WHEN CHARACTERS in a first-draft novel start to infiltrate your dreams and grumpily tell you off for leaving your manuscript in the bottom drawer, you know you really ought to do "something" about it.
And so Kate Legge's debut book The Unexpected Elements of Love has, after five years of gestation, brought Beth and Roy to life.
And with what life they emerge. Old, physically frail, funny, subversive, artistic, tragic, sympathetic and so very identifiable.
"I'm proud of them," Legge says. "They were really creatures of the imagination. They really did just develop on the page. They came from using all those little magpie bits of tinder. Once I started putting them together they just came alive."
So much so, that she actually dips her cap to them in her acknowledgments.
"For two years I didn't do anything with the manuscript and at night Beth and Roy started to come to me in my dreams as if to say, 'Come on, get a move on, don't just leave us here.' And it was that that prompted me to think, 'Oh bugger it, I will do something."'
Beth and Roy are among a small, engaging cast of characters in an enviable first novel from a writer with an enviable journalistic career.
Legge is a senior reporter with The Australian who has worked in newspapers for more than 20 years. Her experiences have taken her to Canberra, where she covered federal politics, to the United States to cover presidential elections, to Sydney as an editor of book reviews in The Australian and a features writer, and more recently to Melbourne, where she now resides with husband Greg Hywood (a former editor of the The Australian Financial Review, The Age and the The Sydney Morning Herald) and their two sons.
Legge's social-affairs coverage has been rewarded with some professional pats on the back. In 1994 she became the Graham Perkins Journalist of the Year for her series of articles on the issues confronting families in the 1990s. In 2003 she won a Walkley Award for a story on a case in the life of a Family Court judge - a report which also won her the Victorian Law Society's inaugural Tony Smith award.
For someone who lives and breathes newsprint, a departure to fiction is a bold and, some would argue, foolhardy step. But Legge has crossed over, in both style and intent, with graceful carriage.
"What is it that drives you to write a novel?" Legge says. "Is it having that space in your life, is it having that kitchen table big enough to put it on, is it a stirring, is it a voice inside you? What is it that actually prompts you, is it because you've always wanted to write, is it because that's the way you express yourself, is it your therapy? It's all of those things for me."
The Unexpected Elements of Love is a work of fiction with gentle persuasion. It tells the story of a young boy, troubled by the weather, and of an old man grappling with dementia and a changing environment. These two pivotal figures provide the links between family and friends in a world caught up with the anxieties of contemporary society.
And those anxieties could have easily overwhelmed the book.
Legge examines the treatment of the elderly, euthanasia, Alzheimer's disease, the over-doping of hyperactive boys, childless professional women, guilty working mothers with strained marriages and global warming.
Yet despite the heavy subject matter, she manages to create a subtle, absorbing, often witty and ultimately uplifting story full of people who linger in the memory well after the final page is turned.
Whether it is Janet, the working mother, whose job as a weather presenter is juggled with her family life, or Dale, the successful professional who has put off having children until fertility is possibly undermined, or young Harry who doesn't quite fit the mould, or the feisty Roy and Beth, getting slower in a fast world. "It's one of those things when you write a book, you do it often from the subconscious, you've got lots of issues floating around that are stirring something within you."
One key issue permeating the book, is changing weather patterns - from the sharp, descriptive pockets of observation and thematic links between each of the character's lives, to the metaphorical devices which help provide the underlying tension and pace throughout.
"Climate change, it's something that's been preying on me for a long time. You feel like you can hear it and you can see it. When I was a little girl I read a really frightening science fiction book about the climate heating up and it stayed with me forever. So it's always been in my subconscious."
She uses this subconscious fear to flesh out her characters. Roy, a sculptor, has, in his many years, witnessed the changing landscape and monitored these changes through his art. But his life is becoming more fragmented as his memory splinters. His beloved wife Beth is mentally sharp but physically eroded, and, between them, they must face a harrowing future.
Legge says she drew on the memory of the day she heard that British writer Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's (her life was chronicled recently in the film Iris). In particular Legge remembers the report of Murdoch attending a conference in Israel where she "couldn't engage with the audience".
"That started me thinking about [how] someone very gifted who uses their brain in a creative process - imagine how shocking and terrible it must be to start registering the first cracks of dementia."
Legge also drew on a "couple of vignettes" to mould and shape Beth and Roy.
"We had just come back from Washington and we'd moved to Sydney and this frenetic pace of traffic. I remember driving across one of the feeder roads into Sydney Harbour Bridge one day and I just saw this elderly man on a walking frame trying to cross this road, and I just suddenly got this sense of 'My God, how difficult it must be when you're old, living in such a fast-paced world."'
Legge says that after she completed her novel her family moved to Melbourne and she volunteered to take over the aged-care round on the newspaper.
"Boy was that a wake-up call. No one's interested. We're an ageing society. I don't think many people realise or recognise what's ahead of us."
Which is why Legge delves deeply into the concept of caring for the elderly, and the notion of voluntary euthanasia in The Unexpected Elements of Love.
"I know I'd like to have that option and I think that because we're a generation that's used to making up our own rules, I think there will be increasing support for it as people go through it with their elderly parents, then themselves. I think that's an inevitable change. People have the right to choose to go with dignity."
But far from creating victims in a sad subject matter, she manages to inject her elderly characters with humour, interest and a deep love for one another. "I wanted to look at a couple who have just hung in there for such a long period of time because it's something that's becoming not so common in modern life."
In the end there is triumph, a triumph shared by the novel's youngest and most endearing character, Harry.
Legge says it was essential that Harry provide the final moment in the book.
"I wanted to have an uplifting end and give Harry a role, you know, 'Go kid', go out there, don't let anyone hold you back."
Harry is Legge's answer to society's intolerance of difference.
Harry is intelligent, sensitive and difficult at school. He is diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and his mother, Janet, must soul-search for answers. It is this family's story which provides some of the most honest and moving accounts of the struggle faced by so many parents today.
"There's just so much over-diagnosis of this thing. I've got two sons, and I've written about aspects of problem behaviour for boys and how they're dealing with it, so that was a subject that was really close to my heart.
"We've got such high expectations of these kids now. We've got them all under magnifying glasses. And, OK, we're not all the same, we've got some mad people in the world. But I think that as we become more accepting of physical difference we've become less accepting of behavioural differences.
"And the whole thing about these kids ... Who do you talk about in life? You talk about the characters, you talk about the people who do the naughty things, because they make you laugh."
And laughter, however small, is what provides hope for Harry, Janet, Roy, Beth and the other characters in the book.
"Hope is so important in people's life. What makes you happy? Something to look forward to, someone to love and something to do."
For Legge, all three elements have been, and are still being, realised. And her latest "something to do" has been exhilarating.
"I love writing and I love having the liberation of not having to check or get the quotes," she says with a chuckle.
But given the time it's taken to provide this first novel, Legge is uncertain of when her next venture will arrive. "I'd love to do it, and I've got some things that I've been working on, but I'm not going to rush, I'm just going to do it in my time. By the look of me I'll be 75 before I get the next one out!"
Perhaps Harry, like Roy and Beth, might just prod her along - a sequel perhaps?
Pleasant dreams, Kate Legge.
The Unexpected Elements of Love By Kate Legge. Penguin. $29.95. Available from Monday.