On how to handle creative feedback

Your first book Howling Women is coming out soon. How are you feeling?

I was just emailing Patrick, my publisher, about this earlier, but I’m going through some of the biggest life changes in my personal life right now. I guess that’s just the way life happens. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of making it so I can’t be obsessing too much about what will happen to the book, because I have all this other shit that I have to take care of. I feel a little relieved that I’m not thinking about it too much, and I’m just kind of slowly trying to send emails.

One thing that’s a bit strange is there were a couple of people in my personal circle who got early copies, and they have texted, or said something. I didn’t really anticipate what would happen when people I know in real life read my work. It’s really kind to hear nice things, but it also makes me feel so uncomfortable, because the book was this kind of private thing and some of the people that have reached out maybe didn’t even know I was a writer. I’m part of a 12-step program, and a woman in the program found out about the book and told the entire group. They started a book club, and they’re going to read the book. One day I walked into a meeting, and the entire room started howling.

That’s incredible. Now that people are reaching out to you about the book, do you give thought to your own privacy and boundaries regarding what you’re willing to talk about, or what is okay for people to ask? It’s a novel, but you’ve been open about how some of it reflects your personal experiences.

It’s an interesting thing because I have interviewed a lot of people in the past, and that question always comes up in one way or another, about inspiration or where things come from, but I did an interview where there was a personal question asked that really caught me off guard. I feel like I should have known better and gone into it mentally prepared for certain types of questions, and I wasn’t.

In terms of drawing lines, I feel like I didn’t imagine myself to be a very private person, because there is a lot that I talk about openly, especially things that I think are useful for other people to hear. I am a sober person. One of the things that helped me get sober was hearing other people talk about sobriety, especially people who were artists, writers, and didn’t look square. I thought, “Oh. If those people who are cool and artistic and interesting could do this thing, then maybe I could.” So, I think the metric maybe is, is it useful for someone to know? Would this benefit someone else to know, or is this just prying and gossipy? That’s kind of where, at least currently, I imagine drawing the line.

I think that’s the perfect answer. Along those lines, since you have interviewed a lot of writers yourself, do you think that doing that has helped prepare you at all for your own publicity? Or not at all?

I don’t think it prepared me necessarily to have questions asked of myself. My brother jokes all the time that I’m an investigator, that whenever we meet people or we’re at dinner, I’m always the one asking questions, and I realize that maybe it’s a way to deflect talking about myself. And so, I think it didn’t really help prepare me to do a thing that is naturally somewhat uncomfortable for me, but it did help because I have gotten to hear about all different spectrums of experience, from publishing, to writing, to promotion, just from conversations.

The best part of interviewing writers is getting to ask questions that you genuinely have about how people do stuff. All those years of just talking with dozens of other writers gave me some insight on how soon I should be sending my book out to people and to what kind of places, and what’s useful and what’s not useful, and even just how to carry on and persist when it’s difficult.

How have you been collaborating with your publisher LEFTOVER Books? What’s your communication and working style like?

Patrick Trotti, who runs LEFTOVER Books, is really cool. He’s super open, so we email a lot, and the great thing about him is he takes care of a lot of the stuff that my brain just doesn’t have the bandwidth for.

But in terms of editing, one of the most helpful things he did was just write me a letter about how he felt about the book and who he thought it was in conversation with. I think hearing someone who was imagining selling the book, and how they perceived it fitting into the publishing landscape, allowed me to see my book differently, and that helped me when I went into the final rewrite. And hearing someone else validate some of the things I thought about my own work allowed me to lean into the weirder elements or the elements that I was maybe not leaning all the way towards. Then, after that, it was just a lot of sending edits back and forth.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so when he mailed me the proof copy, I think he thought he would get back a handful of notes. I don’t even know how long my notes were, but by the end, he was just like, “And this is it, right?” So, that was kind of the process. He’s been wonderful to work with, and he’s put up with my perfectionism, which is really appreciated.

Something I admired about Howling Women was the level of craft. You can tell that you’re doing exciting things to propel the story forward. Part of that momentum comes from wanting to know what happened, but for me it also came from really caring about the characters and wanting to know what was going to happen to them. How did you do that? What is your approach to creating characters?

For me, character is the most interesting question. I think that’s what I spend the most time on. I didn’t really do this for Howling Women, but the book I’m working on now, a lot of it was just journaling about characters for literally months before I even started writing a first chapter. And sometimes having conversations, that’s a big part. When I feel like I’m stuck journaling, I might ask my husband, “What do you think a character would do in this situation?” Or if I wanted them to do something, I would ask, “What would warrant this behavior?” So, I think it’s a lot of psychoanalyzing and just trying to imagine their motivations.

Talking, journaling, but for Howling Women, honestly, I think a huge part of it is the book has been rewritten so many times, and so this final draft is unrecognizable from the first draft. I mean, the first draft was twice as long. A lot of the characters that are now more minor characters had whole sections in previous iterations, so it was just spending a lot of time writing material that didn’t actually end up in the book, which is kind of scary, because you’re like, “I’m putting all these words on the page,” and I think in a capitalist society we want to see, “Okay. I did this, and the product is this.” With art, you do a lot of work that doesn’t overtly look like a product. And so, it’s hard to make sense of putting all this time and energy into this thing that I’m probably going to delete. But all of that sticks in our brain and shows up organically on the page later. So even though it sometimes feels like wasted time, I think it does actually play a really important role in what comes out at the end.

You mentioned going through many different versions and drafts. Since it did go through many drafts, can you think of a specific moment where you were stuck, where you knew something wasn’t working or you didn’t know what to do next? And then how did you unlock the revelation of what you needed to do differently?

There are probably a couple of things that happened. I was part of a writing group and they saw many chapters. And so, there were questions that they asked that were helpful. One thing was the book previously had a lot of flashback sections, and so when you were talking earlier about momentum, it kept coming up that the flashbacks pulled people out, and so I had to really ask, what purpose is every section serving to move the plot and the stakes forward?

Also, Mila Jaroniec, her and I swapped novels a couple of years ago and she said two things. One was a quote about how, “The past has to be alive in the present.” So I just kept wondering, “What does that mean? How do I make all of the past have a meaningful place in how she’s behaving in the present?” Because everything she’s doing is in some way related to the past, but on the page, having 20-page flashbacks is obviously killing the momentum. So, I think that was how I got to the construct of her awaiting trial, because that was not at all in the original ten drafts.

I also wrote this book when I was still not a sober person, so getting sober while rewriting the book had a huge impact on how I perceived the characters. There was a version of it that was a lot more recovery focused, and honestly, it was pretty boring and trite. And so, the other thing Mila said was, “This character would not have this level of self-awareness.” That propelled me to make a big change.

Switching gears a little bit, I was wondering how you balance everything you do. Your own writing, teaching writing workshops and courses, being an editor at Write or Die Magazine, and I think you also have a 9-to-5 job, but I could be wrong. So, how do you balance all that?

So, while I was writing Howling Women, I did have a 9-to-5. I was a high school teacher for a big part of it. Now I do all the things that you mentioned, but I work part-time for a local nonprofit, and I work from home and get to maintain somewhat flexible hours, mostly that I don’t really start that day job until 10:00 AM. So I think the big thing that’s always stayed consistent is when I’m being my best writerly self I just wake up early and I write before I go to work.

It’s a lot easier now than it was in the first drafts of Howling Women, because at that time I was in grad school and teaching high school, and my stepdaughter was really young, and so it was kind of just no sleep, really. Then, one thing that was nice was, because I was a high school teacher, I would have week-long breaks and such, and do at-home writing retreats, where I would send my husband with my cell phone and our WiFi modem. I would ask him to take them to work with him.

That’s amazing. If I’m really trying to work on something, or even read at night, I can’t have my phone right next to me. I literally hide it in another room or something. Otherwise, the temptation is too strong. It’s sad, but true.

Yeah, every night before bed, I have to turn my cell phone off, and I unplug my WiFi, and I don’t plug my WiFi back in or turn my phone on until I’ve done my writing time.

If I’m writing something creative, especially if it’s something where you’re kind of making something from nothing, that’s really hard to do. It’s easy to go and get a dopamine hit by checking Instagram, and it takes longer to get that dopamine hit from writing, but the high lasts way longer.

I feel, at this stage, when the first book is about to come out, most people are just starting to think about their second book, but you’re actually quite far along with yours. So, I was interested in hearing about that and how writing that compared to the experience of writing Howling Women.

The major difference I would say is I wrote the first draft of Howling Women in grad school, and so it was getting workshopped all the time along the way, and I will never do that again with another book, because I am way too sensitive. I realized that I need some space before I let other people’s voices come into my own head, and that was in part maybe why it took so many drafts to get it right. With the next book, I hand wrote the whole first draft, which is also what I did with Howling Women, and then I typed the whole thing up. It wasn’t until I had typed the whole thing up after having handwritten it, that I even shared a chapter with someone else. And so that was the biggest difference, is that it was really private. It was all mine. No one else got to see or really even hear anything about it until I knew what I wanted it to be.

I have a fun question to end with. One of the first interactions I had with you online was over our mutual love of Alejandro Zambra’s book, Chilean Poet, so I wanted to ask, what do you like so much about that book?

Oh, gosh. I love so many things about that book. As a stepparent, I really appreciate that Gonzalo, the main character, has a stepson. It’s this specific family dynamic, which a lot of the world has, and yet, for some reason, is not in a lot of media. Zambra’s the first writer I’ve ever read who gets the insecurity and pain of being a stepparent right on the page.

I also love any novel that is about a writer, because it’s always metafictional in the way that the narrator is trying to grapple with, how do you tell a story? There’s this scene I always teach in one of my writing classes. Gonzalo’s at the grocery store with his stepson and the checker asks, “What are you guys to each other?” And it sort of sends him on this spiral of language, and how language fails to capture the meaning of relationships, and he’s thinking about the word for stepson in a bunch of different languages. He even calls this linguist on the phone and asks, “What do you call this specific relationship in all these other languages?” It’s playful, but I love any book that grapples with how difficult it is to put into words what our experiences are, and how, as much as we try, language so often fails us.