Ten questions with Hayley Scrivenor
Hayley Scrivenor’s debut novel Dirt Creek has been shortlisted for the 2023 Lammy Award for LGBTQ+ Mystery AND nominated for the International Thriller Writers Best First Novel award. I added Dirt Creek to my TBR pile when I saw the cover blurb from the incredible Jane Harper. Thank you Hayley Scrivenor for this thoughtful and inspiring interview.
1. Please tell us about your debut novel.
Dirt Creek is the story of Esther Bianchi, a young girl who doesn’t make it home from school one day in her small town in country Australia. It’s also a book about what loss does not just to the people close to a missing child, but the way an event like that reverberates through a place. It’s also about how we see ourselves, and how that differs from the way others see us. I was deeply interested in queerness in the small-town setting, and the ways a community can lift you up, but also drag you down.
2. I’ve read that only 4% of the people who start a novel, finish writing it. Why do you think you beat the odds?
For me—and I’ve just been through this with a draft of my second novel, so this feels pretty fresh—there’s a certain sadness as the particulars of a novel begin to firm up. I wrote an enormous amount when drafting Dirt Creek: over 300,000 words for what would eventually become a 100,000-word novel. I was so afraid of nailing anything down, in case it was the wrong thing. Ann Patchett said something that really helped me: ‘I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.’
Once you narrow your field of vision, things begin to cohere in ways that never would have been possible if everything had remained open-ended. But you have to find a way to stand the erosion of the ideal, the perfect idea of the book that exists in your head, and work with the tangible reality. It’s only by setting things in place that the true magic can happen.
3. Was your debut novel the first book you wrote? (Any prior efforts hiding on your hard drive?)
I’d written a handful of short stories when I started this novel, but that was it. I should add, though, that I began Dirt Creek as part of a PhD in creative writing. That meant that I had a scholarship to live on, a wonderful supervisor, and a firm deadline. I don’t know if I would have finished without those things. I was also very lucky to find a writing community that made me feel like what I was trying to do was possible. I think that’s so important when it comes to finishing a book.
4. What helped you become a better writer? Any books or resources you found helpful?
Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is my go-to gift for the emerging writers in my life, and I love Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing. I reread both those books often and find different things helpful every time, depending on what stage I’m at. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard is one of the most beautifully written books about writing that I know of. An Australian resource that I can strongly recommend to North American readers is The Writer Laid Bare by Lee Kofman: such an extraordinary gift to writers everywhere. You should get your hands on a copy if you possibly can
5. What was your process like getting an agent?
I did the slightly odd thing of only contacting overseas agents with my book at first—perhaps it was because I wasn’t afraid that I’d ever run into them and turn pink with shame that they’d read and rejected my work! This is not an approach I would recommend, because, at the end of the day, you’re likely going to need representation in your home territory before anyone will want to represent you in another country. I had quite a few requests for the manuscript from these overseas pitches, but no takers. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t approach my current Australian agent until I’d done a fairly big rewrite of the manuscript. That is really so important when contacting agents: to put your best foot forward. There was a lovely moment of synchronicity though, where my Australian agent ended up bringing one of the agents I’d been talking to in the U.K. on as co-agent. She also had a relationship with an agent in New York who now represents my work there, so I got very lucky in the end.
6. How did you celebrate when you learned your book would be published?
I bought a new trash bin! For context, we got a kitten during the COVID-19 lockdowns in my home town of Wollongong, Australia. His name is Mausgaard (because I was obsessed with the Norwegian writer Knausgaard’s My Struggle series and re-reading them all at the time, and also I love a pun). Mausgaard had this bad habit of knocking our bin over and going through it for food scraps, and he’d come out all stinky and in need of a bath, which he hates. I’d seen these trash cans that you could mount in cupboards, so they become like a pull-out drawer which is cat-proof, but I was shocked by how expensive they were. When I got the news that my book was being published, and that I was going to get and honest-to-goodness advance, my partner and I went to our local hardware store and treated ourselves. I actually strongly recommend that kind of purchase—I interact with my trash bin every day and am reminded that I wrote something that some people liked enough to make into a novel.
7. What was the most exciting moment involving the publication of your debut novel? (The moment you first saw the cover? The call when you learned when it was being published? When you cashed your advance check?)
I had this completely irrational fear, in the lead-up to publication, that I was going to get a phone call from my publisher saying that they had made a terrible mistake and they couldn’t possibly publish the book. Even when copies were printed, I lived in fear that they would be pulped. It was ridiculous, because my publishers in each country have been so excited and supportive about Dirt Creek, but I couldn’t seem to get my nervous system on board with that. So, a real highlight for me was actually a pretty quiet moment. In the first week that the book was out, I was walking into a bookstore to say hi to the staff and sign some copies, and I saw a woman walking with her daughter out of the store. The woman was holding a copy of my book. The fact that on a weekday morning, someone had gone down to their local bookstore and bought my book, without knowing me, felt like a moment of quiet clarity: Oh, it happened. You wrote a novel and it has been published. It was beautiful.
8. What’s your best advice for someone who wants to be published?
It’s an annoying answer – but write the best book you possibly can. To put it another way, what is the thing that only you can write? It might be inconvenient, it might scare you, or you might think that there is no way it would ever be interesting to other people, but I guarantee that there is something that only you can say, and your best bet is to focus on saying that.
9. What are you currently reading? Or, what's one of the best novels you've read lately?
I just finished an advance reader copy of Polly Stewart’s The Good Ones. I’m interested in the intense, flawed elements of female friendship and it delves into this beautifully, while being a compelling mystery. It’s great to read a crime novel and see a bisexual protagonist who is flawed but also completely fleshed out. I just tore through it.
10. What are you working on now? Any projects coming out soon?
I am hard at work on my second novel! For me, a key way into story is finding the point of view. Who is telling the story, and why? When I feel like I’ve found the best delivery system for the story I want to tell, that’s when things get exciting. I’m a tad superstitious when it comes to talking about works-in-progress, but, right now, it’s pushing me in ways that I think are a good sign.