Kate Taylor is a Toronto writer and cultural journalist. She is the author of Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen. She has an arts column at The Globe and Mail and before that served as theatre critic, winning two Nathan Cohen Awards for her reviews. Kate Taylor was born in France and raised in Ottawa. Her new novel is A Man in Uniform.
1. How would you summarize your new book in one sentence?
A Man in Uniform is a political detective story set in Paris of the Belle Epoque and inspired by the notorious Dreyfus Affair.
2. How long did it take you to write this book? I began research for the book, an idea I had conceived several years earlier, while I was on maternity leave. My son is now 6 ½! So, six years, but I did not work on it continuously except during one five-month leave from my job at The Globe and Mail during which I wrote the first draft. Otherwise I revised and edited it during holidays and weekends.
3. Where is your favourite place to write?
I write at my desk in my office in my house. I am not sure if that is my favourite place, it’s just the place I work, but it does have a particularly nice little chandelier and some blue and white curtains I have always liked. It could use a lot more bookshelves and a door.
4. How do you choose your characters’ names?
A few of the characters are actual historical figures bearing their real names, but most of them are fictional and, since they are French, I needed names that were French and not complete clichés but also easily recognized and pronounced by English speakers. I gave all the characters common French first names. Some of the last names I just made up in my head, but one great source for me was a list I found on the Internet of the 100 most common surnames in France.
5. How many drafts do you go through?
Well, one writer’s draft is another writer’s minor revision, but I would say this book went through three significantly different drafts that included major plot changes. Draft one became draft two at the behest of my agent; draft two became draft three at the behest of Doubleday Canada, but along the way draft two also had some serious tweaking before it went to Doubleday, while draft three had another major rewrite and then a major set of cuts before it was ready for publication.
6. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
7. If your book were to become a movie, who would you like to see star in it?
A Canadian A-list: Paul Gross as François Dubon, Martha Burns as his wife Geneviève, Kristen Thomson as his mistress Madeleine and Sarah Polley as the mysterious widow who visits his office.
8. What’s your favourite city in the world?
Ottawa
9. If you could talk to any writer living or dead who would it be, and what would you ask?
That’s a toughy: I generally find art more gripping than artists. That said, if there is a writer I admire whose biography remains obscure, it would be Jane Austen. Given the ironic gap between her life and the happy endings she created for her characters, I would ask her if she regretted that she never married.
10. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind??
No, no music. I would find that distracting.
11. Who is the first person who gets to you read your manuscript?
In this instance my first reader was my agent Dean Cooke, but my husband is also always an earlier reader.
12. Do you have a guilty pleasure read?
Decorating magazines. I particularly like to read them in the bath. Actually, I mainly just look at the pictures.
13. What’s on your nightstand right now?
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction by Brian Boyd. He argues that the human taste for fictional storytelling is an evolutionary adaptation that encourages our minds to imagine what action we might take in the face of different eventualities.
14. What is the first book you remember reading?
The first books I remember reading to myself were the Nancy Drew mystery stories.
15. Did you always want to be a writer?
I wanted to be a journalist since the age of 15. I had no ambitions to write fiction until I had the idea for my first novel – in my thirties.
16. What do you drink or eat while you write?
Tea and cookies
17. Typewriter, laptop, or pen & paper?
I always write on a desktop computer. I find laptops hard on my neck and I find pen and paper too slow for writing and too cumbersome for revising.
18. What did you do immediately after hearing that you were being published for the very first time?
There wasn’t really I moment when someone first told me I would be published. I have published journalism since I was a teenager, if only in student papers at first, and the route to publication of my first novel was a gradual process of revising a well-received but unpublishable first draft, finding an agent and finding the right publisher. One turning point was a letter of refusal from Penguin Canada that kindly included a reader’s report recommending against accepting the submitted manuscript but full of useful criticism. It was very helpful in revising, and certainly made me realize that I would be published eventually. It took another five years.
19. How do you decide which narrative point of view to write from?
Point of view is central to how fiction is told but the choice of first, second or third person, limited or omniscient, is often self-evident. For example, A Man in Uniform is a detective story: all mystery fiction must be told by a limited narrator; an omniscient one would be able to tell you whodunnit on the very first page. It is told entirely from the point of view of its hero, François Dubon: no action takes place unless he is present. The choice of third person rather than first felt natural partly because it is the convention of the genre and partly because I am not a man.
20. What is the best gift someone could give a writer?
Kate Taylor is a Toronto writer and cultural journalist. She is the author of Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen. She has an arts column at The Globe and Mail and before that served as theatre critic, winning two Nathan Cohen Awards for her reviews. Kate Taylor was born in France and raised in Ottawa. Her new novel is A Man in Uniform.
1. How would you summarize your new book in one sentence?
A Man in Uniform is a political detective story set in Paris of the Belle Epoque and inspired by the notorious Dreyfus Affair.
2. How long did it take you to write this book?
I began research for the book, an idea I had conceived several years earlier, while I was on maternity leave. My son is now 6 ½! So, six years, but I did not work on it continuously except during one five-month leave from my job at The Globe and Mail during which I wrote the first draft. Otherwise I revised and edited it during holidays and weekends.
3. Where is your favourite place to write?
I write at my desk in my office in my house. I am not sure if that is my favourite place, it’s just the place I work, but it does have a particularly nice little chandelier and some blue and white curtains I have always liked. It could use a lot more bookshelves and a door.
4. How do you choose your characters’ names?
A few of the characters are actual historical figures bearing their real names, but most of them are fictional and, since they are French, I needed names that were French and not complete clichés but also easily recognized and pronounced by English speakers. I gave all the characters common French first names. Some of the last names I just made up in my head, but one great source for me was a list I found on the Internet of the 100 most common surnames in France.
5. How many drafts do you go through?
Well, one writer’s draft is another writer’s minor revision, but I would say this book went through three significantly different drafts that included major plot changes. Draft one became draft two at the behest of my agent; draft two became draft three at the behest of Doubleday Canada, but along the way draft two also had some serious tweaking before it went to Doubleday, while draft three had another major rewrite and then a major set of cuts before it was ready for publication.
6. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
7. If your book were to become a movie, who would you like to see star in it?
A Canadian A-list: Paul Gross as François Dubon, Martha Burns as his wife Geneviève, Kristen Thomson as his mistress Madeleine and Sarah Polley as the mysterious widow who visits his office.
8. What’s your favourite city in the world?
Ottawa
9. If you could talk to any writer living or dead who would it be, and what would you ask?
That’s a toughy: I generally find art more gripping than artists. That said, if there is a writer I admire whose biography remains obscure, it would be Jane Austen. Given the ironic gap between her life and the happy endings she created for her characters, I would ask her if she regretted that she never married.
10. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind??
No, no music. I would find that distracting.
11. Who is the first person who gets to you read your manuscript?
In this instance my first reader was my agent Dean Cooke, but my husband is also always an earlier reader.
12. Do you have a guilty pleasure read?
Decorating magazines. I particularly like to read them in the bath. Actually, I mainly just look at the pictures.
13. What’s on your nightstand right now?
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction by Brian Boyd. He argues that the human taste for fictional storytelling is an evolutionary adaptation that encourages our minds to imagine what action we might take in the face of different eventualities.
14. What is the first book you remember reading?
The first books I remember reading to myself were the Nancy Drew mystery stories.
15. Did you always want to be a writer?
I wanted to be a journalist since the age of 15. I had no ambitions to write fiction until I had the idea for my first novel – in my thirties.
16. What do you drink or eat while you write?
Tea and cookies
17. Typewriter, laptop, or pen & paper?
I always write on a desktop computer. I find laptops hard on my neck and I find pen and paper too slow for writing and too cumbersome for revising.
18. What did you do immediately after hearing that you were being published for the very first time?
There wasn’t really I moment when someone first told me I would be published. I have published journalism since I was a teenager, if only in student papers at first, and the route to publication of my first novel was a gradual process of revising a well-received but unpublishable first draft, finding an agent and finding the right publisher. One turning point was a letter of refusal from Penguin Canada that kindly included a reader’s report recommending against accepting the submitted manuscript but full of useful criticism. It was very helpful in revising, and certainly made me realize that I would be published eventually. It took another five years.
19. How do you decide which narrative point of view to write from?
Point of view is central to how fiction is told but the choice of first, second or third person, limited or omniscient, is often self-evident. For example, A Man in Uniform is a detective story: all mystery fiction must be told by a limited narrator; an omniscient one would be able to tell you whodunnit on the very first page. It is told entirely from the point of view of its hero, François Dubon: no action takes place unless he is present. The choice of third person rather than first felt natural partly because it is the convention of the genre and partly because I am not a man.
20. What is the best gift someone could give a writer?
Time
A Man in Uniform