industry. He left the financial services industry in 2008 and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology.
Mills's debut novel is Bitter Passage, a work of historical fiction.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Colin Mills's website.
I hope it doesn’t pull any punches. It’s true what they say: coming up with a title was the hardest part of writing the book. I won’t share the original title if you don’t mind, but my publisher—quite correctly, I think—suggested it include the word ‘Passage’, alluding to the Northwest Passage. I thought long and hard about how to succinctly describe the Royal Navy’s nineteenth-century search for the Passage, and ‘Bitter’ was the most appropriate adjective. The British wanted to find the Passage, thought they needed to find it, but the search was arduous and dangerous. Men died trying to find it, even before Franklin’s expedition. For all that, the search for the Passage became almost like a kind of unpleasant medicine the Royal Navy felt it needed to consume. Why? Bitter Passage tries to explore some of the answers.
What's in a name?
The two main characters, Robinson and Adams, are loosely based on real men with the same names who searched for Franklin in 1849, but are fictionalized versions of those men. Historical fiction requires a delicate balance between fact and imagination. As I’ve noted in the Author’s Note to the novel, I’ve taken creative liberties to develop these characters and tell a story. I’ve done so to try and imagine the human side of an event the historical record leaves incomplete, while also trying to spark curiosity about the Franklin tragedy. They say fiction writing begins with a simple question: what if? In this case, I knew the real Lieutenant Robinson led a sledge mission to Fury Beach but returned having found nothing. I thought, what if he kept going south? What might have happened, and what might have been the emotional and psychological complexities of that experience? I wanted to know—or at least imagine—so I started writing. Then I kept writing because I wanted to know what was going to happen.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
I grew up in a house with books in it (thanks, Mom and Dad), but always thought novelists were some special sub-set of unusually cerebral humans, a category that excluded me. So I think my teenage self would be most surprised by the notion that I, too, could write a story that (hopefully) both entertains and explores someaspect of the human condition. I hope my young self would realize that I could also ask, what might that have been like? What might I have done in that situation? Hey, you know what? There’s nothing stopping me from writing a story and figuring out the answers that way.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
For Bitter Passage, the beginning was harder. My first draft was 120,000 words long and took a few years to write. Muddled and unsure what to do with the mess I had created, I hired my first editor. He helped me realize who the key characters should be. More importantly, the story actually started halfway through the draft, so I cut the first 60,000 words. After that, I felt more confident about where the story would go.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
None of the characters in Bitter Passage are me, but of course they have certain traits I relate to, while others I need to try harder to imagine. More than anything, I am fascinated by what feeds our sense of self-worth, because when we talk about a character’s motive, that’s what is at the heart of it. We can talk about a character’s motivation as being money, love, or status, for example, but I want to know why that is the motivation. It’s all about what fills our souls. In Bitter Passage, for example, I can relate to Robinson’s self-doubt and perfectionism. On the other hand, I found the depiction of Adams’ piety more challenging, as I do not share the character’s religious faith.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
Because I have written a work of historical fiction, I would have to say I’m heavily influenced by what we know of the historical record, and how we’re able to keep interrogating it. I’m fascinated by historical events that are imperfectly understood or chronicled, because it gives the fiction writer room to make stuff up and imagine new stories. In addition to non-fiction history books, I love documentaries and podcasts about history, archaeology, and philosophy. I never cease to be amazed by the extent to which we’re able to reassess what we thought we knew about ourselves. What have we learned? Have we evolved? If so, in what way? And what are we still missing?
My Book, The Movie: Bitter Passage.
The Page 69 Test: Bitter Passage.
--Marshal Zeringue