In particular there’s one Greek myth that feels like the backbone of the book. Your novel is about determinism, too, and it also goes to fiction to find a way to talk about it. I think it probably appeared because the book was about being stuck with yourself – your place in the world, your choices, your limits – and time travel gave another way to nose around that.

Muscle wasn’t always going to have time travel, no, though that came reasonably quickly it wasn’t long before Box sat down to read a time travel story. It was as if I had to do the writing first and then make the book later, which is probably not the usual way to go about a novel. I had all these parts, and a sense of how they should fit together. Then, as I redrafted, I realised that what I’d actually been doing was stocking a workshop, so that (most of the time) when I needed a particular piece for the book I was making, I just had to reach out and it was already there. I don’t know if it was because I worked on the novel for so long, but it felt like I’d written it around myself, until I couldn’t quite get out and there wasn’t much hope of a reader making their way in. The first complete draft had most (but not all) of the same parts as the finished book, but they were tangled, maybe impenetrable.

I wrestled with the structure of Muscle a lot. And because I’m a little awed by both your short stories and by Everything Under. I am so glad that you liked Muscle, it means a lot, not least because you were about the first person to say something nice about it as it first stuck a toe out into the world. Did writing about violence impact the way the novel was written, or was it the other way around? It’s a novel entangled in violence, so much violence you find yourself hardly noticing it by the end. How much did you have to wrestle with this structure? Was this always going to be a novel with time travel? Each doll surprised me more than the last.

Reading Muscle I kept thinking of it like a series of Russian dolls: one inside the other, an endless number of them. Daisy Johnson and Alan Trotter discuss their latest novels, how they approach research, and the ways in which myths, horror movies and detective fiction influence their writing.

Everything under johnson