Matter of Craft with Kelsey McKinney
In this installment of Matter of Craft, Kelsey McKinney, author of God Spare the Girls, talks about faith and religion, Texas as setting, writing fiction while working full-time in non-fiction, and misconceptions of novel writing.
God Spare the Girls explores the loss of faith and questioning of religion. I’d love to know why this was a topic you wanted to explore in fiction.
There is no better artistic medium to explore the internal conflicts and concerns of a person than in writing, and faith is this personal, intimate thing. So much of belief in general is something we do internally in silence, so it's best on the page, and there's a long, beautiful history of writers working through questions of faith through stories. I knew I wanted to write about how it feels to believe something and how it feels not to and the uncomfortable space when you aren't sure which side of that question you're going to land on.
Personally, I wanted to write about faith and questioning religion because both of those things have been fundamental to my development. With a project as long as a book, you need something that you really care about, and I knew really early on that this would be a book about a young girl trying to figure out what she believes because I don't think there's a ton of modern fiction grappling with faith. There are plenty of stories trying to answer questions about how to be moral or how to make ethical decisions, but not many for people who grew up with a set of codes and want to question whether those need to be followed at all.
The setting, North Texas, is a huge part of this novel. Do you have any advice for writing place? Did you face any challenges in this part of the novel process?
I wanted every space in this novel to feel real and to be immersive enough that the setting itself could act almost as a character in the story. Part of that is because selfishly I like to read books with great senses of place, but it's also because I wanted this to firmly be a book in and of and about Texas. I think that there's a tendency in a lot of modern novels to be vague about where a story is taking place in the hopes that it will ring as universal, but the books that I've always loved do the opposite: they venture that by being insanely specific, you will relate more easily and truly to these fake characters.
One thing my editor Jessica Williams told me that I've been repeating to anyone that will listen is that description and florid language in general only works for the reader (and not just for the writer) if it contributes to the tension of scenes. So that was something I thought a lot about as I tried to build out the physical landscape of the book, making sure that when I was describing a space or a horizon or a heat index, it was always for a reason and always meant to tell the reader something more than just the color of the sky. It forces you to be economical as a writer, but I think it also gives you a chance to be more creative, to use more metaphors, to describe the way sweat falls instead of just listing the temperature.
What are some other books you love that are set in Texas?
God, there are so many Texas books that I love. Cynthia Bond's novel Ruby is absolutely gorgeous. No one describes the Texas landscape as well as Paulette Jiles. Most recently, I really enjoyed News of the World. and Bryan Washington I think might be my favorite writer Texas has produced. And like every Texas father, I love Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.
Since this is your debut novel, I’d love to know what the process looked like for you. Did you outline? How long did it take you to write this book?
I started off writing scenes on yellow legal pads without editing. It was more of a vomiting than a planning. And I did that for a long time before I realized that these characters were evolving together and becoming something more than a bunch of scribbles in my terrible handwriting. Once I realized that I edited it, and laid it out in piles on the floor and tried to make it better. But since it was my first novel, I didn't really know how. I tried, but honestly the early versions of this book were slow as hell! Nothing happened! Every single piece of action took place in the past and in the present there were just two girls sitting on their grandmother's property.
When I signed with my agent Dana Murphy, she pointed this out and it was immediately obvious that she was right, that though I had a lot of beautiful passages, there was absolutely no engine to the book at all. So after that I learned to outline, and to set up questions and reveals to give the book momentum. I knew I wanted to write a book that people could and would read in a couple of settings, so it was important to me to build that motor. I think from the first words I scribbled to the book in hardback in my hands was something like four years. Hopefully, I've learned enough that it won't take that much time in the future, but a novel is a place you live for a long time before anyone else gets to visit you there.
Were there any misconceptions about novel writing that you discovered along your writing journey? Or anything new you discover about yourself as a writer?
Oh, absolutely. I thought that people wrote novels in one pass. I thought that everyone who had written a novel was this genius who just kind of typed for 90,000 words and then had a book, and that's not at all the way writing a novel works. Or at least that's not how it worked for me. For me, writing a novel is a process in infinite revision. You have to write at first for yourself, but over time the book becomes its own object separate from you and you have to start making decisions for the book to be the best it can be.
As a writer, I learned that I use way too many filler words. I cut maybe 500 instances of words like "just" and "really" and "very." I have a tendency to use adverbs instead of ever fucking describing anything, but I'm getting better. I'm growing.
Can you share your writing routine with us? Take us through a day in your life.
So, I have a full-time job writing non-fiction. I work for a site called Defector.com where I write sometimes reported pieces and sometimes blogs about houses I find on zillow.com. What that means is that I work too much, but almost all of my work is about words and typing them with my silly little carpal-tunnel ridden hands into the computer. That doesn't answer your question, let me start at the beginning.
I wake up at 7:30. I need a lot of sleep because I'm neither a genius nor a superhero. I have one cup of coffee and scroll on my phone and then I try to read during my second cup of coffee. I walk the dog. I sit down at my computer at 9:00 for my blogging job and I work until about noon. Then I have lunch at my desk. At two, I take the dog for a walk again. Then I work more. At 6, I log off, but then I have to exercise because otherwise my clinical depression will get out of control. Terrible. I hate doing exercises, but I do it. Then (you guessed it) I walk the dog again. Usually I will make dinner after this, and then I will read on the couch or I will watch some trash television.
If you are wondering when the hell I ever write fiction, same? But really I think most of writing is about thinking and only some of it is about actually writing. I'm always writing. I sometimes have to sit down on my dog walks and frantically type something I think is good into the notes of my iphone. Usually it is bad, but it's the work that counts. When I'm in the middle of a fiction draft, like I am now, I'm usually avoiding it. I work in like accidental marathon sprints, where I will sit down on a weekend or an evening and just pound words out for like 5 hours. I motivate myself to do this by laying out sour candies on my desk. If I'm revising, I'm more methodical and less insane. I'll set days to revise or work on structure or write out plot points on the windows of my study and figure out what order they go in, but mainly I feel like most of my work happens in random bursts. I go to bed at 11:00 unless I fall asleep on the couch before then.
What was a piece of craft advice that helped you while writing this novel?
My editor gave me a hack that I love for writing really anything and its that every section needs to have a main source of tension, a question, and a reveal. As long as you are doing that the plot will move forward. How well it works is a product of how good you are but it's an easy check when a section isn't working. Usually, if I ask myself what each of those three are in a chapter or a scene, I'll realize one is missing, and then I can figure out how to solve it.
If you could make a playlist for God Spare the Girls, what are a few songs you might put on it?
The playlist for God Spare the Girls is just two albums back to back and that's Semler's Preacher's Kid, which absolutely destroyed me the first time I listened to it, and Lucy Dacus' Home Video.
What was the last book you read that you would want to recommend?
I know this is an old book and a popular one, but I'm late to the party and want to pretend to be somewhere new. I read Annie Ernaux's The Years in the Spring and cannot stop thinking about it. I ended up reading a ton of Ernaux's books after that one and each one is an absolute banger. I really can't recommend her oeuvre enough.
KELSEY McKINNEY is a freelance features writer and cofounder of Defector Media. She previously worked as a staff writer at Vox, Fusion, and Deadspin. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Cosmopolitan, and New York magazine, among other publications. Raised Evangelical in north Texas, she now lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and dog. God Spare the Girls is her first novel.
