Q&A: Author Candice Fox Isn't Afraid of the Dark
The bestselling crime novelist discusses her craft, compulsive creativity, and fascination with the worst of humanity
Last year, my good friend actor Thomas Jane asked me to join the writers’ room of his latest TV series, “Troppo”, which was entering its second season for Australia’s ABC and Amazon. I’d already watched the first season and was a fan of the “tropical noir’s” creepy, sweaty mélange of murder mystery, man-eating crocodiles, and Queensland’s jungle scenery. But most importantly, I was anxious to put words in Tom’s mouth, a possible collaboration both of us had been discussing for more than a decade. This is how I began to read Candice Fox, the author of the Crimson Lake series of novels “Troppo” is based on, as well as numerous other international bestselling novels (some of which she’s co-written with the legendary James Patterson).
Season 2 of “Troppo” — which is slang for “going tropical/crazy” — premiered in Australia on July 5th and all of its episodes have already dropped here, but the rest of the world had to wait until July 25th. If you’re curious, I wrote Episode 6, which Tom (or TJ, as many of us know him), chose to direct. I thought I’d commemorate this by inviting the person whose imagination inspired the series to join me for one of my artist-on-artist conversations. There were a few reasons why I was thrilled when Candice agreed. The most obvious one is that she’s quickly transformed herself into a master of the crime novel, a kind of writing I’ve yet to be able to discuss with an author here at 5AM StoryTalk. The other reason was more personal; she lives in Sydney, next door to the Blue Mountains where I live, and I don’t personally know enough Australian authors yet. It’s always good to know who your neighbors are (in the arts).
What I didn’t expect was for Candice to be such a spectacularly exciting conversation partner. Her ideas, her wicked sense of humor, her willingness to let me into her life, process, and relationship with darkness turned out to be as exciting as any of her novels. She and I will be getting drinks in real life in the near future, but, for now, you can get to know her like I did - through this chat. For writers in any medium and at any stage of their careers, you’re about to encounter a fanatical over-achiever with a kind of boundless, even manic energy for the arts, for storytelling, for constantly topping her own accomplishments. More, you’re going to get an intimate glimpse into her creative and professional anxieties, her fearlessness when it comes to mining (and trying to understand) real-life horror, and her problem with “likeable characters” in fiction - amongst many other subjects. Brace yourselves for one hell of a read.
COLE HADDON: Candice, you’ve had an astonishing seventeen novels published in ten years. That takes a level of discipline most writers will never possess, I think. And so, what I want to ask you to begin our conversation is, what do you wish you had more time to be doing with your life in between the books and, of course, a family?
CANDICE FOX: I'm a pretty artsy person, so if I had more time I wouldn’t be relaxing on a beach. That would drive me mental. I’d be making shit. All day and all night. The last year has taken me through courses in lead lighting, oil painting, sewing, knitting, crochet, pottery, and woodworking. I become obsessed with a craft and buy everything associated with it, ramp myself up to basically do it professionally, before inevitably becoming bored with it and moving on. I spent $300 on whittling knives, for chrissakes. There have been a couple of “love of my life” arts which have stuck with me though, so if I had time off, I’d do those – I’d build and repair furniture, or I’d oil paint. The oil painting really has a grip on me right now because I was immediately good at it, for some reason, and it’s a very patient game. You have to plan, process, work in layers, sometimes double back and wipe things out, and stick with the painting through an “awkward teenage phase” in which it looks terrible, but you have to trust the process and yourself. That’s exactly what a novel is like. I start a painting and I think, “I’m in love with this. This is going to be amazing.” A couple of weeks later, it’s like “Urrrrggghh. Push through, push through!” Then there’s the upward climb toward awesomeness. It’s an art that has to be earned.
CH: All of this sounds inspiring, but also…not very relaxing?
CF: It's kind of exhausting, all this periphery art. My garage is overloaded and there’s paint all over my office and I sometimes buy stuff at the supply stores and tell the checkout person not to say the total out loud because I’m ashamed of my splurging. But it makes you look at the world differently. With the writing, I have my ears pricked all the time for story opportunities. That never switches off. And with the oil painting, I’ll say to someone, “Hey there’s green in that shadow. Look. The unexpected green there casting back from the grass outside” or whatever. I get the same kind of looks as when I say, “So, did you read the article about that guy who beheaded his mother? Wild.”
CH: Working with oils, with colors specifically, really does change how you look at the world from my experience. Since you started painting, has your writing changed at all as a result of that, let’s say, expanded perspective?
CF: I suppose it has made me a little more relaxed about periods of “ugliness” in my novel. The current novel is proving difficult, but I get to look over at something I’ve got on the easel or something I’ve just taken off the easel and say hey – yeah, that was ugly for a while, too. And with painting, there’s the sketch, the gesso, then the over layers of color, and finally the varnish, and each of those stages has its own micro-stages. You lay the sketch on and look at it and say, “No, that’s not right. Neither is this. Neither is that.” Then, you finally get it right and move on to the next bit. And there’s no color at all until, like, stage three. After gesso. So, it’s okay for it to be a bit colorless and flat. You’ve just marked out where the color will go later.
It took me a few books to really look at my writing process and understand it. To figure out what worked and then hone and sharpen that system. Now I understand it, and it works like clockwork. The first 10,000 words is like a fast, furious dream state. That’s the sketch. Then, I lay down the gesso and that gets me to 30,000 words, and I look at it and go, “Oh God. I hate this. I’ve put so much effort in already and it’s so ugly and I have no idea what it’s going to look like at the end and whether all this will be worth it.” Then come the colors, the finishing of the manuscript, and the combing over and over until it’s pretty. It’s comforting to have my process represented visually for me.
CH: Clockwork can mean comfortable and sometimes comfortable is dangerous to creativity. Does that ever become an issue for you and, if so, how do you shake things up?
CF: Well, the thing is that clocks break down. In my case, it happens, and I don’t really understand why. The current novel, for example, has been a stopping-and-starting crawl and I’m really hating it. I’ve had it looked at a few times, and I’m being told it’s great, but the whole thing just feels sludgy to produce. That might be my life circumstances - my kid started school, so there’s that routine adjustment to deal with. And I’m a bit emotionally close to the themes I’m writing about, of bad mothers and betrayal, so that might be a psychological blockage. Maybe I’m subliminally worried about stepping further and further into the book because I’ll find out what I’m actually trying to say about my mother and it won’t be nice. Maybe I’m just too in love with the novel I want to write next, and I’m not giving this one the chance it deserves. So, while on the one hand I’ve worked out my supreme system, that system sometimes malfunctions.
CH: I empathize. I think I just survived a malfunction of my own. It lasted a while, too. Sludgy is exactly the right word for how it felt. I described it as like trying to run a marathon through knee-deep mud.
CF: When you’re just not feeling it, there’s something wrong. You just have to figure out if it’s something wrong with you - your mentality - or the concept itself.
CH: Before I move on, I don’t want to ask about your new novel – that’s a work in progress you’re still trying to find your way through along with, it sounds, some complicated feelings about your mum. But have you found yourself in a similar situation in the past, struggling to get through a novel? If so, what was the obstacle and how did you find your way through it?
CF: Oh my god, I have, and I tried to solve it, and I’ll never do that again. I had a lot of trouble with Gathering Dark. I was pregnant and my brain just broke, and I couldn’t figure out a way in. I tried to enter the novel in five different ways, and was just flubbing it. Didn’t know who any of the characters were, didn’t care about them necessarily. So, I booked a cabin in the woods. Like, deep in the woods. My Google search terms were like “isolated, secluded, no one can hear you scream.” And the place was great. It was in the middle of the Blue Mountains, miles from anywhere, no reception, a winding 5km dirt track to get in. Nothing but trees. I worked my butt off. Then, night fell. And I was alone, in a cabin, so deep in the woods that no one could hear me scream. There were no curtains, so basically anyone looking in could see me, but in the firelight, I couldn’t see out. Sounds of big animals crashing around in the bush at all hours. Do you know just how closely the thumping of a kangaroo tail sounds to footsteps? Never again. Never, ever again.
CH: [Laughs] Amazing. That’s the start of a short story there.
CF (cont’d): When it comes to all of the art adventurism you described, what you’re really talking about is constantly diving into new mediums. It sounds like a non-stop process of discovery. Do you ever have the same urge to play in other literary sandboxes when it comes to your writing? Say, write a piece of magical realism, a rom-com, or even tackle TV or film just to see what happens? What I’m probably really asking is, do you experiment as much with words as you do with other art forms even if those experiments aren’t for public consumption?
CF: Oh, I flirt with other genres all the time. When I was published for the first time, my agent asked me what else I had in the bag, and I was a good deal of the way into an alien invasion book, but she told me to turn around and stick to crime so I could establish my brand. That book still rumbles around my brain sometimes. A foray into another genre for me would definitely be something end-of-the-worldy. The stakes have to be sky-high. Life or death. Zombies, aliens, virus.
When I’d just had my daughter, I was up breastfeeding her all hours of the day and night, so I downloaded the Final Draft app on my phone and wrote a horror movie one-handed while I sat there. Which sounds really unloving, I know, but sometimes you’re breastfeeding a kid for an hour, an hour and a half, so there’s only so long you can sit there staring into the baby’s face and seeing all the majesty and wonder of the universe in their eyes. If their eyes are open at all. So yeah, I’m not really good at sitting still. The horror movie script was resoundingly hated by everyone I showed it to.
CH: When my wife gave birth to our second kid, I formalized something I just did quietly with the first one. I went to bed at 9 and got up at 3 a.m. on the dot to take the baby. She then slept another four or so hours to recover. On Day 9, at about 4 a.m. in the morning, I started writing a novel that was published a couple of years ago now called Psalms for the End of the World. My newborn was slung to my chest. I did that for three months, writing most of a 600-page book that way. An oftentimes incredibly violent book about my anxieties about the future – and my kids’ future. I don’t bring this up to talk about me as much as because I’ve never met another artist who had such a similar writing experience and went to such a similarly dark place with a baby clinging to them – albeit mine wasn’t feeding off me. I wonder, as a mother – a very different emotional experience – do you have any thoughts about why you went there that might help me understand better what I was doing?
CF: What people don’t talk about when it comes to babies is the gory stuff. Like, you think “babies” and what comes to mind is giggles and cuddles and plush photo shoots on fluffy pink faux-fur rugs. Wrinkly little Anne Geddes bodies and tiny naked bums you can fit in the palm of your hand. But I was shocked by how much death talk there is around pregnancy and birthing. Because as soon as I became visibly pregnant, strangers started wandering up to me to tell me their abortion or stillborn or miscarriage stories in a bright and cheerful and friendly way. It’s weird. People just blurt it out. So, you’re confronted with that. I stood in a park with my belly stretching the shit out of my tee-shirt and listened to this woman take me through all eight of her miscarriages one at a time – how she knew, what happened, etcetera. I’d never met her in my life. Then, you’re going for your weekly checks and ultrasounds and constantly wondering, “What if they tell me it’s dead?” lying there watching the radiologist’s face for emotions as she rubs the dial over your belly. Then, the baby’s born, and there’s all the gore and horror around that, and then you have to creep through the night to her bassinet every few hours for weeks at a time wondering what the hell you’ll do if you reach in and find her cold and stiff and blue. Then, you get those weird intrusive thoughts, lightning flashes through your brain, about what might happen if you accidentally drop the baby and crack her head open on the edge of the kitchen counter. Bringing a child into the world is a horror show. But it’s also the most beautiful and wonderful and adorable thing you’ll ever do at the same fucking time. So, yeah. Whoever designed that system needs their head checked.
CH: I feel like whatever PTSD I’d had from both my wife’s pregnancies and births just got a nice jolt to wake it back up, so thanks for that? You bring up some wonderful points, though, about the entire experience. So much of it is defined by the possibility of death. You spend a good eighteen months of your life, each time around, fixated on it. Hell, my kids are six and ten and I still experience that momentary terror as I check on them before I go to bed. Of course all that would permeate our subconsciouses and color our creativity – not to mention exacerbate any other fears we have about the world and future staring back at us.
CF: It’s all the more awful for someone writing in the crime fiction genre. Because my brain is basically stock-piled with murder cases, many of them involving children. It’s not good.
CH: Yeah, I can imagine. So, as I said earlier, you’ve written a lot of books in a relatively short period of time, I think. I want to understand how you make that happen without losing control of the rest of your life. Tell me about how and when you write.
CF: I can’t relax. It’s a problem. I get to the end of every day and ask myself what I got done, like there’s this endless series of deadlines for everything applied by none other than myself. Because the publishers will take the books as fast as I can write them, and a book a year, instead of two, would mean a lot of free days for me. A lot of days where I “achieved” nothing. Even when I’m taking a break from the novels, I’m cleaning the house, organizing things, digging through cupboards, sorting, shifting, optimizing. I can’t just sit. Ever. I’m sure it drives my husband nuts. Between books, I have a weird sort of mental shutdown where, at times, I’ve lost the ability to string a sentence together. I can’t find the right words. It’s like riding a bike when the pedal slips, and I experience the whizzzz of the tractionless pedaling.
CH: I crash every time I type THE END, sometimes for several weeks. It can feel like I’m swimming through quicksand, trying to get back to the place where I feel wholly present in conversations. Where do you think this “need” to be producing all the time came from?