On loving the process even when it hurts

How did you become a writer?

It’s always an interesting question to think about, because retroactively, your life appears so inevitable, but I don’t think that I’m someone who wanted to be a writer from childhood. I read a lot. I was a pretty lonely kid. Books were my friends. I was one of those people. And over time writing became something that I did more seriously. I was a dabbler. I dabbled in everything. I sang. I was a theater kid. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that writing became the thing that I knew that I was going to do, although now it feels like, “of course, I couldn’t have been anything else.”

I think that writers are people who have difficulty expressing themselves, and I had difficulty saying or knowing what I meant. I had fantasies of people really listening to me. When you write something, no one can speak back, you inhabit other people’s minds. And so that might have been what really ended up drawing me to [writing]. That one way mirror. The feeling that you can make someone see what you see. Of course, people can stop reading, but there’s a fantasy where you draw them in. In real life, I’m a people pleaser. I try to say what I think people want me to say. Writing became a place where I didn’t have to do that, or maybe at the beginning it was, and then, later it changed.

I started writing more seriously in college. I took an Intro to Fiction course with a teacher who was tough on me in a good way, and my dabbling just became something else. And it became something that I really, really, really wanted to be good at. It began to feel like a vocation.

What do you mean by “tough on you”?

I felt like everything I wrote was wonderful, but he was like, “there’s a lot here that needs work.” There’s a moment when you decide to do something for the good of itself. You’re like, “okay, maybe I really want to see what I can do. Maybe I’m really willing to work. Maybe it’s not going to come easily to me and that’s okay.” That was the beginning of my love of working, instead of just loving the praise.

Did you always know you wanted to write a novel? This novel?

The whole process of writing a novel was surprising to me. I did not always know that I wanted to write a novel. I was a short story writer. I loved short stories. I actually felt like I had this fundamental sense that I would be incapable of writing a novel. Novels were what I read. I read a lot of short stories too, but I loved the novel as a form. It felt really impenetrable to me, maybe because of the length, sustaining a voice for that long, sustaining one mode for that long, building a structure that could maintain itself for that long. So no, I absolutely did not always know that I was going to write a novel, or this novel in particular.

By the time I felt that I wanted to write a novel, I didn’t have an idea, it was more so that I just felt compelled enough by the form that I knew I wanted to do it, but I didn’t know what it was going to be at all. It ended up coming together because I got a fellowship in Provincetown.

Maybe the way I work is that I really need something to latch on to, something that I can extrapolate from, and moving to this really small coastal, weird, beautiful, mysterious town in the offseason, in the fall, suddenly opened something up for me. A couple weeks in, I wrote the first scene of the book. I had gone to a bar and I started writing about the bar, and then this voice sort of began to emerge. And I had worried that I wouldn’t be able to find a voice that could sustain the book, but I was like, “okay, maybe there’s something here.” I felt like it could propel me. The whole thing was surprising, and I never knew if it was going to hold together.

How long did it take from beginning to end?

It was faster than I would have imagined, because I am generally a pretty slow writer. I spent seven months working on it at this fellowship in Provincetown, and then I left, and had to do work for money. And then I finished the first draft after seven weeks at another residency. So it ended up taking a year, and then there was some editing and revision.

I don’t really do multiple drafts. I really have to nail something down before I can move on. So, the first chapter took me forever, and the second chapter took me forever, and then I had to go back and fix it. The final quarter of the book was much faster to write.

Why do you think that is your process? What is it about your personality that requires such a level of scrupulousness?

Oh, it’s such a good question! It’s the only way I can work. I don’t know. What I enjoy about writing, what attracts me to it, is the nailing down of language. So if it doesn’t sing to me, I have no interest in moving on. I never know what’s gonna happen next. I don’t have a plan. So, if I can’t lock in what it’s doing, then I have nowhere to move. But it also makes it really scary. I really felt like the whole time I was writing into the dark, totally into the dark, no idea if I would finish.

The voice of your protagonist is so singular, so zany. How did you find her voice? And the voices of your other characters. Your style of dialogue is so effervescent.

Voice is the thing that comes first. Even if it’s third person, if I don’t have a narrative voice, I don’t know where to go. I think the voice of this novel, the voice of probably everything I’ve written, comes from so many books that I’ve read and so many different influences that come together unconsciously. I was reading a lot of W.G. Sebald-influenced novels, and I thought there would be something funny about merging that tradition with something a lot more insane, with an extreme comic sensibility.

There’s a lack of quotation marks in the dialog. There’s something about dialogue that is reported and dialogue that exists without quotations, that I think allows the voice of the narrator to seep a little bit more into the voices of other characters. And there are moments where it can get really porous between those things. So, I wanted that kind of effect where sometimes the novel as a whole feels more singular, like one single breath.

Let’s talk about autofiction. Does your fiction ever resemble your actual life? What is your take on this played out term?

I’m trying to decide if I hate this question, or I don’t know? I have no idea. I am not an autofiction hater. I think there are a lot of autofiction haters out there in this economy. I love autofiction. I love the tradition. I don’t consider my work autofiction. There are resemblances.

You’re from “the city in the middle of the country.”

Yeah, exactly. I think there are some very surface level biographical similarities that I can take from my life. I was about to say, out of laziness, which is not exactly true, but out of a sort of need to hold on to something. Or maybe it’s that I need something to grab me, or it’s things that I am preoccupied with. But then everything that happens in this novel is all made up. I’ve worked at a school, but I was an administrative assistant. I was interested in the school conceptually. I was interested in the idea of a campus novel and of teachers, but I never taught Bleak House. I’ve never taught troubled girls. I’ve never worked at a boarding school.

Your writing is so funny leaning towards the absurd. How does humor play into your creative process? Why is humor important to you? Is it?

I’m not funny in real life.

Yes, you are!

I’m like a normal amount. I’m a normal person.

I take humor really seriously, as an aesthetic mode. It helps us get close to things that we don’t want to look at. I think that is a seductive technique. It’s a kind of spasm, when you laugh, it’s like a spasm of your consciousness, and it’s a little bit out of control. Humor, when it’s working well, can draw you somewhere that you really don’t want to go, that you didn’t expect.

I really love books that have no sense of humor, but I’m picky about humor in books. I tend to want it to be doing something more. I’m interested in humor that sort of works with defenses as a way of breaking through them. Sometimes you read something and you feel that it really is defensive, or it’s ingratiating. It wants you to like it. It wants you to laugh desperately. I don’t want to be desperate. It’s really the mood that I’m drawn to.

What humor books do you like?

I love Nabokov. I love Joy Williams. Muriel Spark. Dostoyevsky. There are parts of Notes from Underground that I think are the funniest things I’ve ever read, but are also dark.

Lots of famous canonical novels are featured in Offseason, like Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Kafka’s The Trial. Who or what are you inspired by?

Some of the people I just named are big inspirations for me, for the book in general. In terms of contemporary writers, I really love Fernanda Melchor, she’s a writer that I find just absolutely incredible. Also, Claire-Louise Bennett.

I was interested in working with the canon in Offseason, because it is sort of a book about literature. In a way, it is a book about the novel. And I thought there would be something both very funny and very serious about taking a figure like Charles Dickens and taking that really seriously as an obsession. When I read Bleak House, I lost my mind. I was like, this is an absolutely incredible, incredible, incredible book.

I know you are off social media for the most part. Has this distance from the distraction machine made you a better, more disciplined writer? Or what have you learned about yourself and/or society while off of it?

I went off social media because I’m not strong enough. The temptation of creating an image, creating an image around yourself, creating a narrative around yourself is too strong for me, too painful, too tempting. I admire people who are able to engage with it in a way that doesn’t pull their whole self into it. At a certain point, I realized that there was something about it that was making me sick. Spiritually sick. And so I had to leave. And sometimes I do feel like, “Oh no, I’m a little out of touch.” And it’s true.

I also think the internet is like a material part of the way we live now. And I’m not a writer who is a Luddite. I don’t want to pretend that technology doesn’t exist. In my work, I don’t want to pretend social media doesn’t exist. So, I do think about it. My attention span is still pretty bad. There are many things that I can scroll on my phone, like Google.com. I can find anything. But I do think it has helped me detach from being perceived, from wanting to be loved. I think it’s bad for me as a writer to want to be loved too much. It makes my work bad.

I know you’ve been living in Germany the last year or so, how has this change of scenery impacted your creative work?

I don’t even yet know what is going to come of that year, my year abroad. I think that disorientation, being dislocated from your language, are all really useful things for a writer. I’m also interested in Americanness.

Where is your mother from, again?

Soviet Lithuania.

And the narrator’s mother is also from Soviet Lithuania?

Yes. Surprise!

Having a parent who was not born in the States makes me feel even more American. I am compared to her. And I think she really, really sees me as an American. But I also, to a certain extent, feel some level of alienation. I’m interested in what that means. And so living abroad in Germany was interesting, but I don’t know what’s going to come of it. I haven’t written much that’s reckoned with any of it yet.

What do you love most about writing and being a writer?

Hmm. Dedicating your life to something outside of yourself, to art, it’s a great honor. It’s a gift to be able to love something and do something that I think matters. The fact that I can live a life of literature, I couldn’t imagine a greater gift. It’s really sappy, but I think it’s lucky. I think it’s very lucky.

I don’t know what it means to be a writer. I don’t know at what point you’re like, “I am a writer.” Like that is my identity. My professional identity. What is it that makes you a writer? Is it publishing something, or is it writing? I think you know if you’re a writer. If you do, you write. If you commit your life to it.

What do you love least?

Well, writing is really hard. Like, I’m not someone who’s like, “I’m walking on sunshine.” Sometimes it feels really sublime. Sometimes it’s devastating. And my own lack and the fact that you can never make something that is as good as it appears in your mind, it’s very painful. But I still love that part. I think that’s part of what makes it beautiful.

There’s this Thomas Mann quote that I saw the other day: “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

That is true. I think grappling with the difficulty is what makes it a worthwhile challenge. I also think the real difficult part is turning art into a product, into a commodity. Art becomes commerce. No one likes that. That’s pretty universal. Maybe there are some writers who are like, “I love that part. I love commerce. I love the part that is commerce.”

What is your relationship to creativity? What advice would you give other writers and artists on how to harness their creativity?

My relationship to creativity is fraught. I am someone who goes through fertile and fallow periods. I’m not someone who is like “I write every day and every day it’s a joy.” There are times when I feel like I’m in despair and I’m never gonna write again, and that happens to me almost every time I finish something. I do think you have to have faith in your unconscious, in your intuitions, in the sense that what has to be will be. And people talk about this all the time, but it’s so true: the more you read, the more you encounter the world, something will come of it.

I used to have a bad habit of waiting for the muse. “I’m waiting for the muse, I’m waiting for the muse.” And something that writing a novel taught me was that I had to impose a pretty rigid schedule on myself, and I really had to commit to working.

What did your schedule look like?

I tried to write five or six times a week. I took one day off. I would read a short story when I woke up, and then I would write. I would put my phone in a lockbox. I have to stop talking about this lock box. I’m literally constantly talking about it. I would have to sit and write, or if I wasn’t writing, I’d be thinking about writing, and then I would read novels in the afternoon. I’d go for walks and also do other things.

Elizabeth McCracken once said something to me that was really helpful, where she was like, “you have to romanticize the good parts of your process.” Some people romanticize the bad parts of their process, which is something that I was definitely doing. I do think process is really, really individual. But it has to be yours.

Now that your first novel is out in the world (both the US and the UK!), what advice would you give to your past self if you could go back in time and talk to her?

To her? I’d be like, “Have a little more faith. Calm down.” I would get so worked up. The whole thing is so mysterious. You’re so lost. And I think I would try to tell myself to accept being lost, enjoy it.