Author Kate Simants talks to us about her latest novel Freeze and the skills needed to be a ghost-writer.
Kate Simants is a writer of psychological thrillers and crime fiction.
After a decade working in the UK television industry, specialising in investigative documentaries, police shows and undercover work, Kate relocated from London to Bristol to concentrate on writing. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Brunel University and another in Crime Fiction from the University of East Anglia, where she was the recipient of the UEA Literary Festival Scholarship. Her first novel, Lock Me In was shortlisted for the 2015 Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger, and was published by HarperCollins.
Kate won the 2019 Bath Novel Award with her second novel The Knocks, which is published by Viper under the title A Ruined Girl. Kate's latest novel, Freeze, was published by Viper in March and is available on our catalogue.
Put it this way – I told such shocking and audacious stories to my teachers about what I got up to out of school that they’d often phone my parents to check. In one Monday morning round of ‘what did everyone do at the weekend?’ I concocted an elaborate tale of kidnap and violence that ended with me having a series of special chats with the head. So if ‘being a serial liar’ counts as storytelling, then yes!
It’s a bit of a grizzly story actually. On the morning of my 27th birthday I was in Oldham working on a fly-on-the-wall police show, filming officers cutting a man down from a tree where he’d hanged himself. And I just thought – I don’t want to do this any more. But the experience I’d gathered over the years of working undercover and on police-based shows stood me in good stead for becoming a crime writer.
Oh definitely. I’d barely entered anything like that before but it was based close to where I live and I thought, why not? My book A Ruined Girl was the first crime novel they’d chosen as a winner, and that recognition was just such a boost.
Freeze was essentially my lockdown novel – I wanted something really hooky and pacy that would keep me entertained while I wrote it, but that would also require me to occupy somewhere geographically very different. It’s about a reality TV production that’s being shot in the Arctic, on a small ship. When I worked in TV people always wanted to know about what went on behind the scenes, what presenters were like when the cameras were off – so I wanted to lift the veil of that a bit.
The truth of it is that there’s far less glitz and glamour in TV than most people think! In Frozen Out, the fictional show in Freeze, everyone has ulterior motives for being on the show, and that plus the dangerous cost-cutting that’s been going on means that the contestants are in far greater danger than they signed up for.
The last few months have been eaten up by my day job: I’m a script editor for a history podcast. I try not to talk too much about my books while I’m writing them because it can feel like I’m putting them in boxes somehow! But the next book may have something of a supernatural element – I want to keep myself on my toes!
Listening is the number one criterion, I think. Not just to the story but the bits they don’t say – and hearing the threads that connect what might seem like disparate stories of people’s lives. I ghostwrote a memoir a couple of years ago for a lady who had advanced cancer – she had young children and wanted to get her story down for them to read when they were older, if she didn’t make it.
When I sent her the finished book, she said that she felt like she could really make sense of a lot of elements of her story – that this led to that. She felt the process to be incredibly cathartic, and I loved being able to facilitate that. But you do need to be able to pack away your preconceptions and your ego when the book isn’t really meant to be your book.
I think we’re done with that anthology for now, but I do like writing a short story here and there. Often I’ll have just the kernel of a story and I’ll write it as a short just to see if it goes anywhere…
Oh goodness, loads of books! I’m appearing at a couple of writing festivals this year and like to have read at least one book by the other participants – this week I have Tom Hindle’s A Fatal Crossing and Helen Fields’ new one, The Institution. I’m also about to dive into Queen K by Sarah Thomas, a thriller about a tutor to a super-rich family.
The book I’ve bought most copies of to give to friends is Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. An absolute masterpiece of characterisation, I must have read it a dozen times. But also, and especially for those wishing to write: anything at all by George Saunders. Along with Kurt Vonnegut, he’s my literary hero – there’s just like a gleaming pearl of perfect humanity at the centre of everything he writes.
I can only type with two fingers. I’m doing it right now – just my index fingers and very occasionally my thumb on the space bar. I can do it really fast, but it does look utterly ridiculous!
