Procrastination, Film-Making and Niche Porn: Chris Killen on In Real Life

Chris Killen first began to attract attention with the publication of his debut novel The Bird Room in 2009. A sparse, eliptical love story, mixing romance and sleaze, the book earned comparisons with authors like Tao Lin and Toby Litt. His much-anticipated follow-up, In Real Life, is the story of a love triangle stretching over a ten year period. Killen follows his characters as they drift through their twenties, with all the awful jobs, unsatisfying relationships and low-level sense of alienation this involves. Told with deadpan humour, the novel is an insightful look at the lives of young people in the present day, particularly the pressures of existing on social media.

In addition to his novels, Killen is also a member of film-making collective Metal Man, alongside authors Joe Stretch and Socrates Adams, and their film Wizard's Way won the Best Comedy Feature award at the London Independent Film Festival. Here, he talks about procrastination, crap jobs, and his writing process.

In Real Life review

In Real Life is quite stylistically different from your first novel, The Bird Room - was there a conscious decision to, move away from your 'alt.lit'-ish style, or was it a more natural development?

Am I allowed to disagree? Meaning: I don’t know if it is that different, stylistically. I suppose The Bird Room was a bit more playful with language – more ‘poetic’ perhaps, trying harder, sentence-by-sentence to show off, to do some first-novel cartwheels, etc. – but the more concrete, deadpan, minimalist style that a lot of In Real Life uses is something I personally think of as more (not less) closely aligned with ‘alt lit’/internet writing/whatever you want to call it.

But what do I know.

In one of In Real Life's plot strands, your character Paul talks about the pressures of being a writer on Twitter - seeing people talking about their writing methods and word counts - what's your experience of being a writer on social media like? Is it a help, or a distraction?

I don’t know. For the most part, I consider social media as an opportunity to amuse myself, so anything I usually contribute to it is something I do during ‘down time’. I guess what I mean is, I don’t like roll my sleeves up and groan and wheeze as I attempt to craft the perfect tweet – something that will both be entertaining and also sell a thousand books. (Usually I’ll just make some sort of weird/shit joke that probably does more harm than good re: selling books.)

In another plot strand, you look at some of the more comically depressing jobs available for young people today - what's the oddest job you've ever done? 

I’ve done pretty much all the jobs the characters in In Real Life do. I’ve taught writing, worked in call centres, worked in retail and – and this is definitely the oddest one – I too have been employed (like Paul) to write nonsensical paragraphs of dense, keyword-rich copy for unpleasant niche porn sites for a salary of roughly 0.3 cents per word, paid weekly via Paypal. It was completely miserable. I only lasted about two and a half months.  

Your characters are living in the strange hinterland between university and 'proper adulthood' - it seems like this is a relatively underexplored time in fiction, do you have any thoughts on why that is (if it is)?

I’m guessing (although, again, what the fuck do I really know about anything at all) that perhaps it’s perhaps a (relatively) new phenomenon? (i.e. people just not really fully growing up or taking on the kinds of responsibilities – job, family, etc. – that would usually make them grow up, and instead just kind of drifting around in a perpetual adolescence, like the majority of my characters.)

Maybe it’s because the kinds of people who would be most interested to read about and – therefore – interested in publishing that kind of stuff are also probably in a similar situation themselves, and are therefore not high enough up the publishing food chain to have any clout if they said, ‘This is relatable, let’s publish more stuff like this’?? (They probably just work at the reception desk of the publisher’s, or in the Subway across the road.)

Has the time you've spent working on the film Wizard's Way influenced the way you approach your writing at all, or are they totally separate disciplines for you?

Filmmaking/screenwriting and novel writing are, at the moment, pretty separate disciplines for me. I’ve done all film stuff in collaboration with two other people (Socrates Adams and Joe Stretch) and a lot of that process has been about a seemingly endless discussion – just going over and over ideas and characters and situations, forming a world slowly, by committee. And by the time we have a finished script, it’s often hard to remember who suggested what.

I suppose novel writing is sort of the same process, except I do the majority of work on my own, just churning my thoughts over and over, and then, when I have to finally have show another human being what I’ve done, it’s because I’ve reached a point where I feel utterly ashamed and dreadful about my idea and I need help. But then (sometimes) they’ll look at what I’ve given them and say, ‘Yeah, it’s alright actually.’

One thing that might have carried over from films to novels, not on purpose but by osmosis, is the idea of ‘narrative structure’ – that miserably familiar three-act template that dictates like 99% of mainstream films. I’ve become uncomfortably aware of that shape now, in pretty much everything I do – but I’m not sure that it’s actually any good for my writing.

Which modern writers do you most enjoy reading?

I really enjoy Tao Lin’s writing – his poetry, novels, short stories, non-fiction. Just anything he does, really. I like Miranda July – but who doesn’t?? I’m enjoying the new Ben Lerner novel (10:04) very much at the moment. I really love the last two Nicholson Baker ‘Paul Chowder’ novels (The Anthologist and Travelling Sprinkler). And Jesus: Rebecca Perry’s poetry collection Beauty/Beauty kind of blew my imaginary hat off recently, too. Its so good you kind of have to squint a little bit as you read it.

What do you do when you're procrastinating over your novels?

I’ve been getting back into playing music more and more, which is something I spent most of my time doing about fifteen years ago. I started a band (Hot Shorts) this time last year with two friends and we play “sarcastic grunge,” I guess you’d call it.

And I spent about the last two years not really reading anything except the display of my phone, so I’ve just about finally managed to stop doing that and begun reading real actual books again, which is good.

But apart from that, I don’t know. I’ve become kind of sick of the internet.

What are you working on next?

I’ve just just started on a new novel – so I’m guessing it’ll be finished (in first draft) by around 2025? My only real tentative hope is to publish it some point before the end of the world.