This week’s debut author has featured on the blog before. Katie Hale is an author and poet, who was part of Penguin’s WriteNow programme. I interviewed her a couple of years ago about her experiences on the programme and have kept up with her since on Twitter.
It’s exciting to see the book that we discussed then about to be published. I’ve heard fantastic things and can’t wait to read it!
Tell us a little about your book and how you came to write it
My Name is Monster is a novel about power and the strength and the danger in a mother’s love. The story centres on a young woman called Monster who believes she is alone in an empty, post-apocalyptic version of Britain. Slowly, piece by piece, she begins to rebuild a life. Until, one day, she finds a girl: another survivor, feral, and ready to be taught all that Monster knows.
The story is particularly inspired by Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein. I’ve always been fascinated by power dynamics between two people, how one person can come to feel a sense of ownership over another, and the impact that has on both parties. In My Name is Monster, the relationship is ostensibly a mother-daughter relationship, but one where language is used as the controlling factor, alongside age and the sense of affection being ‘due’.
I’m originally a poet, so I approached writing fiction with poetry in mind, which perhaps explains the focus on language in the novel, and my fascination with the power of individual words to make us behave in certain ways.
There’s also this commonly held belief that poetry should be true – not only in terms of general truths, but autobiographically as well, like an outpouring of the soul. It’s strange, because we don’t seem to require this literal truth from other art forms, but it does allow poets to play with these preconceptions of the form; the language of the poem sounds beautiful, and so the reader trusts it. The way I see the role of unreliable narrator is very similar to this; we start the novel trusting the narrator’s view of the world in which we find ourselves. They are our guide. If they tell us they’re the last person left on the planet, we believe them – at least until we find evidence otherwise.
What makes your book unique?
It’s true there are a lot of books set in dystopian futures, exploring how individuals survive when society breaks down. But what interests me is not what gets lost as society crumbles, but what is left behind. Humans are social animals by nature. We gather in tribes, or we form family groups, or we come together in vast numbers to create cities. And, to enable us to live together in this way, we have to create rules. Some of these rules are spoken, and some are just implicit in how we behave, but rules and social expectations are present whenever humans come together to live. I wanted to explore what happens to these expectations once the society that requires them has crumbled away, and the rules are left standing on their own.
I’m particularly interested in expectations of gender. Historically, expectations of women have been tied up with homemaking and childbearing (and, in many circumstances, still are). In this sense, women are expected to create. But in a world that is defined by destruction, what does that mean? And what happens to gender roles when there are no men?
Your book will soon be in readers’ hands. Which part of being published are you most excited about?
All along I’ve been excited about holding the finished book. So much of the writing process takes place in your head, and then when it does leave your head it goes into a notebook or onto a document on a computer. But that isn’t the thing itself. There’s something intangible about a novel, right up until the actual book lands through the letterbox. I’m all for e-readers and audiobooks (the more ways to engage with books and stories, the better), but I think that’s why so many of us have such an attachment to physical books: they’re an idea made solid; a spirit made flesh. When the advanced proof copy of My Name is Monster arrived, it was a bit like this. Suddenly, this story I’d been carrying around inside my head had physical form. It had a weight and a feel beneath my fingers. I opened the pages and it had a smell. There’s something magical about that – it’s a kind of transubstantiation.
What has been the most challenging part of your journey to publication?
I think the most challenging aspect of writing anything is worrying about what other people will think of it. Writing is so solitary – particularly when you’re writing a novel, which involves days on end in your own company and that of your characters. You spend so much time wrapped up in this fictional world you’ve created, that when it’s given over to somebody else to read, it feels as though someone is shining a light on some intimate part of your brain, and you have no idea if they’ll like what they see. I’m not sure it’s ever possible to completely overcome this fear, but having people read your work is part of being a writer, so it’s something that I’ve had to learn to build into my creative practice.
Do you have a writing mentor, or someone who has influenced your work?
I started writing the novel in response to the callout from Penguin Random House for applications to their inaugural WriteNow scheme. WriteNow is a mentoring programme aimed at finding and championing new talent that the publishing house may not otherwise find. I’d had the story in my head for a while, but never had the confidence to write it, so I ended up writing the first thousand words the night before the application was due. By the time I was accepted on the scheme, I think I had about twenty thousand words – just under a third of the novel.
During the WriteNow year, I worked with Heinemann editor, Tom Avery, who was a mentor-editor for me and for the novel. Working so closely with an editor from such an early stage of the book is quite unusual, and it helped me to understand some of the creative choices I was making during the writing process, as well as how to navigate the literary world.
Publishing can be an incredibly friendly sphere (because, let’s face it, it’s mostly full of people who just love books), but like any industry, it has its own rules and vocabulary, which can make it seem quite intimidating from the outside.
If there was one book that you could have written, other than your own, what would it be and why?
I think we all have our own ways of telling stories, so every book is particular to its author. There’s something of ourselves in everything we write, and someone else would write the same story completely differently.
That said, I’d love to have written Naomi Alderman’s The Power, which is about a world where, almost overnight, women develop a power that makes them physically stronger than men. It’s such a finely balanced novel of the very personal stories of individual characters, and the global scale of radical change. It’s also just a cracking good read.
What advice would you give to other writers hoping to publish a novel?
Keep going. There are a couple of things I’ve noticed since starting My Name is Monster. One is that there are thousands of people who want to write a book. It doesn’t matter who you talk to – family, friends, the person on the bus – you don’t have to look long before you find someone with, and I quote, ‘a great idea for a book.’ The other thing I’ve noticed is that most of those great ideas never turn into books. A lot of them never even turn into completed first drafts. There’s nothing wrong with this – we all have ideas for things we will never carry out. (I’ve been meaning to buy a stair carpet for about five years, and still not got round to it.) But if you want to get a novel published, first you have to finish it. And then you have to finish it again, and again, and again. What I hadn’t realised before starting My Name is Monster is just how many drafts it could take. You’re always learning. You’re always improving. Every sentence you write makes you a better writer. So keep writing.
Is there a debut novel you’re particularly looking forward to reading in 2019?
I loved Geraldine Quigley’s fantastic debut novel, Music Love Drugs War (Fig Tree Books), which came out in January. It’s a tender, funny, heartbreaking story about a group of friends coming of age in Derry during the Troubles, and is another book to have come through Penguin Random House’s WriteNow scheme.
I’m also really looking forward to reading Julia Armfield’s Salt Slow (Picador). It’s a short story collection rather than a novel, but I’m going to choose it anyway. Her story, ‘The Great Awake’, won the White Review Short Story Prize, and has one of the best opening lines of any story I’ve ever read. I can’t wait to read the rest of this collection.
Author bio
Following a year’s mentoring from Penguin Random House UK through their inaugural WriteNow scheme, Katie’s debut novel, My Name is Monster, will be published by Canongate in June 2019. She has two poetry pamphlets: Assembly Instructions (Southword, 2019) and Breaking the Surface (Flipped Eye, 2017). Her poetry has won the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and the Munster Fool for Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, and the Manchester Poetry Prize. Katie lives in Cumbria, where she runs creative writing workshops in schools, and is currently working on a first full collection of poetry. My Name is Monster will be published by Canongate on 6th June 2019.
You can visit Katie’s website or follow her on Twitter.
Find My Name is Monster on Amazon, Goodreads and Waterstones.