Ask the Author: Tana French
Answered Questions (28)
Tana French
I definitely write like an actor, for better or for worse. I think the acting background is why, until The Secret Place, I've always written in the first person. That's what I'm used to doing: working to create a real, three-dimensional character, show the story through his or her biases and desire and fears, and draw the audience into that character's world till they go away feeling like he or she is someone they know intimately. I'm not saying I always manage to do that - but that's the goal.
And I was never one of those actors who like playing variants on themselves. I always liked playing characters who were far from me, the farther the better. I already know what it's like being me; what's interesting is trying to understand what it's like to be someone utterly different, trying to bring someone else's utterly different reality to life. I'm the same when I write: my characters have practically nothing in common with me.
And I was never one of those actors who like playing variants on themselves. I always liked playing characters who were far from me, the farther the better. I already know what it's like being me; what's interesting is trying to understand what it's like to be someone utterly different, trying to bring someone else's utterly different reality to life. I'm the same when I write: my characters have practically nothing in common with me.
Tana French
Thank you very much :-) When you mention in-depth, vibrant characterisation and settings, some of the first writers who spring to mind are Patricia Highsmith, Donna Tartt, Daniel Woodrell and T.H. White. All of them bring their characters to life with an intricate precision so dazzling it takes your breath away, and all of them create settings so rich with atmosphere that you can practically taste the air.
Tana French
It's hard to beat Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy: 'When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.' Right there, you know a big handful of important things about the narrator, you're swept into the rhythms of the prose, you know this book isn't going to be rainbows and lollipops, and you're hooked.
I have to go. I have a nasty feeling I managed to delete a few answered questions along the way, but I'm hoping they're just not showing up in my dashboard any more... There are literally hundreds of interesting questions left, and I'll try to come back tomorrow and answer some more, but I might not be able to. Either way, a huge thank-you to all of you who took the time to send in questions - I'm sorry I couldn't answer every one - and to all of you who took the time to read the book. Cheers.
I have to go. I have a nasty feeling I managed to delete a few answered questions along the way, but I'm hoping they're just not showing up in my dashboard any more... There are literally hundreds of interesting questions left, and I'll try to come back tomorrow and answer some more, but I might not be able to. Either way, a huge thank-you to all of you who took the time to send in questions - I'm sorry I couldn't answer every one - and to all of you who took the time to read the book. Cheers.
Tana French
I love mysteries. I always have - real ones, fictional ones, solved, unsolved. So a part of me is always looking for mysteries. So far, the ideas for my books have come from ordinary everyday things that set me looking for potential mysteries. Faithful Place came from a battered old suitcase I saw in a skip one day, outside an old house that was being renovated - I started wondering who had left it there, whether he or she had meant to come back for it, what had stopped him or her...
And The Secret Place came from a wonderful site called PostSecret, where people create postcards revealing their secrets anonymously, and send them to the site's owner. The site taps into two deep and contradictory human needs: the need to share our secrets, and the need to keep them inviolate. I think those twin needs are at their most intense in adolescence, so I started wondering how a board like that would work out in a secondary school - and then I started wondering what would happen if a teenager used it to reveal what he or she knew about a murder...
And The Secret Place came from a wonderful site called PostSecret, where people create postcards revealing their secrets anonymously, and send them to the site's owner. The site taps into two deep and contradictory human needs: the need to share our secrets, and the need to keep them inviolate. I think those twin needs are at their most intense in adolescence, so I started wondering how a board like that would work out in a secondary school - and then I started wondering what would happen if a teenager used it to reveal what he or she knew about a murder...
Tana French
I think the stories would definitely be different if they were set in another time and/or place. Murder happens everywhere, but the reasons for it vary wildly, and they say a lot about the society in which the murder is committed - its priorities, its fears, its taboos and its dark places. The murder in Faithful Place stems to a large extent from a very Irish sense of family - it might not happen in a more individualistic society. In Broken Harbour, the murder grows out of the insanity that enveloped much of the country during the Celtic Tiger, and the devastation it left in its wake - it wouldn't have happened in another place or even a few years earlier. In the mystery novels I love best, the murder becomes a window into the heart of the society where it happens.
Tana French
I don't plan it in advance. What generally happens is that there's a stage, about halfway through a book, when my mind starts wanting to do something else, anything else - all of a sudden, cleaning the oven or trying to braid the cat starts to sound totally enthralling. And one of the things it does in order to keep me from writing is come up with ideas for the next book - which is at least more useful than, say, painting my fingernails in stripes. And so far, at least, the new idea is usually a good fit for some minor character from the book I'm actually supposed to be writing.
Tana French
Cut the dream sequence.
My husband is my first reader, and he's amazing at it. In particular, he has a demon eye for any kind of structural sloppiness. And he's killed every dream sequence I've ever written (except the prologue of The Likeness; he let me away with that one). He says that a dream sequence is almost invariably either a repetition of something that's already done within the actual action, or a lazy way of doing something that should be done within the actual action. And he's right. These days I just kill the dream sequences before I even hand the book over to him.
My husband is my first reader, and he's amazing at it. In particular, he has a demon eye for any kind of structural sloppiness. And he's killed every dream sequence I've ever written (except the prologue of The Likeness; he let me away with that one). He says that a dream sequence is almost invariably either a repetition of something that's already done within the actual action, or a lazy way of doing something that should be done within the actual action. And he's right. These days I just kill the dream sequences before I even hand the book over to him.
Tana French
I'm very lucky: I know a retired detective who's incredibly generous with his time and knowledge, and who's answered a wild variety of questions for me over the years. Not only that, but he answers the questions I didn't even know I needed to ask. I'll ring him and say 'What would you do in this situation?' and he'll say, 'It depends. What time is it? How old is the witness? Do you think your suspect's done X or Y? Do you have the fingerprint results in yet? Have you already asked the suspect A and B?' And he tells me stories. I don't know what I'd do without those. They're where I get the sense of what it's actually like to be a detective, the atmosphere, the texture of it... A few detectives have emailed me over the years to say I got it right; those emails blow me away, and they're all down to this guy.
I do occasionally move away from the facts. Just to take the most obvious example, there's no Murder squad in Ireland, but I wanted that sense of a tight-knit, elite unit, so I made one up. But I want any departure from the facts to be deliberate, for the sake of the story, rather than being just because I didn't know what I was talking about.
I have huge amounts of respect for detectives. These are people who are willing to take on the responsibility of dealing with life and death and truth and justice on a daily basis. Me, if I have a bad day at work, I end up with adjective overload. If they have a bad day at work, someone could *die*. I'm in awe of that - and if I'm going to write about it, I want to come as close as possible to doing it justice.
I do occasionally move away from the facts. Just to take the most obvious example, there's no Murder squad in Ireland, but I wanted that sense of a tight-knit, elite unit, so I made one up. But I want any departure from the facts to be deliberate, for the sake of the story, rather than being just because I didn't know what I was talking about.
I have huge amounts of respect for detectives. These are people who are willing to take on the responsibility of dealing with life and death and truth and justice on a daily basis. Me, if I have a bad day at work, I end up with adjective overload. If they have a bad day at work, someone could *die*. I'm in awe of that - and if I'm going to write about it, I want to come as close as possible to doing it justice.
Tana French
Oh yeah. The really annoying thing is that every time I manage to smack down one of those habits, another one pops up to take its place. I'm not going to tell you what they are, or you won't be able to read my books without going 'Hey!! She's doing that thing again!!'
Tana French
I've got a pretty good off switch for writer mode. I think it might come from having been an actor: in that job you need to get the knack of throwing everything you've got into the character on stage, and then leaving him or her behind in the dressing room, or you're not exactly going to be a laugh riot in the pub after that performance of Hamlet. So when I stop working, the book's gone.
Tana French
Thank you! No, I don't base characters on real people. It's too limiting: if I did that, I'd be stuck with what the real person would actually say and do and feel, and that might not match the needs of the book.
I do occasionally steal a line I've overheard in passing, though. My husband once told me about hearing one kid call another 'yeh bleedin' golf ball', and that was way too brilliant to waste. I stole it for Faithful Place.
I do occasionally steal a line I've overheard in passing, though. My husband once told me about hearing one kid call another 'yeh bleedin' golf ball', and that was way too brilliant to waste. I stole it for Faithful Place.
Tana French
Ah, that's only bleedin' deadly, so it is :-D
The slang of youth was *terrifying*. I think the heart of what it's like to be a teenager - the fever-pitch intensity, the vulnerability, the ferocious struggle to find a version of yourself that feels true *and* can exist in this complicated world - that stuff hasn't changed in the twenty years since I was a teenager. It was relatively easy to remember what that felt like.
The slang, on the other hand, has changed. I couldn't exactly have 2014 teenagers using 80s/90s slang - but nobody wants to be that cringeworthy middle-aged eejit who's desperately trying to be down with the kids and getting their slang all wrong. So I spent a lot of time lurking on messageboards for Irish teenagers, and a certain amount of time hanging around train stations when school was letting out, eavesdropping and presumably looking incredibly dodgy. Not that I think any of them noticed; when you're a teenager, some thirtysomething woman isn't even on your radar.
The slang of youth was *terrifying*. I think the heart of what it's like to be a teenager - the fever-pitch intensity, the vulnerability, the ferocious struggle to find a version of yourself that feels true *and* can exist in this complicated world - that stuff hasn't changed in the twenty years since I was a teenager. It was relatively easy to remember what that felt like.
The slang, on the other hand, has changed. I couldn't exactly have 2014 teenagers using 80s/90s slang - but nobody wants to be that cringeworthy middle-aged eejit who's desperately trying to be down with the kids and getting their slang all wrong. So I spent a lot of time lurking on messageboards for Irish teenagers, and a certain amount of time hanging around train stations when school was letting out, eavesdropping and presumably looking incredibly dodgy. Not that I think any of them noticed; when you're a teenager, some thirtysomething woman isn't even on your radar.
Tana French
In terms of theme, this way gives me a lot more freedom. For any given person, there are only a certain amount of core issues that run through the very heart of his or her life. If you stick with the same narrator, then you have to either stick with that narrator's themes, or else write books where your narrator isn't really at the heart of the narrative - and neither of those really interests me. I love reading the classic-style series that revolve around one narrator's life, but I don't want to write them.
The changing narrators mean I can focus on a different set of themes every time. In In the Woods, both the plot and the narrator's life revolve around memory and the enmeshed relationship between past and present; in Broken Harbour, both the crime and the narrator's life revolve around the idea of following the rules and what happens when the rules turn around and kick you in the teeth; in The Secret Place, all the characters and the crime are fundamentally about identity - not only how you define yourself, but whom you allow to define you. I like the extra scope that the changing narrator gives me.
The changing narrators mean I can focus on a different set of themes every time. In In the Woods, both the plot and the narrator's life revolve around memory and the enmeshed relationship between past and present; in Broken Harbour, both the crime and the narrator's life revolve around the idea of following the rules and what happens when the rules turn around and kick you in the teeth; in The Secret Place, all the characters and the crime are fundamentally about identity - not only how you define yourself, but whom you allow to define you. I like the extra scope that the changing narrator gives me.
Tana French
Thank you :-). Scorcher Kennedy in Broken Harbour was definitely the one I've the hardest time connecting with. I don't have much in common with any of my narrators, but I really don't *get* a lot of the things that are fundamental to Scorcher - his obsession with following rules, his devotion to doing things the way you're 'supposed' to, his desperation to turn everything into a positive even if it's clearly a bad thing, his fanatical need for control... In real life, I tend to get irritated with people like that. And yet i knew he was the right narrator for this book, so I had to find a way to understand him.
So I started thinking about what might make someone like that, and I thought one thing that might do it was if he was terrified of his own mind - if he thought of it as something slippery and unreliable that might let him down at any moment. That would explain why he had such a need for rigid, externally imposed controls - because he could rely on them, when he felt he couldn't rely on himself. Once I could understand why Scorcher might feel that way, I was able to make him into a real character rather than an irritating rule freak.
It also made me less impatient with real-life people like that. It can be pretty humbling, spending your time trying to understand people who are different from you.
So I started thinking about what might make someone like that, and I thought one thing that might do it was if he was terrified of his own mind - if he thought of it as something slippery and unreliable that might let him down at any moment. That would explain why he had such a need for rigid, externally imposed controls - because he could rely on them, when he felt he couldn't rely on himself. Once I could understand why Scorcher might feel that way, I was able to make him into a real character rather than an irritating rule freak.
It also made me less impatient with real-life people like that. It can be pretty humbling, spending your time trying to understand people who are different from you.
Tana French
This is one of the many reasons why I invent my settings...
Tana French
Coming right up in Book 6, if I ever (fingers crossed) get it finished :-)
Tana French
Yes, the location is one of the first things I come up with! Usually I start with the basic premise, the narrator, and the core location. For The Secret Place, for example, I had the idea of a school noticeboard where teenagers could reveal their secrets anonymously, and of one teenager using it to reveal what he or she knew about a murder; I knew I wanted Stephen Moran from Faithful Place to be the narrator; and I knew I wanted to set it in a very insulated, small, enclosed private boarding school, where the students were as cut off from the outside world as possible. I didn't know who had been killed, how, why, who had done it...none of that. But I knew what the location should feel like.
Tana French
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Tana French
Thank you very much :-) I'm hoping to keep going for a long, long time, touch wood...
Tana French
Thank you so much! I'm too old to have teenage friends and too young to have friends with teenage kids, so I was worried about getting that right - I'm delighted it hit the mark for you.
Holly and Stephen met in Faithful Place, my third book - she was a witness not to murder itself but to some evidence about it, and at the end of the book it's made clear that Stephen is the detective she'll be talking to.
Holly and Stephen met in Faithful Place, my third book - she was a witness not to murder itself but to some evidence about it, and at the end of the book it's made clear that Stephen is the detective she'll be talking to.
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