Louisa Costa: I rediscovered my love of writing

I would go to sleep wondering what a character might have said and wake up knowing the answer.

Louisa Costa

KSP Fellow, 2026

Pictured Above: Writing cabins at KSP Writers' Centre

It was such a thrill to be accepted for a KSP Fellowship, to pack my bag to bursting with research folders, notebooks and novels, and to fly solo to Perth from Sydney. I live with six other people - my family - in a very busy, noisy household, and have never had two weeks alone away from them all before, let alone with the sole purpose of writing a story.

Stepping into my own little writing cabin at the bottom of the garden felt like entering the Tardis. Over the next 12 days, as the noticeboards on either side of my wooden desk filled with post-it notes on which I scrawled questions that needed to be answered and scenes that needed to be written, I travelled back to the Sydney of the 1940s, in which my story is set. I would go to sleep wondering what a character might have said and wake up knowing the answer.

Every afternoon, I would emerge from my cabin and find myself back in July 2026 in the hills above Perth at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre. I would meander up the path, past the other two cabins, knowing that my writing companions, Karleah Olson and JD Cleghorn, were inside, busy at work, and catch up with Michaela Ironwood, the centre’s coordinator, in her office by the main house. Most afternoons, I would continue on for a walk.

Over the course of my fellowship, I completed the first draft of a 5000 word short story that will be published in an anthology of family histories by the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG) at the end of the year. I and the other eight contributors are taking part in a year-long SAG masterclass taught by historians and authors, Dr Betty O’Neill and Louise Millar-Hoffmann. I focused on a particular moment: the abrupt end of my great-aunt and uncle’s honeymoon when police arrested and interned my great-uncle, like thousands of other Italian immigrants living in Sydney, on the day Italy entered World War Two. I also generated enough scenes for two more connected short stories or chapters that I think will flow on from this one to form a novella.

I gained a lot of confidence as a writer thanks to my KSP Fellowship. I learnt that, given the time and space and privacy, I can really get in the flow and write thousands of words. I rediscovered my love of writing and the knowledge that, especially when I make it my top priority, it makes me so happy. I would love to return.

Top Ten Tips:

1. When you get to your desk and you don’t know where to start, limber up by writing ‘three morning pages’ to get your fingers and your mind moving, as recommended by Julia Cameron in her book, The Artist’s Way.

2. If you tell someone the germ of your story, and they say, ‘I want to read that’, trust that it is a good idea worth spending time on.

3. Trust that if you go to sleep with a question about your writing, you will very likely wake up with an answer.

4. A good place to stop writing for the day is in the middle of a scene or a sentence because you are more likely to keep going with it in the morning.

5. At the end of each day, save your writing and, in the morning, copy that and make a new document with the day’s date in the heading so that you have a backup and also so that feel like you are making progress.

6. Once you have written a piece and taken it as far as you can go, leave it for a few days and when you come back to it, you will see how you can take it further.

7. Comb through your story for adverbs and adjectives and delete almost all of them.

8. Make your verbs as strong as you can.

9. Record yourself reading your story and listen to it to pick up tangled sentences, lapses in rhythm, boring bits.

10. If you are very fond of a paragraph that you’ve written but you also know that it just doesn’t work where you’ve put it, instead of deleting it entirely, create a ‘kill your darlings’ document and store it there. This will make deleting easier and, who knows, you might find a place for it elsewhere down the track.

Louisa Costa is a Sydney-based writer who has worked for the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend Magazine and SBS Television and also other publications while living in New York and London. After The Wedding illuminates the experience of the women in her Italian immigrant family when the men were interned in Australia during World War Two.

Pictured Above: Louisa Costa