Jeff Cottrill talks to Debbie Bateman about his latest novel.
1. In your novel, Hate Story, the line between make-believe and reality often blurs. As a film critic, the protagonist Jackie is obsessed with movies, but she is also trying to uncover the real story about a man who was the object of extreme hatred on social media. Would you like to share your thoughts on why people enjoy movies, and how that relates to the way people sometimes fictionalize themselves and others on social media?
Movies are a form of escapism. They allow us to forget the complexities of the real world with temporary fantasies. Even the classics and art films Jackie loves are an escape for her. Although some of these movies deal with realistic social issues (like Bicycle Thieves or Do the Right Thing), each is still wrapped up in a convenient packaged form that aligns more with the artist’s vision than with accurate reality. We create similar packaged visions for ourselves when we develop public personas on the Internet—as if we’re directing our own biopics. In Hate Story, Jackie is forced to confront real life and all its non-contrived unpredictability when she investigates Paul Shoreditch’s life story, and also when a fellow social-media user confronts her about her online trolling persona. She learns with a shock how she has used both film and the Internet to isolate herself from reality.
2. Throughout your novel, we are privy to Jackie’s inner voice. These outbursts of private thoughts and feelings are amongst the few acts of honesty in the novel. And yet, many of her thoughts and feelings are never shared. This adds a deep layer to the story. When did you first discover Jackie’s inner voice? How did this inner voice help to shape the story?
Jackie’s voice came naturally to me—I just had her think and feel what I would likely think and feel in the situation, but with more sarcasm and swearing. I conceived Jackie, in part, as a person who is tough and confident on the Internet, but who is socially inept and has trouble confronting people in the real world. This is why her inner voice plays such a big role: it’s the only place where she can be honest without worrying about the consequences. Her private thoughts become especially important to the plot when she hears one story about Paul that makes her deeply conflicted: her gut emotion combined with social conformity make her feel obligated to believe the story, even though her sense of reason wants her to step back and be more objective. I’m guessing this is a common reaction these days to Internet gossip.
3. You make Paul, a victim of relentless bullying, difficult to like. He sings off-key and without warning, and he has such poor hygiene he smells really bad. And yet, as the story progressed, I found myself registering with his humanity and the magnitude of his mistreatment. It’s a bold choice to make the victim so unlikeable. What were the advantages and challenges of using an unlikeable victim in your novel?
Part of the fun of making Paul so repugnant was that I wanted to tease the reader. Like many of the characters, Paul is larger-than-life and somewhat Dickensian, and my goal was to pique the reader’s curiosity about him rather than make him “likeable” (which is such a subjective concept anyway). I deliberately made him an enigma for the first part of the novel—revealing him mostly through online bashing and his mother’s biased recollection. This leaves the reader wondering: “Is he really as bad as they say? What did he do?” The key to making it work was to stay within Jackie’s point of view, so the reader discovers the truth about Paul as she does. It’s during Chuck McMahon’s story that Jackie (and, I hope, the reader) really starts to view Paul as a human being rather than just a freak case study.
4. A large part of the conflicts in the novel relate to people’s perceptions of what others say. This is intensified by the fact that much of what other people say turns out to be unreliable because it is said recklessly and without ownership on social media. How did the idea of truth and perceptions influence the writing of this novel?
We seem to be living in an anti-truth generation, and part of the reason is that it’s so easy to spread misinformation and distortion on social media. We’ve seen how Russian misinformation influenced the 2016 United States election and how widely anti-vaccination lies have spread online during the pandemic, for example. But Hate Story was particularly influenced by the current notion that we have to believe every sexual-misconduct accusation we hear, blindly, whether or not the individual case carries credibility. Yes, it’s important to take accusations seriously and investigate them, but blind groupthink is dangerous. That’s how witch hunts start, both literal and metaphorical ones, and it legitimizes gossip. And it frightens me how easy it is to ruin a person’s reputation with a reckless accusation online, due to mob mentality—and that some otherwise smart, rational people I know think this is a good thing.
5. What was your intention in writing this book? How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed: as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point; as a cultural event/phenomenon; or as an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
Although my main intention was to tell a gripping, funny and entertaining story, I also hope that readers come away from the book re-evaluating how they deal with other people, both online and off—and questioning everything they read and hear. I wanted Hate Story to be a timely depiction (if also an exaggerated one) of online toxicity and the way we respond to it. When Twitter mobs want to “cancel” or humiliate someone, we have to ask ourselves honestly if the virtual public stoning is deserved or if this is just schoolyard bullying on a mass scale. I’m just not convinced that Justine Sacco or even Amy Cooper is the devil. People make mistakes, and forgiveness and empathy are often better choices than revenge or punishment. While social media is wonderful in many ways, it’s still far from a bastion of nuance or justice.
6. With what other book will this work make a good comparison? Does the protagonist or indeed other main characters in the book remind you of main characters from another literary work? Are any ideas in this book related to ideas in a comparable work?
On one level, I’d like to think Hate Story follows a tradition set by the great over-the-top satirical novels of the 1960s and ’70s, like Vonnegut’s best works and Catch-22 and The World According to Garp (though not as good as those, of course). But thematically, the novel was largely inspired by Jon Ronson’s 2015 nonfiction book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which recounts many real-life incidents of ordinary people becoming unwitting celebrities due to online mobs ruining their lives. Meghan Daum’s The Problem with Everything is another nonfiction book I had in mind, in the way it questions extreme woke-ism and political/cultural conformity. The plot structure of Hate Story is a loose parody of the movie Citizen Kane. Kathy McDougal, the cat-obsessed online influencer from the book, may have been subconsciously informed by Titania McGrath—the loony, far-left activist character created by British comedian Andrew Doyle.
7. How long did it take you to write the first draft? What was the core of the developmental process between drafts? As you moved through drafts, were you working mostly on the structure, the story world, aspects of style and language, or something else?
I began the first draft at the start of January 2019 and finished it in the spring of the following year, while making occasional revisions to earlier chapters whenever I thought of changes I wanted to make. I always had the Citizen Kane-style structure clear in my mind, so virtually no revision was required there. In addition to cutting excess wordage, most of the revisions between drafts were about character—making Jackie more relatable and Paul’s mother less of a straw-man caricature, for example. One big mistake I made in the first draft is that I made middle-aged Paul (in Morty Bozzer’s story) too much of an innocent. I still wanted him to be somewhat childlike, but total wide-eyed innocence (while appropriate for the earlier childhood flashbacks) wasn’t believable when he was forty. So I added some self-awareness to him as a sign of maturity.
8. Are there threads of the story that were not told? Were there ideas that you couldn’t use? Were there threads you had to keep for a later work because of editorial reasons or plans for a sequel?
A couple of long-ish scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor. One was a surreal dream sequence in which Jackie finds herself in the courtroom in To Kill a Mockingbird, on the stand as a witness against Paul, with Kathy whipping cats at him from the prosecution side. My mentor at the Humber School for Writers advised me to cut it, feeling it might have worked in a comedy movie, but not in prose. And there was an early scene about Jackie getting irritated by a fellow audience member at the movies; its main purpose was to foreshadow her later behaviour, and it had good character moments, but I ultimately decided it added nothing to the plot and slowed the pace down. I’d still be open to reworking either of these scenes as self-contained short stories, though—or even resurrecting them as DVD-style “deleted scenes”.
9. What was the most satisfying aspect about writing this book (other than perhaps the satisfaction of finishing it)?
The most satisfying part was creating Hate Story almost exactly as I wanted it to be—and getting it published that way by a legitimate press. I was not trying to conform to any genre restrictions or formula, and I did not want to tone down the racy subject matter, nor dumb down the humour and references. Nor was I interested in making Jackie a conventional heroine in a standard mystery novel. This obviously made the book a lot less marketable, and searching for a publisher was a tough slog. But in the end, I was fortunate enough to find Dragonfly Publishing, a small, independent press in Australia, who really “got” the book and asked for minimal changes to it. Many artists have trouble getting their visions to the public in the forms they intended, so I got lucky in that respect.
10. Other than finding the most effective way of telling the story, were you conscious of any particular literary ambitions such as developing a distinctive voice or narrative style, or disrupting standard reader expectations of the genre?
I wanted Hate Story to feel like a movie as much as a novel. Since Jackie is obsessed with film, I thought she would imagine events and stories through a cinematic filter, and I wanted the reader to experience that. (This approach backfired in one writing workshop, in which a participant refused to offer feedback because the chapter draft “felt like television” instead of fiction.) This is why I structured the long flashback sequences with occasional, sudden present-day interruptions: I viewed each one as a long movie flashback that would suddenly cut back to the present-day storyteller now and then, like in Amadeus, for example. It even influenced the design of the book. It was my idea to add a “DVD menu” page in a couple of spots, making the reader a DVD viewer choosing between the main feature and bonus content.
Jeff Cottrill is a fiction writer, poet, journalist and spoken-word artist in Toronto. He has headlined in literary series throughout Canada, the U.K., the U.S., France and Ireland since 2001. His performance style is influenced by slam conventions, but subverts them with wit, ironic humour and a satirical tone. He is the former Literary Editor of Burning Effigy Press and has had poetry and stories published in several international anthologies, from Canada to Australia. Other work has appeared in The South Shore Review and The Dreaming Machine. Hate Story is Jeff’s seventh or eighth attempt at a first novel. http://www.JeffCottrill.com