The Stephen King writing tip that changed everything for Aussie thrill-master Christian White

Over 15 years, in the spare hours when he wasn't selling sandwiches from a golf cart, picking apples or editing adult films, Christian White penned four books that never saw the light of day.

He and his wife, Summer De Roche, were resigned to being "starving artists forever" when White read American horror master Stephen King's "incredible" book On Writing. 

In it, King delivers "incredible nuggets of wisdom", White says, and one in particular - that you should write with the door closed and rewrite with the door open - paved the way for his best-selling debut novel, The Nowhere Child.

In 2018, when The Nowhere Child became the fastest-selling Australian debut novel in history, White says all of a sudden, his entire life "did this complete 180". 

"I'd wasted 10, 15 years of writing and not showing anyone else my work. That big change pretty much straightaway led to me getting a publishing deal and everything else so, I really owe that book a lot." 

"Suddenly, I could afford to just sit at my desk all day. That was my one thing I had to do. I could write for a living. It's the best job in the cave-like office all day, away from the sunlight, just telling stories. It's amazing." 

Once "the dust settled", though, White realised that even with the extra hours, his writing output was still the same as it had been while he was juggling casual jobs.

"We have this idea that when you get the big break and you've got this amount of money or this amount of success, you will feel different. And you kind of don't, but there's something nice about that. You're just the same person. My life is actually really, really normal outside of my job." 

Over the years, White says he's been lucky to get a lot from his wife with plotting his novels, especially one "huge plot twist" in 2019's The Wife and the Widow that he'd spent weeks trying to figure out. 

"I was about to give up, and then I went to my wife for advice, and I laid it all out. She was quiet for 10 seconds - an irritatingly short amount of time - and then she said, 'What if X, Y, and Z?' and she completely solved it. 

"Now, when people say, 'I love The Wife and the Widow, the twist was amazing', I say, 'Yeah, what else did you like about it, though? It wasn't just the twist, right?'"

De Roche also helped to shape White's new novel The Long Night - a psychological thriller about a small-town teenage girl kidnapped after a date. 

Witing his fifth novel, White leaned more "heavily into the horror world" than ever before.

"My publishers let me just go as dark as I wanted, which was nice."

Ordinary life can seem much more exciting with the addition of "fun, cosy, pop-culture horror" stories, White says.

"That's why I like it so much and why I'm drawn back to it - it just makes the ordinary extraordinary."

With a sideline as a screenwriter, White co-wrote the 2019 horror film Relic and co-created the Netflix cyber-thriller series Clickbait.

Although his novel-witing style is always "very cinematic", while composingThe Long NightWhite thought the story would "translate pretty easily" to the screen.

"All my other books are written in past tense, whereas The Long Night is written in present tense, which is how I write a script. 

"This one in particular feels like it could be a good show or a movie, but we'll have to see."