In Conversation with Anna Young

Anna Young is the author of two short stories published with ENIGMA and discussed in this interview. Click here to read “Do You Remember, Dear?”, and here to read “My Feelings for You Only Grow”.

SYLVIE: I thought I would start by asking you if you could tell me a bit about your background with writing. How long have you been writing prose fiction for?

ANNA: A long time. My secondary school had a creative writing club, so I wrote at least once a week.

SL: Do you predominantly write shorter fiction? And what do you find that the advantages, or perhaps difficulties are, of writing short stories, as opposed to a larger body of work or flash fiction?

AY: Yeah, I mainly write shorter fiction. I find that with short stories you don’t need to have a plot in mind before you start writing. You can just start with an idea — like the word ‘lovestruck’ — and see how you get on from there. With a longer body of work, I’d have to map out a journey and see how the characters change from the start to the finish. And the characters that I’ve written about work well in short stories; I don’t know what they’ve done prior to my story, or what they’ve done afterwards. I don’t know whether they’d become less interesting the more I wrote about them. I’m happy with this little glimpse into their lives.  And because I don’t have to think about how my story ties in with the overall plot structure, or how the decisions my characters make relates to their overall character-arc, I have the freedom to experiment and see what happens. The difficult part of writing short stories is finding the right balance. I’m aware that pace is very important in shorter fiction, but at the same time I don’t want to neglect description. I’m usually either waffling or not expanding my imagery enough. With flash fiction, because the word-limit is so short, you’re forced to be concise, so you don’t have that problem. Instead, the difficulty is whether you’ve been able to successfully convey your ideas with so few words.

SL: I love the idea of the mystery of short story characters — that there’s this unknowable quality to them — that outside of the story, they don’t exist.

AY: Yeah, I think that when you encounter them in short stories you don’t actually need to know what else they’ve done for the story to be good. Do you get that as well?

SL: I do. And I like the idea that you’re not as caught up by traditional plot, necessarily, when you’re writing a short story; you can write something that exists for an emotional journey, rather than—

AY: A transformative journey.

SL: Yes, in the literal sense. Who are your literary influences?

AY: I think the first writer to have a big influence on me was R. L. Stine. He wrote a children’s horror series called Goosebumps, and I was obsessed with it when I was younger. The main thing I loved about his books was that in every story there would be a shocking plot twist, and it would completely throw you, and completely change your perception of the story that you’d read. I think plot twists are really fun to play around with. I also think they make rereading stories fun. You can reread a story and pick out the little hints and clues that lead to a plot twist and think: Oh, so when that character said that, it actually alluded to this major revelation! It makes me feel like a detective, I love it—

SL: I was just going to say that! It’s nice when a writer makes you feel you can do your own detective work with a story. And with your stories, I’ve definitely noticed moments of revelation that make them so engaging to read.

AY: Thank you. As for other influences, I’d say that Nabokov’s Lolita and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange also helped shape my writing style. Both books are dark and disturbing. It’s interesting because the protagonists in both stories are unlikeable, but the narration is amazing. I want to explore characters who are hard to like and hard to empathise with, and I like the idea that a character can seem funny and likeable until you learn something dark about them. Your perception of them shifts and you think: Can I still enjoy their narration? Can I still find them fascinating when I know what they’ve done? I like toying around with that idea. Leading on from that, I read a book by Louise O’Neill called Only Ever Yours, and it was the first book I’d read that had a horrific ending. Everything I’d read prior to that had some sort of happy ending, but this was just very dark and bleak, and I didn’t realise that you could do that before. I think it’s nice that you don’t have to resolve conflict or tension, and you don’t have to wrap things up neatly for the characters.

SL: I can definitely see that influence in your work, with the unreliability of narrators. And I remember having a similar experience with a shocking ending when I first read Hemingway. I remember being really taken aback at the time that something could end so tragically. It is telling how that can shift your perspective on what you can do with fiction, and where you can take your characters. I did also have a question about whether you have any key influences outside of traditional literature — so for instance film, visual art, television, or music?

AY: I think so. Have you ever seen Killing Eve?

SL: I’ve been meaning to, but I haven’t yet!

AY: It’s so good. The first series, especially, is amazing. It’s written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

SL: Yeah, I love her.

AY: Fleabag is also amazing. I love the way she’s incorporated first-person narration into a TV show. I think the direct interaction with the audience makes the show really interesting. I think interactive elements are really cool to have, and I think in lots of fiction — traditional fiction — it’s harder to have an interactive element. I think in the digital age, it’s easier. When you think about Choose-Your-Own-Story adventures, or visual novels, you’re actively making choices for the characters, so it’s cool to see how you can still incorporate an interactive element in fiction when you’re not forcing the reader to make choices.

SL: Fleabag is one of my favourite recent shows, and I think it’s so interesting the way that her breaking the fourth wall gets you so invested in a way that you might not be if that device wasn’t utilised.

AY: I agree.

SL: And so when you do find out things that are shocking about her, it’s more of a shock, because you feel like you know her. She’s gained your trust by that point.

AY: Yes! 

SL: I was hoping you could tell me a bit about the thought process and writing process behind your short story “My Feelings For You Only Grow”.

AY: I wanted to flip the word ‘lovestruck’ on its head and write an unconventional love story. But how could I go about doing that? How could I make a love story dark and unique? Initially, I was considering writing from the perspective of a stalker, but it didn’t feel unconventional enough. I realised that in most love stories, it’s important for both characters to be alive, and somebody dying effectively ends the narrative. So I wanted to explore what would happen if a character fell in love with somebody who was already dead. 

SL: The connection persisting after death, or the connection starting after death, is a fascinating idea. One of my favourite parts of the story involves description of an urn and ashes, and it has the phrase ‘zombie-bride’, which I loved! I was wondering whether memorial and materiality is an important subject to you in your writing?

AY: I think it is, because materialism is important for everyone, regardless of whether you’re dead or you’re alive. Social media has traces of people left that can survive after their death, whilst also being a way to document the lives of the living. If you think about trauma cleaning — when you have to tidy somebody’s house after they’ve passed away — there are so many aspects of their lives or their personality still living on in their house in things they’ve collected. Even when you’re still alive, you might have photos in your room, to remember the good times youʼve had. 

SL: I love the idea of characters leaving behind relics, and documenting their lives with materiality.

AY: Yeah, and when characters are already dead, the only way to get a sense of who they really were is through things they’ve left behind. 

SL: Something that I also really like in this story is the tone, and how certain phrases balance the shocking and dark with this genuinely enjoyable sort of wryness — moments of irony. The quotes I’ve noted down here are ‘Trust me to fall in love with someone dead,’ and the fantastic ending: ‘Isn’t that romantic?’ I wondered what the process was like of creating this narrative voice, and if there was a tonal balance there between dark and light that you were aware of keeping while writing?

AY: It’s important to me that I write, seeing as the content is quite dark and disturbing, with some element of humour. I think that the narration really helps with that. Obviously it’s quite creepy, especially as there’s a plot twist as well, so I needed somebody who’s likeable and funny at the start to make the plot twist seem more shocking.

SL: It’s the Fleabag-effect.

AY: Yeah, that’s essentially it!

SL: And next, I was hoping you could tell me about your thought process behind your short story “Do You Remember, Dear?”

AY: I vaguely had an idea that I wanted an interaction — not really an interaction, because when I first wrote it I only had one person speaking. I only had the Spirit’s point of view. The human’s point of view was added much, much later. But I wanted it to read like a letter to somebody - similar to We Need to Talk About Kevin. And I wanted something supernatural-esque, because I don’t really write much with mystical elements, but it’s something I want to try more of.

SL: I hadn’t thought about whether you’d created one character before the other. I think it’s interesting that one of them was an addition, because I think when reading your stories, there is something to me that feels like it could translate well to script; there’s something dramatic about it. Because you’ve got the dialogue in this one, and the monologue with the other story.

AY: I did, at times, feel like I was writing a dramatic monologue. I found this with both stories. There’s always an audience that the narrator is speaking to.

SL: I’ve been wanting to promote script more for ENIGMA, so if you ever wanted to write anything like that you absolutely should!

AY: I’d like to try! I haven’t done much script writing, but I definitely want to try it more.

SL: It’s a little alien to me too, but I think it’s a really nice form. So why did you choose to write the story around the structure of changing seasons?

AY: Seasonal imagery is very important to me, and I wanted, again, to flip the connotations of different seasons on their heads. Traditionally we think of autumn as the season of death, and I wanted to change that. In my story, autumn is the beginning; it’s childhood, it’s nostalgia, and winter is teenage years, and summer — people think of it as the happiest season, but in this story, it’s actually where everything ends.

SL: I had wondered why it starts with autumn, and I think it works really well. The sensory detail used to evoke the seasons is so — it’s really beautiful, but it doesn’t fall into cliché, which I think can be quite easy to fall into with the seasons—

AY: That’s really what I wanted to do.

SL: Yeah, you definitely achieved that.

AY: Thank you!

SL: I was also wondering about the epigraph at the beginning of the story, and why you chose to start with that.

AY: That was actually the last thing I added to the story. It went through a lot of edits. Because I was writing about characters that were humans and spirits and ghosts, it could get a bit confusing. For me, as the writer, I understood what was going on because I had the overall story idea in my head, but to the editors who were reading it, it was hard to identify who was speaking — what they were exactly. So I added that last minute to make the whole story more cohesive. 

SL: It does serve as a useful sort of explanatory note.

AY: Also, I didn’t give the story a happy ending, because I feel like a fairy tale ending would be one where the spirit is able to see the ghost, and they’re able to live happily ever after. But I foreshadowed from the start that the spirit wouldn’t be capable of doing this. That comes up in the epigraph — that idea that they won’t be able to see each other. Speaking of fairy tales, I find that idea very strange. Because most fairy tales are actually very dark in nature, so it’s weird that we describe fairy tale endings as happy endings.

SL: Brothers Grimm are shaking their heads at us.

AY: I know!

SL: But in a way that means you are taking it back to the fairy tale tradition by taking it to the darker—

AY: Taking it to the darker side.

SL: In both stories you shape character really successfully. I have the feeling that people don’t blur into each other in your work, and that if a character’s there they’re meant to be there; no one’s simply an add-on. I wondered how you make sure you create voices that sound distinct enough from each other.

AY: I’m really happy that you’ve said that, because shaping character was something I struggled with. This was mostly the case in: “Do You Remember, Dear?”, as I had two narrators, and when I was first writing them, they seemed alike. One of the feedback comments I got was that I had to try to make them more distinct from each other, and I wasn’t sure that I did that in the end—

SL: Oh, you definitely did.

AY: I’m glad you think so! 

SL: That distinction between the two characters is one of my favourite parts of the story, because depending on who you’re listening to, you get invested in their side of it.

AY: I actually have a question about that. When I was writing it, I didn’t want to specify their genders. I just wanted to see what kind of characters the readers would imagine for themselves. When I was working on the first story, “My Feelings for You Only Grow”, I always saw both the narrator and the person they’re in love with as two females, but when I was talking to editors, they always saw the narrator as male — and I hadn’t specified that, so of course they could come to that conclusion, but it was interesting to me. So I wanted to see what readers thought of the second story, who they imagined the two speakers as. Could I ask you what you thought?

SL: You could ask that! Genuinely for me, it shifted as I read it. There were points where, depending on whether I could see myself as that character or not, that would influence how I thought about their gender. But I think on the whole, I didn’t realise ascribe a gender to them. I imagined them as these sort of androgynous figures.

AY: I like that you can do that. I think it just feels more inclusive and accessible to the reader when you can do that.

SL: The Great Godden, which came out not too long ago, doesn’t specify the gender of the narrator. Early on, you would assume that they’re a girl, because that plays into the heteronormative assumptions we might have about the romantic relationships they have. But as it goes on it becomes apparent that we don’t actually know, and we never find out, and it’s sort of unimportant. But the ambiguity itself becomes important.

AY: That’s really cool.

SL: One of my favourite parts of “Do You Remember, Dear?” is when one character thinks about busying themselves with various tasks so that they can feel ‘worthy’ of who they love, and they ultimately consider this wish for connection with this character ‘unattainable’. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately in general is the importance of longing in narratives — that’s currently one of the themes I’m promoting for ENIGMA. Because personal drive, even in works that aren’t plot-driven, can be so central. And I think that both of your stories handle the subject of longing really beautifully. I was hoping we could end on any thoughts of yours on the theme of longing, as something that on the one hand is simply a useful way of propelling a narrative onwards, but on the other is so complicated and so central to what it means to even be a person.

AY: That’s so true, it’s important in both respects, because everybody — whether you’re a real, living person, or a character — longs for something. Whether you act on that longing or you donʼt, it’s useful for propelling a narrative onwards. I think itʼs really fun to explore within stories, especially in terms of relationships. The relationship in Killing Eve is amazing, and you can tell that both characters long for each other. As an audience member, I kind of want them to get together, but at the same time, I don’t even know how that would work. I don’t know if I can root for the characters, considering what they’ve done. I think that the presence of longing can make you more invested in a story, even when the relationships are messy and complicated. It’s a fascinating theme to explore.