Dizz Tate: On Teenage Years, Her Publication Process and Finding the Chorus Voice of Her Debut Novel, 'Brutes'
Teenage girls. Florida. The Virgin Suicides. Obsession. That was all it took for me to grab Dizz Tate’s debut novel, Brutes, immediately.
The novel opens with a disappearance, 14 year old Sammy Liu-Lou, the daughter of a famous televangelist. But we don’t learn much about Sammy because this story is more about a band of 13 year old friends who can’t stop watching her through their bedroom windows. Desperate for freedom and to break free from their restrictive lives, these brutes, as their mothers call them, are fascinated with wealthy and older, Sammy, a girl who shaved her head and is on her way to becoming a Hollywood star. Tate beautifully captures the whimsical chaos of being a teenager as we follow the girls through Florida subdivisions and swamps.
I spoke with Dizz over email, where she discussed memories of being a teenager, her drafting and publication process, how work is never wasted and finding the chorus voice of the narrators.
Kailey Brennan DelloRusso: Teenage girls and their obsessions is such a fascinating and complex topic, one I personally never tire of reading about. I loved the world you created in this novel and how these teens move through the world, watching from windows, with binoculars, or hidden in trees, their obsessions all-consuming. Can you speak about how this story started for you? What were some of the first images that came to mind? Why do you think teenagehood is so fascinating?
Dizz Tate: I think the experience of being a teenager is literally incomparable - it’s where my memory begins, so it’s a time untinged by nostalgia, where I felt like I was seeing the world anew, for the first time. As a child, I have flashes, fragments, but being a teenager is the first time I remember how it felt to be a physical body in the world, trying to figure out how to talk, how to connect with other people. I always think embarrassing memories are sometimes the clearest (the ones that awaken you at 4am with a crystalline cringe) and I was pretty much embarrassed the entire time I was thirteen. So that year sticks in my mind. I think I started writing about it because it was a time that I loved so much - the sort of love that I didn’t understand, I just felt it, and it wasn’t a love that was gentle, it was the kind of love that felt destructive, like a love that was impossible to satisfy. The first images I had of the novel were of a group of friends together - I had snapshots I drew from my own life, the freedom we felt in little ways, hanging out on the intersection after school, walking home and screaming a lot, running wild in these constrained spaces, doing dares, the manic nature of our first crushes and how we did anything to get close to them. I think any subject that makes you feel a bit nauseous, with how longing and uncomfortable it all was…I knew I wouldn’t get bored of thinking about it.
KBD: The majority of the novel is written in 1st person plural, a chorus of “we.” Was this present throughout all your drafts, or did these voices come later? How did you know this was the right narrative choice?
DT: At first, I wrote it in first-person, then a terrible draft in third, then went back to first. It was okay, but something wasn’t clicking. The narrator was all consciousness, analysing her behaviours and those of everyone around her. This was part of being thirteen, but for me, it didn’t accurately express the whole of it. I missed the strength, the joy, the fear, the craziness, of being part of a pack, of feeling bigger than yourself with the understanding of your friends. How you pushed each other to make life entertaining, even for an hour in the parking lot after school. I read a story in the New Yorker called ‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ by Mariana Enriquez, and it killed me; it’s narrated by a group of teenage girls who are obsessed with an older boy, and as soon as I heard their voices together, I thought: oh, that’s how you do it! They’re powerful as a collective, they’re afraid of being alone. The chorus voice was the best way to express that for me; how you constantly feel two ways at once as a teenager, or more, and the strength of those feelings could only be reflected as a shared experience.
KBD: What did your day-to-day process look like while you were working on the novel?
DT: It depends on my day job! When I’m waitressing, I write in the mornings; this is probably my favourite schedule. For a while, I was working in schools, so I would write on the weekends. I do find mornings to be the most productive still (or early afternoons if I’m procrastinating). There’s something about being close to a dream state that feels the best for making things up from scratch; the blank page looks less luminously terrifying if you’re still half-dozing. When I’m editing, then I can be a bit cleaner and go sit on the couch. I did 1,000 words a day for Brutes for the first few drafts; that helped and kept things going, even if I was writing complete nonsense. The best advice I ever got about writing was: Nothing is wasted work. I didn’t believe it when it was told to me, but having finished a book, I now hold it with me as my greatest comfort to get me through writing the next!
KBD: How did you know it was done and ready to go out? Can you walk us through your publication process?
DT: Sure! I wrote about seven drafts over a two year period. I’d written short stories before, but it took me a long time to learn how to structure a novel. They require so much detail, so much attention. Short stories sometimes feel like they come out like an epiphany; you realise something in the writing of them. Novels are the same, but those realisations are multiple and organised, the feeling for the reader is different, maybe, like the world of the novel existed and will exist after the description is over. Short stories feel a little more like a moment; I don’t think about the before-and-after when I read a story, I’m diving in and out. With the novel, it took me a long time to build the world; I drew maps, wrote timelines. I wanted to keep everything tight and constrained, or I felt like my story would wander off without me.
When I found the chorus voice, things happened quickly. I wrote the final draft in about three months. I’d already done the preliminary detail work, finding the characters, so the last draft before publication was fun to write - it was experimental, I made myself laugh. I now take this as a really good sign that things are working well! I had already signed with a brilliant agent called Harriet Moore when I was twenty five after she read one of my short stories - she was also a very supportive editor through the drafting process. We submitted to publishers and then it was another year of final edits, but the structure was already in place. I knew I wanted it to be short and intense - every sentence had to earn its place in multiple ways. Now it’s out!
KBD: Was there anything you needed to work through or overcome in your creative life or process while writing your first novel? What advice do you have for debut authors?
DT: Take your time and stick with it! Write to please yourself first. Write about the parts of life that fascinate you, that make you cringe, that you relate to, that you love. Write about something you don’t understand fully, an experience that still confuses you. And then keep going. It is hard, and it takes a long time, but if you keep writing, you will get there. And normally, if you’re already writing, you’ll keep doing it anyway, because it’s how you understand the world. So try not to worry about whether you should do it or not, or whether it’s worth it. You’re tougher than you know. Nothing is wasted work.
KBD: What’s next? Are you working on anything new right now?
DT: A novel about falling in love for the first time. It’s an experience I definitely didn’t understand at the time, so I’m looking forward to a few years of good thinking about it.
Dizz Tate grew up in Florida and lives in London, U.K. She has had short stories published in Granta, The Stinging Fly, Dazed, No Tokens Journal, Five Dials, 3:AM Magazine, among other publications. She was long-listed for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2020 and won the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2019. Brutes is her first novel.
