LOCALLY-grown novelist, playwright and scriptwriter Gabriel Bergmoser is looking forward to the day - hopefully in the not too distant future – when he’ll be back in Mansfield, launching his most recent book ‘The True Colour of a Little White Lie’ to a hometown audience.

“I did spend a fair bit of time in the region when I was writing the book, as the story is ostensibly set in Mansfield and on Mt Buller, under a fictional guise,” said Gabriel.

“I really lifted a lot from my own experience of growing up in Mansfield and going up the mountain (Buller) regularly during winter to ski, and I’ve taken quite a few of my own embarrassing personal anecdotes and filtered them into the story in a somewhat fictional way.

“Of all my books, True Colour is the most Mansfield book I’ve ever written, and it will be great to share the book with the local community, especially as I plan to do a school talk.

“My hope is that local kids will relate quite strongly to the story, and see parallels with their own experiences of town.”

On bookshop shelves since early April, this work of young adult fiction is a sensitive, introspective and quirky novel addressing feelings of isolation and alienation in the teenage male protagonist.

“It’s about a kid who grows up in a small town and his parents take over a ski lodge at a nearby mountain resort and he gets to re-invent himself,” Gabriel said.

“But the white lies he tells spiral out of control, leading to this veritable avalanche of chaotic circumstances.

“It’s a book for all the weird kids of the world, because I was that kid.

“I really struggled to find my place growing up and was a bit of a misfit at school.

“I’m very much aware that this can be a bit of a stereotype, but just because it is a cliché, it doesn’t make it any less real.”

The resulting book, due to the personal nature of the tale, came together incredibly smoothly for Gabriel.

“It had a charmed life this book from inception to publication - which is so incredibly rare, with agents and the production team alike, seeing and loving the book for what it was," he said.

The universal appeal of the story has seen Gabriel sign a two book deal with Harper Collins for the novel, with a planned follow-up, along with feature film rights picked up by Pirate Size Productions, with funding from the Australian Children Television Network to assist with development.

“True Colour was initially conceived as a novel, but now we have both a film version and a play version in development,” Gabriel said.

“It’s been an interesting process, developing the story now in three mediums.

“My first love was writing novels, however, my Masters was in screenwriting, and the bulk of my actual output in my early twenties was in theatre.

“Theatre teaches you how to write dialogue, film teaches you that strong visual element, and prose teaches you how to go that bit deeper in character and theme.

“They all help each other, and in retrospect, it has put me in a very fortunate position with my career in what can be a tricky industry to negotiate.”

It has also put Gabriel in the unique position, that he is the obvious choice to write the screenplay for The True Colour of a Little White Lie.

“I’d love it if it was filmed in Mansfield,” Gabriel said.

“Although the fundamentals of the story are universal, I do believe it should be an Australian story.

“And when have the Australian ski slopes ever been depicted in an international film?

“The story wouldn’t exist without Mansfield or Buller.

“And though compromises need to be made in this industry, I feel like the film belongs here.”