With the true crime genre booming in popularity, one has to wonder – why are we so interested in violent men? While I’m fascinated by all things serial killer, binging the latest documentaries and podcasts, I’m also grossed out at my own interest in these men, men we only now care about because they have hurt women.
In Danya Kukafka’s latest novel, Notes on an Execution, women are the star of this story. Murderer Ansel Packer sits on death row, waiting to die. The countdown is on. Through wildly rich and intuitive prose, we learn of the lives of Ansel Packer’s mother, his ex-wife’s sister, and the policewoman who solves his case. It is through these stories of womanhood, that the exhausted narrative of the American serial killer and the overlooked women impacted by his violence is flipped on its head. In its place, Kukafka has created a stunning and unforgettable novel about resilience and survivors.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Danya about the erasure of women in true crime, the transformative power of writing in second person, her meditative writing process, and the research involved to write her latest novel, Notes on an Execution.
Kailey Brennan DelloRusso: In the introduction of the book, you explain that Notes on an Execution was created out of a desire to dissect the exhausted narrative of serial killers. “The one where you glorify average men who hurt women.” That is so perfectly put. Was there a specific moment for you that you were like okay enough is enough, or was it a growing realization?
Danya Kukafka: It was a growing realization that came over a period of decades. I grew up watching network crime TV, which I absolutely loved and still enjoy. Law and Order SUV always being my favorite. I grew up watching criminal minds with my mom every night before bed. We watched CSI: Miami, and all the Law and Orders. And I felt like, this cannot possibly be the whole story. We see this narrative over and over again. The show opens on the dead body, the detectives come in, they solve the murder, justice is served. Even as a teenager I had the thought, like, what about everybody else? And that has driven me for a really, really long time, into how I think about crime and particularly about violent men. So often they are reduced to stereotypes and the women who they kill are erased. And that is so frustrating to me. I’m tired of it.
KBD: Yeah. The whole true crime genre is so interesting to me because I’m like all about the new documentaries coming out and then I’m like wait. Why am I so excited to watch this? I’m usually left feeling unsettled.
DK: I’ve been wondering that for many, many years. As I got older and started thinking in a more feminist way about gender, about violence, and female vulnerability, I started realizing that the angle of the true crime world is really problematic. Like the note in the front of [my] book says “men become interesting when they start hurting women.” I think that is true for how true crime has been angled for many, many years. I wanted to flip that on its head a little bit.
KBD: Yeah, definitely. That’s what drew me to this novel too. And I was really struck by how you were able to give us the interiority of these women in such an honest way. I just felt like their desires, which were often messy or ugly were so accurate and created such a rich narrative. I was curious how did you, as a writer, get so close to your characters. Is it a lot of drafting and figuring them out along the way? Or do they come to you first before the plot?
DK: I believe that plot comes from character always but I also get so close through time. Just time sitting with them, time spent with them, drafting and redrafting and digging and digging until you reach that heart. And for me, that actually looks in a technical sense, like retyping. I retyped every scene of this book, many, many, many times. That’s my revision process- pasting it into a separate tab, and retyping from what I have. That I find is a way to just hone into every little detail. As flow becomes clear, so do character, so do sentences. You retype it enough times and eventually, it gets done. (Laughs)
KBD: Do you outline?
DK: Oh God. I try. I try to outline. Every time I sit down and I tell my agent I’m gonna outline this one, she just laughs in my face. I keep trying to outline and it doesn’t work for me. I ended up actually outlining this book as a totally different book that really didn’t work. It was told half from Ansel’s perspective over the entire span of his life and half from the perspective of a character who barely even exists anymore. Blue. I outlined a book that I thought was totally reasonable and feasible and I sent it to my agent. And it was boring. It was just not the right book and it didn’t have the right angle. She said to me, what about the women? And that’s what triggered the throwing away many years of work, redrafting completely, finding these women, and spending years with them. All that to say, tried outlining. Absolutely not.
Someone asked me recently if I had like drawers and drawers of thrown away manuscripts of ideas that don’t work. I was like, no, I don’t have any of those because when I have an idea that doesn’t work, I just change it until it does. I think that’s what happened here.
KBD: I’d love to talk about your use of second person for Ansel’s chapters. That can be such a tricky tense and I thought you did it brilliantly. Was that always your first choice when writing these chapters in Ansel’s perceptive?
DK: That’s a great question. I actually came quite late in the drafting process – I would say like three out of five years into writing this when I discovered the second person. Ansel had always been written in the third person and it felt really flat to me. It felt like something was missing. I was actually watching one of those many Ted Bundy documentaries and asked myself that question we were just talking about, which was why do we love this guy so much? Why do we love all these bad men so much? And I had this lightning bolt moment where I was like, we’re curious what it looks like in there, in their messed up heads. We’re morosely and morbidly wanting to see what it feels like to be that person. I have to put the reader inside of his head. It has to be “you”. I literally retyped it word for word, what I had from the third person into the second person and it just came alive. It was amazing. I really never had an experience quite like that.
KBD: Wow. Did you find after you had that lightning bolt moment any challenges with using that voice or did you just feel like this is it?
DK: It had been so challenging up to that point. And then I was like, oh, there it is. It was the last puzzle piece. I had spent a lot of time hemming and hawing over whether this was even a worthy story, why it was so flat, and why I couldn’t get it to feel alive. Once I hit that second person, I was like, aha, there it’s. And it’s funny – I don’t know how or why it changed it, but it definitely did.
KBD: Yeah. I feel like second person is this magical thing. I’ve had experiences and I know other writers that I’ve talked to have as well, where there’s a subject that’s really difficult and you’re just like not getting it. Then just playing around with second person- something happens. It’s so interesting.
DK: Totally. And it’s funny because I struggle reading a whole book in the second person sometimes but because this was already broken up in the way that it was, it worked for me. But again, I don’t think it could work as a full book.
KBD: So what is a typical writing day for you? Are you an everyday writer or what does that look like?
DK: Yes. I am an everyday writer. I think it has changed over the years between my first book and my second book. Now as I work on my third, it looks different for all of them. With my first book, I wrote while I was in school and working full-time. For my second book, this book, I had left my publishing job to write full-time and was trying to force myself to write five hours a day and found that to be absolutely miserable. And now I’ve found a halfway in which I now work as a literary agent. So I have a full-time job aside from writing, but it’s a very flexible full-time job. I’m able to sit down for that hour or two every morning, which I found is my really good sweet spot. So when I do sit down, it’s usually right after walking the dog and checking any urgent emails for my publishing job. Then I turn everything off. I light a little candle. I have a process journal and I keep track of the hours that I work. I find that that is a better marker for me than word count because often you just sit there for an hour and that’s fine- that counts (Laughs) I actually keep a really intensive process journal. I wrote a little bit about this on my Instagram page, if you wanna see more.
KBD: I actually remember seeing that!
DK: Oh great. I wanna do more posts like that because I do think people will find them helpful. But every day when I sit down, I log the number of hours that I write. I write down what I did that day. I write down what’s working, what’s not working, and what comes up next. I find that that’s just a really, really great way to remind myself that even if there are not a thousand words written that day or whatever your arbitrary goal is, you’re still doing the work. You’re still sitting there. You’re still turning everything off, living inside the story. And that’s what matters the most. That’s how you actually get the book written.
KBD: I love that. I’m going to try it.
DK: Please! I’m all about passing the word.
KBD: Well especially when you are revising, you can’t say oh I wrote 1000 words today so I can see how this would be helpful.
DK: I’m trying to look at it now – having really pushed myself in this incredibly grueling sort of self punishing way through writing book two – as more of an act of meditation and self-connection than the desired to prove myself or a job or whatever it is. It’s always gonna be work and it’s never quite gonna be fun, but I don’t think meditation is particularly fun either. (Laughs) So I’m trying to look at it as something I need to do for my soul and wellbeing rather than anything I guess more cruel.
KBD: Yeah. I love that. Any way you can make the work feel less like work is always a good thing. (Laughs)
DK: Exactly!
KBD: Since this book does take on the psychological elements of a killer, what kind of research did you have to do?
DK: I did quite a bit. So in terms of researching killers, I leaned pretty hard on the troupes that are already out there and tried to create a character that was true to himself, and not just a collection of tropes. I do believe that even the worst people in the world are people and they have their own character traits. They have a whole life aside from the bad things they’ve done. And I wanted to show that as well. But I wanted to show that along with not letting him off the hook.
In terms of murder stuff, I think I had a lot of that in the bank already from consuming so much of the media. But I, of course, did do some pretty serious philosophical research into crime. One of my favorite pieces is by Sarah Marshall in The Believer called “The End of Evil.” It’s about visiting the prison that Ted Bundy was executed in. It’s absolutely wonderful. It really questions the idea of the psychopath which I found completely fascinating. I had some quotes from that piece cut out and taped above my desk for a long time writing this book. The idea that calling someone a psychopath eliminates their humanity in a certain way. It’s a way to dismiss them instead of allowing ourselves to really be afraid of their humanity. I found that really fascinating.
And then in terms of other research, I had to do a lot of research into prisons. I actually hired a research assistant – shout out to Dylan Simburger! He was a Ph.D. student who lived in Houston, who was able to talk to ex correctional officers from the prison the book takes place in. He talked to some judges and some lawyers. We were both pretty wary of making contact with inmates but we found a couple of inmate websites that were really, really helpful in terms of daily life living in this specific prison. He helped me with the police procedural stuff as well. Research in that sense, in the really, really detailed sense, is my least favorite thing, which I know is rare for a writer. Most just love research. It’s not my jam. So I was thrilled to be able to hire someone who loves to do it.
KBD: So you have already given us lots of advice throughout this whole interview, but I didn’t know if there was a specific piece of advice, maybe when you were working on this novel, that you could give to writers who are working on their first novel. This is a selfish question because I’m currently working on my first. (Laughs)
DK: I will say the main thing I learned from this novel that I eally want to bring to my next novel is that the process is to point. Writing the book is the point, not to get published. I mean, publication is a whole other separate world from writing the actual book. The process is what you’re in it for. I think it’s really, really hard to remember that. I came to a certain point with this book where I just, emotionally, completely gave up on the idea of selling it, because it was not working. I was like, this is just not gonna be a book. I had to sit down and ask myself, if you never sell this book, if nothing ever comes of it, if you’re a giant failure, et cetera, et cetera, would you need to write it anyway, for yourself? And the answer was yes. That was how I managed to continue – by realizing that I had to write it no matter what happened and I needed the process of finishing it. I think, that for me, that’s how I’m gonna start looking at it going forward, you know?
Those hours you sit at the desk, that’s the point of it all. It’s not actually in service of a larger goal. A lot of debut writers think, oh, once I get published, this is gonna be easier. My life’s gonna change. And it definitely does not get easier. The process is always going be what it is. Relishing that and realizing the whole point of writing is the physical writing, the act of sitting at your desk and doing that meditation every day. That’s why you’re in it. Just remember that and take that for what it is. That’s easier said than done (laughs) but I’m gonna try that next time around.
KBD: I love that so much. That really is key advice because it takes so many hours and even years.
DK: Yeah. And it can feel never-ending. Looking at it like there may be an end in sight is, I think, kind of fruitless because ideally there’s never an end in sight. You’ll always be writing. Knowing that those hours are the point of it all is really helpful for me.
Danya Kukafka is the internationally bestselling author of Girl in Snow. She is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She works as a literary agent.