One of my very favorite contemporary writers, Edgar Award winner, Tana French, is gearing up for the much-anticipated release of her third novel, FAITHFUL PLACE.  Just as a character from her debut novel, IN THE WOODS, steered THE LIKENESS (Ms. French’s second book) in FAITHFUL PLACE we’re drawn into an intrigue involving a detective that we’ve already met and found fascinating.  Each novel stands alone, but Tana French’s people, places, and insights will have you craving to connect all the dots.  Clever.  Very.  Honestly, I can’t wait to read it and it doesn’t hurt a bit that Booklist tagged their review of FAITHFUL PLACE with a star and proclaimed it, “Her best book yet.”

We’d like to thank Ms. French for taking the time to be part of our “5 Minutes Alone” interview series.

AuthorScoop: What was your very first publication credit?

Tana: IN THE WOODS. I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, along with your standard-issue terrible poetry – I actually submitted one short story to a couple of places and even got a great rejection letter from The New Yorker saying they’d like to see more of my work, but that was as far as I got. When I started drama school, the acting took over and the writing went out the window – till I had the idea for IN THE WOODS, years later.

AuthorScoop: Tell us about your latest release.

Tana: It’s called FAITHFUL PLACE, and it’s out this July. This time the narrator is Frank Mackey, who showed up in my second book, THE LIKENESS, as Cassie’s old undercover boss. Back in 1985, Frank was nineteen, growing up poor in Dublin’s inner city, living crammed into a tenement flat on Faithful Place. But he had his sights set on a lot more. He and Rosie Daly were all ready to run away to London together, get married, get good jobs, break away from factory work and poverty and all their old lives.

But on the winter night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show. Frank took it for granted that she’d dumped him – probably because of his alcoholic father, nutcase mother and generally dysfunctional family. He never went home again.

Neither did Rosie. Everyone took it for granted she had gone to England on her own and was over there living her shiny new life. Then, twenty-two years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, and Frank is going home whether he likes it or not.

Getting sucked in is a lot easier than getting out again. Frank finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind. The cops working the case want him out of the way, in case loyalty to his family and community makes him a liability. Faithful Place wants him out because he’s a detective now, and the Place has never liked cops. Frank just wants to know what happened to Rosie Daly – and he’s willing to do whatever it takes, to himself or anyone else, to get the job done…

AuthorScoop: Aside from your own hard work, who (or what) else do you feel has contributed to your success?

Tana: The obvious, and wonderful, people: I’ve been lucky enough to have an amazing agent and three amazing editors. And my husband is my first reader – he’s got an incredible sense of pace and structure, and somehow he can tell me ‘You know you need to cut that scene and rewrite the whole chapter in a different setting, right?’ without making my head explode.

And drama school. I had a great acting teacher, and I think that, deep down, acting and writing (specially writing in the first person, like I do) are basically the same skill: you’re aiming to create a complex, three-dimensional character, draw your audience into that character’s world and bring them the story through the lens of that character’s needs, fears, biases and preconceptions – you’re aiming to have the audience go away feeling like that character is someone they know deeply and intimately. Plus, in drama school you spend a lot of time observing the nuances of behaviour and relationships, and a lot of time working in minute detail on some of the best plays ever written, which helps to develop your instinct for what works in terms of structure, plot and character. It was great training.

And I never forget to be grateful to pure dumb luck. I believe that talent and/or hard work can get you to the right place to grab hold of luck when it goes past, but then you’re going nowhere until and unless it does.

AuthorScoop: At what time of day or night do you do your best writing?

Tana: Late at night. I’m nocturnal. Which is unfortunate, given that I have a baby so night writing is out. These days I write at whatever time I get the chance, including early mornings. Up until my daughter came along, I thought the only reason for early mornings to exist was when they were actually very, very late nights…

AuthorScoop: Finally, what advice would you give to new or unpublished writers?

Tana: You have absolute licence to screw up. For me, this was one of the big revelations while I was writing IN THE WOODS: if you need to rewrite a paragraph fifty times because the first forty-nine versions are so awful they make you cringe, that’s OK. I guess I was conditioned by doing theatre, where the show has to be right every single night, because that audience will never get another chance to see it. It took me a while to figure out that writing doesn’t count as the show until it goes to print; until then, it’s all rehearsal. It’s really easy to get discouraged when something just isn’t working, but that doesn’t mean it’ll never work. You can get it wrong as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.

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FAITHFUL PLACE hits the shelves July 13th and is more than ready for preorder at your favorite online bookseller if you can’t trust yourself to remember to put it on your errand list.  (Yes, that would be me.)  Get it.  Get it soon.  And learn more about Tana French and her work at www.TanaFrench.com.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 9:57 am and is filed under *Jamie's Posts, 5 Minutes Alone, AuthorScoop Exclusives, The Writing Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.