Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings Debut Spotlight feature. For November that debut is Down the Rabbit Hole by Shaeden Berry (Echo Publishing), a haunting and suspenseful mystery following the lives of three women in the wake of tragedy.
Can you tell us about your journey to publication?
My journey to publication began in 2015–2016, which was the first time that I tried to get published. It was with a young adult fantasy novel, and it got rejected more times than I care to count. This was probably for the best because I had an idea back then that once you sign the contract and your book got published, you immediately started making money off it and you never had to do anything but writing ever again. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for a lot of authors.
So this time around when I wrote the novel, which took about a year, I made it my mission to learn as much as I could about the Australian publishing landscape so that I was more familiar with the process. I researched different publishers, and I read a lot of books that were similar to my own to see who represented them or who had published them, and to narrow down my scope of queries. I sent out some queries, and then wonderfully, Echo [Publishing] picked it up.
From signing the contract to now, it’s been about a year. I think that’s one of the things that surprised me the most was how slowly things move in the publishing industry and how little of it is dependent on things actually to do with the book (like the editing process which might only be two, three months), and how much of it is actually external factors like publishing schedules and other authors than might be publishing around the same time as you.
The characters in Down the Rabbit Hole are so authentic and multifaceted. Did each of the characters come to you naturally or were some more difficult to write than others?
There are three main characters in Down the Rabbit Hole and they each get the chance to speak their point of view. I think the character that people would assume was the most difficult to write would be Marnie because she’s quite an unlikeable character, and she straddles that line of is this person redeemable or not? But oddly enough, she was actually the easiest to write. I wrote her portion before I wrote any other part of the book, and I think it’s because her voice was so strong and distinct. Also, because what you see is what you get with Marnie, she’s completely unapologetic.
Which brings me to the character that was the hardest to write, which was Rachel. I think that’s because Rachel has this sort of wilful ignorance of her own red flags. So I actually wrote her from the third-person point of view initially. It wasn’t until the editing process, which was almost a year later, that I ended up writing her from the first-person point of view. It took that long before I could find a way to tap into this mindset that is both self-aware and completely in denial of her own faults.
Did you have a particular reader in mind when you wrote this story?
There’s a saying, that I believe is by Toni Morrison, which is ‘write the book that you want to read’. I think that’s true for a lot of what I write, in that the first reader that I have in mind is myself. I’m such a huge fan of crime and mystery novels, and what I love the most is when authors play around with this genre in a way that challenges the reader or has them questioning at the end whether it actually was a crime or mystery novel. So playing around with the usual traditional structure or ‘whodunit’ narrative in a way that pushes the book outside of these strict genre boxes.
What I want readers to take away from this book, and even to go into this book knowing, is that Down the Rabbit Hole is not strictly a mystery, or strictly literary. At its heart it’s not about solving a crime or unpacking a tragedy—it’s about the humans at the centre of the situation.
What’s one piece of advice you’d like to pass onto aspiring authors?
There’s the usual ‘write as much as you can, read as much as you can’ that we’re all aware of. What I would like to tell aspiring authors is: don’t be in a rush and don’t judge yourself against someone else’s timeline. I’m constantly in awe of people who sign their book contracts before the age of twenty-five, I think that’s incredible. But when I was an aspiring author in my twenties, and that didn’t happen for me, I let the perceived failure keep me from writing for quite a long time because I thought if it doesn’t happen when I’m that age, then it’s never going to happen. So, what I’d like to tell aspiring authors is just don’t be in a rush. It might not be that first manuscript—or second, third, fourth—and it might not be when you’re in your twenties—or thirties or forties—but that doesn’t matter because there isn’t an official timeline that you need to be ascribing to. Sometimes, some of us just need a little extra time, a little bit of extra experience with our writing, but everything will happen as it’s supposed to.
What books have you loved lately and what’s on your TBR pile?
I just finished reading Hayley Scrivenor’s Girl Falling. I love everything that Hayley writes. I think she is brilliant at characterisation and at really tapping into that murky grey area inside of humanity. Plus, she always catches me out with every one of her twists!
In terms of what I’m reading next—I just got out from my library All Fours by Miranda July, which I saw recommended across my newsfeed, so I’m excited to start that. And then, because I always have two books on the go at any given time, I also got out Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane after reading a review in the Guardian. I’m really intrigued by the concept of a bunch of short stories that are tied together by a serial killer’s crimes. So excited to start that one as well.
You can pick up a copy of Down the Rabbit Hole at your local bookstore today.
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