SOURCE: "The Thorned Words of Colleen McCullough," in Writer's Digest, March, 1980, pp. 32, 34, 36.

In the following essay, Cassill offers insight into McCullough's views on writing and the editorial process behind the publication of The Thorn Birds.

Even though Colleen McCullough has been writing since she was five, she didn't think about publishing her work until she was 32. "I always wrote to please myself," she says. "I was a little snobby about it—that way I could write entirely as I wished. To write for publication, I thought, was to prostitute myself."

She changed her mind at 32 when, working as a teacher at the Yale Medical School, she decided she'd wind up an old maid in a cold-water walk-up if she didn't change her ways. And changing her ways meant writing for publication—and eventually meant her bestseller, The Thorn Birds.

McCullough's scientific training as a neurophysiologist helped her approach...