Big 4 with Bec: Nansi Kunze
Nansi Kunze grew up surrounded by books in Australia and the UK. After studying languages and ancient history at university, she spent several years teaching foreign doctors how to pronounce rude words and teenagers how to mummify each other, while cultivating a taste for manga and video games in her spare time. Unsurprisingly, her early attempts at writing serious adult fiction failed. Fortunately she proved to be much better at writing slightly zany Young Adult fiction, and her first YA novel, Mishaps, was published by Random House Australia in 2008. Her second, Dangerously Placed, has just been released. She lives on a small farm overlooking the Victorian Alps with her husband and son.
1. Congrats on the recent release of ‘Dangerously Placed’, Nansi. A YA mystery novel (that our reviewer loved), this is your second book. 2008’s ‘Mishaps’ was met with very favourable reviews, including many remarks about your keen sense of humour. What makes you laugh? How difficult is it to translate your own sense of humour to your audience?
I’m blushing now! Well, I’ve got to admit that I’m easily amused – a lot of things make me laugh. Some of my biggest influences, though, are classic school-based films and TV shows (John Hughes movies, Buffy and so on), and the greats of British humorous writing, like Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. One of the elements I enjoy the most about those forms of humour is that the characters don’t take themselves too seriously. If your protagonist makes a fool of herself in front of her friends, sure, that can be entertaining – but it’s even better if she has a ready quip to make about the situation.
The funny bits of a novel are usually the easiest parts for me to write, because I’ll often note down ridiculous situations and cheeky remarks I want to include in a novel while I’m still in the early planning stage. I don’t really think much about whether what I’m picturing as funny will seem that way to my audience, to be honest – I guess I just assume that it will. I probably should be more worried about that! Fortunately, I have great test readers and editors to bounce my ideas off and to help me realise if any of it falls flat.
2. I’ve read that you weren’t always an aspiring writer. Your academic background includes Ancient History and European languages & your CV includes a pretty eclectic mix of job positions! What impact has your prior research and work experience had on your creative writing and do you continue to research now?
It’s true that I wasn’t one of those people who grew up writing stories all the time and dreaming of being a writer – it was more just something I started doing one day and got hopelessly addicted to! Having had an ‘eclectic mix’ of jobs can be useful if you do end up becoming a writer, since it gives you a wide range of experiences to draw on (although I must confess that I’ve yet to find a good use for the time I spent teaching rude slang to overseas-trained doctors). The most useful job I’ve had in terms of my writing was being a high school teacher – the first YA story I ever wrote involved a teacher mummifying a student in toilet paper, which I used to do with my year 8 History students – but I probably draw on my experiences as a high school student just as much.
I do still research quite a lot. While some of it is just Googling the technologies I base the speculative elements of stories on, other parts are a bit more hands-on. The book I’m working on now is set in several different locations around the world. Later this year I’m travelling to England to visit family and stopping off briefly at each of those places along the way to do a little book research (yep, it’s a tough life as a writer!). My background in languages helps a fair bit with that kind of information-gathering, but I also love finding out about things I didn’t study at uni, like the genetics I looked into for Mishaps. It’s one of the great privileges of being a novelist, I think: knowing that absolutely anything you learn or experience is potentially useful for your work!
3. Now that you’ve written two YA novels, do you think you’ll continue writing for that audience? What other sorts of writing do you do? Who do you read?
Oh, it’s YA all the way for me! I feel like I belong in the world of teenage fiction. It’s got an intensity that I think is often missing in writing aimed at adults, and I don’t feel that the scope I have to play with as a YA writer is any less broad than I’d have if I were writing for adults. I don’t really do any other kind of writing at the moment. except the occasional blog post or interview! Being a mum to a preschooler takes up a lot of my time, so when I have the chance to write I head straight for my current YA manuscript. The novel I’m writing at the moment is full of glamour and intrigue, so it’s extra-fun to write, and I never feel sad that I haven’t got the time to start any other stories.
I mostly read YA too. I don’t usually stick to one particular sub-genre – I wander along the Teen shelves at the library every week looking
for anything that catches my eye. I often bring out old favourites to re-read: any of the Discworld books that feature Granny Weatherwax, Diana Wynne Jones’s works for older readers, my collection of Rosemary Sutcliff novels. I read a lot of manga too; right now I’m desperate for the next volume in Bisco Hatori’s awesome manga Ouran High School Host Club to be released. I don’t think I’d ever have the patience to write a long series – it drives me mad just waiting for other people to finish theirs!
Q. 4 Which of all your fictional characters Burns Brightest in your mind and why?
That’s a tricky one! I suppose, like a lot of authors, while I’m working on a particular manuscript the main characters in it seem all-consuming … but by the time their book hits the shelves, I’m already focussing on new ones. In each novel there’s someone I find particularly fun to write. It’s usually the one with the fewest inhibitions, because a lot of the excitement in being a novelist is in living vicariously through your characters. In Dangerously Placed, that character was Kiyoko. She’s unashamedly academic and very self-confident, and her Goth style makes me nostalgic for the days when I had a wardrobe full of black and my fringe covered half of my face (or at least one lens of my nerdy round glasses – I wasn’t quite as stylish as Ki!).
I’ve also got a lot of affection for the guys in my books; I think it’d be difficult to write a guy your protagonist is going to fall in love with if you didn’t have a bit of a soft spot for him too! But I think the character who really burns brightest for me is the Gianna, one of the two main characters in the novel I wrote before Mishaps. She’s brilliant, fearless, beautiful, indecently rich and has major issues – what could be more fun than that? When a character means a lot to you, their story is always in the back of your mind. It’s my dream to one day polish that novel up until it burns as brightly as Gianna does.
