Interview with Katie Smart at CURTIS BROWN CREATIVE
“Don’t be afraid to write a terrible first draft.”
— Ann Gosslin
You took our online Edit & Pitch Your Novel course in 2017 – what was your experience of studying online with us like?
I was on the verge of submitting to agents a draft of The Shadow Bird, when this inner voice whispered (okay, shouted) that I should seek feedback before sending it out. Though friends and family may seem like obvious first readers, if something isn’t working, they might not be able to articulate what that is or how to fix it. CBC’s Edit & Pitch Your Novel course gave me exactly what I was looking for in spades: feedback from other writers working on their novels, and key tips and suggestions from industry insiders.
How did the course impact your approach to pitching your debut novel to agents?
Before starting the course, I thought my manuscript was in fairly good shape. But after working through Anna Davis’ helpful editing tips for sharpening the narrative, I quickly realised that the story was weighed down by unnecessary scenes and subplots. I tend to overwrite, and once the words are on the page, it can be hard to slice them out. It helped to imagine myself as a tree surgeon, tasked with restoring an ailing tree to health by cutting out dead branches and pruning the whole into a more pleasing shape.
Feedback from the participants on my course, many of whom I’m still in touch with, made a tremendous impact on the submission process. After so many solitary hours at my desk, being part of a dynamic group of talented writers gave me the motivation to push through the final edits. At the end of the course, I was thrilled to have been awarded the 30-minute tutorial with Norah Perkins, an agent at Curtis Brown. Norah’s encouraging words and submission tips spurred me on to hone my manuscript, synopsis, and query letter even further. On your own, grasping the agent submission process can feel like deciphering a jigsaw puzzle, but all the pieces fell into place when I found a home (and a perfect fit) with Charlotte Seymour at Andrew Nurnberg Associates.
Your debut novel The Shadow Bird will be published by Legend Press this summer. How did you feel when you found out about your publishing deal?
Stunned, giddy, elated. Legend Press has published an exciting roster of authors over the years, and it’s been a pleasure to work with my editor, Lauren Parsons. When we met up in London, I was delighted to hear that she’d been intrigued by the setting and gripped straightaway by the storyline. Music to a fledgling author’s ears!
Can you tell us a bit about your debut novel and the inspiration behind it?
The Shadow Bird is about a psychiatrist who must overcome her troubled past to uncover the truth about a patient locked up for a brutal crime.
A few months after Erin Cartwright leaves London to take up a role at a private clinic in upstate New York, she reluctantly agrees to evaluate the case of man who murdered his mother and sisters at the age of seventeen. Found not guilty by reason of insanity and held in a maximum-security psychiatric facility for twenty-seven years, Timothy Stern is finally eligible for release. After learning the crime occurred in the same village she spent summers as a child, Erin is on the verge of refusing the case, when a startling discovery triggers memories she’d rather keep locked away, and a suspicion that the wrong man is behind bars.
I have always been fascinated by the notion of identity: where it comes from, how we define it, and if it’s possible for someone to change their inner identity by creating a new, outer one to show the world. The inspiration for The Shadow Bird began with a single image: a psychiatrist sitting at the bedside of a teenaged girl in the pre-dawn darkness. While the snow piles up outside, she listens to her patient breathe, hoping she’ll wake up.
That image kept coming back to me at odd times of the day. Who are they, and what is their story? When Erin began telling me about her life, and how she came to inhabit two different identities, that’s when the story arc began to take shape. Although The Shadow Bird went through a number of iterations and drafts over time, that first image, and the first sentence, has never changed. That sentence became the engine of the story, and the starting point of Erin’s journey into her own past.
What does a typical writing day look like for you?
Emily Dickenson’s line of poetry, I started Early – Took my Dog, perfectly encapsulates my writing day. Early in the morning, during that foggy state between waking and sleeping, has always been the best time for me to write. After making a cup of tea in the pre-dawn darkness, I head straight for my desk and begin writing down the scenes I’d imagined in my head the previous day while walking my dog. The puzzled look on my dog’s face, as he tries to make sense of the dialogue I often voice aloud, is priceless…
If you could only pass on one piece of advice to aspiring authors what would it be?
Don’t be afraid to write a terrible first draft. I typically spend a great deal of time imagining the story in my head, but until it’s written down, it isn’t a novel. Treading the path from imagination to words on the page is hard. Especially when that beautiful butterfly of a story in your head seems to go ‘splat’ – to use Ann Patchett’s metaphor – once it hits the page. But writing a (terrible) first draft is an important bridge from initial spark to something you can edit. While writing The Shadow Bird, rather than deal with the empty page (and that smashed butterfly), I became so fixated on getting things right, I ended up rewriting early sections again and again, instead of writing to the end. When I gave myself permission to write a really bad initial draft, I wrote the first draft of my follow-up book (terrible, yes, but now I had something to work with) in three months.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
Legend Press acquired The Shadow Bird as part of a two-book deal, so I’m working on the second book now. Set in an isolated psychiatric clinic in the Swiss Alps, The Double (forthcoming in July 2021), is about a doctor who must resort to unorthodox methods to reveal the dark secrets a patient is harbouring: a celebrated neuroscientist and Cambridge don, who nearly kills a man in a fit of rage, and may not be the person he claims to be.