Perilous Adventures
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Pandora

 

 
 

Krissy Kneen

interviewed by n a bourke
 

Krissy KneenPA: Why do you write?

I write because if I don't write I become incredibly sad.  It is the one constant in my life.  It is my place of escape.  When I am not writing well I feel awful about myself.  It is where I get my self esteem.  Even though I have a great day job, I get no sense of achievement from it.  The happiest moments of my life have come after finishing a major work like a book or a particularly good short story.  I write to get that high back, I suppose.  I also have this burning desire to write something truly beautiful and can't stop until I feel like I have acheived this.

PA: Have you ever had difficulty writing? What stopped you from writing? What brought you back to it?

I have constant difficulty writing.  I am in a period of trouble right now, mainly because I have been focussed on marketing this current publication [Affection] and it is very distracting.  Also, I feel a lot of pressure on my work at the moment.  I feel like everyone is watching me and this makes it harder to write.  There are always trouble spots and it is hard to break through them.  I do anything I can.  I look at paintings, go to galleries, watch really good cinema, read really good books.  I have even had competitions with friends. A friend and I once chose a painting by Cezanne and had a competition to write a story inspired by the work.  I was having trouble writing and he hadn't written anything for a year.  At the end of the competition we both had great stories.  We were both really proud of the work.  I also had a competition with a writer to finish a novel by a certain date.  The plan was if either of us didn't finish we had to clean a friend's bathroom from top to bottom and we hate cleaning.  We both just pushed through it and wrote the books. Guilt and shame are fabulous tools.

PA: What is your writing process like? Do you plan or splurge, edit madly or let it ride on the first throw?

Writing is a trickle most days.  I spend my time trying to make sure the tap is turned on just a little.  If I write something small each day I am happy.  If I do not  beat myself up about it.  The best of my writing happens when I get to go away and work uninterrupted.  It is torturous.  I take a week at a time and go away to the beach or to the forest but I don't get to swim or walk.  I start each day early and sit at the desk until I am completely sore.  I refuse to let myself eat until I have written enough.  The only other activity that is permitted is reading, but it has to be something good that will inspire me to write more. During these writing stints I am actually surprised by the quality of the work that comes out.  Often, it is pretty close to the way it will be in the final edit. That said, often I have to finish a book and then realise that it just isn't good enough, throw it away and start again.

PA: Do you do much editing? How does that work?

I use a lot of index cards.  I write my scenes on index cards and stick them on the wall.  This helps me identify gaps and fill them.  My actual writing line by line is luckily pretty clean on the first hit.  Sometimes it needs a little weeding, but generally my voice is there from the first draft, which is half the battle won, I suppose. This is lucky because I am lazy and don't care too much on a word by word basis.  I do, however, have heaps of trouble with structure and labour over this.  The edit is the most important part of the process and it is also often the most boring and tedious.  I have to force myself to find ways of connecting with the work.  Sometimes, I just want to ditch it and move on to the next project.  Editing with Mandy Brett at Text was wonderful.  She kept  the work consistent and made great structural suggestions.  I don't get attatched to too much of my writing.  I am always happy to cut stuff.

PA: What’s the most interesting part of the process for you? What aspect of the process do you most enjoy, or despise?

I need to fall in love with my main character.  Writing a book is like having an extended crush on someone.  It gets to the point where I can't live without them and I feel like they are my only friend.  This is actually the best bit: spending time with my best friend, learning more about them.  The best moments are when something falls into place.  You can feel it sometimes.  You are writing and suddenly it is like you have found the missing jigsaw-puzzle piece.  You slot it into the puzzle and everything is suddenly seamless.  That is pure joy.  My least favourite bits are when things are just not working well.  Often about 20-30,000wds into a book I get to a point where I am completely stuck.  The writing feels dead.  I feel like the story is not worth saving.  I have experienced this enough times now that I can get to that point and go 'here we go again' and just push through it, but years ago I would just get depressed and cry a lot and say bad things about myself as a writer.  It is just part of the process and now I can see it as that.  I have heard that many writers experience this at around the same point in a book.

PA: You’ve been amazingly open and honest in this memoir; do you see that as part of the form? What do you think about the ‘fake’ memoir scandals (Frey, et al!)?

I think you have to be a good enough writer to make what really happens interesting enough to hold the story together.  I understand the compulsion to make stuff up.  This happens because you haven't cracked the structure yet. You can be writing the memoir and get to a point where you think you just need something dramatic and shocking to happen so that the story has somewhere to go.  The thing is, life is pretty dramatic in general.  You just have to see it through the right lens.  I suppose in my book I could have dwelled on the homeless stuff, made it into this tragic story of homelessness, but the truth is I was pretty confused during that period and I don't think anything particularly dramatic happened at that time.  It was pretty day by day so I kind of glossed over it.  I tried to remember things in detail, but I was in the midst of a fairly serious depression and things get a bit hazy when you are dealing with that.  Instead, I decided to focus on what I did remember and to make sure that I shaped the reality into a proper story arc, leaving out bits that were entertaining, but not helpful to the story, and I did shift time a little at one point, bringing two incidents closer together so that they could resonate off each other.

A lot of fiction is based on real life.  We steal from our lives to write fiction.  I don't see why people have to call it memoir if a lot of it is made up.  On the other hand, if a memoirist gets their dates wrong or colours things slightly differently then that just seems like the general fallibility of memory and I don't have a problem with that at all.

PA: Is there a difference between the fallibility of memory and deliberately fudging the truth? How important is truth or honesty to writing memoir, or fiction for that matter?

In fiction nothing has to be true and yet in fiction people can smell a fake more easily.  The emotional core of fiction has to be spot-on honest.  Otherwise, people will not engage with the writing.  In memoir I believe you are telling your audience that this is true and if it turns out that it isn't then you have broken some kind of contract with them and they have a right to be mad at you.  Of course, your memory will colour and change events.  Maybe they even happened differently and in a different order.  Certainly the dialogue is going to be invented.  Still, there has to be a certain truth at the heart of it to fulfill your part of the bargain.

PA: The connection of depression or mental illness and writing is one that comes up again and again in writing about writing, or in looking at author biographies. Do you think there’s a connection between the compulsion to make something beautiful and the experience of despair?

I suffer from depression and can't imagine writing without this hanging over me the whole time.  I know writers who do not but who are still good writers.  Sometimes when I am in the heart of depression it feels like I have no skin.  This is certainly an interesting perspective from which to experience the world.  I seem to get depressed before I launch into some good solid writing.  But in the depths of depression I can't write anything good.  It is a constant balancing act.  There certainly is some kind of connection.  Often writers suffer from this.  I wish I didn't have depression.  It is awful, but then I need some small level of friction as a place to start the writing process.  I have no answers for this.  I certainly can't write at all when I am medicated.


PA: You keep a successful blog – Furious Vaginas – how has that contributed to your writing process/career?

The blog has helped make me write.  I used to post every day and that was like a deadline I had to meet, no matter how tired I was, how upset, how drunk (unfortunately) or how ill.  It also had the added benefit of being the interface between me and an audience.  It helped me to grow an audience.  It also helped me to show a publisher that I could do it, quickly and with a degree of regularity.  It certainly helped in so many ways.  I don't think everyone should keep a blog.  If your first drafts are super-rough sometimes it can hurt rather than help, and certainly don't start believing it if your friends comment on the blog and tell you that this is the best thing ever because they are probably not being honest, just friendly.  For me it was very useful.

PA: How has working in the book trade impacted on your writing career? How did that insight help or hinder you? What have you learned from that work that you think other writers would/should/could benefit from understanding?

Working in the book trade has been all-important to me.  It helps my work because it normalises what might otherwise be seen as a heightened career.  I am in amongst it.  I understand that it is a tough industry and that books only last in the market for three months, six months tops, unless they gain cult status or are a best seller.  I also know that the ones that get reprinted do so because they are important works.  It helps keep things in perspective.  It helps me to understand why my work gets rejected.  It is difficult to sell unknown authors.  This is a basic fact.  I also know that in Australia print runs are small.  This is not an industry of huge fame and fortune.  I also think that reading only new release fiction can be bad for you as a writer.  Sometimes I fall into this trap for work and it negatively impacts on my writing.  You must read a range of books.  Keep in touch with new release stuff like it is the dessert but eat the classic literature like your meat and veg.  This is the stuff that will sustain you.

PA: How did you hold on during the years you were writing without getting a big break?

I barely held on.  It was pretty close to 20 years of seriously writing without getting anything major published.  I did get a few short stories published but I had been focussing on novels and not short stories and it takes years to write each one.  I was pretty despondent at times.  I remember crying outside the state library one time, feeling like I would never get anything published.  I had to call my husband to come and rescue me I was so upset.  All that was about how others see me.  I just felt like a big joke amongst my peers.  It was all about the ego.  When I was writing well during that time I still had the buzz of doing it and knowing in my heart that the work was good, but it was hard to keep my ego out of it sometimes.  I remember a day when I got twelve rejection letters in one hit and I seriously thought I would go and jump off a bridge it was so disheartening. The thing that kept me going was my friendships.  I have some very strong relationships with writer friends, who understand how hard it is.  I could talk to them and they gave me some amazing words of wisdom.  I made sure I had friends at every stage of their careers.  I am friends with some more established writers and also friends with some younger, unpublished writers.  This keeps it real for me.

PA: How did you finally get your big break? How has being published, after 20 years of working on your wriitng, shifted your understanding of what you do, or how you do it?

This book happened surprisingly quickly.  They said yes and pretty much six months later it was on the bookshelves.  I structured the thing and wrote it into book form in a matter of ten days.  The writing of the source material only took about eight months.  This whole process of publication has certainly made me feel quite a bit of pressure about the next book.  I now have to include my audience in the conversation I have with a new book.  I feel them looking over my shoulder.  It is odd, but I am going to learn to work with it.  I also see my publisher as a first reader now.  I feel like they are in the room with me.  It makes me write a bit smarter, I suppose.  But I hope that I can use this as a positive thing.

PA: What's your favourite section of Affection? What is it about that section that you like?

Misdirected emotions. I like this bit even though it is kind of out of place.  It happened later, after the end of the book really, but I had to put it in somewhere.  I had this fascinating relationship with a man that troubled me for many years. I even wrote a novel with a main character based on this man.  I think I like the section more because all that stuff is still rich for me.  I haven't quite milked that relationship properly yet.  I keep finding aspects of that man in my short stories and books.  I think I have ingested him.

PA: What/who do you read? What’s so good about them?

I have recently read M J Hyland's This is How and I loved it.  It is so clean and perfect.  She manages to sustain tension without any tricks.  The writing is so sparse.  I love Raymond Carver for this reason and have his short stories next to my desk so that I can constantly refer to them.  I love it when a book is full of subtext.  I hate an author spoon-feeding me.  I have thrown books across the room because of the dross of exposition.  I don't mind the poetry of a work, too.  I like reading Ondaatje, which is almost pure poetry, barely any structure to hold on to.  I love Don DeLillo and Jeffrey Eugenides and Cormac McCarthy, anyone who has a strong clear voice.  But, you know, it is very hard to write a great novel and it is rare that a book is great all the way through.  This is disheartening, but gives me hope at the same time.  If my work is not perfect I can see that most of Delillo's books are also imperfect.

PA: What advice would you give other writers? What do you think a writer most needs to do/have?

A writer needs to write.  It is as simple as that.  You have to write and you have to read.  If you do enough of this you will eventually find your feet.  Blind hard work is the best way to succeed.  You have to be dogged.  Try as hard as you can to think about everything in the world as just a feeding tube for your writing.  It seems to work for me, anyway.  No pleasure or pain is wasted. It is all material.  It helps me to survive life, too.  When things feel awful I know I can make art out of it.  Another little tip is to surround yourself with people who also think that their art is the centre of the universe.  This will make you feel less like a freak.  It will also be a support for you.  Your friends will not be constantly urging you to give up. If your partner also has that same dogged commitment to their craft it helps to let you off the hook of doing the dishes instead of writing.

PA: I’ve heard you speak before about your feeling of strong empathy for a masculine view of the world, and a lot of the writers you read and enjoy are men (DeLillo, Carver, Ondaatje, etc). In the writing you’ve done in the past, too, a lot of your viewpoint characters have been men or boys. Do you think gender plays a strong role in the way an author writes? Do you still feel that attraction to a masculine viewpoint, or sensibility?

I am beginning to change my mind on this.  I used to always identify with male voices thinking my own voice felt more like a male one in some ways.  I certainly don't relate to some overtly female voices.  But now I just think we gravitate to voices that are similar to our own.  I am forcibly trying to make my main characters female at the moment.  They start out as men and then I go back and force them into female bodies.  This is because I want to admit that women can and do think like I do.  It is not a male way of thinking, just an alternative female voice.  I am going to continue to try this.  If it doesn't work I will have to go back to my boys.

PA: It strikes me as quite intriguing that this book is (perhaps necessarily as a memoir) an exploration of your experience of being a sexual and gendered woman, albeit with a strong dose of kink and perversity: how does that gel with this sense of yourself as ambivalently gendered (as opposed to sexed!)?

Yeah, I have struggled with the idea of myself as a woman for ages.  I am certainly quite girly in a lot of ways and yet I feel more comfortable in the company of men and I often feel left out in women's conversations.  This is the first book I have written from a woman's perspective and now that I have started I am going to try to continue in this way. 

PA: Writing about sex is one of the hardest things to do well, without it seeming arch or mechanical, how did you find the right tone, the right voice?

A good friend of mine told me that when I write about sex I am never actually writing about sex.  Sex is the setting.  It is the landscape and that is how I can write about it and never come to the end of it.  Each sex scene is actually about something else entirely.  Sex is just the lens, but really what is going on is much more complex.  I write about loneliness or self doubt or about misunderstandings.  These are my major themes.  Sex is the place where these misunderstandings occur.  I really believe that sex is rarely just there for its own sake.  Every interraction with another human being is always about the differences between people and how we can pretend to overcome those differences and really we cannot.  I suppose this is why I never tire of sex and writing about it.  It is when we are naked that our barriers and insecurities come up.  Being in bed with someone is like standing in the changing cubicles at Myers.  We are naked and the light is too bright and we don't really want to see what is in front of us but it is impossible to look away without seeing yet another reflection of ourselves.


More Author Interviews:

Gary Crew interviewed by n a bourke (Issue 09:03)

Patrick Holland interviewed by n a bourke (Issue 10:03)

Belinda Jeffrey interviewed by Inga Simpson (10:02)

Susan Johnson interviewed by Sandra Hogan (Issue 11:01)

Krissy Kneen interviewed by n a bourke (Issue 09:05)

Steven Lang interviewed by n a bourke (issue 09:04)

Pippa Masson interviewed by Janene Carey (10:02)

Lisa Unger interviewed by Inga Simpson (10:01)

Charlotte Wood interviewed by Sandra Hogan (11:02)

 

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