I gave a talk at Perth writer's festival and some of the audience asked me to put the words up as a blog. Here you go.

The past has never been as unloved as it is now. The past has never been as stigmatised as in today's society. I sense that bygone eras were more shamelessly steeped in story, legend, folklore, and a reverence for ancestry.

Never have we been more obsessed with the future, or struggled so much to abide in the present. Mindfulness is just a quiet wave moving through Western society now, a wave that is up against the technological pace of life.

But the past is not a foreign country. Nor is it passed. It is not yesterday or last week. It is you. Now.

To say you are not the past is to say this building is not brick.

I realised this week that my relationship with the past is not as I thought. I have long held the view that my struggle and my fascination is with the future. Of that paradoxical holy trinity that is time: the past, the present, it's the future that I hold most sacred.

And yet all of them are ghosts. The future because it never arrives, and the present because it is always, like the past, abandoning us.

Time, I'm sure, is a concept, an abstract. Man made. And like everything man made, like everything that will die when humanity dies: time, money, religion, democracy, folk dancing, it doesn't make sense.

I was asked by a WA paper what I'm good at, my answer was the future. I've always been a pathological daydreamer. And so I suppose I'm in the right profession now. My daydreaming certainly didn't hold me in good stead when I was a marketing executive in partitioned offices. Though daydreaming did help me slip through those grey walls and out over the Thames. Flying away like the swans that passed our lofty office at eye level, their necks undulating elegantly forward, their white wings beating them out across the city. I used to be so jealous of those swans.

I always believed the past is nothing to me, until I sat down to consider what I'd say here. It was then I realised that for several hours of every day I am in the past. When I write. Not my past per se, but since the best writing is writing that achieves authenticity (how else do you make fiction ring true?), my craft necessarily involves the past.

For my fiction to feel real for the reader it must feel emotionally real for me, which means applying my own authentic emotions to a fictitious scenario or character. It means painting fictitious lives with real emotions.

And where are the realest emotions from? You'd think it was the present since this is where we are when feelings happen. But our reaction to the present is never about the present.

If a loved one does something that angers you, where does that anger hark from? The present? Their actions?

No, our reaction to the present comes from previously learnt ideas of right and wrong, of pain and betrayal, of our own remembered shame. Any strong feeling is about you, not the action of the present, or the behaviour of another. You. It is the machinations of ego and of empathy. And ego and empathy come only from your own experience. And where does experience come from? The same place feelings come from.

This trick of time is what makes life so confusing, and interesting. It is what makes us mysteries to ourselves. (routine/feelings story?) Because our reactions to the present are emotional postcards from the past. That's hilarious when you think about it. A bit like having a conversation over a long distance phone call with a thirty year delay. A delay that happens instantaneously. No wonder our feelings perplex us.

Directly translated, nostalgia means return home pain. Writing – meaningful writing – is about returning to pain, regret, loss, love, childhood, ambivalence, fear, is it not? There's those other ones, happiness, hope and all that stuff. They're the flip side of those coins I just mentioned. The existence of sadness relies on the existence of happiness. You can't mention happiness without sadness being in the room.

So in writing about the emotions, we are writing about the past. You can't escape it. Sure, fear is the emotion of the future. Ambivalence belongs to our tendency to travel between the three time zones constantly. You've been doing it the whole time I've been talking.

So our feelings are citizens of that so-called foreign country. We are all citizens of that country. Denizens of the past. And yet we're taught to be ashamed of that. We're taught the past cannot be rectified.

Except. The pain of the past can. And if the past is where the pain is, visiting the past is where the healing is.

I write to entertain, I write to spin wonderful, powerful stories. And yet healing is also why I write – the healing of myself, and, hopefully, of those who read me.

Healing is the hand I want to hold if I am to walk boldly into the future. Or sit comfortably with myself in the present.

But (and I struggle with this) if I want my bright future, if I want to get on with life, to hurry onward, then I have to confront the fact my past is here. That I'm carrying little magpie stashes of emotion. Because I'm betting my fascination with the future is really a search for some recompense for the past.

Isn't our yearning directly proportional to our pain?

Nevertheless, it's a surprise to me that I am here sticking up for the past. But I've realised that without the reverberations of the past, I also don't have writing. And I don't know where I'd be without writing. And reading.

Without the reverberations of the past we don't have the emotions. And it's the emotions, like time travelling messengers, that make the present so abundantly, confusingly, painfully, but beautifully, alive. And it's what brings books alive.