Anna Snoekstra is the author of the new suspense thriller Only Daughter. She has worked as a screenwriter, music video director, and film reviewer, and she lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Q: How did you come up with
the idea for Only Daughter?
A: After seeing the Ingrid
Bergman film Anastasia, I was fascinated with the idea of imposters. The
impersonation of missing persons has happened countless times throughout
history. Martin Guerre in 16th century France; Anastasia Nikolaevna in Russia
and Walter Collins in Seattle, both in the 1920s.
I was really interested to
see how this scenario would play out in a seemingly perfect suburban world. I
was curious to play with ideas of women performing certain roles: Wife, mother,
daughter.
In Only Daughter I took this
performance to its most extreme with a woman impersonating the decade-long
missing Rebecca Winter. She impersonates someone that meant so many different
things to the different people in her life and has to navigate the dualities of
that performance.
Of course, there is one
person who knows she is an imposter, and that is the person responsible for
Rebecca’s disappearance.
Q: Did you plot out the
entire book before you started writing, or did you make changes along the way?
A: I like to know where my
plot is going before I start out, but I also try and embrace surprises along
the way. A big part of writing is trusting your judgment and embracing your
subconscious choices.
For me it helps to get into
the character’s head if I know the events that are going to be thrown their way
but not necessarily how they will react to them. It makes me feel like I’m
living the story along with them.
Q: Why did you decide to
write the sections set in 2014 in first person and the 2003 sections in third
person?
A: Good question! It was
something I thought about for a long time. It was really important for me that
the voices were very different, so that the reader got a strong sense of the
unique characters and perspectives from the tone straight away.
Unreliable narrators are
something I really enjoy in fiction. My first-person narrator in 2014, the
imposter, lies to everyone she meets, but she is honest with the reader.
My third-person narrator,
Rebecca Winter in 2003, seems honest and straightforward, but isn’t. Using
third person allowed me to take a step back from Rebecca. We see all the things
she does, but not necessarily why she does them.
Q: You also are a
screenwriter. How do the two types of writing coexist for you?
A: Each makes me love the
other more. When I am in the middle of a script I crave the freedom of prose.
When I’m writing a novel and I have a hundred loose ends and am lost in all the
detail, I crave the simplicity and structure of screenwriting.
They are very different ways
of writing, but I think each makes me better at the other.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: I’m working on my second
novel! It’s called Dolls and I couldn’t be more excited about it! It’s about a
would-be journalist who gets in way over her head while trying to uncover a mystery
in her small town.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: Just how pleased I am to
be included on your blog! Thank you.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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