On allowing for time and space

You said on the Time Person of the Week podcast earlier this year that “Time is the secret currency of art,” but I wanted to ask you about space as the secret currency of art because I feel like much of what I’ve read and heard about your creative practice is related to space, the most intriguing of which, to me, is the fact that you have separate writing desks for different projects. Talk to me about that.

I have separate desks, but I have separate places in the room. It’s a very small former nursery of my younger son. When I finally started getting paid for my writing, I had this beautiful woodworker make a 10-foot long desk. So, I have different places on the desk for different things and I have a standing desk, but I also have a chaise longue where I have other projects too. I just really think that specific projects require a specific space, and it really depends on what the project is.

Some books I’ve actually written in bed because that is the safest place for me. Some books I’ve written mostly outside because I just needed to be in contact with nature even if it was incredibly cold at the time. So it depends on the book or the work that I’m doing at the moment.

You also said on that podcast that you have not only the time in the morning away from your kids, but the space away from them as well. How important is it to hold that space in your mind in the morning for output?

It’s immensely important. Without it, I don’t get anything done. If I let other concerns creep in or if I let people steal my time, the writing day is not retrievable. It’s just lost, unfortunately. So, really it’s passing between bed and work with as little time as possible. With as little light as possible, too. Lights spark the limbic system, and what I really want to do is go from dream to dream without really coming into wakefulness.

If we were talking about space, it’s vastly necessary to have a door that can close because if I’m trying to work in the same room as another person I can’t access what I need. It makes me sound very precious, but I have a very hard time doing it. When I travel [with others], I sometimes have to go into the bathroom and sit on the edge of the bathtub and work there. At least there’s a door between me and another human!

Even sometimes birds are a little bit annoying—I love them, [but they are annoying].

Have you ever had any pushback from people who might be taken aback by a mother not doing performing care in the ways we’re conditioned to?

I think that when someone says something like that, the immediate impulse is to feel as though I am calling into question their life choices, but of course, I’m just saying what works for me. Everyone has a different situation, so I think people get very defensive and for a good reason. I mean especially if you’re a mother, nobody’s doing it right. I’m not doing it right. Nobody’s doing it right because it’s not possible to be correct and a woman at the same time, right?

I have zero apologies. If I were to apologize to anyone, it’d be to my husband, but he has been on board since day one also and he loves getting up with the boys. I mean, he’s always enjoyed it, so we’ve made it work for ourselves. The boys don’t miss me. I’m the anxious one. It is much, much better that I not be around. I’m not yelling at them as they’re trying to go to school. It’s much better that they have the Zen father making them omelets delivered directly into the world.

One thing that I discovered really early on is that I had to really build a citadel around my work or else it wasn’t going to get done. I’ve had to make structures in order to make that happen. Building structures required a great deal of compromise just from everyone around me. Everyone builds structures around their jobs. Sometimes having an external place to go to gives you the excuse to go away also. Just because I’m in the house doesn’t mean that I’m available.

It’s that devaluation around creative work and writing like, “Oh, that’s not a real job, that’s just a hobby.”

More than that, it takes so long to write a book and it takes so many years of genuinely staring in silence at a wall. To put the language of capitalism onto something that’s actually inherently anti-capitalist is really destructive. I mean, not sitting there producing, producing, producing all the time. If anything, you’re just dreaming into the void and sometimes the dream becomes material, but it doesn’t always become material and that’s all right as well. Valuing art for art’s sake and the art is in the creation. It’s not in the production. That’s the thing that I would like for people to transfer their understanding to. It’s not the finished book that matters, to be perfectly honest. It’s the sitting and dreaming and working through the problems and the struggle and actually engaging and getting better and writing toward this platonic ideal that hovers above your head and shining beams down on you. I mean, this is what we’re working toward, right?

Speaking of working towards that, I know you write longhand and then redraft completely from memory! Do you ever go back to those previous drafts and if so how do you cross reference?

No, I’m never worried that I’m going to forget anything from a previous draft. It’s not that I don’t forget good things, but I think that often we fetishize what has been done to the detriment of the larger design. I think sometimes we fall in love with a paragraph, even a chapter or a character, and ultimately, those things don’t necessarily add to the book at hand. I actually see it as this beautiful process of almost whittling away. I know it seems counterintuitive, but if I do remember something and it does come into the book in the next draft and I never look at my previous draft, then it probably deserves to be there.

If over the course of that, the next one, it falls out of the draft, it is probably not something that deserves to be there. It is just having almost blind faith in the book developing itself as opposed to me imposing my ego on the book and clinging to the things that I think are good. The book itself has a completely different understanding of its own needs, which I know sounds really woo-woo and spiritual, but I think if you respect the work as an equal, you let it speak back to you and you let it tell you what it requires and which direction it wants to go and you don’t force yourself onto it.

Like children, you can’t force people to be what they are, and I think that art is a rarefied manifestation of humanity. It is a person. It’s a part of a person, and you can’t force it to be what you want it to be. So, the way that I do it is just through this drafting longhand process, setting things aside, never looking at them again, and trusting that it will speak back into me. If it doesn’t, that’s fine. Then the previous draft is probably the closest to the platonic ideal, and then I can put it on the computer.

How do you know when you’re done with a project, whether that be finishing it or shelving it indefinitely?

It’s paying attention to the energy of the piece. If it feels really distant from me, I know that there’s an irreconcilable problem between me and the work, and I need to just put it to the side until it wants to come back to me. If I wake up really excited to work on something, then it’s still present in me. If not, I put it to the side without fearing, because often those things come back much, much better a decade or two decades later. It’s really allowing the work not to just be the work at hand, but the longer process of making something, making a life and making a life in art. So, knowing that even if this story, I tried to do this story when I was 19 and it didn’t work and I kept trying 26 and then 34 and then 42.

It didn’t work any of those times. But finally at 46, it came to me in the form that it required. It takes a long time sometimes, but it also takes ruthlessness and not letting the story go into the world if it’s publishable, but it’s not singing in the voice that it needs to sing in.

You also judged the O Henry Prize and write in the introduction to Best American Short Stories that you’ve read probably thousands of short stories in the past couple of years. How do you find the time? Or again, the space to do so, as you mentioned sometimes working from bed or the chaise longue.

There is a very physical demarcation in space. I do all of that [in my downstairs office] and it doesn’t bleed into the other stuff generally. I have a lot of policies and I have OCD too, so I need to be very precise about certain things. I have an inbox zero policy: I get to inbox zero, then I get to read short stories for the Best American Short Stories.

I have deadlines. I have specific dates that I do specific things in the afternoon. I write my non-fiction on Fridays, for instance. It seems very illogically rigid, but it’s the way I’ve been able to make it work.

Talk to me more about how OCD affects your work and for people reading this who are also struggling with OCD, what would you say to them?

It’s a personal struggle. Nothing that I could say would help anyone else because I’m not a therapist and I have no understanding into anyone else’s mind other than my own.

But I can speak from my own experience, which is that I’ve had to trick myself in specific, very structured ways to get through the OCD. Writing longhand, for instance, was a way to trick myself out of this endless loop of writing on a computer where it looks almost completed. When you write on a screen, it looks very similar to the way that it would look when it’s finished. But if I’m writing longhand, I can’t even read my own handwriting, which is really liberating, especially if you’re doing draft after draft after draft.

I also think that having a really rigid artificial structure allows me freedom within that structure. Having an alarm go off and saying, “That’s the end of my creative day,” that allows you to relax into it. Having a door that closes implies that the door could be open if I chose to do that.

I struggle with it every single day, but there are certain things that I can do that actually work with the compulsiveness that I have and those things allow me to move through time without getting stuck. I think that’s the thing with my anxiety and my OCD is the fear and the danger is getting stuck, getting stopped in the tracks. Creating external motivators that push me from beginning to end without getting stuck, that’s the thing that helps me.

How do you see your role as guest editor or a judge? Is it more about getting the pleasure to read and select these stories?

Oh, that’s exactly what it was. It was pure pleasure the whole time. I have to say and I said this in my introduction and people took umbrage with it, but I don’t care. I had a hard time because out of 120 [stories that were sent to me, about 90 of them] were in the first person, which was an overwhelming number of first person stories. I think it’s because of the loss of our faith and authority in 2024. I mean, as media outlets are disintegrating, religion is showing its ugly themes, all sorts of larger structures, we’re just collectively losing faith in them. I think that the one place of authority is the self.

I think writers are writing from the self, which I don’t deny them the right to do. I do it all the time myself. I do think it’s much, much harder to write something memorable and something that feels new in the first person. Most of the stories in [Best American Short Stories 2024] are in the first person, because that’s mostly what I was given. If I had been given more amazing third person stories, I would’ve chosen them. But that was a very strange thing to see. It happened with the O. Henry Prize stories, too. The vast majority of stories being written now are being written out of the self, and I’m sorry, self is so limited. I mean, the third person exists as this magisterial god’s eye for a reason, and you can do a lot more of it, I think, especially in the confines of the short story.

What advice do you have for short story writers to avoid some of the pitfalls of the first person then?

It’s not that I want people to avoid the first person, but to make sure that the first person is doing something unusual and maybe even something that nobody’s ever seen before. Try to push it as far as you possibly can push it. I would say that for any writer of any person for second or third, take massive risks. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine, rewrite it, but don’t be safe. You can choose what you write. If it feels shopworn, find a way to maybe make it less shopworn or don’t write it. Find something else.

How do you ensure that other people’s ideas and voices don’t seep into your own work?

I want voice creep! The whole purpose for me of literature is to have voices speaking to you out of time. I want brilliant writers speaking to me all the time because it makes me feel less existentially lonely. I welcome voice creep because I want to steal from the book. I want to steal from Alice Monroe. I want to steal from Helen Garner. It’s having a conversation. It’s speaking back to these people whom I love so profoundly and just want to be in conversation with.

How do you avoid burning out on all of these different projects?

I think burnout is natural and it’s normal. I don’t avoid it because I don’t know how to. I’m in a period of massive burnout at the moment, actually, because I think fallow periods are necessary for all fields. So, instead of writing poorly I’m reading beautifully, and the reading is part of the writing too. I don’t feel like I’m being unproductive because I’m still dreaming into the space where books come. So, I’m not being productive at all whatsoever and I haven’t been in a couple of years, but it doesn’t matter. I’m still a writer and I know that one day, it’ll come back or it won’t. That’ll be fine too because I’m still doing the work.