Gina Nutt: “Try Hard” is told through second-person narration. What drew you to this perspective for this particular story? What did second person achieve that first or third person may have missed?
Kate Doyle: It wasn’t a choice for this specific piece so much as I’ve generally been writing in second person a lot lately. I like its immediacy, and how it kind of evokes the inescapability of being yourself, caught in your own perspective. In this piece specifically, I like how it gives a feeling of solitude and isolation—that feels right for this character’s experience of arriving in a new place.

I suppose writing with “I” suggests telling a story to someone who’s listening, while “you” suggests something more like telling the story to yourself, trying to make sense of it. I like stories that are told not because the narrator knows what it’s about or why it matters, but because they don’t know, they’re trying to figure that out by telling it.

GN: This story details the experience of a couple who recently moved abroad and are attempting to befriend their neighbors. How did this premise—a narrative of strangers—evolve from its early seeds through revision?  What considerations were on your mind as you zeroed in on the dynamics, the friction, in how these characters relate to each other, as well as themselves?
KD: I moved to Amsterdam with my partner in 2022 and I found myself trying to write down a lot of that experience. I think I had some sense I would fictionalize these notes eventually, so I was really writing into a gray area between recording our lives and inventing things. We really did have neighbors with a balcony adjoining ours, and the dynamic with them did have a kind of one-sided intensity. I think our concept of what it is to be neighbors was more culturally specific to the U.S. than I’d realized. Whereas in Amsterdam it’s often said—though this is a broad generalization—that it's a small country and very likely if you’re Dutch, you’ve lived here your whole life, you already have your friends, you don’t need new ones. So we needed our neighbors much more than they needed us, because they had a whole life and we knew no one yet. We felt very needy! There was a discomfort in it I couldn’t resolve and wanted to write about. As for revision, I wrote and revised this and then put it down for while, so I’m trying to remember. I know I shared a draft with an editor friend who wanted to really see in a potent flash of detail how hard they’re trying to be good hosts—so that’s how the moment of not just vacuuming, but deep vacuuming behind the sofa, came to be.

GN: Tell me about how you approach your sentences. They are so airtight and sharp. I’m curious about their connection to the story’s interest in language, interpretation and translation.
KD:  I don’t really know how to explain this exactly—it’s one of the more mysterious parts of writing for me. But I love syntax, the technical work of it, and the range of possibilities it offers for evoking emotional states and moods and ways of being in the world. Sentences are what most excited me when I was first becoming serious about writing: more than devising the big-picture plot, I loved the minutiae of grammar and the subtle effects of phrasing something one way versus another. Books like Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte and How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish and How Fiction Works by James Wood made a big impression on me. There’s also this tiny, beautiful essay by the playwright Sarah Ruhl, which I was just re-reading, that really expresses the essential thrill of sentences. She says, “There is drama in the linguistic progression: what word will follow what word? I might call this the drama of the sentence, how it will unfold, how it will go up and down, how it will stop.” For me all the little structural choices of sentences are a way of communicating how a character sees the world. So then inevitably I think most of what I write ends up having themes about interpretation and misinterpretation, whether that’s across cultures as with the neighbors, or in close relationships as with the character and her boyfriend. 

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
KD: I often read sort of narrowly, in that I read a lot of a certain kind of book: narratives (fiction or nonfiction) that are very internal, kind of probing and essayistic, that really keep you inside the narrator’s mind. Two books like this that I loved recently are Practice by Rosalind Brown and The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş. And one of my favorites of the past several years is The Long Form by Kate Briggs. Going further back, Greta Gerwig’s films have been a huge influence on me. Frances Ha in particular really unlocked something for me as a very young writer, both in terms of it what was conceivable to write about, and what kind of language might convey it.

Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved live theater too—the immediacy of it, and its emphasis on a certain kind of collaboration. I used to direct plays as a college student, and I think as a writer I’m always drawing on those years spent in a rehearsal room just closely watching people interact. But I sometimes think a key thing that made me a writer, rather than staying with theater, is how you don’t need anyone’s permission to write, you don’t need a rehearsal room or actors or funding. You can always, no matter what, sit down with a pen and write.

Recently I’m back onstage for the first time in years, because since moving to Amsterdam I’ve been doing improv comedy. It’s great to have a creative practice like this where you invariably laugh a lot. And I do find it really useful for writing, because it’s working with the same kind of instinct. From a small piece of inspiration—a one-word suggestion from the audience, in the case of improv—how do you bring a world into being and sustain it? How do you find out its logic and what it’s wanting to become, and communicate that? How do you work with the unexpected, and stay flexible? It’s similar to writing in all these ways, but it’s all happening live, the audience is right there with you. It’s a good exercise in just creating for the moment, for a community: once it’s over, it never happens again.