What was the process of writing the memoir like for you? Old ghosts and therapy?
The whole thing, soup to nuts, took three months. Mid November to Valentine's Day. Whap. Then straight into layout. Then proofreading (I'm sorry to say I didn't do a very good job). Then production (a lot of hand assembly). Then shipment to WisCon. There was no time for old ghosts. It certainly wasn't therapy.
In the middle of the writing, my mother died. Her death reinforced my decision to tell nothing but the truth, and not all the truth. This is a tell-some, not a tell-all.
The best decision I made was to focus on one clean through line: how I became a writer. The rest was easy.
Would you ever consider collaborating with Kelley on a novel?
I'd rather stick a fork in my eye. We're used to being the absolute gods of our respective fictional worlds. Neither of us would willingly give that up. We've collaborated on essays (watch for the latest, "War Machine, Time Machine," coming in Queer Universes, ed. Pearson et al, coming next month from Liverpool University Press), and we'll do it again; it's enormous fun. We'd planned, a while ago, to collaborate on a screenplay, to learn together, but now that Kelley's written one already, working together would feel pretty unbalanced. I'll have to write one of my own and catch up. Then we'll think about it.
I can imagine that you and Kelley hold much of the same opinions about writing; do you have ones that fiercely contradict that of the other's?
I think our philosophy of writing is similar: story is god. Character, and premise, and setting are royalty, and brilliant writing is High King, but story is god. If something is precious, or unbalances the story arc, cut it out.
We set about our storytelling in different ways, though. I write from the outside in, and Kelley writes from the inside out. My focus tends to be physical: the character moves through her environment, and what she notices about that environment becomes a reflection of her internal journey. My metaphors are geophysical, environmental, physiological. Kelley's focus is emotional. Her characters have nuanced, delineated interior lives. Her metaphors are cultural and pop-cultural and interpersonal.
I can't explain this, but whenever I read your work, two colours come to mind: blue and silver. How would you describe your writing style?
I sometimes think of my work as water, or mercury, or steel—not dissimilar. But as to what that means in terms of style... Ooof. I don't know.
Perhaps precision is part of it. I like my words to say exactly—not sort of, not vaguely, not roughly, but precisely—what I mean. I'm a huge fan of etymology. Words are like icebergs; nine-tenth of their meaning is hidden, but it's there, it matters. I also like my sentences to feel liquid, as though they could run into whatever matrix your brain has laid out and occupy it totally. That liquidity makes it possible for me to sweep you, the reader, off your feet and away, because the words seep into every crevice. You can't seal me out.
Read further about Nicola's views on literary merit, the scariest thing in the world, and why writing matters.
Lynne Jamneck - Lynne Jamneck lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Short listed for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda Awards, she has published short fiction in ...
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