But to humanise an antagonist, to make a reader practise empathy when I add those dimensions to a character, another layer opens up. Our first instinct is to make a black-and-white world where people get what they deserve and learn a moral lesson, etc etc, because we’re brought up on fables and myths which work to gratify that yearning in us. Then they feel realer to me, and something occurs to me that I can plausibly make happen to them to make what they’re trying to keep hidden break the surface. If a character seems two-dimensional, recognising their complexity and trying to step into their skin to do it feels like a way to humanise them. For a sense of realism and empathy, and to create character dimension, I keep returning to this question of human fallibility. There’s a temptation to want everything to be simpler and more coherent in a story than it feels in real life, but I keep finding (both in fiction and in real life, actually) that while dilemmas and predicaments can be clear and cogent, humans (and characters) demand a bit more time and effort. Can you speak about these qualities?ĬK: Thank you for that response. Farmer Frank Slovak in Flexion comes to mind. I am frequently touched by your capacity to inhabit a character, and to imbue even the most unlikely character with empathy. Now I try to worry less, and not overthink it – just imagine a kind of telepathic conversation happening between me and the reader. Developing a voice takes a long time and doesn’t seem, to me, to be something you can do abstractly or by theory alone – you have to learn it through the writing. This is everyone’s early problem, I think: lack of confidence makes us tentative and hesitant, and we don’t take risks, so our writing seems to lack that boldness and verve we strive for. I see I was more tentative about just trusting my reader to make connections themselves, based on what I was attempting to show them. When you look back on your earlier stories, do you see a shift or development in how and what you write now?ĬK: I do see a shift when I look back at earlier stories. So maybe the more important realisation was the unlearning, and then finding compelling enough reasons to return to it after such a long time of avoiding it.

I was thinking the other day what a long spell of ‘not-writing’ I had when I finished school and university, and realised it was almost exactly the same number of years I’d spent in the education system – fifteen years altogether.

That feels more like renouncing learned expertise, and admitting yourself a beginner every time you sit down at the desk. CK: At school I recall realising I could excel at ‘composition’ and essay-writing, because I was always such a huge reader, but that excelling is a very different thing to stepping out onto the tightrope of creativity.

Like a house on fire by cate kennedy