Kate Hope Day, author of IN THE QUICK: A conversation.

Kate Hope Day is the author of IF, THEN and IN THE QUICK. I recently had the privilege of interviewing Kate Hope Day and asking her about her writing process, how she balances research and writing, and what she has to say to the world.

PL: Previously you have said you had access to all kinds of books growing up. Was there a specific genre you felt a pull toward over other genres?

KHD: As a child I was drawn to speculative books like A WRINKLE IN TIME and THE LION, THE WITCH, and THE WARDROBE. Once I got a library card, I liked to take out books that incorporated supernatural elements, and I remember reading a lot of Lois Duncan. When I got older and started reading adult fiction, I drifted away from science fiction/fantasy, I think because I didn’t find enough women protagonists. That’s when I started reading the books on the shelves in my house, mostly nineteenth century British and American novels, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, JANE EYRE, and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. I studied that same time period in college and then focused on the Victorian novel for my PhD.

PL: How soon after you finished writing IF, THEN did you begin writing IN THE QUICK?

KHD: The idea for IN THE QUICK lived in my mind for at least a year before I wrote a word. June felt very alive in my imagination, but I was still revising my first novel, IF, THEN. I made a deal with myself. I could start writing IN THE QUICK when I finished the final draft of IF, THEN. It was a fantastic motivator.

Once I started writing, the first draft came quickly, and the writing and revising process took about two and a half years total, which is a big contrast to IF, THEN, which took over six years to complete.

PL: In the Quick there are a lot of technical details and world building that immerses the reader in June's world. When doing research for a book how do you know you have done enough research? How to you balance research and writing?

KHD: While I was revising IF, THEN, I did let myself do some research in preparation for IN THE QUICK. I knew part of the book would be set in space, in a scenario a lot like the International Space Station, so I watched a lot of YouTube videos from the ISS, read several memoirs of astronauts, and learned a lot about fuel cells, gyroscopes, and the nitty gritty details of daily life in space.

That said, I don’t do a lot of notetaking when I’m doing research. I just read or watch in a fairly unmethodical way, and trust that the right details will hang around in my brain until I need them. I think this prevents me from getting too absorbed with topics that may not even end up in the book. For IN THE QUICK I put away the books and videos while I worked on my first draft. Around the time I completed a full draft, I went to space camp (yes adults can go!) and participated in simulated launches and space walks. Because I already had a draft in hand, I was ready with a list of very specific research questions, many of which had to do with the physical experience of living in space. Most important was finding out what it felt like to wear a space suit, and what it was like to try to do basic tasks while in it (communicating, using tools, moving around).

PL: Many writers get stuck on having to create a perfect first draft. How do you turn off your internal editor long enough to get your first draft down?

KHD: When I start a project, I like to produce about 30k words before doing any active revising or editing. During this phase of writing it helps to set daily word count goals, 500 or 1000, depending on how much time I have in the day to write. If I’m trying to get to 1000 words for the day, or more, I can’t take time to fiddle with sentences or reorder paragraphs. So that first “draft” is really a series of freewrites, which can include anything and everything, in any order: thoughts about character and place, little snippets of dialogue or short descriptions of actions, lists of possible scenes, and so on. I try to stay as free and loose as possible, allowing things to unfold in whatever they want to unfold, and in this way I start to get a feel for the world of the book, who its main characters are, and the voice of the narrator. At around 30k words, that’s about as much mess as I can stand, and at that point I’ll start to think more in terms of scene, sequence, character arc, and structure, and will begin to make the first of many outlines for the book.

PL: It is often said that every writer has something they want to tell the world and it comes up subconsciously in our writing. Now that you have written two books, what do you think your message to the world is?

KHD: On the one hand, I think novels belong to readers and what readers find in my books is more important than what I intended to say with the book. It’s probably my training in literary

criticism that makes me shy from the idea of authorial intention. But of course I have preoccupations that come up again and again in everything I write, for instance, the lived experience of the human body, the tension between human mind and body, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. In that sense my novels could be described as invitations to think about a set of problems or questions. For example, what does it mean to have human will and choice in the face of the vast power of the natural world? Or, what’s the value of chosen family?

Kate Hope Day is the author of If, Then. She holds a BA from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh. She was an associate producer at HBO. She lives in Oregon with her husband and their two children. In the Quick is her second novel.

Paola Lastick is currently a student at the Mountainview MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. Her writing has appeared on blogs as well as the newspaper, The Real Chicago. She lives in a suburb of Dallas with her husband, daughter, and three small yappy dogs.