In the 1970s when Helen Garner was starting to write, ambition was a dirty word. Now, looking back, she sees she was ambitious and still is: “I’m ambitious to get it right, to do it well.”

But different writers have different kinds of ambition. At the Melbourne Writers Festival last weekend, Garner said she was once summoned by the editor of The Australian and asked if she’d write regularly for the paper. Just think, the editor said, you might get to interview the prime minister! She was “kind of insulted… I thought, is there anything in my work that shows I’m interested in that? Then I thought, he hasn’t read my work.” She didn’t take the job.

After two pandemic-cancelled years, the festival was back live, plus some Zoom appearances, with the theme of Ambition. One goal that all writers shared was to survive financially. They didn’t always chase it hard, though. Garner said that as a freelancer, she was paid at the same rate as decades earlier, and had never asked for more. She had been “bewildered” by the big sales of The First Stone.

Garner’s conversation partner Chloe Hooper had interviewed a prime minister (Julia Gillard). “I have ambitions for the story, not for myself,” she said. But it must have been alarming when a bookseller friend said: “If you write about death, what are you going to say to all those people who say you’re just copying Helen Garner?”

Others wanted financial security too much. When Ottessa Moshfegh wrote her first book, Eileen, she tried to write “a commercially viable novel” because she was broke. It was a horrible idea she would not recommend to anyone.

Her thinking was delusional, she said. “I wanted it so badly, to be a working writer and not have to give my time to a job I thought wasn’t worth the sacrifice of my passion … I’ve never been so desperate again. I grow a lot when what motivates me is not desperation, pain and fear but curiosity and willingness to be vulnerable and do the really hard work.”

Writing wasn’t always the first ambition. Sheila Heti and Sarah Winman were both actors. But Heti said she felt very wooden: “I can still act through the writing of books.” Sitting in front of a computer was not a nice way to spend time, however: “I’d rather spend my days painting … You see your limitations but that’s very freeing, because you can only be yourself.”