Interview

A short conversation about the work, conducted for this site — the kind of interview a fictional author might actually sit for.

The following is presented as a conversation for readability. Like everything else on this site, it's part of the fictional showcase — a way of getting at the same ideas as on writing, from a different angle.

You write both literary and speculative fiction. Which comes first, the idea or the genre?

Neither, honestly — the person comes first. I find a character before I find the impossible thing that's going to happen to them. Once I know Wren is a mapmaker who works nights and doesn't trust her own judgment, the maps that shouldn't exist follow almost naturally; the fantastical element grows out of what the character already needs, rather than being bolted on afterward. If I start with the concept instead of the person, the story usually feels clever and cold, and I throw it out.

Do you outline?

Loosely, and later than people expect. I let the first third of a draft be a genuine search — that's where The Man Who Kept His Mondays found its ending, one I hadn't planned and wouldn't have guessed. Once I know roughly where a story is going, I'll sketch the shape so I don't wander forever, but the sketch comes after the discovery, not before it.

What's the hardest part of a novel versus a short story?

In a short story, the hardest part is the ending, because there's nowhere to hide a soft one. In a novel, the hardest part is the middle, because that's where you find out whether the idea that carried you through the first hundred pages actually has three hundred more in it. North of Ordinary nearly stalled around page 140 for exactly that reason — the road-trip structure needed a second engine I hadn't built yet, so I went back and gave the sister a secret the brother didn't know she was keeping.

Where do the ideas actually come from?

Attention, not inspiration — I write about this at more length in on writing, and the raw, unfiltered version of the habit lives on the notebook page. Most ideas are two small noticed things rubbing together until they spark.

Who were you reading when you found your own voice?

That's really its own answer — see influences for the longer version. Short version: ghost stories that weren't trying to scare anyone, and writers who let a strange premise sit quietly inside an ordinary sentence instead of announcing itself.

What would you tell a reader who's never read anything of yours?

Start small. A single short story — What the Frost Wrote is a fair, fast introduction — will tell you in ten minutes whether this is your kind of quiet strange. If it is, the books are where the same instincts get room to stretch out.