Ann Packer on a Quick Draft

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Ann Packer about her new novel, Some Bright Nowhere.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I read somewhere that you wrote Some Bright Nowhere once you found the hook you needed very quickly.

Ann Packer: I did the first draft in four months, which, I mean, it’s a short book, but that’s still really fast for me. For context, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, the entire process was ten years. I don’t remember quite how long the first draft was, but it was definitely in years, not months.

Mitzi Rapkin: What do you attribute that to?

Ann Packer: A number of different things. I think one of them was that I had this struggle with the other book, and what it cost me was my life as a writer, writing confidently. And so, once I was into something that I felt confident about, I wanted to live in it. I wanted to swim in it. I wanted to be there all the time. That’s one thing. Another thing is I knew it had to be a really short book.  At some point I was saying to someone, yeah, I want it to be like a knife. And I didn’t really stop to think about what I meant by that, until maybe even after the end of the draft, where I realized what I mean is slim and pointed. It’s just really, really pointed, and so that’s part of it also. And I think the main explanation of how, how it came together so quickly was at first I didn’t know that I was on to something. And in fact, I usually don’t show my work to anyone until I have a full draft completed, but I did show it to my husband to get a kind of just to read, like, is this working? Should I keep going? And once I had that from him, then it really accelerated, and I was working hours and hours and hours every day.

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Ann Packer is the author of four bestselling novels: Some Bright Nowhere, The Children’s Crusade, Songs Without Words, and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has been published in two collections — Mendocino and Other Stories and Swim Back to Me — and includes stories that appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. Ann’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages and published around the world.