The Dry
The Dry
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Jane Harper on The Dry
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Fed up with waitingFor most of her adult life, Harper’s reason not to write a novel outlasted her reason to write one. The fear was specific: that years of effort might produce nothing worth reading, making the whole attempt a waste.
I’d wanted to write a book for years, ever since I was a kid, really. And one of the things that held me back was this fear of putting in all this time and effort and not being successful and it being a waste of time... I realized that actually I wanted to do it badly enough that I just wanted to write the book—it didn’t matter so much what happened afterwards—I just wanted to see if I could do it.
The shift, when it finally came in late 2014, was less a burst of inspiration than an act of impatience. She enrolled in a 12-week online writing course at Curtis Brown Creative because she needed external deadlines to force pages out of herself, and the application required a synopsis and a 3,000-word opening, which is where The Dry was born.
I honestly just got fed up with waiting for it to happen.
That course application, written under a deadline she had paid to impose on herself, became the seed of a novel that would eventually sell in more than 30 countries.
She went into the project with a clear sense of the kind of story she wanted Australia to see itself in. The ambition was cultural as much as commercial.
[paraphrased from audio] She wanted to tell an Australian story and write the kind of book that she would like to read.
How she wrote it
One hour at a timeHarper was still working full-time as a finance reporter at the Melbourne Herald Sun while drafting the book. She protected writing time by keeping her work clothes on when she got home, treating the desk as an extension of the office rather than a retreat from it.
I’d come home from work and I would stay in my work clothes and I would just sit down. I’d almost set the time and I would do one hour.
When the draft stalled at the halfway point, she used a list to get herself to the end. After finishing, she went straight back to the first page. The manuscript that entered the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Award ran to 65,000 words; by the time publishers bought it, it was 75,000; the book on shelves reached 90,000.
[paraphrased from audio] When I look back on writing The Dry, it’s funny because I feel like I was completely fearless writing that book. I had no expectation that anyone would ever read it. All I wanted to do was finish it.
Rather than discovering the solution as she wrote, she locked it in before she typed a word of the opening scene. The novel’s structure then worked backwards from that fixed point, with two intermediate anchor moments — around the halfway and three-quarter marks — where specific clues or character revelations had to land.
It helped me a lot to know ‘whodunnit’ and why before I started writing. I had the start and the end before I had almost anything else, including most of the key characters. I also had a handful of anchor points with a crucial clue or character point that needed to come in around the half- and three-quarter mark.
Her Curtis Brown Creative course tutor pushed students to trim every scene to its minimum. When fellow students told Harper her early drafts leaned too heavily on description, her response said a great deal about the instincts she brought from newspaper writing.
As soon as they said that – ‘You don’t need it’ – I was like, ‘Oh great! I can cut it out then.’ Because I didn’t really enjoy writing it.
Kiewarra, the drought-stricken fictional town at the heart of The Dry, was not chosen after the plot was settled. Harper thought about the physical world and the story at the same moment, treating the landscape as something that shapes who characters are, not merely where they stand.
When I am thinking about the plot – and the real seed of the idea – I am thinking really simultaneously about the setting. I’m wondering about what’s going to showcase the setting in the best possible way. I want to give the reader something to visualise on the page and the setting impacts the characters in the way that they have grown up or how they have come to that place.
The personal thread
What journalism taught her about griefBefore fiction, Harper spent 13 years as a print journalist, and part of that work required knocking on the doors of families who had just lost someone. Those conversations didn’t leave her when she changed careers.
You talk to them and you see this lingering shock and this absolute ripple effect of devastation.
That image of devastation spreading outward from a single event became the engine of her fiction. The crime in The Dry exists to set that ripple in motion; the novel is really about what it does to the people it reaches.
The book she called ‘My Stupid Book’ while drafting it went on to reshape her life in ways she could not have anticipated when she was writing it in one-hour sessions after journalism shifts. She has spoken about the before-and-after quality of its success in stark terms.
The Dry completely changed my life. It was like night and day – my life before The Dry and after The Dry.
What she wants us to sit with
Ripple effects, not the stoneHarper is careful to position the murder in The Dry as a mechanism rather than the subject. What she is actually writing about is the community that gets pulled apart in the investigation’s wake, and that priority shapes every structural decision she makes.
The crime is more simply the catalyst for the story that follows. The ripple effects of a traumatic event and the way they impact the community is what I always look to explore as an author, and emotions are central to that.
On the question of why someone commits a terrible act, Harper aims for a specific and uncomfortable destination: not sympathy, but comprehension. She wants readers to be able to follow the internal logic of a person who has done something unforgivable, even if that logic is flawed.
What interests me is that people aren’t drawn to do terrible things because they are terrible people: in some way, they feel that they are forced into their actions because they have no other choice. And maybe the reasons for that are not good ones or sensible ones, but, in that moment, it makes sense to that person. That’s what I’m always trying to bring out, so that even if maybe there’s no sympathy for the person responsible, there is some understanding of what’s driven their actions.
Harper has resisted taking personal credit for any wider shift in Australian crime fiction’s global profile. When she does allow herself a moment of satisfaction about The Dry’s place in the genre, she frames it as a door rather than an achievement.
What I am happy with, is if The Dry opened doors and persuaded others to give the genre a go.