In Josie & Jack, your characters are so unique, dark, and complex. Who was the hardest to write? Who was the easiest? Did you have a favorite?
KB: The hardest to write was probably Josie. Part of that is sheer quantity, since the entire book is from her point of view, but she was also tough because her view of the world is so limited and claustrophobic. A lot of writing a convincing character lies in being able to find common ground between your characters' experiences and those of your hypothetical reader, and Josie's experience was so limited that finding that common ground was sort of a challenge. She's sort of loosely inspired by my memories of being a socially awkward, confused sixteen-year-old-but at least I had a TV, for God's sake.
I'm not sure that any character is really easy to write. In the early drafts, Raeburn was the most fun to write, because he says such absurd things, but the flip side of that was the work that went into toning him down in later drafts. By then, I'd spent so much time with Josie and Jack themselves that writing any of the side characters -- anybody who'd lived a more or less normal life, with only the normal amounts and varieties of psychopathology -- was a relief. Reading it again now, my favorite character is probably Michael, the tattoo artist that Josie spends the day with in Erie. He's one of the few people in the book who doesn't have a creepy personal agenda, and therefore one of the few that I wouldn't mind sitting down and having a beer with.
Can you talk a little about the pacing and restraint in Josie & Jack? Did you go through many revisions to get it so evenly paced, or was that the book’s natural rhythm from the beginning?
KB: [Struggling against the surge of dark memories]: So . . . many . . . drafts.
Seriously, I think I did eight full revisions and a couple of partials. Since the novel is pretty much episodic, the only plot arcs that run throughout the novel are Josie's emotional maturation and the sense of building tension. I think that some of that was organic to the story -- it was heavily inspired by the Raymond Chandler/Patricia Highsmith brand of laconic, inexorable crime fiction -- but it took a lot of tweaking to get just right. Sort of like spaghetti sauce: if you've got a few cans of tomatoes and some dried spices, you can dump them in a pot and come up with something that's basically right and not so bad, but making the really good stuff takes a lot of tasting and fiddling around. Frankly, I'm proud of what ended up on the page, but sometimes I still wonder if I didn't add a little too much oregano. Or whatever.
Some writers go through a kind of post-partum depression after finishing a novel. When you finished your novels how did you feel? After finishing the first, how long was it before you started your second?
KB: Finishing the very first draft is a pretty good high: hitting "save" the last time, printing it out into a fat satisfying stack, knowing that you did it and it's all there. By the time my books came to the end of the editing/copyediting/proofreading process, though, I have to admit that I was mostly just glad to get them out of my hands. I love writing -- hell, I even love revising -- but after working for eighteen months-plus on the same book, it does sort of start to feel like an endurance run on a hamster wheel.
As for the new book, Last Seen Leaving: I had the idea for that before I sold Josie and Jack, so I was thinking about the story and keeping notes on it long before I was officially writing. When I did officially start, I sort of wrote in fits and starts for a few months before I actually dug in. The lag time between the two was probably about six months in total.
Was the process of writing your second novel different than the first? If so, how?
KB: Actually, I feel like I learned so much from Josie and Jack that the process was completely different. Josie and Jack was mostly written after work, between prime time and sleep; some of it I actually wrote at work, which I'm sure my various employers appreciated. By the time I started Last Seen Leaving, I didn't have a day job, so the actual writing time itself was much more intense and focused. Obviously, it can be hard to get yourself to sit down and write, but I also found it hard to let myself stop writing; I felt like I should be writing all the time. Weekends, holidays, always. I ended up forcing myself to write a thousand words a day, and actually keeping track in a geeky little spreadsheet, with lots of built-in calculations and color-coding (ah, procrastination). After those thousand words were done, if I still had it in me, I let myself keep going; but if I was tapped out, as long as I'd hit my word count, it was okay that I was done, and I could go watch cartoons or play video games without feeling too guilty about it.
For both books, how much of the story did you know before you started writing? Do you believe in outlines?
KB: With Josie and Jack, I had a relationship that I wanted to explore (the brother and sister) and a vague idea of two possible endings; what happened in between sort of came on the fly, which I think is one of the reasons that the book is as episodic as it is. The idea for Last Seen Leaving was more intricate and fully formed when I started, but I still figured a lot of it out as I went. I actually have a horror of outlines. I occasionally teach novel writing, and I've preached some pretty fiery sermons against outlines. For one thing, once you write an outline, you're going to feel like you have to stick to it, and that can limit or kill your story. For another, they're wasted time; you learn a lot about your story, your characters and your themes as you write your first draft, and you can't learn those things through an outline. So why spend two weeks working on an outline when you could spend two weeks working on a draft? I consider my first draft an outline, really. But that's me. I'm sure there are some wonderful writers out there who find outlines really useful. (Those writers probably shouldn't take my novel-writing class, though.)
Finally, what are some of your favorite books and what are you reading now?
KB: I tend to be woefully behind the curve on my reading list; it takes a while for me to get to the latest hot books. My favorite novel of all time is John Steinbeck's East of Eden, with Sweet Thursday a close runner-up. I was also pretty blown away by Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, and Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I'm deeply into genre fiction, wild inventive stuff like Tim Powers and China Mieville, as well as crime writers like Denise Mina or Ruth Rendell. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon are both great conflations of historical fiction and fantasy, brilliant and very impressive. Right now I'm reading End of Story by Peter Abrahams, which is amazing, and a fantasy novel that I got for fifty cents at my local used book store. Which is also amazing, but in a very different way.
