Author Q&A : Jenn Ashworth
By Festival Programme Director, Sara Beadle.
Jenn Ashworth is the author of the brilliantly dark and quirky novel,
A Kind Of Intimacy, and is appearing at the Birmingham Book Festival on Saturday October 24th 2009. If you haven’t read the novel, scroll down for an earlier review. Jenn is currently writing her second novel, and promises to keep our minds in a state of unrest once again…
Firstly, congratulations on the reception A Kind Of Intimacy has had. Everyone in the Festival office loved it. Are you writing another novel?
Thank you very much. And yes, I am writing another novel. After a slow start I’m on the downward stretch of a book I’m calling
Cold Light at the moment. I was recently awarded a Time to Write grant by the Arts Council, so I’m more or less full time on that right now. It’s about two girls – Chloe and Lola, who were best friends in the strange, secretive and competitive way fourteen year olds are. Chloe didn’t grow up, and Lola did, and the novel is from her point of view, remembering a period of about six weeks during the winter of 1998, and realising that her understanding of just what happened between her, Chloe, Chloe’s boyfriend Carl and their friend Emma isn’t exactly the way she always thought about it.
Readers of
A Kind of Intimacy will be familiar with my style – a creeping sense of unease and barely suppressed guilt about past misdeeds. It’s not exactly a thriller or a crime novel, but it’s in that family in the same way that
A Kind of Intimacy is. I always think they should be called whydunnits.
How did the publication of your first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, come about?
I completed the novel during my MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. Shortly afterwards, I entered the first chapter and the last paragraph into a competition run by Durham County Council called ‘The Enigma of Personality’. I didn’t win that competition, but one of the judges – Anne Fine, liked the novel so much she asked if I would mind her sending it to her agent. We now share that agent, and he submitted it to editors and handled the offers in the usual way. Since then, rights have sold in Italy and the US, which is all really exciting. The best part of the process was going to London to meet my new editors at Arcadia – it was the first time I’d spoken to anyone who’d read my entire novel besides my agent, and having that realisation that they liked it, and understood what I’d been getting at was fairly amazing. The process of getting the cover right was another experience I enjoyed – there were several drafts, and I love what we settled on. It was all distracting in terms of trying to settle down and work on
Cold Light, but I can’t wait to do it all again!
I imagine creating a character like Annie might be something like having that fantasy during an exam of standing up and screaming – did you allow yourself to live vicariously through her at all?Annie’s life isn’t anything like mine, so there’s nothing about this novel that is autobiographical at all – except her feelings. I’ve often felt unsure about walking into rooms of people, or at dinner parties, or when trying to make friends. None of my social gaffes have ever worked out as horribly as Annie’s have, but I think part of my imagining the novel was the process of putting myself into Annie’s shoes and imagining the worst that could happen in any particular situation. And then writing it. And as the mother of a young child, it was fun writing Annie’s temper tantrum when she’s first faced with the demands of a new baby – it was very satisfying to let Annie talk about the things you’re not supposed to say about the sheer, unrelenting monotony of parenting a newborn.
A Kind Of Intimacy creates in a reader a great sense of creeping discomfort – mostly in the way one can’t help but recognise small (or not so small!) shades of themselves in Annie’s behaviour - is this a by-product of writing what you felt compelled to write, or did you always intend it to have that effect?
I did want the reader to feel the things that Annie was not letting herself feel. She is relentlessly, delusionally optimistic when she should be, perhaps, a little bit more worried about herself. I wanted the reader to do that work for her – to feel the dread, embarrassment and humiliation that she never allows herself to experience. Putting the reader in Annie’s shoes was very important to me, as from the beginning it was a challenge I set myself – getting my reader to empathise, and perhaps even root for a woman who is fundamentally unattractive and unsympathetic. And I do think there’s little bits of Annie in all of us – I wanted to create a character that played on the worst kinds of insecurities we have – that question you have in your head, late at night after you come home from a party… ‘what if they don’t really like me?’
I grew to like Annie quite a lot, anyway!
The novel is very clever in its use of time and flashback, making a reader simultaneously curious about Annie’s past and what might come next. It seems as though this would be difficult to plot - did you write the novel in the order it appears?
No – not at all. This novel went through seven drafts, and one of the things I found very difficult was keeping both threads of the story in the air and suspenseful – delivering the information to the reader in the right order, and making sure that the tension built slowly so that both sides to the story – what happened to Will, and what will happen to her neighbours, were resolved more or less at the same time. I cut out a lot of scenes to do with Annie’s childhood, partly to keep that focus on her as an adult, partly because I don’t think Annie would want to tell us all her horrible memories about that time, and partly because I didn’t want the reader to ‘diagnose’ her – there’s more to Annie than the product of her upbringing. The endings came to me first, and in the first writing, I worked backwards from there, and stitched it together at the end. It involved, as I say, lots of drafting, cutting and pasting and ignoring people who told me that long flashbacks don’t work in modern novels.
Do you see yourself as predominantly a novelist, or do you/will you write other things, too?
Yes – a novelist. I write short stories, and I love blogging but I can’t imagine myself ever, for example, trying my hand at poetry or scripts. I’m young, so that might change, but I’ve already got an idea for what I want to write after
Cold Light and that is novel-shaped too. My main interest in the novel form is in what you can do with narration – how first person accounts deal with the experience of remembering, the problems inherent in narrating that memory and how the circumstances of the telling of the story colour the story itself. None of that is exclusive to novels, of course, but it is certainly where my interest lies.
What are your writing techniques or quirks? Do you have a desk, an office, a shed, a hole in the wall in which you hide to write? Do you write at night or first thing in the morning or only when it rains?
When I was writing
A Kind of Intimacy I had a desk in the corner of my bedroom, and wrote most of it in short bursts while my daughter slept, or during the night. Now I have a office (it is actually much less grand that that – a spare room with a desk and a computer in it would be a more accurate description…) but it’s an office I share with my partner and one which my daughter still wanders into. She is here now, in fact, entertaining herself with a sheet of bubble wrap and a hole punch, so nothing much has changed. It is the summer holidays, the childminder is off and the idea of a hole in the wall to hide in sounds more and more attractive.
Now I’m full time I am training myself to write for longer periods during the day; treating it like the job it has become. It is doing me good. As far as quirks – I type right onto the computer unless the words are coming slowly. I had a hard time starting
Cold Light, so I wrote most of the first and second drafts longhand, in A4 notebooks while sitting in my car. The process is a little more ordinary now I’m into the swing of it: I sit here, type, drink tea, get up and stretch now and again, and swear a lot. I eat a lot of oranges. There aren’t any special gizmos or lucky charms, although I can’t work with music on. This method, if you can call it that, seems to be working.
You recently became a full time writer. How does that feel?
Scary, and exciting. Because I used to work full time, most of my writing took place in the evenings and weekends and I was constantly, permanently exhausted. I’m recovering from that now, and learning to manage my time and set a schedule for when I’m going to be writing and when I’m doing other things. I worried about feeling lonely, but I shouldn’t have: I don’t regret giving up my work in the prison for a minute. Apparently, being a full time writer will cause no end of havoc when it comes to my car insurance premiums, but that, and still being a bit shy when people ask me what I do for a living, are the only draw backs.
As a writer, you’re very active in terms of social networking. How much of an impact do you think this has had upon a) your profile as a writer and b) the way you interact with your readers?
I’ve had the blog long before I got anything published and I used it as a kind of diary, and a way of keeping in touch with what my friends were doing. It isn’t too different now, although as the promotion for the book has swelled to take over more of my life than it used to, more of the posts are about that. I think readers expect to be able to contact writers, to find out a bit more about them. At least by keeping my own blog I can control, more or less, what kind of things I want out there on the internet and it’s a great way of answering questions, doing interviews and promotion when you are, like me, a bit of a wall-flower and almost telephone-phobic. I can interact with people using writing, which, for obvious reasons, is very comfortable for me.
It is a time-drain though. I really need to limit the amount of time I spend browsing on people’s blogs and messing about on twitter – and reading other people’s reviews and opinions of your work can be distracting. I’ve not come across anything negative so far, but I know bad reviews happen to all writers and I’m still wondering how I will feel about that…
What does writing mean to you?
It’s hard to come up with a pat answer, because I have always, always written and I can’t imagine understanding the world, or myself, any other way. I think a lot of the things Annie says about her hopes for intimacy can be applied to the way I feel about writing – it is a way, first and foremost, to communicate an idea or a feeling, and even though words are unreliable and language is slippery, I imagine learning to do that communication successfully is a magical feeling. It is the hope of that that keeps me going through all the drafts, anyway!
Have you met Annie? Not wishing to risk jumping on the ‘life imitating art’ bandwagon, I mean to ask if she has come through to you in people you’ve seen, met, talked to? Is she a tiny bit of lots of faces and personalities you’ve known? Do you see her on the bus or in the supermarket?Annie isn’t based on a real person, although as I’ve said, there are shades of my own feelings and fears wrapped up in her personality and experiences. I lived in Oxford when I first started writing this novel, and on the bus into work there was a large woman with a bobble hat, a chocolate bar and a Mills and Boon novel every single morning. The books changed, but nothing else about her did. She’s probably a perfectly nice, sane, contented lady, but there was something about her that caught my attention and she probably inspired A Kind of Intimacy a little bit. When I worked in a library in Cambridge, one of our self-help books, The Surrendered Wife, was very popular. This would have been in 2002 or 2003, a while before I wrote the novel, but I do remember wondering what kind of person would read such a thing and watching it coming in and out of the library very carefully…
See Jenn at the Birmingham Book Festival on Saturday 24th October 2009. For tickets go here:http://www.birminghambookfestival.org/index.php?view=details&id=86%3Areaders-afternoon&option=com_eventlist&Itemid=56See Jenn's excellent blog here :
http://jennashworth.blogspot.com/
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