SmokeLong Quarterly

One of the things I loved about Nevers was the narrative voice. In a lot of the pieces, the voice has a mix of humor and sadness and–I’m sure there’s a better way to put this– excitement about a world where anything can happen covered in cool disdain. Can you talk about how you used voice to create Nevers the book?

Thank you!  Before I knew Nevers would be a book, it was clumps of hand-written sentences that were really just stream-of-consciousness/automatic writing/me talking to myself.  The clumps were a mess.  I don’t think they had a voice.  I write first drafts really quickly, which means most of my writing happens through a process of rewriting bad sentences over and over, combining and recombining them, switching out words and images for better words and images until the sentence sounds right and is surprising or interesting enough to stand on its own.  At some point in that process I realized that what the pieces were trying to capture was how, from moment to moment, being alive feels very different; a moment that is light and humorous can shift to being very uncomfortable or exciting or beautiful or beyond despair terribly quickly.  In each tiny piece I wanted to capture all of the strangeness and variousness of life.  To do that, all of the sentences needed to bounce off of each other in ways that were unexpected and felt, and the voice had to shift with the sentences.  And I think the form–how the sentences make leaps or smash against each other, and also what happens in the space between sentences–is a huge part of the voice, too.  Even the plots of the stories, which I’d describe as more “lyric” plots, plots made of feelings, came out of the emotional landscape of the voice.

If you were teaching someone about telling a story without using any books, what would you use? Why? 

This will maybe sound weird, but I don’t really think of myself as telling stories when I write.  In life I am incapable /terrified of telling stories because I have a terrible memory and I have a mind that sees the world in pieces or weird details, not as a narrative.  When I write, too, it never feels like a process of drawing things together to make a whole or moving from beginning to end, but more like an experience of making or building something: tacking together or smashing up, juxtaposing or balancing or hammering or extracting.

I probably wouldn’t really teach them, I would just have them try things, which is what I do when I actually teach writing.  So maybe I would have people start by making a piece of art that they love.  And then invite someone they know to destroy whatever they made and put it back together in a different way.  And then smash whatever the new thing is together with a piece of art that feels like its opposite, or throw in a rogue element that seems very wrong, and keep going with the collaging and keep seeing what happens.  I don’t think that actually has anything to do with telling a story, except that it speaks to how many disparate things a story can hold, and also to engaging with a process more than a product, and also to patiently dealing with something that is a mess, and also being receptive to surprise.

I feel like writers are often taught to disdain and maybe even fear the exclamation point. How did you learn to embrace the exclamation point? And what (if you excuse me for being a horrible person who asks the double-pronged question) do you think the exclamation point adds to fiction? 

My attention to detail is sometimes really poor.  I wasn’t thinking about the exclamation points very much as I wrote Nevers.  They were just a natural part of the sometimes manic voice, and they had to be there for that voice to exist.  In retrospect, it makes sense that they’re there because the book is so much about refusing norms, as writers and people, no matter how disastrous the outcome may be.  As far as what it adds to fiction, I guess doing anything you’re taught not to do says something about what you believe fiction could be, and also opens up a lot more possibilities than one might find in a traditional workshop.  It seems important to interrogate how we’ve been taught to write and see whether what we’ve been taught actually holds true for us as writers.

What’s the worst advice someone’s given you about writing? What’s the best advice?

I think much of the prevailing advice for writers is along the lines of: work hard, write constantly, every single day, for the rest of your life, put your nose to the grindstone, and you’ll be successful.  I’m not sure whose version of success that is, but to me it sounds like some awful version of the American Dream for writers.  I do work hard, but I also have a job and don’t have the privilege of writing for hours every day, so that advice generally rubs me the wrong way as it implies that if you can’t write all the time, you’re lazy or don’t care enough.  The other part of that advice that bugs me is that what is often implied by success is a giant book deal and money.  There are countless ways to feel and be legitimate and successful as a writer.  Getting or not getting a fancy book deal isn’t an indication of the worth of your writing, or an indication of why you should or shouldn’t be doing it.  If you’re writing, you’re a writer, and there is no one way to do it.  So despite the fact that I don’t have the luxury to write all day every day, if I did spend my every waking hour writing, I probably wouldn’t feel alive or have a reason to write.  Probably I would feel burnt out and lonely and really in need of a beer.

Best advice:  I know that someone, somewhere along the way mentioned how important being part of a community is for writers, and for me it’s the most important thing because being a writer is hard.  I was recently talking to a friend about how hard it is to write when you feel like you don’t have other writers around you.  I need other writers’ friendship and weirdness and inspiration, and need to be reminded that there are people other than me who think writing is important.  I need writers to talk to about all the things that would bore the non-writers in my life to death and to help me remember why I write.