Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings Debut Spotlight feature. For April that debut is Lead Us Not by Abbey Lay (Penguin Random House), an emotionally charged novel of expectation, compulsion and desire, charting the unseen currents of tension and control that shape a friendship. We spoke to Abbey about her journey to publication, which books influenced her writing and her advice for beating writers block and building narrative tension.
This interview has been transcribed and edited for clarity and concision. To watch the video conversation, visit KYD’s Instagram profile.
Can you tell us about your journey to publication?
My journey to publication began with the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards back in 2021. On a friend’s recommendation, I submitted the manuscript to the unpublished manuscript category and it was shortlisted later that year. Within about a week, I’d signed with my agent, who’s at Curtis Brown, and the two of us worked together on the manuscript for about six months before she took it out to a group of publishers who she thought would connect with the work. From there, I signed with Penguin Random House and began the editorial process.
Did you have a particular reader in mind when you wrote this story?
No, I think I was just writing it for myself most of the time. As it drew closer to the end, I started to think about who might resonate with it and I still didn’t really come up with an answer. I felt like people of all ages would like it, and probably that women more than men would respond to it. But now that it’s out I feel like I’m only just starting to learn about who this book is really for.
How did you create and build tension throughout the narrative?
I think initially I just trusted that when I was bored the reader would also be bored, so I was constantly writing with that sense of escalation in my mind and quite intuitively responding to when I felt like that energy was dropping. I think in hindsight, it’s the layering of Millie’s gaze over everything that happens. From my perspective, there’s a continuing escalation in the way that she perceives everything and the gap between what she thinks and what is actually the case. So even as other events in the story crescendo and fall away, my hope is that there’s a continuing tension in her own self-insight. And that, I think, persists probably all the way to the ending.
What’s your best tip for beating writers’ block?
I think it’s probably to pretend that you’re not the one writing it. Show up and think about what is it that only your characters could do and how can you narrow the range of choices that they have available to them in the moment. I felt like, especially when I was writing the first draft, I rocked up with no plan because I hadn’t really done any creative writing before and it forced me into the position of a reader in a way. I could only move from moment to moment and think about what is likely to happen next and where the energy of the story guides me. In hindsight this was a great way of not having to think about what my intentions were and just seeing where the story needed to go.
What other writers or books have influenced your writing?
The epigraph for Lead Us Not came from Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which is a book that I first studied at school and really opened my mind to the possibilities of writing. Of course, we’ve got an incredible protagonist in Briony here, so I found myself so many years later coming back to how her character was constructed and how her own gaze has quite a pivotal effect on the people around her.
Otherwise, I would say that my writing’s quite deeply influenced by Elena Ferrante, possibly in terms of subject matter—I didn’t think that you could write books about simple things like friendship until I read her work. And last, and perhaps more broadly, one of my favourite writers is Claire Keegan. I’ve heard Claire Keegan say in an interview that she sees her job as to show readers pictures and to trust them to do the rest of the work—I found that to be a great guiding principle for my own writing.
You can pick up a copy of Lead Us Not at your local bookstore today.
