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#184 - Karen Jennings
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Critically acclaimed author, Karen Jennings joins us this week to chat about how being long-listed for the Booker prize changed her life, her writing process and how aspiring authors can approach the publishing industry.
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Transcript
Introduction & Reader Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question. I love it. Because the writing is sort of everything, right? You can fix plot holes, but if the writing... Yeah. So some readers love that, and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this. So it's kind of a gamble.
Meet Karen Jennings
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello, and welcome back to the Right and Wrong Podcast. On today's episode, I am joined by a critically acclaimed author who was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. It's Karen Jennings. Hello. Hello, thank you very much for having me. Thanks so much for coming on. Really great to be chatting with you.
About 'Crooked Seeds'
00:00:34
Speaker
Let's start off, um as I always do, with the the latest publication, the new novel, Crooked Seeds, which came out earlier this year in April. Tell us a little bit about it.
00:00:47
Speaker
Well, I always hate trying to explain what my books are about because I always feel that whatever summary um I can come up with, it's always going to sound appalling. And i it's one of my worst things is when I have to read the little summary or blurb at the back of my books. And I just think, oh my God, this sounds horrific. No one's going to read
Novel's Themes & Societal Critique
00:01:08
Speaker
this. and come But so it's set in the very near future. So let's say around about 2028 in Cape Town in South Africa, and um the protagonist Deirdre, she's in her early 50s. And when she was around 18 in a terrible
00:01:29
Speaker
accident which we find out about more later. She lost her leg so she describes herself as a cripple and she never wanted a prosthesis so she um walks around on her crutches and she's got a drinking problem. She's not very healthy. She's very bitter. She uses people. She basically spends her whole time being a manipulator and a user. and um And then we find out more about her past and about what that is it the explosion was where she lost her her leg and
00:02:13
Speaker
how this relates to her brother and some bodies that have been discovered on the grounds where her family home used to be. So it's it has that sort of cold case criminal investigation sort of element to it whilst also said being about people and family dynamics. I suppose
South Africa's Historical Context
00:02:33
Speaker
so. I i know that in Australia, they marketed it as, ah I think, a crime thriller, which it really isn't. There are, of course, aspects of crime in it. But we're never really trying to find out motive and and things like that, because um really, the story is about Deidre and
00:02:58
Speaker
her really toxic relationship with the past, with the future, with the present, with everything. So um the crime the crime stuff is all in in the background. And if you're hoping for you know a good whodunit, this unfortunately is not going to be it. Okay, the so the crime stuff is very much the sort of B plot, the the thing that's happening whilst the main plot is is is kind of ticking along. Yeah, the story is, it's really talking about, um if you want to go in a deep dive metaphorical sense, it's looking at people, um particularly in South Africa, who since the end of apartheid in 1994, have felt um
00:03:45
Speaker
literally handicapped by this new South Africa and that they have no place in it and that ah they don't want to be
Origin of 'Crooked Seeds'
00:03:54
Speaker
part of the community. They don't try. They just stay on the outsides. And so the the crime is is really not the main thing. the The main thing is people being unwilling or unable to participate in the creation of a ah new and better place. Right. Okay. So it's more about this sort of societal critique than it is about the the crime and and the investigation. yeah what was the What was the kind of inception point? what was the Was there a certain thing, was it that specifically that you wanted to write about and then everything else came from that? Or did you have like a setting or a an idea that it all grew out of? I've been trying to figure this out. i I think I even wrote um
00:04:44
Speaker
an opinion piece or essay about it ah that was published a couple of weeks ago on, I think it was the Kalahari Review, about um how I don't really remember where the the idea for the story came from. I do know that many many years ago um in my vastly distant youth when I used to take the train to university that for a time there were municipal workers digging digging up the pavement um just outside the the railway station and I don't know what they were digging for but I would sort of look forward to it coming in the morning and then coming home in the afternoon
00:05:34
Speaker
to see what they had dug up as they were digging this big trench. And it wasn't anything particularly exciting. There'd be, I guess, some old chicken bones and um an old fork and a handbag and little bits of pottery, but nothing valuable or significant. But it really got me thinking about if we if we came back and started really digging into the past, what would we find and what would it tell us about ourselves? And, you know, i I'm always thinking about South Africa, always thinking about where we are, where we're coming from. You you can't escape history in and South Africa. um we're still We're still contending with it. We're still trying to make sense of it. And so I think all of it is
00:06:34
Speaker
part of it, I hope to just try to understand it or experiment with certain aspects of understanding. um So I don't have any kind of really great ah starting point at all.
Karen's Writing Process
00:06:55
Speaker
tumbled tumbled out of my mind together and formed something, um thank goodness, something yeah vaguely coherent in the end. Okay, so it was more like it this is something, it was sort of many things that had been sort of rumbling in the back of your mind for a long time, which sort of ah all kind of coalesced to create ah this novel, Crooked Seeds. Yes, I'm not one of those people who plans, actually I was
00:07:25
Speaker
I'm giving some mentorship workshops for the Cane Prize recently in Malawi and um I realized something quite extraordinary that i I don't have much of an idea before I start writing. I have like a very basic idea, sort of one sentence and then I just write and um hope for the best and then I'll normally do one very rough first draft and then ah another very rough second draft. And only then do I actually look at the manuscript and say, okay, what's happening here? Who's who's doing what? Who's here? And then i I'll, not exactly plan, but I'll see, you I'll see what, what, what do I need to be doing in order to get this to a complete manuscript eventually.
00:08:23
Speaker
Okay, so
Role of Research in Writing
00:08:25
Speaker
not someone that plots or plans out these things in advance. you are someone You are the kind of writer that just opens up the page and starts writing and sees you kind of see where your your mind and the words take you. um I'd like to say that I'm much more organized than that, but it actually came as a surprise to me when I realized that I'm not, because um you know you'd think I would know that about myself, but no, I only discovered it purely by chance that I'm ah that i'm a mess.
00:08:57
Speaker
and and it came as a huge shock i imagine because, you know, I've got all these notebooks. I've got just, kind because I still write by hand. I'm i'm afraid I'm lost in and ah previous centuries where they still used to do things by hand. And so I have all these notebooks and you'd think, okay, I've got all these notebooks that I'm filling with just brilliance, but it's most of the time it's just absolute rubbish. So, yeah.
00:09:28
Speaker
Would that, people do talk about a a process um sort of adjacent to what you're describing where you a lot of the purpose of ah writing out notes and that kind of brainstorming in a way is to essentially dump the ideas that they don't want onto a page so that they kind of have closure on that and then the good ideas go into the actual kind of manuscript of the work or whatever it is. Yeah, I think that that is, um even though i'm I'm bragging about doing it myself, I think it's excellent advice because often, you know, we have all these crazy ideas and we can't, you know, we just keep thinking, oh, it would be amazing if she, I don't know, let's say like metacrocodile in the street. But you know that it's ridiculous. But when you're writing
00:10:17
Speaker
just by hand in ah in a notebook and no one's going to see it, you have that opportunity to indulge that but crazy moment and you write the scene and you think, okay, now I understand why this would not work in my novel, but at least I got it out of my system. Yeah, that makes sense. Whilst the sort of prose is not planned, do you do a lot of research ahead of the writing? I do I do a huge amount of research um and that is another reason why I also believe in that um dumping of everything that's in your mind um in scribbles on the page because I think a lot of the time.
00:11:04
Speaker
people who do research, um they want to put it all in. And what you end up with then is like a Wikipedia article. And yeah um so if you you know, of course, you've put in the work, you found out all this information, you want to share it, you want to show off. But um you don't need everything in there. Or if you have it, it can be subtly inserted in ways that it doesn't stand in the foreground and take over the story or the character. um So that's what I i also, I've recently finished writing um a manuscript set in the 19th century. So for that, I also had to do a huge amount of research. And for that, then you you
00:11:52
Speaker
Again, you put in everything that you know, and then you come back and draft after draft, you whittle it down so that you have a real sense of it being in this particular time and place, but you're not you don't feel like you're reading a textbook telling you about it. Yeah, exactly. It's the it's the it's the iceberg metaphor, right? The iceberg is giant, but you only see the sort of top 10% of it. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Goes unnoticed and just went in the context of like writing a novel. It's, it's all there. the The foundations are there, but you don't need to necessarily read every single detail. Yes.
Karen's Writing Journey
00:12:32
Speaker
And sometimes the truth can be so fantastic that it's unbelievable. So even if you were to put it in, and people would think, Oh, this is ridiculous. Why did they make up this nonsense? Yeah, stranger than fiction.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah. You you mentioned um university. I wanted to just quickly back. You have a master's degree in both English literature and creative writing. So im am I right in thinking that being an author is something that you've wanted to do for from a young age? Yes, um it's interesting. I was thinking about this the other day, how it's something I've always known about myself that I wanted to be an author and that I would be an author. There was no doubt in my mind that I would be an author.
00:13:23
Speaker
so much so that i I didn't actually do anything about it. I i and you know i did write a bit as ah as a child and a teenager, but never with any kind of serious um focus. And i I do remember that I had this idea that what happens is that you get struck by an idea and then you sit down and you just write it out and it comes out word perfectly and that's how it's done. I guess maybe I got that from montage scenes in in films where that's how it happens. And and when that didn't happen, and I suddenly realized, oh wait, I actually have to
00:14:12
Speaker
work at this, I have to sit down and this was the thing I had to get my mind around and I'm i'm ashamed to say it was in my 20s only that I really figured this out, that you're not a failure for working at writing. You're not a failure for practicing. You're not a failure for sitting down during just a fun exercise like weird association or something. All of this is adding up to something. yeah it was It was another one of those moments where I was quite surprised that I had had this real sense of I will be an author, but just waiting for it to happen and not doing anything about it at all.
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of people fall into that. There's a lot of people who sort of spend far too long conceptualizing a book and thinking, oh yeah, one day I'm going to write this great novel and it's going to be amazing when the reality of it is, I think for most people is that you just have to start doing it. You have to sort of get in the weeds and in the mud with it and start because it won't be perfect the first time you write it and it'll need redrafting, you need to look back at it and hone it and Yeah, I've just finished a very rough first draft of another manuscript. And I have to keep reminding myself that when I go back to look at it again, I know it's going to be awful. But at least at least it's something, you know, to start, it's, it's ah a foot in the door.
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, indeed. Because the saying is, you can't edit a blank page, right? Exactly. You've got to get to the editing phase so that you can really... Most books are sort of written in the edit, so you've got to get to the point where you can do that. Yeah. And Crooked Deeds, this is your... I'm already thinking this is the fourth novel that you have published. Oh, gosh. I think so. Yeah, there's also a um ah like a autobiographical novel memoir somewhere in there. So I don't know what that counts as. And you've also published some collected poems and and short stories as well. Yes.
00:16:32
Speaker
You kind of, like you said, you you've kind of always knew you wanted to be an author. When you first started writing and submitting your work to agents and editors and publishers, how long were you kind of, how long was that journey for you before you did ah find a home for your for your debut novel, which i was in 2012, I think. Yes. um So that was, Gosh, 2012, yes, it is a very long time ago. um I probably sent that manuscript out to easily between 20 and 40 publishers and um I didn't get any interest from
00:17:25
Speaker
anybody. I first tried in South Africa because it is, I am a South African author and a novelist said in South Africa and, um, but no one, no one wanted it. Um, and then I found a very small independent publisher in the UK who are was willing to publish. Um, and I, so I, for a number of reasons, ended up staying with them for several books. um Also, just the fact of the difficulty of getting um getting a publisher, getting anyone interested, especially as a ah writer from Africa, and there are specific ideas about
00:18:15
Speaker
I mean, in the in the West about what Africa should look like and what an African novel should entail. So, um yeah, it was difficult. And then they didn't want that publishing house didn't want my novel, an island. um So then I had to find a new publisher. And again, it was a small UK publisher. And it was an island that got longlisted for the Booker just out of nowhere. yeah yeah um and then Based on that, an agent reached out to me. um so That's how I got an agent. i i didn't
00:19:01
Speaker
have um I know that other people have had huge struggles trying to get agents. um It's very difficult and you know, agents also, they only make money if you make money.
Publishing Experiences
00:19:14
Speaker
So they have to decide whether your it's not necessarily a matter of quality, it's a matter of whether that book is suitable to the people and the publishers that they know. a So it's important to find the right the right agent, but it takes time. Yeah.
00:19:34
Speaker
Yeah. did you Had you submitted to agents as well as um small publishers during that that kind of submission period? I had looked at agents, but I guess I felt quite overwhelmed by it. and I did have an experience with an agent who sat on a novel of mine for nine months without doing anything. I just thought, you know, I don't have time to waste. I, I don't mind being published by a small publisher. I'll just keep going. um But now yeah, now I do have an agent. um It does make it easier. And she actually, she's, she's my main agent. And and then she's got various
00:20:32
Speaker
sub-agent so I'll have an agent who represents me in America and then in other you know other parts of the world um and that does make it a lot easier um but uh I do sometimes miss just having ah just myself and the and one publisher and not having to deal with there so many things. I'm not saying that to be ungrateful. i'm i'm It's just that it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes. and
00:21:04
Speaker
ah Like I said, I'm i quite an old-fashioned kind of lady and so I hark back to older, the simpler times in which I wasn't even alive, but I just always want things to be um simple. Okay. Yeah. I mean, i I get it. Sometimes I think things are way too complicated right now. We all have to be on so many different social media channels to like maximize our outreach and stuff. And I think you may have chosen the the correct route, to just kind of keeping it simple.
Desert Island Book Choice
00:21:38
Speaker
yeah um I'm going to get back onto, we're going to talk more about an island and island and and the the long list for the Booker Prize and things like that, but we are first going to go over to the desert island and I will ask you, Karan, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be? Okay. I've thought long and hard about this and I'm afraid I'm going to be exceptionally boring okay and say some kind of dictionary. And when I say some kind of dictionary, I i mean, one of those old timey dictionaries, you know, the big thick ones that were almost like an encyclopedia when they had pictures inside them and long explanations and quotes and things.
00:22:29
Speaker
um And I have several reasons for this. And I think they speak to probably um both an insecurity in me and also a sense of like the Calvinistic ah punishment and suffering that one's supposed to go through in life. And I remember when I was a little girl reading a book by Russell Evans called sa Survivor. And I don't particularly remember the details but I think it was this man who ran away from a prisoner of war camp or some
Conclusion & Social Media Shoutout
00:23:05
Speaker
kind of camp and he ended up and siberia some way in in a cave and he found
00:23:14
Speaker
ah for some reason he found a ah dictionary and and a book and I think they were in Russian but why would they be in Russian if he was Russian but they were in some other language and so he while he was hiding from everyone in this cave and trying to survive he um was teaching himself this language whatever language it was with this dictionary and this book and I always thought well that's a good way to spend your time and I think a lot of Prisoners in history have done the same. I think Malcolm X did that where he would just, when he was in prison, he wrote out the dictionary several times. So I feel like maybe that's what I would do with my time. Read the dictionary, but have a nice one with pictures in it just for entertainment as well.
00:24:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think it's it's a good choice. I think you're you're not alone and people have chosen similar things like encyclopedias and and dictionaries but for for you know similar reasons. I think there's a sort of strange sanity to it if you were stranded by yourself, just kind of having a reference of almost everything in front of you. yeah Yeah, yeah, that's a good way of putting it makes me feel less crazy. um Yeah, no, it's a great choice. um And we're going to chat more about the Booker Prize. And I also have some questions about dealing with rejections and advice for authors looking to break into the industry, but that will be in the extended episode exclusive to my incredible Patreon subscribers. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, um Karen, for coming on and chatting with me and telling me all about the new book Crooked Seeds, which is out right now and and kind of all of your publishing adventures and and journey. It's been really, really fascinating chatting with you.
00:25:00
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. And, uh, I'm not sure if you have mentioned my Instagram. I was just about to i was going to say, if anyone does want to follow me, it's mostly just stuff about my dogs, but they're very interesting dogs. And to find Karen on Instagram, you want to look at um Catalyst Fan is where you'll find her account. To support this podcast, like, follow and subscribe on your podcast platform, The Choice. Join the Patreon for ad-free extended episodes and check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and other tropes. Thanks again to Karen and thanks to everyone listening. We will catch you on the next episode.