t feel speculative at times!), politics, and humour against the backdrop of rock-pop stardom. What was the initial spark of inspiration for the book?
In 2014, I spent nearly six months backpacking through South America and Europe, so many of the book's characters and locations sprung out of that. Around the same time, I found myself gravitating toward speculative fiction. I’m not necessarily a hard sci-fi, outer-worlds type of guy, but the ‘not-too-distant future’ stories – the stories where all you have to do is change one thing about the world, then sit back and watch the ripple effect – those stories click with me. Maybe it's because it feels like a way of embedding high-concept genre stuff into slightly more relatable, more universal stories.
Time travel is another fixation of mine, and I was doing a lot of reading and researching it, from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History. Time travel presents such an interesting set of narrative opportunities (and challenges) for storytellers, and it’s so much fun to play with precisely because of its inherent paradoxes. Ultimately, there’s no “right” or “wrong” way of incorporating time travel into a story; you really can’t lose.
On top of all that, the past decade has felt like an uncommonly difficult time for the arts and artists. There’s this sense of the arts being under constant attack from all sides. That pervasive feeling – plus the anxiety of watching entire artistic communities crumble as a result – got thrown into the mental blender with everything else. Big Time came out the other side.
I love when you said that Big Time is about “doing everything you can to keep the world as big as it can be” - something that has felt increasingly difficult in recent years. How do you believe we can overcome the challenges that seem to shrink our world and maintain a broad, expansive outlook?
I think what I’m learning in my mid-30s is that being open-minded is a very active choice, and it takes actual hard work. When you’re 21, it's easy to say you’ll always keep an open mind and be receptive to new things because when you’re 21, the whole world’s at your feet, and you’re basically the centre of the cultural universe. Staying that curious, responsive and empathetic takes genuine effort as you get older.
Change is the only true constant in life, and if you don’t fight to accommodate that change, to make space for new ideas and experiences within yourself, it’s only going to make you brittle and small-minded while the world continues to shift and evolve around you. And we’ve seen what happens when brittle, small-minded people end up in positions of power and influence, making decisions for the rest of us.
I think a lot of it comes down to humility and a decentring of oneself. Yes, we all like things to be a certain way – but that’s never the only way, and there’s rarely a single right way. Yes, it is utterly exhausting to remain malleable, seek out new things, and bend your brain towards accepting a new type of music or a new social status quo. Yes, forcing yourself to adapt is painful, but I believe the alternative – the refusal to do so – is far, far worse.
You mentioned the book was ten years in the making, and I appreciate that honesty. We often hear about books that go from being written to published in a year. What has your journey to publication been like? Are there any nuggets of personal wisdom you could share?
I wrote the first few chapters in 2014, spent seven years thinking about it as a lost friend I hoped to one day see again, and finally picked it back up in 2021. From there, it took a couple of big writing sprints. My friend Sarah Walker and I committed to a few months of a thousand words a day on our respective projects. That’s how I got through the first half of the book, including Chapter 3, which had its own life as the short story ‘Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game’.
In 2022, that piece won the Peter Carey Short Story Award, and literally, by the time I left the awards ceremony, I had an email waiting for me from the wonderful Aviva Tuffield at UQP. She read the short story and then asked what else I was working on. How handy I had another fifteen chapters of a novel to send her! They offered to publish it based on that partial manuscript. Then the pressure was on for me to actually finish the book (one thing I didn’t anticipate: writing the later chapters, once I knew people would actually be reading them, was much, much harder).
Looking back on that journey, I suppose that would be my number one piece of advice: always have something in your back pocket. If I’d simply written a cool short story and nothing else, Aviva and I might have had a nice email exchange, and that may well have been that. The fact that I had something more to show her ultimately led me down this very exciting path to publication.
Once you’ve got one foot in the door, you should always have something extra to pitch, something more to talk about. It’s good to maintain a deep bench of different ideas.
You’re also a filmmaker and Big Time certainly feels very cinematic at points; it was very easy to visualise lots of the big scenes! How does your creative lens as a filmmaker inform your writing and vice versa?
While both writing and filmmaking are incredibly visual mediums in their own way. What filmmaking specifically teaches you is how to structure and order those visuals. For example, if you’re cutting a scene in a film, you might start with a wide shot, then go to a mid, then work your way to a close-up (or vice-versa for a totally different effect) – and I think that sense of visual sequencing is a skill I’ve tried to carry through to my prose writing: being able to guide the reader’s ‘eye’ from one object or person or action to the next. My book has a lot of characters and some fairly frenetic sequences, so it was important to maintain a coherent sense of spatial geography in these scenes to help the reader keep track of where everybody is at any given time. It’s blocking, basically, like you would do for a play or during rehearsals on a film set.
In terms of how my writing might influence my filmmaking, I’ll have to wait and see. The thing that writing a novel forces you to do is spend a lot of time with your characters. It necessitates the kind of deep character work that can be all too easy for an impatient screenwriter (i.e. me) to skip over. So, hopefully, the next time I sit down to write a screenplay, I’ll be able to bring some more of that patience and rigour to my characters because I now know how it pays off.
And as a bit of a follow-on, I’m always curious to learn how others approach the concept of creativity and invite it into their lives. Do you have any personal creative philosophies that steer your work?
What a lovely question. Let me see. First of all, I think it’s about being a total bowerbird and just collecting stuff from everywhere. I am completely arts-agnostic when it comes to finding inspiration. I’ve had great ideas for films while watching ballet, I’ve dreamt up poetry while watching action movies, I’ve cracked a play script by simply staring at a painting. As soon as I have a new idea in mind, I’m looking at everything around me through the lens of that idea, building up all my reserves and energy so that once I decide it’s time to sit down and write 1000 words a day for 60 days straight, I’ve got all the material and ammunition I need.
Conversely, the other most important thing for me to do is completely disengage. I love running. I love cooking. I love video games. Sometimes, as soon as you create a little negative space in your brain, a new idea will come along and fill it up. It’s like what they say about relationships: it always happens the moment you stop looking for it.
Lastly, I should mention that it’s taken me years to embrace the kinds of stories I want to tell. I wasted so much time when I was younger thinking I could be a chameleon, thinking I could make a career out of replicating other people’s successes. But the shittiest creative experiences of my life have inevitably come out of trying to flog something I didn’t believe in, but I thought might sell. It’s liberating when you realise: I’ll never be able to do what that other person does. And that’s okay. Because by the same token, they’ll never be able to do what I can do.
Lastly, what’s next for you? Any new creative projects in the wings you can tell us a little about or any upcoming events where readers can engage with you and your work?
I’m working on a couple of new books and a handful of screenplays. The first book is set in Melbourne in the present day, about a woman hellbent on winning a competition that will see her become the first person on Mars. The second book is much more in the vein of Big Time, a globe-trotting paranormal adventure set in the art world.
In terms of events, I’ll be at the Bendigo Writers Festival on August 18. Then, there are a few more things in August, September, and beyond, all of which will be added to the UQP events page in due course. Stay tuned!
Big Time (2024, UQP) will be launched on July 10 at Readings in Carlton, Victoria. This is a free event, but bookings are essential!
Check out our review of Big Time over at our Book Reviews!
Jordan Prosser is a writer, filmmaker and performer from Victoria. He is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, and his short films and screenplays have won multiple international accolades. His short story ‘Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game’ won the Peter Carey Short Story Award in 2022 and was published in Meanjin. His first book is Big Time (UQP).
Instagram – @jordanprosser
X – @jordanprosser
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
