I think even the story itself predisposed me to have this kind of masochistic relationship to putting the story together. I had been interviewed and interrogated by police a lot as a young person, and I had been a really willing participant in that. Because I felt like, well, if I submit to this process—if I just fully submit to all of these questions and all of these things they’re asking me to do—maybe they will figure out who committed this crime. And this person will be put away, and I will at least not be worrying anymore that they’re still on the street and could be harming other people.

It’s tricky because, it’s like, that was great training in being extremely thorough and trying to nail down what had happened, and how I felt about it and what exactly I remembered. And so I think I went into it with that mindset, submitting myself to that process of just endless self-interrogation and endless… like, just being extremely rigorous and thorough with myself. And not having a great sense, at least at first, of what boundaries I needed.

And then, of course, the way that I moved toward prioritizing those boundaries was actually very productivity-motivated. If I was reading police documents or the autopsy report in the middle of the night, and I had been working for hours and hours and hours, and I went beyond my capacity, I wouldn’t be able to write anything for a week or two weeks. And I felt like, if I’m going to actually get this done, if I’m going to keep going forward, I need to be more mindful of what my capacity is at various times.

There are a few things I implemented eventually, and even more things that I advise students to do, that maybe I thought about doing but never actually did. I think embodied practices can be really useful. Like, people often talk about yoga, etc. But back in the days of writing After the Eclipse, I was still a pretty active roller derby player. I would have this immediate sense of belonging and also get to do this physically aggressive thing that was empowering. It was something that would help me get out my anger and my frustration, but among friends.

And a lot it is also just staying mindful of the fact that writing memoir can be such a process of time travel. I found myself really traveling back to times in my life that were a lot more difficult and mental states that were really challenging.

A great example of that is that one month in 2012, I wrote a check and I wrote the date—but 1994.

Oh my god.

Sometimes you don’t realize how transported you are. So I would resolve to write two hours, and then, even if I had more writing time afterward, I would stop and entrust the part of myself that was less under the trance of memory and of investigating these things to have a good sense of what my capacity for that day was, and I’d put it aside.

How do you hold yourself to it, though? Do you set timers for yourself?

Yeah, definitely setting a timer. I’m a big fan of tracking and logging things. I have a lot of my own spreadsheets and systems. If I am actively working, I’m usually working more than I feel like I am. So watching hours add up over a week really helps me assure myself that I am showing up for my work.

I’ve heard a lot of writers who write memoir about their trauma say that they’re not sure they’ll ever write about anything else. Do you identify with that at all?

I do. And I have to say, my current orientation to that is frustration.

Then I was working on this memoir that’s a lot about sexuality and love in the wake of trauma. And a lot about thinking through all of that via my mother’s example and experiences, and trying to interrogate some of the sex-negativity that surrounded the trial. So you can imagine, that one was a good time, too, to write. [laughs]

I was working on that, and it was 2020, and I was just like, “I can’t do this work right now.” I have the world’s biggest sweet tooth, I like to say, and my partner had long been suggesting to me, “Why don’t you write about candy?” And I had said, “I’m sorry, I’m a serious writer. I’m not going to do that. What are you talking about? That’s not a book.”

But I finally broke down and gave it a shot. I said, “I’m going to get up every morning for 100 mornings and write about a different candy every day, just as writing exercises.” I just wanted to enjoy making sentences again and get into that sort of pleasure of language. And then I would go on and do my “serious” writing for the rest of the day.

Now, Sweet Nothings has become this book that I hope gives people some lightness and joy in a continually really difficult time. Of course, it still does have this frame of—I like how you put it earlier—not only Mom and the murder, but this telling of that story in Eclipse. So it’s very much still folding back in onto the same subjects. The funny version is, “Why won’t my mom leave me alone already?”

And I feel like—a lot of people, especially those who have one big traumatic event—they get to feeling like, “Am I a good enough writer to make meaning without using this thing? Is this the only thing I can make the gravitational center of something?” Because so often, I’ll be writing a piece, and I’ll be trying to do another thing. I wrote this piece about a fried cherry pie in Oklahoma, and that turned into a mom-mourning piece. And I thought, is this just the same shortcut that I keep taking here? And then the New England part of me, who is embarrassed about having feelings, comes in with, “Am I so wounded that I can’t stop talking about this? Can I put it aside for a second and make something else already?”

How do you respond when you notice other writers writing about their trauma from different angles, taking a prismatic approach to that one event in their life? Do you have a similar reaction to their work as the frustration you’re describing you feel with your own?

I totally don’t. It’s definitely one of those things where it’s like, I would never say that to my best friend. My friends and colleagues can write about the same thing forever. But it was like, didn’t I write Sweet Nothings to get away from this?

I want to backpedal a bit and ask about that 100-day writing challenge you mentioned, which kicked off Sweet Nothings. What did you learn about yourself from doing that, and do you ever think you’ll try that kind of challenge again?

I actually openly welcome any idea from anyone about something I could do 100 times again. It was really fun, and very fun to accidentally have a draft of a book after 100 days.

What I learned was that I surprised myself a lot. It’s a lot weirder and funnier than I realized I could be on the page. I think that’s not only because After the Eclipse is obviously so serious, but also because I had this conception of myself as this very sedate writer of lovely, conventional sentences. This almost old-fashioned, little New Englander thing. I read too much Thoreau as a kid or something.

Whereas the work I love? I’ve always been such a big Maggie Nelson fan. I love Heather Christle’s poetry. I love weird little things. But I just never thought I could make that myself. I am long-winded, but to make all these short little things that are sometimes quite snappy and unplanned was really thrilling to me. I don’t think I could’ve done them well without the process. They are what they are because of how I wrote them: first thing in the morning, usually before my “editor brain” was on, as I say. I would just instinctively go to these weird places, and there was absolutely no pressure. If I were to do this again, the trick would be pretending I wasn’t taking it seriously. I don’t know if you can do that twice.

You were nominated for a James Beard Award for an essay you wrote about gas station pie.

Crazy.

Now you have this new book about candy. It’s so clear that food is a creative doorway for you. How did you discover that about your writing process?

Honestly, totally by accident. I started writing about candy just because I love it, and other people had to point out to me that I had an unusual level of focus. And then honestly, I ate that fucking pie, man! And I was like, “The world has to know about this pie. Oh my god.”

I also felt like it was an opportunity to do some class work around food. Class consciousness. Class critique. Thinking about who gets to eat what and how we judge those choices.

It’s funny, too, because one of the gigs that got me through writing After the Eclipse was working as a fact-checker for WSJ Magazine. They cover a lot of high-class food. That job gave me major poor-kid class anxiety. There was a lot of French I couldn’t pronounce. I remember thinking, “God, I’ve lived in New York for six years, and I still feel like a bumpkin in this job.” So to be at the James Beard Awards was surreal.

I want to ask about the art of writing micro-essays, since there are 100 of them in your newest book. How does your approach to writing a micro-essay differ from your approach to writing a longer essay?

I really believe that every time you sit down to write, it’s like you’ve never written anything before. You have to totally relearn it. But now that I have experience in writing a pretty long memoir and in writing micro-essays, I just don’t feel like I know how to write a conventional-length essay yet. It’s the length I teach, but I haven’t really nailed it yet.

We always talk about how the essay is flexible, capacious: insert whatever quote about the essay here. And I think those especially apply to that 3,000 to 5,000 word range. Each one really feels like its own form. I just haven’t aligned form with content at that length yet. I haven’t found the thing I want to say that wants that length.

With micro-essays, sometimes, maybe half the time, I’d start with something like, “Today is about Reese’s Pieces.” I’d start typing, maybe pull in a quick bit of history from Google, and then I’d write this paragraph. I’d hit the last sentence and I’d almost hear it click in my head. I’d know: that’s the end. And I’d put it down. And I’d walk away.

Wow. Did that happen 100 times?

Not 100 times, but maybe 30 or so. Sometimes, I’d get this feeling, like, “Okay, this paragraph sounds like the first one. There’s a shape here.” That’s the challenge with micro-pieces, you’re trying to signal to the reader that you’ve come to the end much earlier than in a length we’re more used to reading. You don’t want to give it unearned gravity. You can’t ring the bell of completion too loudly.</span< And since I knew there would be 100 of them, I was always asking the reader to reset their attention again and again. So each one had to feel complete but also open enough that you could step forward into the next one.

But as for how I did it? I don’t know. I just felt around.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I certainly was not trying to write a more commercial book. The part of me that gets the ideas for books is unfortunately unable to learn worldly wisdom like that. I was kind of aware that it was a better log line than my other books. It’s kind of hard to describe what the other books are. It’s just like they don’t have a strong pitch, and I was aware that OnlyFans was timely or culturally relevant in some way, but I think that it really was kind of a surprise, honestly, to both me and to my publisher, that MARGO did so well. And I think that it was in part just because of the TV show and all of that happening, I think that Hollywood immediately was like, “OnlyFans? This is culturally relevant!” And I think we thought that the book was going to be too weird or too left of center to have a broad appeal. I was more involved in how this one was going to be marketed and I wasn’t really thinking about upmarket or low market.

All I was thinking about was trying to communicate. I wanted to communicate two things with the cover. I wanted it to be clear that some dark stuff was going to happen, but that overall, the book was going to be really fun.

A lot of times sex work is used as a flagellating-women plot: you’re there to watch a woman get punished, and then you get whatever pleasure you get out of that, I guess. I wanted it to be clear that it wasn’t going to be that kind of book. I wanted it to be clear that it was going to be weird, and I had long thought about MARGO as kind of a superhero, so I was the one pushing for an illustrated, comic-booky style because I felt like that would get across that it’s going to be fun and that she’s going to be kind of a superhero character who goes on these adventures.

You mentioned that you felt like MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES had a stronger log line than your previous books. Has that influenced your writing today? Do you want to have that piece kind of secured when you’re working on a project?

Well, unfortunately, like I said, it’s more that I will work harder trying to figure out what the log line could possibly be. But the project is kind of the project. You just don’t have that much choice over what you get obsessed with. Then it’s more like, how could I make somebody else understand what I’m talking about fastest?

I think I am much more patient at this point in my career with just understanding that nobody is going to understand how to position a book better than me, and also nobody is going to care as much. And so it behooves me to spend some time thinking about how to communicate about what kind of book this is and who it would appeal to.

I was very keenly aware of this after THE GIRLS FROM CORONA DEL MAR: the hardcover design had this beautiful black-and-white photograph. And I loved the photograph, and I loved the cover, but also I kind of knew that I wouldn’t necessarily go pick that book up in a bookshop because I’m usually looking for things that are a little bit more offbeat or weird looking than that. And then I saw in a bunch of the reviews for that book, which were from a lot of women being really upset that there’s a lot of the F word in it. I was like, “Oh, it’s like we tricked them into thinking this is going to be some sort of nice seaside girlhood memoir.” Since then, I think that I have gotten more confident in my own judgments in terms of how you communicate to a reader what this book is going to be.

It seems like your audience has grown a lot since MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES came out last year. Do you have any advice for writers about how to handle audience growth?

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, RuPaul said a beautiful thing, which is that all novels are beacons. And I think that it is counterintuitive at first that you find your widest audiences by being most idiosyncratically, passionately yourself. But I think that that’s true. I think that that’s the magic of it: it’s like when you figure out, “Oh, what I can contribute is my own warty, imperfect experience of reality. This little shit hill that is myself is what I’ve got, so I’m just going to work it.” And then you find out that the more you relax into being yourself instead of being who you think people want you to be, that’s when you start to appeal to more people, because you’re being authentic finally, and you’re not just peddling some heavily edited version of yourself.

It is scary to be perceived by a lot of people. It’s scary. I hated the emphasis on social media in the 2010s. It was very much seen as, like, “You’ve got to be on Twitter,” and I was so bad at all of it. I just am a fiercely private little weirdo. I’m not good at taking my personality and making it a product, and I just found it so nerve wracking to try and have these glib little conversations in this public way. And now I just try to not think about it at all. If I’m going to post something, I try and pretend that I’m only posting it for my friends.

If people don’t like me, I feel like that’s maybe a sacred right. I feel like I personally reserve the right to hate books that are even very good books. And honestly, a book that’s capable of pissing me off has really already achieved something magnificent. It’s better than being a book that you can’t remember what it was about a year later. I’ve just tried to let go of trying to control or cultivate how people think about me. And it turns out that it is safe. It’s okay for some people to not like you. You can’t write a book that’s going to please everybody. It’s okay to get some bad reviews. It’s okay. It’s even okay to write a book that’s not very good. You’ve got to try anyway.

It’s interesting hearing what you were just saying about not being a fan of sharing your life online, because I think you have one of the most creative marketing practices I’ve ever seen.

Really?

I mean, you have the most fun author website ever: I watched an interview you did with Emma Straub, and she said the exact same thing, and I was like, “thank God other people are noticing Rufi’s website.” And you made this hilarious video during the pandemic where you put on a wig and interviewed yourself about your novel THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN. I think a lot of writers get really intimidated by the idea of marketing their books, but you seem to lean into it in a way that’s, as you’re describing, extremely authentic.

I kind of came from this position of always feeling like an underdog. In grad school, a professor I idolized and worshiped took me aside and was like, “You’re never going to be a writer. You don’t have what it takes. Let’s brainstorm some other careers for you. You’re just not talented enough.” And I cried. I went home and cried, and then I was like, well, am I going to really literally give up my life’s dream because this lady told me? I thought: if God came down and God said, “Okay, you get to be a novelist, but you’re going to be the very worst one that’s ever lived in the history of literature, would you still want to do it?” I was like, yes. I still want to. More than anything, I want that.

I’m so moved by that. Wow.

I always was just like, “I’m just scrappily fighting to get to be the worst novelist ever.”

But I do think that the way that I took the tasks that felt the most alien and commercial, like social media, the way that I could figure out how to do it was to make it something I was interested in doing. To make a funny little video or, oh, I have to make an author website? How do I make it something that I like and think is fun? That’s been my approach for a decade. It didn’t seem like it was working at all, so I’m glad if now it appears to be paying dividends.

Across your fiction, I find that you place such an emphasis on setting really high stakes for your characters. Where does the writing process seem to get the most involved for you? Is it plot or character or something else?

I think that plot is the thing that I am weakest at and therefore have spent the most time trying to figure out. It was the first thing I found most baffling about fiction.

So I entirely became a fiction writer to impress a girl. I was kind of in love with my best friend, and she was dating a guy who was a fiction writer. And at that time, we were both poets, but so to not compete with her but then compete instead for her attentions with him, I switched to fiction writing, and I found it really baffling how you had to make things up. I kept trying to get people to describe to me how you do it. I was like, “So then you what? You close your eyes?” It was trying to describe to someone how to fall asleep or something.

And then similarly, I found all instructions relating to story to be absolutely unfollowable. I was like, “Beginning, middle, end: who can tell which one is which thing?” And Aristotle doesn’t help. Every single definition he offers is a tautology.

I literally read a bunch of books on screenwriting before I wrote THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN and kind of figured out how to make things like a crisis or a midpoint happen. And then I think I took a lot of that and started to feel like I had a little bit more control with MARGO so that I was able to figure out where the story started and started there.

You have four novels out. From a craft perspective, what do you think clicked for you between your first two books and your more recent two?

My second novel had sold, like, five copies. I was very aware that my editor really loved me and believed in me and would probably buy another book, but that if that book also did poorly, then I might not get to go on publishing. I was aware of wanting to swing for the fences: if this is the last thing that I get to say with the big world microphone, I’m like, give it to me. I’m going to say something good.

I’ve always kind of believed that there’s really no reason why we can’t use the toolkits from both high literature and from what we consider commercial fiction. I don’t know why you can’t have a plot and have compelling deep themes and philosophical questions. I really wanted THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN to have both of those layers and for it to be really propulsive. It also takes an incredible amount of processor speed simply to render people talking, let alone control what they’re talking about and write it in a pretty way with nice sentences. Your own awareness gets so stretched thin. It’s almost like you’re pulling something up out of a dark place, and you don’t even know what it is yet, and you’re just trying not to break it on its way out of you.

I got better at multitasking with each book that went along, where I was able to be in control of more of the process, able to be conscious of more of the process. Whereas I think in the beginning, you’re like, “I don’t know how I did it, but I did it. I got it out, but it’s this weird shape, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

I’m sure everyone’s been asking you about your interest in wrestling since MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES came out. The protagonist’s father is a professional wrestler. Can you share some wisdom about weaving an obsession into your work, particularly a pop culture obsession, without letting the minutiae completely take over and bog the story down?

You have to show people how high the ceiling is. I think you have to let yourself write it with all your enthusiasm, as though you’re writing to your friend who totally gets you and understands every weird joke, because you’re not going to be able to take the risks if you’re in a kind of defensive crouch. You’re not going to be able to really share the joy.

With MARGO specifically, the book was too long. It was almost 160,000 words at one point, and it published at 93,000 words, so fully 65,000 words were cut out of that book, and some of it was wrestling details. There were just maybe too many anecdotes. I think I just fell in love with those characters and I was willing to watch them go grocery shopping.

I want to ask you about a recurring theme I’m noticing across your books. You write about heroin addiction in quite a few of your novels, including MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES. That book taught me a lot about methadone and the stigmas and misunderstanding that surround it as a treatment. What keeps you returning to this specific addiction in your work?

It’s complicated. Obviously I have a personal relationship to addiction, specifically to opiate addiction. For me personally, I learned a lot of lessons about moral culpability, and a lot of the toolkit that I was given by a generalized worldview in the nineties, or whatever, was just not very useful for trying to actually dig yourself out of those particular holes or understand other people.

In my family, there was a lot of alcohol addiction. I had a lot of friends struggle with drug addiction. I struggled with drug addiction, and a lot of my work is centered around these questions of, what do you do when someone you love does something bad? What do you do with the part of yourself that did something bad? How do we metabolize harm and evil? Is there such a thing as evil? Are bad people bad? Are some bad people good? Is there such a thing as people who are all good, or does every good person just a bad person who’s trying really hard? I think it’s one of my central preoccupations for a number of reasons. I also just think it’s partially the opiate epidemic and the way that Oxycontin played out. I got to watch that unfurl throughout my twenties, and so it just feels very close at hand.

I got the most beautiful letter from the director of a methadone clinic, who was like, “I cried when I read MARGO because I never see methadone portrayed positively ever. I believe in what I do. I know I’m saving people’s lives, but most people look down on what I do and don’t think it’s really helping people.” It never occurred to me in a million years that someone working at a methadone clinic or directing a methadone clinic would read that book and feel moved by it. That’s sort of going back to the idea of a novel is a beacon: if you write about things as you see them, it’s going to resonate with other people who are also seeing the same little pieces of the puzzle that you’re seeing.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

No. Never. I still don’t. It’s one book at a time.

Do you ever have ideas for the next book while you’re working on the current one?

I want to say no. It goes a book at a time. When I finish a book, then I say, “Oh. I wonder what to write next.”

How much time usually passes between books? Do you ever find yourself closing one and then starting right again on another, or do you have these periods between books?

Right now, I’m in a period between books, but ordinarily, I go pretty much book to book. I would say it takes me the better part of the year per book.

I’m 76. I’ve been writing full-time since I was 18.

Do you think that’s why you work in so many mediums, then?

Yes. I think I find myself getting an itch to write something which may not be in the same genre as what I have just finished writing.

I think part of what makes The Artist’s Way so attractive to people is the very clear and seemingly simple actions you prescribe: the morning pages and artist dates. How did you arrive at the system of daily actions that have become The Artist’s Way?

I would say through practice. I found myself just leading from one book to the next and from one tool to the next. I think they were exciting to me.

What excited you about this framework initially?

The fact that I could keep going.

I notice, when I talk with friends about the practice of writing morning pages, people love to talk about the size of the notebook. Have folks come to you with a lot of questions about that too?

Yes. The often-asked question is, “What size paper should I use?” And I say, “8 1/2 x 11.” If you use something smaller, you miniaturize your thoughts. If you use something larger, you’ll be daunted.

Did you have trial and error with the size of the notebook as you were thinking about how to synthesize this toolkit into what it is today?

I just used the paper that I had on hand, which happens to be 8 1/2 x 11.

I want to talk about the spirituality of The Artist’s Way. It’s a creative program, but it’s also a spiritual program, and I’ve known more artists than I can count who say they’ve picked up the book but almost immediately dropped it because they found that foundation of a higher power to be off-putting. I’ve noticed that many people say the same thing about 12-step programs. But you even address this issue in the book’s introduction, and I think you handle it so well: you say it can simply be an exercise in open mindedness. And yet many readers still find the higher power element to be off-putting. What do you say to those readers?

I don’t have anything to say to those readers.

Why is that?

Well, I just think if they find it off-putting, that is their business.

I think that feeds into something I’ve noticed in your new book, The Artist’s Way Toolkit: you have so much to say about protecting ourselves from the dangers of codependency by utilizing morning pages, artist dates, solo walks, and writing for guidance. Can you say more about that?

I think that the tools lead the way to autonomy. When you write morning pages, you’re saying particularly, “This is what I like. This is what I don’t like.” And it’s particular to the person who is writing. I think when you write out of that state, you are opening yourself up to a spiritual source. That, too, is an exercise in autonomy.

And the same would be true of walking. Walking opens you to a higher source and gives you a sense of benevolence. And guidance is something that we need to try in order to feel that it’s worthy. All four tools are exercises In independence.

Have you written for guidance today at all?

Yes, I did.

Would you be willing to tell me a little bit about what you asked for?

I said, “Dear God, please guide me. Give me faith and optimism. Give me everything I need to make me alert and make me lively. Give me grace and eloquence, give me humor, and let me like Hurley.”

[laughs] I really hope that God is giving you that last one. Do you find yourself repeating questions when you write for guidance?

Yes.

What are some things you repeat?

I ask, “What’s next?” And then I listen. I often find that what’s next is something very simple. And so sometimes I think, “Are you listening to me?”

Does it seem like it can take a while sometimes to be delivered the answers?

I think the answers come pretty quickly. But my belief in them comes more slowly.

In your writing, I love how you express how very gentle the voice of guidance is with you. Do you find that that’s consistent? Or has guidance ever been a little more firm than that?

I think guidance is habitually gentle. And habitually also firm. And so if you are asking for guidance and saying, “Please guide me,” then you are open to the way guidance comes to you. And I think the guidance is, frequently, I want to say, surprising.

In the same way that guidance is habitually gentle, how do you remain habitually open to it?

Well, I use guidance often. And when I do, I am asking to hear what path to take next. And I have found over time that the path, and the suggestion, is fruitful.

And so I think that what we’re doing is asking for openness. And when we are granted openness, we are given a desire to go forward.

You’re the creator of The Artist’s Way, but you’ve also written and directed films in addition to writing plays and musicals and fiction and children’s books and collections of poetry. But you clearly relish both sides of your work. In fact, in your book Living the Artist’s Way, you write, “I love it when I am a building block in someone’s dream.”

It doesn’t seem to bother you that the rest of your tremendous body of work may often be overlooked in favor of one book. Do you have advice for artists who help fellow artists and perhaps struggle to find that balance between pursuing their own work and helping others with theirs?

It’s important to pursue your own work first. When you pursue your own work, you are given what to teach. And I think that it’s an important facet of my work, that I keep moving in many different genres. I think that it’s important for anyone trying to help to teach from creative practice, not from theory.

What does your own writing practice look like these days?

I tend to write several times a day. First thing in the morning, I write morning pages. They sort of give me a trajectory for my day. And then later in the day, I turned my hand to whatever creative project I’m working on, and I write on that for a while. And then I wrap my day up with writing for guidance.

Has your writing routine changed at all through the years, or have you maintained this process of waking up, writing morning pages, working on the creative project later in the day, and writing for guidance to end the day?

It’s pretty steadfast.

How many of your ideas for your books arrive to you during your morning pages?

I think they arise more when I am setting out on them as a creative project. I don’t think that they come to me through morning pages very often.

What other parts of the day do you find yourself being struck with ideas for your work?

I think walking helps.

How long do each of your writing sessions typically last for you?

Morning pages can take quite a little while. And by that I mean, maybe an hour and a half. And when I’m working on a project, I go until I run out of gas.

How do you know when you’ve run out of gas?

When it becomes difficult to find what comes next.

Do you ever feel that you’re wrestling your writing to the ground, trying to get it right? Or do you have a strong sense of when to step away and let your subconscious do its work on it?

I hope to say I have the wisdom to walk away.

How do you know when to walk away from the writing?

I say it takes practice.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

No. Never. I still don’t. It’s one book at a time.

Do you ever have ideas for the next book while you’re working on the current one?

I want to say no. It goes a book at a time. When I finish a book, then I say, “Oh. I wonder what to write next.”

How much time usually passes between books? Do you ever find yourself closing one and then starting right again on another, or do you have these periods between books?

Right now, I’m in a period between books, but ordinarily, I go pretty much book to book. I would say it takes me the better part of the year per book.

I’m 76. I’ve been writing full-time since I was 18.

Do you think that’s why you work in so many mediums, then?

Yes. I think I find myself getting an itch to write something which may not be in the same genre as what I have just finished writing.

I think part of what makes The Artist’s Way so attractive to people is the very clear and seemingly simple actions you prescribe: the morning pages and artist dates. How did you arrive at the system of daily actions that have become The Artist’s Way?

I would say through practice. I found myself just leading from one book to the next and from one tool to the next. I think they were exciting to me.

What excited you about this framework initially?

The fact that I could keep going.

I notice, when I talk with friends about the practice of writing morning pages, people love to talk about the size of the notebook. Have folks come to you with a lot of questions about that too?

Yes. The often-asked question is, “What size paper should I use?” And I say, “8 1/2 x 11.” If you use something smaller, you miniaturize your thoughts. If you use something larger, you’ll be daunted.

Did you have trial and error with the size of the notebook as you were thinking about how to synthesize this toolkit into what it is today?

I just used the paper that I had on hand, which happens to be 8 1/2 x 11.

I want to talk about the spirituality of The Artist’s Way. It’s a creative program, but it’s also a spiritual program, and I’ve known more artists than I can count who say they’ve picked up the book but almost immediately dropped it because they found that foundation of a higher power to be off-putting. I’ve noticed that many people say the same thing about 12-step programs. But you even address this issue in the book’s introduction, and I think you handle it so well: you say it can simply be an exercise in open mindedness. And yet many readers still find the higher power element to be off-putting. What do you say to those readers?

I don’t have anything to say to those readers.

Why is that?

Well, I just think if they find it off-putting, that is their business.

I think that feeds into something I’ve noticed in your new book, The Artist’s Way Toolkit: you have so much to say about protecting ourselves from the dangers of codependency by utilizing morning pages, artist dates, solo walks, and writing for guidance. Can you say more about that?

I think that the tools lead the way to autonomy. When you write morning pages, you’re saying particularly, “This is what I like. This is what I don’t like.” And it’s particular to the person who is writing. I think when you write out of that state, you are opening yourself up to a spiritual source. That, too, is an exercise in autonomy.

And the same would be true of walking. Walking opens you to a higher source and gives you a sense of benevolence. And guidance is something that we need to try in order to feel that it’s worthy. All four tools are exercises In independence.

Have you written for guidance today at all?

Yes, I did.

Would you be willing to tell me a little bit about what you asked for?

I said, “Dear God, please guide me. Give me faith and optimism. Give me everything I need to make me alert and make me lively. Give me grace and eloquence, give me humor, and let me like Hurley.”

[laughs] I really hope that God is giving you that last one. Do you find yourself repeating questions when you write for guidance?

Yes.

What are some things you repeat?

I ask, “What’s next?” And then I listen. I often find that what’s next is something very simple. And so sometimes I think, “Are you listening to me?”

Does it seem like it can take a while sometimes to be delivered the answers?

I think the answers come pretty quickly. But my belief in them comes more slowly.

In your writing, I love how you express how very gentle the voice of guidance is with you. Do you find that that’s consistent? Or has guidance ever been a little more firm than that?

I think guidance is habitually gentle. And habitually also firm. And so if you are asking for guidance and saying, “Please guide me,” then you are open to the way guidance comes to you. And I think the guidance is, frequently, I want to say, surprising.

In the same way that guidance is habitually gentle, how do you remain habitually open to it?

Well, I use guidance often. And when I do, I am asking to hear what path to take next. And I have found over time that the path, and the suggestion, is fruitful.

And so I think that what we’re doing is asking for openness. And when we are granted openness, we are given a desire to go forward.

You’re the creator of The Artist’s Way, but you’ve also written and directed films in addition to writing plays and musicals and fiction and children’s books and collections of poetry. But you clearly relish both sides of your work. In fact, in your book Living the Artist’s Way, you write, “I love it when I am a building block in someone’s dream.”

It doesn’t seem to bother you that the rest of your tremendous body of work may often be overlooked in favor of one book. Do you have advice for artists who help fellow artists and perhaps struggle to find that balance between pursuing their own work and helping others with theirs?

It’s important to pursue your own work first. When you pursue your own work, you are given what to teach. And I think that it’s an important facet of my work, that I keep moving in many different genres. I think that it’s important for anyone trying to help to teach from creative practice, not from theory.

What does your own writing practice look like these days?

I tend to write several times a day. First thing in the morning, I write morning pages. They sort of give me a trajectory for my day. And then later in the day, I turned my hand to whatever creative project I’m working on, and I write on that for a while. And then I wrap my day up with writing for guidance.

Has your writing routine changed at all through the years, or have you maintained this process of waking up, writing morning pages, working on the creative project later in the day, and writing for guidance to end the day?

It’s pretty steadfast.

How many of your ideas for your books arrive to you during your morning pages?

I think they arise more when I am setting out on them as a creative project. I don’t think that they come to me through morning pages very often.

What other parts of the day do you find yourself being struck with ideas for your work?

I think walking helps.

How long do each of your writing sessions typically last for you?

Morning pages can take quite a little while. And by that I mean, maybe an hour and a half. And when I’m working on a project, I go until I run out of gas.

How do you know when you’ve run out of gas?

When it becomes difficult to find what comes next.

Do you ever feel that you’re wrestling your writing to the ground, trying to get it right? Or do you have a strong sense of when to step away and let your subconscious do its work on it?

I hope to say I have the wisdom to walk away.

How do you know when to walk away from the writing?

I say it takes practice.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I’m excited, because I feel like this book is the one I’m the most proud of. I’m the most excited I’ve been for readers to get their hands on it, but it’s also a little scary, because I put a lot of my own hopes and dreams and fears into it. Whatever people say, it will feel more personal in some ways than others.

I freaked out when I saw the title is What Is This Feeling? because I’m a huge musical theater nerd, so I immediately knew it was a Wicked reference. Did you take from your own background or interest in theater to write this book?

I was in the International Thespian Society in high school. Very extra, of course, right? And I think one of the things I loved most about theater was that it was all of these different kids from different cliques, or groups, or whatever you want to call them, that came together for this one thing, who maybe would’ve never crossed paths or been friends. That’s something that is very much explored in the book. There’s Sebastian, who is the tech kid and a loner, versus Teddy, who’s the theater star and very outgoing. I feel like there are people I’m friends with who I might’ve never really hung out with or spent time with, but we just happened to all be performing.

As you write for a young adult audience, do you find yourself mining your own childhood/adolescent obsessions for potential material?

Absolutely. You also end up digging up old feelings, trying to remember what it felt like to have your first crush, or what it felt like to do something embarrassing, like follow someone on Instagram who’s private and they don’t follow you back. With those kinds of little things, you have to really put yourself back there and be like, “Oh my gosh, when I was 17, that felt like the end of the world.” And I think that’s one of the fun things. You get to really go into these emotional highs and emotional lows, and I think a lot of experiences we have (I mean, I guess speaking for myself), we almost bury a lot of them. We experienced something that maybe was really formative, and we don’t, at that age, stop and think about what it means for us, or how we’re going to interpret the world. It’s interesting to write for young adults and think about these things that were formative for me that I didn’t realize would be so impactful or would change how I perceive things.

How do you maintain the heat of those kinds of moments that you felt as a teenager when you have to revise and revise and revise a scene over and over? How do you make sure you keep that emotional center intact?

One thing that’s consistent across all of my books is that all of my main characters are very dramatic. That is just obviously very easy for me to write, because I am a very dramatic person. Sometimes, I actually have had editors who’ll say, “I think this reaction is a little bit too big or too strong.” So, if anything, it’s more about watering it down a little bit sometimes. I write first-person present tense, so I’m just really in it as it’s happening. And sometimes, especially because my characters are dramatic, very headstrong, very stubborn, I find myself letting them get overwhelmed in their emotions to the point of, “Okay, we got to dial it back just a little bit.” That’s not the hard part, though. It’s keeping them in check, I think.

Do you think you’ll always write in first-person present tense?

I don’t know. I’m actually exploring potentially writing in third person. Even that one is still third-person present tense. I don’t know why I struggle with past tense. I don’t know if you listen to audiobooks, but I also really struggle with anything that’s not first person in audio. I don’t know if it’s just that certain brains work differently, but first person really works for me in reading and writing. I want to write in third person to challenge myself, but it’s not natural at all. But for reading and listening, typically, I need it to be first person. I need the same voice all the way through. I just need to feel consistency.

Do you think there’s a parallel there between writing in the first person and your acting background? Embodying a character, so to speak?

Maybe. There might be something there, honestly. I do think you kind of get used to character work. And I think honestly where a lot of my strength in characters comes from. I remember, in AP English and in drama class, that was always something I really felt comfortable and confident in: discovering this character, the motives, all of those kinds of things. Plot is more difficult for me. Maybe there is something there about how you learn to interpret characters and people. It’s really thinking about their backgrounds and their lens that they’re seeing the world through, because I think that makes such a big difference, right? Theater really probably did impact a lot of how I write and study people.

How else do you get in the mindset to write about young people and for young people?

I try not to be too conscious of it. I try not to do anything. I try not to look up slang or get in on trends I’m not already engaging with, because, to me, I think it would feel really forced, and I don’t want that. I’ve even seen some teens that would say, “This felt like an older person,” but then, personally, I think most of the time that probably is when I’m trying to do it. I have also seen reviews where people think it’s written too young. There is definitely this really interesting kind of middle ground between just authentically writing what the voice I hear nowadays, right? At the end of the day, we’ve all been young, and we all know certain things that are relatable and timeless, in terms of how young people interact.

In what ways does this new book feel different from your first two?

This one literally is different, because it takes place right before graduation, and the other two take place the summer before senior year. So there are these new fears and anxieties that the characters are dealing with. A lot of times, we want to create these characters that have the want, and the lie, and all these things, but sometimes there are multiple wants, multiple lies, and there are different reasons for that. Teddy’s a little bit more complex in that way, that he kind of contradicts himself sometimes, and he’s really optimistic, but he won’t pursue songwriting because he doesn’t think he’s good enough.

Also, I got to write a fictional pop star for this book, and he’s a really big character, and there are song lyrics, and I have a discography of all this stuff. It was really fun to explore fandom culture, and I just got to say so much. There are so many things that I want to say to young queer people, and just young people in general. I get messages from readers who are like, “I wish I had this when I was younger.”

How has your writing process evolved across these books?

It’s kind of funny, because I don’t have a really concrete writing process. Every book, I literally have had a completely different process. I’ll write at different times or in different places, so I kind of just let it happen however it’s going to happen. I remember I wrote What Is This Feeling? a lot on weekends. I would just hole up for entire weekends, which is kind of insane. I don’t know how I did that, but I remember I literally would be like, “Okay, I’m blocking off my Saturday through Sunday,” and I would just write. My Paris book, which comes out next year, I wrote a lot at, like, 5:00 AM until I had to get ready for work, which is not like me at all and very random. I don’t know if there’s some woo-woo thing with the characters or the stories, and with how they manifest in my brain or whatever, but it’s always different. There’s no structure to it at all.

Interestingly, your lack of concrete process feels similar to your approach to writing for young readers: not thinking about it too much, not really letting it be a factor. You’re approaching it in a way that makes sense to you in the moment. I think that’s a great thing. I think more writers should do that.

Well, I’m such an over-thinker. I want to plan everything, and I’m so particular, and I think it’s the one area where it’s not for me to control or plan. I mean, obviously, you do have to plan. If it were up to me, I would not write outlines. You have to be able to give your editor an outline, but I would love to just write and see what happens.

Do you think you’ll ever try writing that way?

I don’t know. Unless you’re, I guess, really, really skilled at storytelling, you’re just going to have so much work on the backend of making that work for you. Maybe one day, if I just have all the time in the world. I imagine that would take a lot of editing. But it’s also worth it, because you get this really authentic, raw version of the story that unfolds the way it should without you feeling like you’re forcing any of it.

Do you bring in other readers to take a look at drafts along the way, or do you just show your agent?

Just my agent. It’s almost superstitious. At first, I don’t know if it was a confidence thing or what, but even when I was trying to get an agent, it wasn’t something where I wanted to have beta readers. I just always felt like it was a very personal thing, even though I wanted to get published and be seen by all these people. I kind of just stuck to the idea that my agent will see it, my editor, and that’s it.

I’ve found when I keep things a little closer to my chest, it always feels better, because I’m more true to myself, and not true to a bunch of other readers.

Maybe that is a big part of it. I think sometimes you just don’t want to hear. It’s almost like confirmation bias, I guess. You’re seeking that. At least, I think that’s what it is. To me, if I were giving people my book before it’s out, I would be expecting or seeking confirmation bias. I want them to say, “I love this,” and if they don’t, it’s like, “Well, what do I do now?” I think that’s probably a big part of it subconsciously: not wanting to get too many opinions.

Are you a deadline-driven writer?

Yes. Luckily, now I’m at a point where my agent or editor will set deadlines, and that external deadline is really good for me. On my own, I might put something off, because there’s so much of writing that feels really nebulous and out of our control. A lot of these ideas have to marinate or characters have to form. But somehow, the deadline? I don’t know if it’s subconscious, but it makes that happen faster. It’s like you have to figure things out. So I love a good deadline. The only way I would probably get things done, I think, is by having a deadline. If I’m setting it myself, I’ll try to make it as short as possible so I don’t procrastinate and waste a bunch of time.

What’s a short deadline to you?

I’ve done one where I wrote 2,000 words a day for 30 days, which was just really hard. I think I saw that Emily Henry, actually, was the one who said, “I’ll do 2,000 words a day,” and I think before that, I had seen people say 1,000 or 1,500, and I was like, “Okay, if she can do it.” And she, I think, has this really sound reasoning, in that the first draft, there are going to be so many things that you cut or so many things that you’ll change; don’t get too married to it. So if I have a good outline, I can get that many pages or words done a day, and then I just feel good about myself and my progress. And then, once it’s done, then you can kind of take a step back, and be like, “Okay, what do we need to change?” I committed to that for my fourth book, and it worked somehow. I mean, the draft obviously did need a lot of work. The edits: there were many of them. But also, I felt good because I didn’t feel like I wasted any time.

Did you always know you wanted to write for young adults?

Yes, actually, now that you say that. I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked me that specific question. I wrote middle grade in high school. It was very obviously Harry Potter-inspired, because everyone does that. But then, everything else I did was teen. So I think I always knew. I had my reading renaissance as a teen. I grew up reading a lot of books, but then, as a teenager, just really found such a profound love for it. And then authors like John Green and Rainbow Rowell came along. When I was in college, that’s when I was like, “Oh, wait, not only do I want to write for teens, but the kinds of books that I like are also possible for teens.” It just all kind of clicked.

The theme of queer joy plays a big role in your books. Is that something you really craved as a young person, seeing that represented in books?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it sounds silly, because we see so much representation now that it’s almost probably hard to believe, but growing up, there wasn’t any really. There would be a character on 90210 who was gay, and that was the whole plot line was him being gay, right? There wasn’t the same thing as there is now with gay characters’ stories having full arcs, with romances and friendships and all these things. I just want to be able to give queer teens a story where they see themselves, and it’s not just about coming out or experiencing trauma or pain.

You’re living in Florida writing gay teen romances. We’re living in the land of book bans. What motivates you to keep writing here in Florida?

I do think there are two schools of thought, and I understand both. I think I’m a little bit more of that stay-and-fight mentality. I could go somewhere else, but these teens and these communities aren’t going anywhere. They’re still going to be here. So I think they need people who stand up and write those stories and believe in them, to make a brighter future for them to be here just as much as anyone else. I want to show that it’s not going to stop me if someone’s going to try to ban a book or anything like that. It really motivates me, because it’s so horrific to think of these teens hearing about books being banned just because a character is similar to them and their experience of the world. I think that’s just really psychologically damaging. That’s really why I write what I write and continue to stay and fight.

You say it motivates you. Do you have days where it does get you down, and it feels like there’s an impossibility to it?

Definitely. I think there are days when the reality of how big these people and their decisions are will hit me. It’s tough when it feels so much bigger than anything one of us can do, but I think that’s the important thing to recognize. The point of queer joy and optimism is remembering that it is tough, but without the hope and the optimism, we just end up giving up. We just kind of have to double down on what we believe and what we know is right.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

It was an amazing experience because it felt so personal. It almost felt like, suddenly, the novel was also epistolary, because I was sending it to my mom. And she was in such a hurry to read it: she would be like, “Have you translated any more pages yet?” I read it out loud to her as I translated it, which is not usually how I go about this stuff. And I would tell her, “I still have a lot of editing to do.” But she wouldn’t let me take my time. She was like, “Give it to me already. Other people have read it, and I don’t know what it says.”

Right now, my mom is partially blind. She has a surgery coming up. So there was this added emotional layer to me. I know she can’t physically read anything right now, so even if I sent her a PDF or I sent her a print version of the book, even though it’s translated into Portuguese, it still can’t fully reach her. I mean, talk about distance. So it was also very emotional for me to be reading it out loud and for her to be hearing it through my voice. I know she’s going to read it many times, but not yet. Right now, we can only talk this way.

I wrote the book very much as a love letter to her, even though it wasn’t necessarily for her to read it right away like this. It meant a lot for me to have her read it and feel everything that I wanted her to feel in her bones: how much I love her, and how much I miss her, and also how much I didn’t leave behind, even though I moved countries and languages.

It was also, I think, a very tall order to translate into Portuguese, for the very first time in my life. It helped that I was an experienced translator working into English. I have to find a voice anew, hone it, make sure it doesn’t falter, and deliver the book as a cohesive whole. It was also a book that I knew very well, so it was sometimes easy to read into things that weren’t on the page. I had a little sticky note next to my computer that just said, “Translate the page.” Not everything else that existed in my head or outside of it or my memories or my concerns. When I translate other authors, I have to focus on that, too: on the text as an object, the book as an object of its own. Not the author’s biography, not what I think of them, not what I know of them. None of that is verifiable, you know? So it was interesting to see the book that way, not from the inside of my head, but from the outside, a very new way of looking at it. It allowed me to experience the book as a reader as well, which I hadn’t done yet.

Was there any part of you, while translating for the very first time from English to Portuguese, that wished you’d taken that on with a book that wasn’t your own? Or was it better to begin with your own novel?

As a translator in English, I always had a very strong sense of my own voice, and I knew my own writing, and I knew how to play with the English language. I would experiment with it to reach these other voices and then produce these other texts that are nothing like anything I would ever write.

It was interesting to have the chance to develop my own sense of self and my own voice in Portuguese. I appreciated that side of it. But on the other hand, it was also, I felt, very inadequate at times, and then I did prep. I would do my research and I would do homework pretty much the same way I do with other authors. I’m used to knowing exactly what I want to say, but in this case, I’d think, “Okay, I know that I was referencing these authors, that there was an echo of this other scene that I studied in order to write this one. I’m having a hard time writing it in Portuguese. Let me see how this Jamaica Kincaid scene or this Sigrid Nunez scene sounds like in Portuguese. Then I can triangulate my influences again.”

That’s so interesting.

I do that with authors all the time. Like with Stênio Gardel, who wrote The Words That Remain, it was like, “I know he’s been influenced by Faulkner,” or Jeferson Tenório has been influenced by James Joyce, and then I go look, and I study those authors, and I understand what to do.

When I was translating Moldy Strawberries, which is this very, very lyrical story collection about the AIDS crisis, I read all of this poetry from the AIDS crisis, all of these experimental queer books and watched documentaries. I really didn’t expect that I would have to do that with my own work.

So there are pros and cons, I think, to coming into my own work very much like it was a foreign text. I was working with this language that, of course, is my mother tongue, but I don’t actually speak it every day anymore, and that I don’t read as much in it anymore and rarely write in it.

When you were reading the translation to your mom as you went, did she ever have feedback or suggestions for changes or anything like that? Did she get involved in the process at all?

She was kind of processing real life, finding a way to narrativize her own experiences through the book, more so than she was looking at the writing. For her, it was more like a life exercise. She said, “I’m trying to figure out how we live now, knowing that this story is out there.”

What do you think she meant by that?

I think it’s a little new to her to see a character that people might think is her, even though it is not her. She’s like, “Oh, I’m going to have to tell your aunt that this didn’t happen. She would be shocked.” It was new to my mom to have this gaze and this persona version of her. I think she gets a kick out of it, to be honest. She’s like, “Oh, how interesting. I have this carefree version of me who drinks alcohol,” and she’s very straight edge, doesn’t put a single drop of alcohol in her mouth. In many ways, very, very different from the mother character.

She was really intrigued by how and why I made up stuff. She was like, “I can see how this makes for a better story,” or she’d be like, “We had an outrageous detail. Why didn’t you include it? It was so fun,” and I’m like, “Oh, maybe a little too fun.” We did have this conversation where she was understanding a little bit, I guess, the driving force of the book versus what our lives are like, which are very, very different. Life is so boring.

Blue Light Hours took you seven years to write. How did you see it through?

I am a very slow writer, and I also was a full-time freelancer working with literature and publishing, so I was writing a ton for work and doing other kinds of writing. I found it really, really difficult to do the thing that people tell you to do: just write every day and structure your time accordingly. Instead, I would do these very, very, very immersive spurts. For two weeks, I would do nothing but live in the world of the book, and then I would write. I would close off one chapter. I wanted each chapter to function mostly like a self-contained story. So then when I went to do my other jobs, like translate a book or write readers’ reports, I knew that that chapter was mostly sealed, even though I would do tons of editing and all of that.

I am one of those writers who only moves to the next sentence after the previous one is perfect. Again, a terrible process, to be honest with you. Very paralyzing. Didn’t help me move toward my writing goal that much, but it’s the only process for me. I’m a very obsessive writer and very sentence-driven. I focus on the line as a unit, and I roll the sound in my mouth for a long time, always very focused on rhythm, on sound, on all of that. Sometimes I would hold one paragraph for several days, trying to play with it. I do love a quiet, introspective novel and a novel that gives the characters room to grieve instead of just pushing them forward all the time.

Nowadays, how are you balancing your fiction writing practice with your translation practice? Do you feel like you’re able to compartmentalize and work on both at the same time? Or do you tend to want to be more monogamous with your work?

I am very monogamous with my work. Usually, I will be translating something, and I might take a little break and then focus on my writing, and back and forth, but I can never work on two things at the same time.

Right now, my focus has been very heavily on craft, on rethinking my process and thinking through things like, “Huh, well, how on Earth does a story work, or a novel chapter, or a novel as a whole? Or does the sentence have an arc?” That’s all I’m doing right now. I can’t also be thinking of new fiction. I don’t know why that is. I envy people who can do lots of things at once. Even if I could do that, I would break up my day in very distinct halves and not mix them too much. It might have something to do with immersion or with inhabiting a voice. I need the writing to feel lived in and embodied, and I don’t know that I can do that and be fully present in the text right away. It always takes me a little bit of warming up.

How do you know when a translation project is one you want to work on?

I’ve been wrong before, but for the most part, I know because of the voice. Even if it’s a voice that’s very, very different from mine, if I can play with the syntax, if I understand its rhythms, I feel like it fits my body. It fits the rhythm of my breath. I can do it. I can sustain it for a long time. For the most part, I have to feel a relationship to the character and to the author’s voice.

How have your fiction writing and literary translating practices influenced one another?

I think there are two things that translation has given me. One is confidence. Just by having practiced different styles, different voices, different plots, I feel like I can take on a page. I am not that afraid of the page. I might not know what I’m going to write yet, and it might take time, but I know I’m going to get there. And confidence is everything in fiction, right? It’s the trick that we’re selling.

And then the other thing that translation has given me is, honestly, an opportunity to try on different styles and know how to execute them. It’s also made me think of language very much as a medium. The way that maybe someone working with watercolors has constraints they’re working with, and then if you’re doing oil painting, there are these other constraints. Portuguese is its own medium. It has its own problems and constraints and difficulties, and it has its own drying time. And then the English language also has its own.

The process of translation as meditation on language is so enviable for me as someone who doesn’t speak or write in another language. Do you have any ideas for how a writer might be able to access that kind of meditation in a way that is not translation?

A lot of my students are brand new to creative writing and don’t speak another language, and I’m like, “Oh, I wish I could tell them what it’s like to have an entire book go through you.” When I translate, I can hold that entire book in my body. From beginning to end, the whole arc. And I wish I could share with them how to do that without actually having to write a book, which is a whole other thing. And one way I found is to have them write in someone else’s style completely, and I call it “writing under the influence.”

During your National Book Awards acceptance speech, you thanked your publisher for putting your name on the cover, and you told the crowd, “Translators are not mysterious fairies working in the dark.” In your view, what work is still to be done by publishers on this issue, and what can readers do to support translators?

There’s so much that publishers can do to inform readers that there is somebody putting in all this artistic labor: moving these texts, experiencing these texts, and enacting these texts for this reader. That absolutely starts with putting the [translator’s] name on the spine and all of that. I’ve been lucky to have been included in book tours with my authors and things like that. They really make a difference, I think, in helping people understand, “Oh, this book wasn’t just born like this. There was somebody making choices for every word and for a reason,” as opposed to an attitude I see in publishing often, which is to trick the reader into thinking, “Actually, this wasn’t translated at all.” They try to give the reader this false sense of stability, like it’s a historical text that has never been touched. It was always perfect as is, like there’s a definitive version of the text, and it’s only one. I think it makes for a much more interesting book and process and reading experience to think of the book as something that is unstable and that has been moved and that you too can engage with, and play with, and then have a completely different result. Imagine how much richer people’s reading experiences would be if we read Proust or Tolstoy not as a painting in the Louvre next to a security guard, but as a painting that you can touch and feel the texture for and maybe even mess with a little bit.

I think a lot of artists wonder how an artist’s life may or may not change when they win an award as huge as the National Book Award. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to share some of your experience with that. How has winning the National Book Award made your life better? Are there any ways in which it’s been maybe even a little overrated or not life-changing the way everyone in the world thinks it is?

Thank you for asking that question. I wish someone had answered that question so I could take a look. Right now I’m dying to ask someone else, “Did you have that experience, too, or is this just me?”

The thing is that my brain is just as broken as it was before. Winning this award might have fixed my life on the outside, but it certainly didn’t fix my psychological issues or my sense of self. I am just as insecure as I was the day before I got the award, and just as scared as well, and that part has not changed. I really wish it had because I’m so sick of being afraid, afraid that my career will end, that I will never write anything again: all the fears that I’ve always had. Every time I write a story, I’m like, “I bet that was the last one.” I still feel that way. That part has not changed.

Many things have changed. I mean, I absolutely do not take it for granted. It’s been amazing. I’ve been able to get a good job. Maybe I would have gotten some kind of job anyway, but it’s certainly easier to apply for a fancy teaching job when you can say, “I’ve won this big award.” I know that it’s easier to get in the door. I think that’s the main difference. Being able to advocate for myself a little better, like, “Oh, you can’t underpay me. I won’t allow it.” Before, I might have wanted to say, “I won’t allow it,” but I allowed it fine all the time.

I moved just now to Iowa a month ago, and I brought my award wrapped in a sweater in my trunk, just like with all my other shit, and I don’t know that it’s quite the magical object that it might have seemed when I was unable to touch it. But it’s hollow. It even jingles a little because there’s something loose inside. It’s still very heavy physically. Actually, it’s incredibly heavy. It’s more than 10 pounds, and given it’s so small, it’s always kind of shocking when I lift it, but then I’m like, “Oh, it’s an object, kind of like I have a paperweight.” And then it kind of demystifies. It all falls apart, all the allure. Oh, gosh, I romanticize! I still romanticize these things so bad, but it’s much more human now to understand, like, “Goddamn it, is there nothing that’s going to shine on me and then make my problems go away?” No, that shit doesn’t exist. That doesn’t exist, it turns out, but certainly things can make your life easier. You know?

Thank you for that very honest answer. It’s so helpful to me to hear that, because it does seem like a magic wand that will make all of your problems go away. But of course it’s not. How could it be? That does not exist.

I know. I know. I guess if I could summarize it in one sentence, it would be that it might help your professional standing cosmetically, but it won’t heal your psychic wounds. Thank God I have a therapist.

You shared with me that you have a sleeping disorder that keeps you awake pretty much all night long. How has that impacted your writing practice?

Oh, gosh. I can never write in a coffee shop or do whatever it is that other people do. It’s always been hard for me to hold down a job because it’s so hard for me to be awake during the day. I still nap during the day a little bit like a baby.

For me, writing is always this almost magical activity you do when time is really still and there’s no one else around, and you do it in secret a little bit, so it’s always felt like something really private, and I have a hard time sharing my writing with other people. It’s hard for me to imagine that other people could see me writing. There is something to be said about something that you only do when you’re in hiding, you know? And I’ve always been a little embarrassed about my own writing. Even with my agent: she’s always like, “Please just send it to me,” and I am doing whatever I can to push it off and make sure she doesn’t see it for another six months. I love having a private inner life like this, but then it does mean that my husband is like, “You’ve been writing a story collection?” I’m like, “Oh, yes. I didn’t mention it?”

I have a feeling that the second I am working on a project again, I will want to work on a project and won’t be able to do it during the day. I’ll get overwhelmed, like, “Oh, gosh, there’s sunshine, there’s noise.” Then I’ll stay up all night and do it, and the whole thing will be back exactly to where it was before.

You have a pet rabbit named Tulipa, and I’ve also noticed from Instagram that one of your hobbies is making miniatures. From one outsider’s perspective, it feels like you’ve built this really delightful life for yourself. Does writing feel as enjoyable to you as petting your rabbit or working on a miniature does?

It does. When I’m in the middle of not knowing what the writing is, I hate it for a little bit. But then the second I get to the moment of knowing, which is what I’ve been searching for all along, there’s nothing that can match that high.

And I love all the other things I do. I love translating. I love miniatures. I have so much fun doing all of those things, but there is something about writing that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else, something honestly life-affirming that I’m like, “Everything makes sense. In this one moment, in this one second, everything feels right. Everything makes sense,” that I really do love.

Writing does feel as blissful as petting Tulipa, who is the softest creature I’ve ever touched. She’s a star. She’s absolutely beautiful and very clever, and I do think that she loves that I’m up all night because she’s also up all night.

Were you drawn to rabbits for that reason?

I didn’t know how intensely they slept during the day and how much they were active at night until I had her, but the second that happened, I was like, “I can never not have a rabbit for the rest of my life.” I’ve always felt pretty strange and wrong about not being able to be up during the day. I tried to fix it. I struggled with it and I wrestled with it a ton and slept in a tube at a sleep clinic and went to neurologists who were like, “Listen, there isn’t anything we can do. We tested your brain, and it only comes alive at night.” And I mourned that. I tried to be like everyone else, but then with Tulipa, things make sense. I’m like, “Of course. This is just what we do.” And in the middle of the night, she gets the zoomies, or she’s doing pirouettes up in the air, and so am I. The second it’s 10 P.M., I have a dance party and I want to write up a storm. She makes me feel like things are right in the world, and that’s a very lovely feeling to have.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I’m feeling good about it. I’m feeling exhausted by it. I’m feeling creatively satisfied, and I’m feeling like I have one more big push.

I sold this book on the first five chapters back in the fall, and I knew at the time that we sold it that the draft timeline was going to be shorter than almost anything I had done in all 12 years of my professional career. I felt excited and energized by it, and now, at the other end, I am feeling, to use a sports metaphor, like I have left it all on the field.

Very appropriate given that the book in question, Heavy Hitter, is about baseball! And from what I know, the deadline you met was a really tight one and you just mentioned it. Can you tell us anything about the timeline of it?

Yeah, so we sold the book at the end of October, and my editor, who I have worked with before and have a good relationship with, was basically like, “How fast can you write this book?” Because we are trying to catch a cultural moment. It’s a pop star/sports guy romance, so there is a very specific zeitgeist that we’re trying to chase.

My agent was very helpful. I’m such a teacher’s pet, such a people pleaser, that I was like, “I can have it done by January.” She was like, “Are you nuts? If one person in your house sneezes between now and January, it’s over.” So we set a February deadline, and I did meet it.

My first drafts are always very skeletal. My writing very much grows from draft to draft. So I knew that the first draft would be short, and it was very short. As soon as I sent it off to my agent and my editor, I already knew some of what I needed to do next. So I just kept going. I was like, “Here’s what I’m going to do while you guys read.” They were like, “Yes, okay, do that.” Then they came back with notes, and we’ve really just been piggybacking and leapfrogging. I work, they give me notes, and it’s all happening at the same time.

What does a skeletal first draft usually look like? What goes into it?

I am very much a plotter. I’ve always been a plotter. I start generally with a situation or plot before character. If you, like me, come out of an MFA background, that’s a quote-unquote hacky way to do it, but for me, I can never tell exactly who my characters are before I see them walk around on the page, before I put them in situations and move them around.

I start with a chapter-by-chapter outline, and then I’ll do a draft that I call a “zero draft” that is really just me telling myself the story. It’ll have scenes that I’m excited about. It will have a few lines of dialogue, and it’ll feel more like how if I was telling the story out loud. “And then she says this and then he says this and then this happens.” That sort of thing. So I get all that down, and once I’ve done that, I have a better idea at that point, character-wise. It’s easier for me to go back and shade in those character details and start to put the meat on the bones.

How do you deal with the stress of a looming deadline, especially such a tight deadline like the one you just met?

I try to take good care of myself physically. I try to get a lot of sleep. I try to get outside as much as I can. When I was younger, I was the kind of writer who could work all the time. I had a day job for years and years and years, and it was a nice, quiet day job where I sat and answered phones. So I would work at work, and then I could come home before I had kids and sit and work for four more hours if I wanted to. I could stay up late and work, and I could get up early and work. Now I have two small kids and there are just different kinds of demands on my time.

The thing that I’m always trying to learn to do is just be where I am at that moment and be working when I’m working and try and make it really focused work and not half-working and half-dicking around on the internet, which is hard. I’m still not really good at doing that when I’m working, and being with my family when I’m with my family, and not having guilt all the time about not doing the thing that I’m not doing in that moment.

When you’re working on a project, do you bring in readers, or is it only really seen by your agent and your editor?

It depends on the project. I will say when I first got the idea for this book, Heavy Hitter, I could tell that I was psyched about it because I shared the first couple of chapters with a bunch of friends, which is not something that I normally do. Normally I’m a pretty private drafter and nobody, even my agent, will see it until I’ve done a revision. I generally feel very protective of my garbage drafts.

Is it a protectiveness of the ego? Is it a protectiveness of the work itself and wanting ideas to be organic? Or maybe a combination of the two?

I think it’s a combination of those things. I think it is ego, mostly. When I know that I’m capable of something better than I have produced so far, I’m always like, “No one look at me yet.”

You published, I believe, seven novels for young adults before your first book for adult readers, Birds of California. Did you always want to write books for adults?

I love YA. I obviously have quite a YA backlist, and I started writing How to Love, my first YA, when I was in high school. It was my senior thesis when I was at Emerson. I didn’t necessarily, at that time, set out to have a career as a YA writer, but I was young, so I was writing about characters who were my age and I just fell into it that way. Then as I got older, I just naturally loved writing about teenagers. I could write the prom a hundred different ways. That stuff is so fun to me, that feeling tsunami of being a teenager is just incredibly fertile storytelling ground. There’s room to do a lot more in YA than I think people sometimes realize.

Having said that, now I’m 38 years old, and I’m lucky to have been in the industry for this long, and I’ve had different experiences. I have gotten married and I’ve had kids and I just was feeling like I wanted my characters to have a little bit more road to run, so that transition to adult fiction felt pretty natural at that point.

What do you think writers of young adult novels are best at when they make the transition to writing for adult audiences? I think pacing might be part of it, because you have to keep the attention of teenagers. Is that one area where you feel like you have an edge over other writers who haven’t written YA?

I think of myself, always first and foremost, as a journeyman craftsperson more than a high artist. I always feel like my first objective and obligation as a writer is to keep your attention for as long as I have asked for it. I always feel like I’m writing for people in waiting rooms. I’m writing for people on planes. I’m writing for moms who are up in the middle of the night with babies and listening to audiobooks. I do think that that’s a quality that is particularly important when you’re writing for teenagers. Before you can do anything else, you have to get them to keep the book open.

You got an MFA in fiction writing after you’d already published several books for young adults. Many writers will get an MFA in the hopes that the degree will lead to publication somehow, but you already achieved that. So what made you decide to get an MFA?

School nerd. I missed being around other writers. I was really excited about the idea of taking time to be in community with other writers again, which is a thing that I had done a lot. The nice thing about the program at Emerson, the BFA program that I did, is that it is a very workshop-intensive program, and I loved it. I was excited about the idea of doing some more of that.

And also, at the time, I really thought that I might like to teach, and then I did some teaching and it turns out that I’m not very good at it and I don’t enjoy it very much, but live and learn. But that was also a thing that was at the back of my mind. I’ve been lucky, but publishing is so volatile. So what kind of insurance could I get for myself to try and be able to do all kinds of different things with my very limited skill set?

Do you ever have to abandon novel projects you’re working on? And how do you decide when it’s time to abandon a project?

There’s the regular writing dread and the regular feeling of, “Oh, this is garbage.” I’ve experienced that quite a lot. It’s nice when it happens quickly. It happens in 10,000 words, but I wrote almost an entire novel last year, and I was like, “This is not it.”

In that period between realizing the project isn’t going to work and dealing with all those emotions that come with that and getting back on some other horse and starting another project: what is that period like between those two things?

Oh, it’s terrifying. I am not a writer with a ton of ideas. It takes me a while to find something that feels exciting to me. There definitely have been points in my career where I was like, “Maybe I’m just done. Maybe I’ve just said everything that I have to say. It was a good run.” I feel confident that I will always be a writer. I feel confident that I’m always going to be how I understand the world. But for me, I don’t think that my supply of ideas is indefinite. I think there will come a point at which I will run out.

What’s the plan if that, God forbid, ever happens?

I think I would be a great school secretary and I’ll just go back to writing dirty fan fiction and it would be fine.

The majority of your books have a romantic component to them. What draws you to romance on the page over and over again?

I love a kissing book. I’ve always loved a kissing book. To me, a book that doesn’t have some kind of love story, whether it’s romantic or otherwise at its core, feels fundamentally incomplete and unsatisfying. I just feel like falling in love or experiencing love is such a universal human experience. I also just like to think about attractive people making out.

How has romance been a doorway into exploring other themes in your work?

If you look at my books’ covers, they are marketed as romances, and they are fundamentally kissing books, but I’ve been able to talk about alcoholism and abortion and teen pregnancy and sexual abuse: all different, really weighty topics. But if you put a cute boy in them, it does, as you said, really open the door, I think, for readers who are suspicious of being preached to.

The trick is also that you can’t be preaching. Teen readers especially can smell it on you if you are coming at them with an agenda, and it’s always really important to me not to be doing that. But I think that teen readers can also handle and process a lot more than we necessarily give them credit for, and they’re smarter than we give them credit for.

Do you ever feel in a first draft, maybe even in one of your “zero drafts,” that you’re coming at the darker themes with the sense of agenda, even if you don’t feel like you necessarily have an agenda? How do you strip that back?

If it’s starting to feel like an agenda is creeping in, I think that’s when you have to really go back to your characters and really give it a think and make sure that you’re being true to who they are, how they would realistically act, even if it’s not the way that would be most convenient for the plot or for your moral agenda. You have to think: what is the most truthful possible way for me to tell this story? That’s your job as a writer as well.

You co-wrote a book with Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City. How did that come to be, and what was that experience like?

Candace and I had the same editor at HarperCollins, and Candace was working on a book. I think she and I were both at a point in our careers where we were trying to figure out what was next. Actually, it came very close on the heels of the one that I was just telling you about that I got almost all the way to the end of and was like, “This is not it.” Candace had written The Carrie Diaries, which was a YA, and had another book under contract and was trying to figure out what that might be. Our editor set us up on a blind date and thought that we might have a similar aesthetic, thought that we might be interested in grappling with similar things.

Candace is such an original gangster, first of all, but she’s also just such a writer’s writer and is so ballsy and so fearless. It was really just like a masterclass in writing, to be able to work with her and to trade ideas back and forth with her. Also, to just see her amazingly fancy apartment on the Upper East Side with her enormous poodles. Everything that you think about Candace Bushnell is true.

We went to one lunch in New York at the very beginning, and I had felt like I was really keeping my cool. I didn’t eat anything at the lunch, obviously, because I was so nervous. And I went to Penn Station, got three Nathan’s hot dogs, and I fell asleep all the way home. From New York to Boston, I passed right out. I was like, “Oh, I guess I was nervous.” Like a small child. Ate three hot dogs and fell asleep.

Let’s talk about a book of yours that came out last year, Meet the Benedettos. The novel’s concept is Pride and Prejudice meets Keeping Up with the Kardashians. And another one of your books, Liar’s Beach, is a take on Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. What do you find most freeing about writing a novel based on existing cultural references?

I wonder if this is because I spent so many years in Catholic school, but I love rules. I find rules incredibly freeing, and I think that’s why I gravitate toward romance. I come from a background of fan fiction. I love being as creative as possible within a prescribed set of boundaries. I find that incredibly creatively satisfying and freeing, and I love retellings also for that reason. It gives me a set of rules. How can I take this world and make it completely my own, completely original, and also completely recognizable? That’s such a fun and satisfying challenge to me.

Is there anything particularly challenging or even stifling about following a form and retelling a story?

There did come a point with Meet the Benedettos where I was trying to make the plot work beat by beat. Right around the time when Lizzie goes to visit Charlotte, I couldn’t make it logically fit. I had written it like five times, and my editor was like, “I release you from this burden.” She was like, “Just put it where it goes. Just let the characters do what they’re doing in the story. It doesn’t have to be a beat-for-beat re-creation.” And that was when it really opened up for me, I think.

What advice would you share for writers who might be interested in trying on what you did, using the structure of a classic book to explore something more modern?

For me, what makes it successful, particularly with a book like Pride and Prejudice, is that I can always tell when writers don’t really love the Bennetts or when they don’t respect the Bennetts, when they think that they are just a silly joke. In the original, the characters are silly, but Austen is so warm toward them, and I feel like the retellings that don’t land for me are the ones that are looking at the characters with an eye that is too harsh. I think you just got to love your source material, fundamentally.

You’re so prolific and so young. What are your writing goals from here?

First and foremost, my writing goal is always to just be able to write the next book. I just feel lucky to have gotten this far. I want to be able to keep going. That’s a thing that feels within my control, whereas things like giant book tours or the bestseller lists or year-end lists: those would be nice, but fundamentally, they don’t really have very much to do with me.

What I can do is take my work seriously, be a person that people want to work with, and just keep at it. I also want to be the kind of writer that can write a lot of different kinds of things. I think the longer you stay in this industry, the more valuable of a skill that becomes. I read more book club/literary type fiction. I would love to write something like that. I think I have a cozy mystery in me. I don’t know. I would like to write a middle grade. I do feel, in many ways, I’m still getting started. So while I do think I will run out of ideas, I’m not out of ideas yet.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I think it kind of all came together very quickly and about the same time. First, I had started to build the main off-line story between Ellora and her friends. And then I had this idea to set it on LiveJournal. It was around late 2018, and I was feeling this nostalgia for the early internet. And I was like, well, that would be a really fun way to structure the book. I knew I could do some fun things with the format. I still planned the general main storylines of the book, but I knew I could do some of the fun things that happen in the book that are based on the format of LiveJournal, like the surveys and the shorter entries as their own little tiny standalone stories.

Did you get your start as a writer on LiveJournal?

I did have a LiveJournal, but I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily where I got my start as a writer. I was very into visual art on there. I made photoshopped collages that had song lyrics and just sort of poetic lines about my feelings, and so it was more of a visual art medium. But crucially, though, it wasn’t necessarily me as a writer there, but on LiveJournal, it was the first time there were other people looking at something I’d made and saying stuff and responding to it. And they were strangers, so it wasn’t like my friends, and they had no agenda to really say that it was good or not. I think that was actually really meaningful.

You workshopped this novel at the Tin House Young Adult Workshop, but the book isn’t billed as a YA novel. I’m curious what the process was in determining you were writing a book told from the point of view of a teenager that’s actually for an adult audience. Did it have to do with LiveJournal being so nostalgic for people, or did it have more to do with the rather adult themes of the book?

I’ve thought a lot about what makes a book with a teenage narrator YA, or what makes it an adult literary novel with a teenage protagonist, and I still don’t really know the answer at the end of the day. It’s definitely not based on literary merit, because there are really great writing and books in both those spaces. When I went to the Tin House YA novel workshop, I wasn’t done with the book yet. I think I just thought it was YA because it had a teenage narrator, and you never see her move past that age. She’s never looking back or anything and she’s always actually a teenager, and she’s also very in-voice, very believably a teenager. And I still think that’s, to some degree, a YA quality. I think sometimes adult literary novels have more of a looking back perspective, or they jump from the adult perspective looking back.

I queried Log Off as a YA novel and I got a full manuscript request from a really great agent and then a personalized pass. And his recommendation was kind of like, “I’m loving this, I’m loving the voice, but ultimately, I think the audience for this is more millennials our age who were teenagers during this time. And I checked with some of my younger colleagues about that too.” So that made me think about how I would market, and that it would actually be an adult novel. I still feel like it’s sort of in an in-between space and I think people our age will like it. But I do actually want teens to read it. I think there’s something real about Ellora’s teenage feelings that I hope will cross generations.

Did you want to be writing a book for adults, or did you have your heart set on writing for teenagers? And did any emotions crop up when you made the audience switch?

I don’t think so. When I think about readers, I kind of feel whoever will really respond to the book could really be anyone or everyone for various reasons. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be a teenager, or an adult who was a demographically similar teenager at the time the book was set. When I’m picturing a reader, it’s not necessarily any age or anything like that. It’s more just someone who will find something that they respond to in the work.

I mentioned those more grown-up themes in the book, and there are a lot of them in the novel: alcoholism, sexuality, guardianship, parental abandonment. Reading your book, I never felt like you had an agenda with any of these themes, but I did feel like you had certain things you wanted to say and represent. What’s your approach to writing about harder topics while avoiding that sense of agenda?

Well, first of all, going back to that earlier question about audience, I would not define whether it deals with harder topics to be the space of either YA or adult books. YA books should deal with hard topics because teens really deal with them, and I feel that I would’ve liked to have been treated with that respect as a teen. But in terms of dealing with harder topics, I think you have to be honest about them. You cannot smooth the edges, if you will. You have to be honest.

I don’t want to approach those kinds of topics with an agenda, or seem like I’m moralizing about them. I think the way to do that is to approach the characters who are dealing with those issues in an honest and empathetic way and be willing to, as a writer, show them as fully flawed people and not judge them. The same way that you would, I think, maybe in life.

There’s so much depth to your protagonist in this novel. Were there any character exercises you did, or anything like that to get to know her and get in her head?

I don’t really do stuff like that much, exercises to get in a character’s head. And I don’t think this will necessarily be true for the next thing I write, but I just knew these characters really, really well, pretty early on. Especially for Ellora, the narrator’s voice, this book is kind of ride-or-die by the voice. Obviously there were scenes or even storylines that I didn’t keep in the book that were exercises of just writing in her voice in those scenes and then editing it to be the book that it is now.

I think writing a book is a huge leap of faith. It’s something you have to do on your own time with no guarantees that it’ll ever see the light of day. How did you cope with that reality and yet, at the same time, reach the finish line of this manuscript?

I think I just really believed in and loved the story and the characters. If you’re having a good time writing, you’re going to have a good time editing and finishing it, even before you think about what will happen publication-wise with the book. I was having a good time finishing the book. I wanted to be in this story and be in this voice, so that wasn’t hard.

I think there is a leap of faith, though, in terms of what will happen to it out in the world. And yeah, that was unknown. That took a while to sort of figure out in terms of querying or going with an independent publisher. But this was never going to be a drawer book for me. It’s a book I really believe in. And if you believe in your book, I really do think that something will happen with it, because you’ll make that happen in any sort of way, even if your first original plan doesn’t work out. I really do believe that. I’m not just like, “Oh, motivational pep talk time.” If you just believe in it so hard, you will not give up on that. It might take longer, or it might just be a different path than you originally thought.

Was this your first attempt at writing a novel?

It was. I’d written a lot of shorter stuff, or loosely began a novel, but this was by far my first and most serious attempt at writing a novel. There were things that were more narratively satisfying in the editing process, like looking at other books to see how they’ve navigated storylines and built tension. It was my first time at the rodeo with that, but it was kind of fun to learn. When you’re like, “Oh, I can consolidate these two characters into one, and that works so much better.” That’s a great feeling when you figure that kind of stuff out.

You mentioned that you’re goal-oriented. Does that mean you’re also deadline-oriented?

Yes. I like to have a deadline in mind for a couple reasons. Without one, it could just go on forever. And it’s also for accountability. Even externally, I feel if someone else wants something from me, I don’t want any ambiguity. I want to know when they need it by.

Can you give us an idea of the rough timeline of writing this book?

Even though I had some loose ideas beforehand, maybe even as early as actually being a teenager, I think I seriously started the book around 2018. I had a goal to get the first draft done by the end of 2019, and then did that into early 2020. And then there was a pandemic, which was a great time to do editing, I think, because it’s task oriented, versus having to be mentally creative. I did that, for the most part, through all of 2020, and some slight editing through 2021. But 2021 and 2022 is when I started querying and making changes based on that process. I did a full manuscript workshop in late 2022, and that was the first time anyone had ever read the book in full, so got that feedback too. The actual writing and editing of the book was almost just as long as figuring out what I was going to do with the book.

Now that you’ve finished your first book, how are you feeling about writing your second? Do you feel less intimidated by it? Are you wary of it? I always think about the concept of the sophomore slump. Is that on your mind, or are you feeling really confident going into it?

I do not feel really confident going into it. Every project, unfortunately—I mean, every book, but also every time I write a new essay or a short piece—it’s like, “Do I remember how to write? Possibly not.” So I think I do not feel confident for a couple of reasons. One, I think each book has its own different set of problems, so what worked for you on one does not necessarily work for the other. And then, this is kind of true to the sophomore slump for books, or for albums, but I think your first book does tend to be a little bit personal, so things are really close to your heart. But that also means you kind of have a fiery confidence in it, versus maybe in a second or third book, where you kind of branch out and go a little further, or try something more complex. But that means you’re going to know some of the material of the book a little less and have to branch out in new skills, whether that’s a multi point of view, or a different tense, or something like that.

Let’s talk about writing adjacent things, too, because in addition to being a writer, you’re the founding Editor-In-Chief of The Bushwick Review, and you’ve interviewed so many writers and artists, many for The Creative Independent. How do you balance these sorts of writing-adjacent things with the writing itself?

I am excited to be doing this interview just because I’ve done interviews for this site, so it’s really special to me. I think, for me, it’s hard to balance. I will say that. I think it’s kind of hard to balance the writing for yourself and the business and email aspects of writing, and then your day job, and then being kind to your friends and family and also just maybe relaxing.

Then there’s also this element that’s really, really important to me, which is supporting other writers. It feels really good to me. I mean, I like celebrating and supporting other people’s work, but it’s also fulfilling to me. When I did The Bushwick Review, it was so exciting to edit people’s pieces, talk about people’s pieces, have the release parties where they could read, and I could introduce them. And I feel the same with the interviews, where I learn things from artists, and it’s really nice to engage with people in that way.

Supporting other people’s creativity is one of the main things of my life, but it’s not just altruistic. It’s what I love to talk to people about. Sometimes it’s more of a struggle for me to talk in small-talk contexts. But if you need someone to work out your project and talk about it, let’s get into it. That’s extremely my bag. We can really talk for hours about that. I’ll be there for you on that.

Same. I can’t do small talk, but when someone wants to tell me about act three of their novel, I’m like, “Tell me more.”

Exactly. Right. Or if you’re trying to figure out what the beginning of your novel you want to be, we can talk about that for three hours. I will very much be present for you for that and help you figure that out.

You mentioned it’s not entirely altruistic, and I completely agree. What are some things you’ve learned from the writers you’ve interviewed that have helped shape your process?

When people have been really transparent about their struggles, whether it’s in the writing, on the business side, losing faith or confidence in themselves, or just how long it took to do something, I think that has been very comforting to learn. It’s also really great to me to learn about people’s schedules. I love that part, the part where people just tell me the breakdown of their days. I am just generally curious about how other people live their lives, I guess. Knowing that other writers, even very successful ones, have had the same doubts, or been in the same kind of problems, or face the same kind of rejections.

I did an interview with the photographer Stacy Kranitz, who shared what her schedule was like, and I was like, “This is the ideal schedule.” The morning, she devotes to the business and email side, and then she takes a long break where she exercises, and in the afternoon, she does the creative work, and nighttime is her intake, where she reads and watches movies. I think I would flip the morning and afternoon, personally, but I think of that structure all the time. Morning creative, long break, physical exercise, afternoon business, email, other people’s work.

I saw on your Substack that you participated in a manuscript bootcamp. How do you decide when it was time to have your full manuscript workshopped? I feel like a lot of writers will enter that kind of space too early, at a time when they really could have sussed some things out on their own.

I have a perfectionist tendency. If other people are going to read it, I want it to be as great as possible. But that’s not necessarily the best state for workshopping writing, because if you already feel like your book is polished, then they might, too, and there’s not really much the workshop can do except for tell you that things are good, and that might feel good, but that’s not actually the most helpful. Having done two of them now (the Tin House YA workshop and the full manuscript bootcamp at Writing By Writers), I’d say to have some secure footing in what your piece is, but to go in with some unknowns and some questions that having some readers would help you with, versus knowing every beat of the way what you want to do.

But I also think there’s something to just wanting readers’ eyes on something, even if you are confident with it. With the first full manuscript workshop, no one had read the full book. And so regardless of how confident I felt about it, it was just so valuable on its own to know that I was going to get a handful of readers to read the full book and be able to engage with me and give me feedback. Sometimes, just having readers might be the answer, regardless of what state the manuscript is in, because you need some sort of response.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I was more interested in creating things from the beginning, like drawing and building my own worlds within worlds. And when I got my hands on music, it was like, this is it. This is what I want. This feels the best. I think because of how visceral music is: it’s so immediate. I was never too keen on school growing up. I think I just didn’t have the attention span for it. And if it didn’t interest me, I really didn’t care. I’d rather spend hours trying to figure out how to play a guitar or going through the painstaking process of figuring something out myself than reading a book about it. The book would be more confusing to me.

It’s interesting to me that you say you felt like you didn’t have the attention span for something like school or reading, but you clearly had the attention span for learning how to play an instrument. What do you think was different about learning to play an instrument versus learning other things?

I think, luckily, I was pretty good at starting things. I’d have a burst of energy. It came easy. And it just felt really good. I feel like learning a musical instrument, you must have these eureka moments where it all clicks.

My first real love was Ritchie Valens. I watched that movie, La Bamba, and I wanted to play Ritchie Valens when I was five. I liked dancing, too. The next step was learning how to play an instrument, an actual instrument. My parents got me a guitar, but it hurt. And they tried to give me lessons and I just couldn’t… the threshold, it was too difficult at the time. And the things they were trying to teach me, it didn’t sound how the tape did. When I played a G chord, it didn’t sound like “La Bamba.” I didn’t have that eureka moment.

It really wasn’t until 13, getting an electric guitar and finding out about Nirvana, and they had these really simple songs that were easy to learn how to play. So immediately, I would be able to remember learning how to play “Come as You Are.” I needed those moments. I found it. And then, you start to build up the dexterity and the strength, and then it doesn’t hurt anymore. Then I wrote my first song: another eureka moment. Then I was like, “Oh, I want to play drums.” I’d work towards getting a drum set, figuring out how to do the beat. This hand is doing this and my foot’s doing this, and my hand’s doing this. And then, after that you’re like, “Well, what if we change?” You hear another beat, you want to try that. But you have to be able to see the bridge or the next rung on the ladder, you know what I mean? If you can’t see it, then you’re going to stop, or at least I would stop.

I would dive in and learn little bits all the way. It was like a rock climbing wall or something. Sometimes I’d take a song and pull myself up on a song rock, and then the next thing is like, “Oh, well, now, I’m going to pull myself up on this piano rock.” And it was never about just going up one thing. For 20 plus years, it was always this zigzag all the way up, to where now, I just have this weird buffet of skills.

Musically, you’re a jack of all trades. Do you prefer to make music on your own, or do you prefer it to be a more collaborative effort with several other musicians?

For a long time, I was more comfortable just doing everything myself because it would move faster. And it was really exciting to figure out all the different parts. Just records in the shed by myself, playing the drums and the bass and the keys, and coming up with all the harmonies: that’s a fun place to explore.

Working with people, it’s like you have to find the right people. When you start bringing in somebody else, that’s where this really magical thing starts happening because collaboration is ultimately the melding of tastes and ideas all together, and it really frees you up to go further, I think. So now, I’m really big on collaboration. I really would rather come up with an idea and see how it evolves when other people spin on it or add something to it or take something away.

But I do like that little area of inner… it’s almost like meditation in yourself. You’re writing, and you’re the only one hearing it and you’re the only one making any decisions. It’s all inside.

What is it about another person that might make you feel pulled toward them to collaborate with them? Can you describe that initial pull toward them, how you know they’re worthy of that collaboration?

It’s a lot like falling in love. There’s just something about them that, like, oh… it’s scratching some itch that maybe you couldn’t get to before. That’s why, I think, young bands are so interesting. Because really, you’re young, you fall in love so easily. You’re just like, “Dude, you like music? Let’s start a band.” It’s not very difficult to connect. And then with those things, it’s really rare for them to fit and be intact for a long time. That’s why it’s crazy to think that the Stones are still a band, you know what I mean? They’ve been playing together since they were teenagers, which is insane to know somebody that long and then to be working with somebody for that long. It’s a different type of relationship and a depth that you can’t reproduce.

I think two things make a relationship powerful. Sometimes time is the thing and sometimes just the energy releases all at once. There’ll be a big explosion, and the relationship may not last that long, but it’s so intense that it creates something completely new. And it can also take a long time, and you’ll see it slowly evolve into something, like a supernova or coal turning into a diamond.

The pull to a collaboration, I think, is based solely on circumstance and where you are and who you meet. If you’re in a place that has a lot of different people that are creative and musicians and stuff, it can boost your creativity. That’s what happens when a scene is happening. It’s like there’s a collective of people and they all are starting to mix and you see each other doing stuff, and that pulls everybody up. It builds because there is a collaboration going on between all these different artists and things.

Was ever a low point for you where you considered not making music anymore, and if so, what made you keep going?

There were plenty of low points. There were times when I thought, well, maybe I need to get a different job or work on something so I could make money and then do this as a hobby thing. But those were short-lived experiments. I never have thought of not making music. It was always something I was going to be doing and making, and creating, and writing. Once I got on the boat, I never got off the boat. That was it.

I fell in love with music really early. I remember just loving a song, like love this song. All I want to do is hear this song over and over, and over, and over, and over, and over. I always tell people that my first step into playing piano was when I went to go see Jurassic Park when I was nine or something, and I couldn’t get the tune out of my head. That silly, triumphant song was just in my head, and I was like, “I want to hear it.” I couldn’t buy the soundtrack. So, I went to the piano and just found the notes so I could hear it. Just hearing it was like, “Oh, man, I got to hear it. I got to hear it more. I got to hear it more.”

You’ve had this commitment to music, but at the same time, you became a parent at a very young age. You’re married to the visual artist Sarah Colado, and today, the two of you have a young child again, 20 years after your firstborn. Do you have any words of guidance or solace to share with people who are in a similar boat: who have families and want to commit to their art at the same time but don’t really know how to make that work with everything else?

I think it can be really scary whenever you put other people into the equation. Because now, you’re not just responsible for yourself, and this could be a big deterrent for a lot of people. You think, “Oh, well, now, I need to settle down, or I need to go get a real job or something.”

It might not look like what you think it was going to look like, but it’ll be yours. Do you want to just do what other people are doing, or do you want to do what you do and make your way? There are no rules to this. I think that was another thing I liked a lot about art and getting into art and creating: there is no real rule. You could do whatever you want and make whatever you want, just like there are no rules to parenting or marriage. It’s like a weird funky thing that you just figure out. And parenting is also a crazy, weird adventure where you don’t know what path you have to take or what it’s going to throw at you. Just like a music career, it doesn’t even need to be a career, but you could still make it, and you could still do those things. It just requires prioritizing.

The biggest thing is learning how to prioritize and maybe kicking away some of that “me-time” and investing it in something. You don’t need to spend two hours playing a video game, or you don’t need to spend three hours watching a movie. Would you rather watch this movie, or would you rather be out with your kid, or working on your music? You prioritize, and then that’s what you get. You don’t need as much free time as you think. You do need some free time, of course, but the older I get, the more I’m investing in people and things that I love.

What has your relationship with the idea of fame looked like? Has the concept of “making it” as a musician been a big driver for you?

I’ve never had a lot of fame to where I’ve really felt the trapping of it. When somebody knows your name, they have power over you, and when everybody knows your name, you’re no longer yourself. I mean, you are yourself, but there’s this other thing now that you’ve sacrificed to. You are now a vehicle for all these other people. Fame is becoming the sacrifice.

Now, what you’re sacrificing yourself for, I think, is the big question. And a lot of people sacrifice themselves for a lot of selfish things. I just made this connection that’s silly as hell, but it’s like the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings: the way you come to this power is how it’s going to treat you. You could take it in a noble way, taking this burden and trying and be as responsible with it as possible and trying and do what’s right with it or try and helping people with it. If you take it out of vengeance or out of jealousy or something like that, or out of selfishness, then that’s what it’ll become. Are you just going to sit around and look at yourself, or are you going to try and lift it all up with feelings and thoughts and something transcendent?

What has your relationship been like with jealousy as an artist, when musicians you know surpass you in terms of milestones? I feel like every artist working has had that happen to them: we’re all vying for a similar thing, and someone else’s timing is guaranteed to be different from ours. They’ll arrive there before we get to arrive. How do you process the feelings that might get stirred up when that happens?

I don’t think anybody is immune to it, unless you’re just some wizard and you’re not really paying attention to what anybody else is doing. But I think when people around you start to achieve things that are bigger, going places you wanted to go, then yeah, you’re going to be envious and jealous. I think that’s natural. Eventually, you have to land on their path not being your path. This is your path, and it’s different, and you can explain it. You can’t explain why something gets picked. There’s so much going into the fact that this band, which maybe has only been around for six months, all of a sudden is shot to the top. And you’re like, “Whoa, I’ve been around for five years. What happened? Why did they get it and I didn’t get it? Why did they get moved up? How did they get found?”

The jealousy and the envy is real, but I think if you really love what you’re doing, you’re going to work past it. There’s always going to be somebody that’s more successful than you. That’s just how it is. There’s always going to be somebody who you think has done better or has done more. And if you’re going to sit around and worry about all that shit, then stop right now. This isn’t for you. You should just find something else. But if you keep going, maybe you’re going to do something that they think is the best thing ever. You just never know. So, don’t stop. Take that jealousy and envy and put it over there and don’t focus on that crap. It’ll make you bitter. It’ll make you real bitter.

I’ve heard stories about musicians that have played with these big bands and then go back to where they’re really at. They’ve been up here for a while, and then they come back and say, “Well, I played with the Stones,” or something like that. And they’re acting like they’re in the Rolling Stones, but they’re not because Stones are up here. You’re way down here, buddy. This is a different place, and be grateful that you had that opportunity, but be grateful that you’re right here, because you know what? There’s also somebody lower than you, too.

What advice do you have for fellow artists who live in cities similar to Jacksonville, FL, that aren’t necessarily known for their artistic culture the way big cities are? How can people who live in these places build a creative network and make moves as an artist?

I spent a long time traveling around to all those big cities, playing in all these different types of shows far away from home. But now, I think you ought to build your scene before you start going to those other places. Build your own scene. Build with the blocks you already have. Make something happen where you are, and then that will start to grow. Then go a little bit out of town. Bring the thing you’ve build to that place. The slow build is the tactic.

Going on long tours all around is definitely a learning experience, and you could learn a lot to bring back. But strategically, it’s a lot more difficult to build a following unless you can go back to those places on tour all the time. So, unless you’re going to live on the road, always be playing everywhere, you just got to think of it strategically. Dispersing your army all over the place: is that going to be as effective as just conquering one thing at a time and growing your empire from there?

It’s a little easier to maintain and build infrastructure close to home, and then your network becomes a more solid thing than driving all the way to New York to play a show. That can be a lot of fun, but it’s expensive. And true, you might meet somebody and then you have a connection up there. But the connections I think that really help are the collaborative ones. And if you can find people in your area to collaborate with, then I would focus on those things because you grow a lot faster and a lot stronger when you have it on a daily or weekly basis.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

My coming out as gay was a tiny part of the speech, but of course, it’s what was the headline afterwards in The New York Times, and it’s what generated both positive publicity and a lot of backlash, especially within the Dartmouth College community. One of the things that it taught me, or prepared me for, was something about the power of the word “gay,” both for good and for ill. Maybe this was more the case back then, although I think it’s still the case to some degree, but sometimes, when you say “gay” or “queer,” that’s all people can hear, and it short-circuits their ability to hear anything beyond that. That’s often been in my mind as I write about queer subjects and themes, even though, for me, they may just be part of the mix.

To stand in front of about 10,000 people at the age of 20 and come out in 1990, when it wasn’t as common or as accepted? After doing that, writing about “risky topics” or “messy truths” or “sexually transgressive topics” just seemed much more doable and much less of a big deal. Or maybe I had fewer fucks to give once I’d come out and The New York Times published that I was gay. It prepared me to think that I could take risks like that and that there was a lot of upside.

I’m interested in something you just said about how all anyone really heard within that speech was the word “gay.” Given that you’ve been circling similar themes throughout your life, do you feel like you’ve been able to manipulate the fact that, at first, people might hear the word “gay” and assume that’s what you’re leading with? Have you been able to use that to your benefit at all?

I do love a good misdirection or sucker punch in narrative. I was writing a lot of explicitly sexual material when I was younger. I do like using the queer sexual aspect as a Trojan horse, where people think they’re going to get one sexy thing, but then it actually turns into either a family drama or something much more about profound loneliness. The headline is Queer Sex, and that’s the entry point, but then I try to take it in unexpected directions.

It seems like it comes really natural to you to examine a certain set of themes from different angles. Why do you think that is? And why do you think you’ve really held on to one set of themes for decades now?

I’m not sure. I mean, I think the truest, but maybe least satisfying, answer is that they’re just my themes. And I know some artists seem to just have this incredibly wonderful scattershot view of the world and move around a lot, but I guess I’m not that way. I used to worry about it a lot and think that it was a mark against my character or my creative abilities that I was always repeating myself and looking through the same lens whenever I observe human drama. But the more I’ve thought about it, I just don’t think there’s any reason to apologize for one’s obsessions.

Many of my favorite writers tend to circle the same ideas and themes over and over. William Maxwell’s coming back again and again to childhood loss and the death of his mother when he was a kid, and I don’t ding him for that. In fact, it makes his work more profound and interesting to me. And Alice Munro has written constantly throughout her career about girls growing up in small rural Canadian towns among undereducated family members and then going to the city and becoming literary and gaining a more liberated feminist point of view. I mean, how many of her stories have a Canadian woman taking a train to the big city? It happens over and over, and I am totally there for it. Looking at their work has made me feel somewhat less self-conscious about circling the same themes over and over.

A friend and I were recently talking about dark matter in physics, where you can’t see it directly, but it’s affecting everything in the universe, and none of the equations about the expansion of the universe makes sense unless you account for it. I love looking at any situation and trying to see that hidden dark matter that is exerting this huge gravitational force, even though it’s rarely acknowledged, and it’s not part of the visible world. For example, my novel Charity Girl is “about World War I,” but I had no interest in writing about battles or the shifting lines of nation states or political calculations. What drew my interest was this whole story about how women were punished for their sexuality, how their desire was seen by the government as a threat. They were rounded up and put in camps to keep soldiers from getting venereal disease. That’s the interesting dark matter going on below these epic battles and trench warfare. I could see parallels with the contemporary situation of the AIDS epidemic. I took my pre-existing concerns and interests and themes and applied them to this historical wartime situation that otherwise might not even have interested me at all.

You’re primarily known as a fiction writer, but you’re working on a nonfiction project right now. Has this decision to work in personal nonfiction came at all from a feeling that you’d written all the fiction you could write on the themes you’d like to explore? Was it even a conscious move away from fiction towards something new?

In all honesty, I’m still trying to figure it out myself. It wasn’t a conscious move other than in the sense that I seem to have stopped, at least for the time being, thinking in fictional terms. I used to see someone in the world and start imagining a whole narrative for them. I would read a story in the newspaper and wonder what the hidden forces and the not-being-told stories were. I just don’t seem to be thinking in that way these days.

I’m thinking much more about the reality of things that I’ve experienced, trying to figure out why I acted the way I did in certain circumstances. And I wonder if it’s just a factor of aging, a tendency toward self-reflection and reassessment. In a few cases, I specifically have been looking back at things, topics, and experiences that I once fictionalized, like my novel Avoidance, which was partly inspired by a boy I knew at summer camp. Twenty years after publishing that, I’m now telling the part that I didn’t include in the novel that in some ways, now, is almost more interesting to me. The Same Embrace, my first novel, had all this very fictionalized stuff about my own family and our Holocaust history, and part of it was inspired by an uncle I knew just a teeny few facts about but didn’t know any more. Part of what I’ve written about is the gap between what I fictionalized and what the truth was.

A huge question or debate in the culture for a while has been: who has authority to tell what story and whose voice counts? And I would like to think that my shift towards nonfiction doesn’t come entirely from a place of defensiveness or fear about that. It does seem, on some level, safe or safer to assume that if I’m an authority on anything, I’m at least an authority on myself in my own experiences. I feel some calling or responsibility to try to articulate my own point of view on various topics and issues.

Who are some writers you admire who are writing about themes similar to the ones you explore in your own work?

One of my favorites now is Douglas Stuart, who wrote Shuggie Bain. I love his second novel, Young Mungo, which is definitely circling some of the same ideas, but even more. I love how a writer like Andrew Holleran has, throughout his career, kept writing at each different stage about what queer desire means: when you’re in your 20’s, when you’re middle-aged, and later in life. He has the real bravery to write about loneliness and disconnection with regard to queer desire specifically. Trans writers and people writing on trans themes, I think, are really the ones who are bringing the news to our culture, which is what novelists are supposed to do: Torrey Peters, who wrote Detransition, Baby, and Andrea Lawlor, who wrote Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Because I’ve been working on essays, I’ve been especially drawn to writers who are mixing memoir and personal story with timely cultural topics: Jia Tolentino, Cathy Park Hong, Sarah Polley. One of my favorite recent books is Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz, who similarly uses personal stories as a jumping point for meditation on thematic topics.

You teach in Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. When you have students who gravitate toward exploring certain things in their work, but maybe aren’t quite sure how to refine them yet, what guidance do you provide?

I try to give them reassurance and confidence that their themes are their themes, and I tell them it’s okay to be obsessed with what they’re obsessed with. I encourage people to hunker down in their obsessions but try to work on what it is that they don’t understand yet about what obsesses them. I ask, “Why does this obsess you? Why do you keep coming back to this?” And this may sound contradictory, but I also encourage them to live in the gray areas and stay there so that, even if they think they know what they’re writing about or what their message is or what they believe, they can try to let go of some of that certainty and live in the half-lit, half-knowing world, and try to be surprised by the undersides of what they thought they believe and know. And if they can embrace the weirdness and the risk and the surprise, that’s the thing that’s going to be the thing in the writing that’s the most them. It’s going to be their unique voice, their unique contribution.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

My coming out as gay was a tiny part of the speech, but of course, it’s what was the headline afterwards in The New York Times, and it’s what generated both positive publicity and a lot of backlash, especially within the Dartmouth College community. One of the things that it taught me, or prepared me for, was something about the power of the word “gay,” both for good and for ill. Maybe this was more the case back then, although I think it’s still the case to some degree, but sometimes, when you say “gay” or “queer,” that’s all people can hear, and it short-circuits their ability to hear anything beyond that. That’s often been in my mind as I write about queer subjects and themes, even though, for me, they may just be part of the mix.

To stand in front of about 10,000 people at the age of 20 and come out in 1990, when it wasn’t as common or as accepted? After doing that, writing about “risky topics” or “messy truths” or “sexually transgressive topics” just seemed much more doable and much less of a big deal. Or maybe I had fewer fucks to give once I’d come out and The New York Times published that I was gay. It prepared me to think that I could take risks like that and that there was a lot of upside.

I’m interested in something you just said about how all anyone really heard within that speech was the word “gay.” Given that you’ve been circling similar themes throughout your life, do you feel like you’ve been able to manipulate the fact that, at first, people might hear the word “gay” and assume that’s what you’re leading with? Have you been able to use that to your benefit at all?

I do love a good misdirection or sucker punch in narrative. I was writing a lot of explicitly sexual material when I was younger. I do like using the queer sexual aspect as a Trojan horse, where people think they’re going to get one sexy thing, but then it actually turns into either a family drama or something much more about profound loneliness. The headline is Queer Sex, and that’s the entry point, but then I try to take it in unexpected directions.

It seems like it comes really natural to you to examine a certain set of themes from different angles. Why do you think that is? And why do you think you’ve really held on to one set of themes for decades now?

I’m not sure. I mean, I think the truest, but maybe least satisfying, answer is that they’re just my themes. And I know some artists seem to just have this incredibly wonderful scattershot view of the world and move around a lot, but I guess I’m not that way. I used to worry about it a lot and think that it was a mark against my character or my creative abilities that I was always repeating myself and looking through the same lens whenever I observe human drama. But the more I’ve thought about it, I just don’t think there’s any reason to apologize for one’s obsessions.

Many of my favorite writers tend to circle the same ideas and themes over and over. William Maxwell’s coming back again and again to childhood loss and the death of his mother when he was a kid, and I don’t ding him for that. In fact, it makes his work more profound and interesting to me. And Alice Munro has written constantly throughout her career about girls growing up in small rural Canadian towns among undereducated family members and then going to the city and becoming literary and gaining a more liberated feminist point of view. I mean, how many of her stories have a Canadian woman taking a train to the big city? It happens over and over, and I am totally there for it. Looking at their work has made me feel somewhat less self-conscious about circling the same themes over and over.

A friend and I were recently talking about dark matter in physics, where you can’t see it directly, but it’s affecting everything in the universe, and none of the equations about the expansion of the universe makes sense unless you account for it. I love looking at any situation and trying to see that hidden dark matter that is exerting this huge gravitational force, even though it’s rarely acknowledged, and it’s not part of the visible world. For example, my novel Charity Girl is “about World War I,” but I had no interest in writing about battles or the shifting lines of nation states or political calculations. What drew my interest was this whole story about how women were punished for their sexuality, how their desire was seen by the government as a threat. They were rounded up and put in camps to keep soldiers from getting venereal disease. That’s the interesting dark matter going on below these epic battles and trench warfare. I could see parallels with the contemporary situation of the AIDS epidemic. I took my pre-existing concerns and interests and themes and applied them to this historical wartime situation that otherwise might not even have interested me at all.

You’re primarily known as a fiction writer, but you’re working on a nonfiction project right now. Has this decision to work in personal nonfiction came at all from a feeling that you’d written all the fiction you could write on the themes you’d like to explore? Was it even a conscious move away from fiction towards something new?

In all honesty, I’m still trying to figure it out myself. It wasn’t a conscious move other than in the sense that I seem to have stopped, at least for the time being, thinking in fictional terms. I used to see someone in the world and start imagining a whole narrative for them. I would read a story in the newspaper and wonder what the hidden forces and the not-being-told stories were. I just don’t seem to be thinking in that way these days.

I’m thinking much more about the reality of things that I’ve experienced, trying to figure out why I acted the way I did in certain circumstances. And I wonder if it’s just a factor of aging, a tendency toward self-reflection and reassessment. In a few cases, I specifically have been looking back at things, topics, and experiences that I once fictionalized, like my novel Avoidance, which was partly inspired by a boy I knew at summer camp. Twenty years after publishing that, I’m now telling the part that I didn’t include in the novel that in some ways, now, is almost more interesting to me. The Same Embrace, my first novel, had all this very fictionalized stuff about my own family and our Holocaust history, and part of it was inspired by an uncle I knew just a teeny few facts about but didn’t know any more. Part of what I’ve written about is the gap between what I fictionalized and what the truth was.

A huge question or debate in the culture for a while has been: who has authority to tell what story and whose voice counts? And I would like to think that my shift towards nonfiction doesn’t come entirely from a place of defensiveness or fear about that. It does seem, on some level, safe or safer to assume that if I’m an authority on anything, I’m at least an authority on myself in my own experiences. I feel some calling or responsibility to try to articulate my own point of view on various topics and issues.

Who are some writers you admire who are writing about themes similar to the ones you explore in your own work?

One of my favorites now is Douglas Stuart, who wrote Shuggie Bain. I love his second novel, Young Mungo, which is definitely circling some of the same ideas, but even more. I love how a writer like Andrew Holleran has, throughout his career, kept writing at each different stage about what queer desire means: when you’re in your 20’s, when you’re middle-aged, and later in life. He has the real bravery to write about loneliness and disconnection with regard to queer desire specifically. Trans writers and people writing on trans themes, I think, are really the ones who are bringing the news to our culture, which is what novelists are supposed to do: Torrey Peters, who wrote Detransition, Baby, and Andrea Lawlor, who wrote Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Because I’ve been working on essays, I’ve been especially drawn to writers who are mixing memoir and personal story with timely cultural topics: Jia Tolentino, Cathy Park Hong, Sarah Polley. One of my favorite recent books is Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz, who similarly uses personal stories as a jumping point for meditation on thematic topics.

You teach in Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. When you have students who gravitate toward exploring certain things in their work, but maybe aren’t quite sure how to refine them yet, what guidance do you provide?

I try to give them reassurance and confidence that their themes are their themes, and I tell them it’s okay to be obsessed with what they’re obsessed with. I encourage people to hunker down in their obsessions but try to work on what it is that they don’t understand yet about what obsesses them. I ask, “Why does this obsess you? Why do you keep coming back to this?” And this may sound contradictory, but I also encourage them to live in the gray areas and stay there so that, even if they think they know what they’re writing about or what their message is or what they believe, they can try to let go of some of that certainty and live in the half-lit, half-knowing world, and try to be surprised by the undersides of what they thought they believe and know. And if they can embrace the weirdness and the risk and the surprise, that’s the thing that’s going to be the thing in the writing that’s the most them. It’s going to be their unique voice, their unique contribution.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I always grew up with a sensitive heart. I’ve been naturally attuned to animal life in the natural world since I was young, but I think it was after my first book was published. That first book, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, is pretty squarely environmental. I don’t think I realized how much it was, though, until someone wrote me a piece of hate mail. You learn a lot by praise, but you also learn a lot from your hate mail. And this piece of hate mail said was from a group of human exceptionalists, and they were like, “You’re an anti-human exceptionalist.” I’d never heard the term, and I was like, “You know what? You’re absolutely right. Thank you.”

This idea, human exceptionalism, is the idea that humans have transcended their animal nature. That we are somehow entitled to the Earth’s resources. And I definitely believe in interconnectedness and a sort of feeling that we’ve underestimated animal intelligence and rights. It was interesting: that piece of hate mail sort of illuminated a core belief.

I was on a run about that time. Back then, I would run six miles a day. It was sort of like a way to cope with mental health, early motherhood, work stress. And I was out on a run, and it was a winter where it had not snowed in Vermont. And I remember this kind of crushing feeling of environmental anxiety. I was in my early thirties at the time, and I thought, We’re not going to fix this. I know that sounds gloomy, but it was this sort of like, I don’t think we’re going to make the sacrifices we need to make in order to fix this. And it hit me so hard that I made an enormous pivot in the tone of my work.

There’s something I feel a lot in the grand scheme of the climate crisis: writing doesn’t always feel like an active role. It can sometimes feel like a passive role. What power do you think writers have in the climate crisis?

More than we think.

I’m of a couple of beliefs. One, I’m from a blue collar southern lineage. I don’t have any false notions that I’m saving lives with my work, necessarily. I do think the more I have a voice and a platform, the brighter the spotlight I can place on certain things. And I’ve always looked at one of my roles in the world as welcoming more people into the environmental conversation. As a young, petite, five-foot-two blonde with an easy sense of humor and a southern accent and not much of a science and camping background, I did not really feel early on welcome in that conversation. It felt like there are a lot of litmus tests for people who are like, “Am I environmental enough? Do I know enough? Do I know enough to have a voice in this conversation?” I feel like one of my contributions in environmental writing has been to widen the aperture of what it can be and who belongs in this conversation. And that means changing the profile of faculty that I invite to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. It means mentoring people who have never really seen themselves as environmental writers.

I also think, right now, the power we have is in honoring complexity. I feel like probably the most common mistake environmental writers make is righteousness. I think self-righteousness is an enormous turnoff to readers, and I think it presumes that the writer has something figured out that the rest of us do not. And I think that’s actually rarely the case. So I find humor, nuance, complexity, grounding things more in science, grounding things more in specific experiences: these are all important. There are a lot of under-tread opportunities in environmental writing that we still haven’t touched in terms of really understanding the experiences of others. There are people who aren’t intensely scientifically literate who still have a really valid viewpoint on what living in the Anthropocene is like or what living on the front lines of climate change is like.

I also would love to see more scientists and people with policy expertise writing in first person. It’s historically been taboo for scientists and lawyers to be passionate, to write in first person to talk about emotion. And I think the best sort of writing that actually changes hearts and minds has a blend of the rational and the emotional. For those of us who do come from a more artistic angle or lived experience angle, I think we need to make sure we’re grounding our ideas in science, in scientific reality. I think people who are in the science world can focus more on letting people in emotionally.

In terms of your own cultural diet, then, how do you balance the intake of the rational and the emotional?

We need a diet that blends both in order to have a well-rounded sense of the climate crisis. I feel like journalism can give really necessary facts and shine bright lights on true experiences that are happening and unfolding and examine policy and the impacts of policy. I think what fiction can do—and this is why I still write and read both fiction and nonfiction—I think we’ve vastly underestimated the spiritual and emotional impact environmental degradation has on the human psyche and spirit. And I think fiction can speak to that and model that.

You spoke earlier about positioning yourself within the environmental conversation and feeling out of place. I feel that way a lot, too, in particular as a fiction writer. I feel self-conscious, like it’s not as important or “hardcore” or something to write fiction as it is to write journalistically about climate. How can fiction writers embrace the form in order to educate others and promote a sense of empathy around this crisis?

I admire climate writing that already folds the climate crisis into the everyday pressures that people are living under. Fiction often under-tends to everyday people and their working lives. So I admire writing that shows how the effects of the climate crisis are already pressurizing characters. A beginner’s mistake sometimes is to use climate change as a sort of plot point, or in a way that feels like a little bit of a hot take. And I guess I just want people to write as if it’s already happening. Because it is.

I think, in futuristic and sci-fi writing, of course it makes sense to imagine what could happen and what that would feel like. And I think there’s real value in laying out that emotional experience for people. An opportunity that I’ve also heard spoken of that I have not made use of myself is the fact that we are, traditionally in literature, really great at building dystopian worldviews and what if it goes wrong and how bad it will be and how we will handle this. But we have not been traditionally great and how good it could be if we made changes. And I don’t know if I’d buy into any utopias at this point, but I think there is maybe a missed opportunity to say, “What if we did make these changes? These policy amendments? What if we incorporated this tech? What does that look like? What does that feel like?”

You mentioned the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference earlier. As you’ve built this conference to what it is today as its director, what have been your goals from an environmentalist standpoint?

I want more people to feel welcome in this conversation and this type of writing. I want more people to look at themselves and say, “I am an environmental writer.” Because I think environmental degradation and climate touches everything. I feel that way about jobs when people ask me, “Am I in a climate job? Is my line of work and climate?” Almost everyone is, if you think about it and if you regard it that way.

I feel like old environmental writing used to be a man in a green tweed suit walking through waving golden fronds of wheat or staring at a frothing ocean. And I think a lot of people still have that sort of feeling when they think about what is environmental writing, and they don’t see themselves in that ideal. But environmental writing can be urban. We have indoor environments. Different environments pressurize things in different ways. They affect water. Affect work. Affect emotions. And I feel like there’s a natural narrative arc in the way places are changing. Change and tension are essential narrative ingredients, and they’re all over the climate crisis. So there are just so many ways for more people to see themselves in this work and for more people to learn how to do it well again.

There are a lot of traps that people fall into when they first attempt environmental writing. And I’ve read a lot of admissions in slush piles, so I know what those look like. They’re usually referencing Thoreau a little too hard. Thoreau is this sacred cow in environmental writing, but we need to widen the canon. And people have been giving him a more critical look. Again, it’s the righteousness trap, and I think we have to ask ourselves how we can give the gift. Readers don’t owe us their time, and we all have saturation points. How do we give readers a gift?

I have a friend who’s an Italian director, and she said something that I think is the greatest tip for craft for environmental writers: “Hide the medicine in the cake.” I think people forget that you actually have to tell a story that people want to read and that people will invest emotionally in. My mentor, Amy Hempel, used to say, “Story first.”

You’re originally from the south, but you live in Vermont now. What was your trajectory toward Vermont?

I’m going to have to give my age here, but I spent my first 30 years in the south, and it was like a pre-internet south. I was born in Gaffney, South Carolina, where they have the peach water tower. I moved to Rocky Mountain, North Carolina before I was one. And that’s really where I was raised, by the beach and in the eastern tobacco towns of North Carolina. And then I went to Wake Forest University. I didn’t even cross the Mason-Dixon line much until I was 30. I moved with my husband to the family farm in Vermont, where he took over his mother’s position in the family veterinary clinic. I still feel like an alien species.

In what sense do you feel like an alien species?

I’ve never been able to accept the lack of light. I can sort of deal with the cold, but it’s dark by 4:00 PM here in November. I think that shows up in people’s personality types. Southern people are fast to a joke. They’re friendly. People are definitely more stoic up here. I miss warmth in all ways. Personality warmth. Warmth of temperature. I still have a biochemical reaction to getting off an airplane in the south and feeling humidity. It’s just home. That’s just still what registers as home.

Do you think southern writers are uniquely positioned to write about the climate crisis?

Yeah. I actually do. I think people underestimate southerners in general, especially intellectually. I feel like I’ve dealt with that most of my life. I know a lot of other people have too. There’s this pressure to feel like, “Oh, I have to neutralize my accent to be taken seriously,” or that if you write exclusively about the south, you’re going to be regionalized in a way that harms your career. People think you’re only writing about Meemaw eating biscuits on a porch. I think there are a lot of unfair traps that still exist for southern writers. I think people are absolutely aware of them now, exploding them as they should.

The story of the land is complicated everywhere, and anybody on American soil is already in a complex relationship with land and land ownership and land stewardship. Southerners have to contend with an especially fraught narrative there. Sometimes, it’s not north versus south, but people who are living in close proximity to the land, I think, in urban environments. There, the estrangement from the natural world becomes easier and more pronounced. For me, I think I’ve realized that, no matter where I live, I’m better suited in small rural places where I can see the moon. I am thinking about the weather, and I don’t feel that pronounced estrangement.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

There’s three skills you got to have to do the job. That’s it. First is you have to have the technical and musical skills. Some people are more tech-oriented, some people are more musicians. I’m a little bit of a blend of both. I’m a Libra: love the balance. The second skill is the ability to get your own business. If you can’t get anybody to hire you, you don’t have a career, you have a hobby. A time-consuming, emotionally debilitating hobby. And the third one is the soft skill of working with people in the studio.

There are books that can teach you how to set microphones up. There are 10 zillion schools out there and YouTube channels to show somebody how equipment works. I mean, you do have to have musical nuance to understand it. But really, it’s a people job, and it’s a matter of understanding how to get something from somebody’s brain and heart and soul into somebody else’s brain. You just got to be tuned into people. Sometimes people need to be pushed a little more. Sometimes people need to be given a little more rope. Some people need a softer touch. Some people need a more direct approach. Some people need a break. Some people need to keep on pushing. It’s just reading the room. Tuning in.

At the time that my career really was starting to take off and I was just busy all the time, more days booked than I could possibly handle, I also had three tiny children at the same time. I’d record bands and they’d say, “You’re so patient. You’re the most patient person in the world.” That’s my job. Being patient.

You feel like parenthood helped you with producing?

Oh yeah. I always viewed that job as being a farmer growing people. I needed to grow the crop straight and strong and keep the weeds out and keep my eyes on the prize and keep them properly nourished both physically and emotionally and mentally and all that. It’s the same as making a record with somebody. Again, you’re just tuned into the people. They make the great music. I’m just helping them draw it out.

You said earlier that a lot of producing is knowing when to push and when to give someone a little more rope. What kinds of cues do you take in from the musicians you work with?

I just listen and try to be flexible. I pride myself on being able to do anything anybody asks me to in the studio. That ranges from things like wanting to record digitally or all on analog tape. They can say, “We want to record live in the room,” or, “We want to do this one piece at a time.” “We want to record the click track,” or, “We do not ever want to record it with a click track.” “We would like you to edit this and make it sound like we can almost play our instruments,” or, “We want this to be the rawest thing on earth.” And sometimes, you’ll listen to what somebody wants and realize that what they’re saying is maybe not the best thing for their art.

The trick is being able to convince people to let me try something, give this a chance. But usually it’s just me being tuned into people and trying to learn about them and who they are and how they feel and what they want and how we can connect on a deeper level. Because music is just a conversation between the creator and the listener. To me, it’s all about emotional impact. I mean, there’s 12 notes. That’s it in Western Hemisphere, you’re going to bump into somebody else’s every now and again. How do you make it unique? I think the way that you make it unique is by figuring out if it really connects to people on an emotional level.

You’re a musician yourself. It’d be silly to ask if producing has made you a better musician, and vice versa, because the answer is obviously yes. But in what ways specifically has it made you better?

Miles Davis said that music is the space between the notes. You hear these great sparse players who are just playing around—they’re not overplaying, they’re not pushing, and they’re not dominating the conversation. Producing and engineering made me better at learning how to play with other people. The other thing is sitting in the studio and listening to music over and over and over and over and over again for my whole life, tens of thousands of hours. You get to the point like, “This gig tonight? If I can just figure out what the first note is, I got it.” I just feel it.

When you listen to the same songs over and over again, do you ever get a little too lost in the sauce and have trouble connecting with the average listener’s three- to four-minute listening experience?

Everybody can. It’s real easy for it to happen. I listen at generally lower volumes than most people do. I mean, I have six or eight other engineers that work in my studio, and I listen typically at much lower volumes than everybody else because I know that your brain can fatigue. Your ears are fatigued. You become numb to it. It’s like adding too much salt to a soup—you turn it up, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up, and the next day, it’s just a pile of mush. It’s awful. The other thing I do to stave that off is to work for a bit—45 minutes to an hour—and take a little break to go outside. The length of time it takes to make a cup of coffee, pee, walk out to the mailbox, answer a couple of texts, look at a couple of dumb videos on Instagram, check the score of the baseball game. Especially if I’m mixing. You really can’t let yourself get lost in it. And there’s people that think they’re not doing the job if they’re not driving themselves to the brink of insanity, but it’s like, you lose your perspective.

So many new formats of listening to music have been introduced since you started producing. How do you take that into account when you’re mixing?

I listen to music in my control rooms all the time. It’s my overwhelming preference to mix at Chase Park because I know what it sounds like. I know what the bass sounds like. I know what a snare drum should sound like, and I know how loud the vocals should sound in there for my taste.

Are you ever hesitant to make changes to the space at Chase Park because of that?

Oh, no. We’ve made changes along the way many times. We moved in 26 years ago and eventually got an architect to come listen in the room and he said, “Your control room could sound a lot better.” And so we got him to do a design and we tore it down and rebuilt it to its current state in 10 days, pillar to post, without a professional construction crew. It was an insane amount of work. We’ve changed the floor out in the main studio. We have hung different things on the walls and on the roof over time and just experimented to find what works. Right now, we’re in a place where we feel like, “Yeah, this works pretty well.” But as I’m saying this, something that just occurred to me that I should try.

Care to share?

Yeah. I’m going to put a two-by-four-foot cloud, a ceiling baffle, in the studio. An ISO booth, I think, might absorb a few low-to-mid-range frequencies that I think could be helpful in those little rooms. But that’s how it is. I come up with an idea and I just build something and try it. If it doesn’t work, I just scrap it. Don’t be afraid to change.

Has there ever been a time where you would’ve preferred to be known solely as a musician as opposed to a musician/producer/engineer?

No. I’m a generalist. When I was a kid, I just wanted to be a rock star like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or The Who or Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix, but I love working in the studio. When I first started working on other people’s records, it was the first time in my life I felt I had a natural aptitude for something. And I’m not saying I don’t have other natural aptitudes or I’m not naturally musical. I know now that I am. It’s funny, as I say this, my fingers have gone out like I’m touching the faders or I am going to get the talk back mic or the tape machines over here. [Moves hands to the left.] And that’s the height and angle of an Atari CB 120 Auto Locator when my hand is in the position.

I like being able to do it all. And sometimes I wonder, would I be greater at a piece of it if that’s all I did? But I don’t think my life would be as rich if I only did one of the things. If I was, like, studio guy but not a player. Frankly, I think I’d be worse at engineering and producing. And if I was only a player who didn’t work in the studio, I don’t think my playing would be as intuitive.

Does it have anything to do with a preference for being home over being on tour?

I generally feel that I’m exactly where I need to be right now. All the time.

Dang.

There’s a booking agent, Matt Hickey, who’s based in Austin. He books Wilco and a bunch of other bands. He’s a really brilliant guy. One time, we were talking about meeting in a music festival, and he said, “No, I never look at my phone at a festival. I’m exactly where I need to be right now.” And I was like, “Deep. I’m stealing that and adopting that as a philosophy.” I love being home, but going on tour, meeting people, seeing things, experiencing things—that’s also great.

How much of your success in music do you feel you owe to the Athens music scene?

I’ve been sponging off them my whole life. I moved to Athens for college and went to journalism school and saw cool bands play in clubs. I’d never seen that. I’d seen The Who and the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd play in theaters and arenas. I had seen Aerosmith and The Cars play on a football stadium, and I’d seen bands play at keg parties. But this indie club scene wasn’t something that was accessible to teenagers in Atlanta in the late seventies. When I was in high school, we heard there was a new kind of music called punk rock, and there was a punk rock band in Athens called The B-52’s. Now, it’s funny to think of them as a punk rock band, but they were a different thing.

But really what I remember is going to see the band Little Tigers at the little-bitty 40 Watt, which probably held about 75 people at the time, maybe a hundred. And when I walked in there and saw all those people crammed in, just seeing how they were engaging with the music, I realized they were my people. This was what I was supposed to do.

Once I got into it, R.E.M. was an amazing, touring club band, and The B-52’s were gone before I ever moved to Athens. Then there was this whole other second wave of bands right behind them. When I moved to Athens, I just believed in all of us here in this important music scene. I’d read how important R.E.M. was, so I believed that we, by proxy, also could be important because we lived in a cool place. I was really taken by it and believed in it. And when I first started playing in bands that other people liked, it felt good to be part of that. Athens is a very supportive scene. It’s not so much competitive as it is supportive, and a lot of that, I think, goes back to those original bands like Pylon and R.E.M. who treated other people very well. Everybody’s like, “Ah, there’s a new band. We’ll go see them. We’ll support them.” It’s never been like, “They’re popular. I’m jealous.”

Then it started branching off into other types of music. Originally, there was the Athens sound—you could dance to The B-52s, you could dance to Pylon, you could dance to R.E.M., though they had more of a pop sensibility. By the mid-eighties, there’s a punk rock scene with Bar-B-Q Killers and Porn Orchard and my band Mercyland. And then there’s this jam band scene that started right after that with Widespread Panic. And you get a few years later, and there’s Elephant 6 and Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control and of Montreal. And then the Americana scene, like Drive-By Truckers, and then there’s these bands that are a fusion of psych and jam: The Futurebirds and New Madrid. And now there’s these new young bands like Hotel Fiction and a new punk scene with bands like Nuclear Tourism and Null. These bands are great.

It sounds like you’ve maintained the habit of supporting new Athens bands.

Totally. Because they supported me. Living in a place like Athens has been very helpful to me. Other cool people like to come to Athens to make records and play shows. Athens might be one of the really desirable, cool music scene places in America. It’s probably the cheapest cool place to live in the country, which allows you space to grow creatively.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I started the book as a memoir, which I think allowed me to be really clear with how comfortable I felt sharing certain truths. And so I felt, when I was writing it as a memoir, it had to be really true to my experiences and really true to other people who were characters in it. I know that my account will never be their version of events, but I felt a major responsibility to be as accurate as I could.

I was surprised by how different I felt about the book when I decided to turn it into a novel. I felt really liberated at that point to turn people into characters, to turn certain traits up, to exaggerate certain parts of the story, to move timelines around.I’m sure people do that with memoir. I just didn’t feel okay doing that because I’m such a rule follower. I’m such a rule follower that I was like, “Oh, I’m just reporting it. It has to be a newspaper, like journalism.” Then once I decided to turn it into a novel and have it be more autofictional, it really helped me see it as more of a story arc, and that really helped make it more of a self-contained thing.

I had a really hard time ending this book because there isn’t a clear ending when you’re just living it. So I think turning it into autofiction and making it a novel helped me see ways that I could end it or ways that I could turn it more into a story with different arcs that would naturally come to an end.

Do you feel like the book lost anything by leaning into fiction? Is there anything you felt like you had to sacrifice from the angle of memoir?

No. As a matter of fact, it helped me realize what was really not necessary. I had a lot of things in it that were more logistical, that were like, “Okay, well this happened, and then this happened…” I was just trying to be true to real life. Once I saw it as a novel, and I think also just with time and space—it’s now been five or six years since all these events happened in my real life—I think I started to become clear about, or saw more clearly that, certain things that really mattered to me at the time actually didn’t even need to be in there. It was just a logistic thing that nobody would give a shit about, so it was fine to remove it.

Do you think you’ll keep working in autofiction, or do you find yourself more drawn to pure fiction or nonfiction moving forward in your writing life?

It’s funny. I think it has made me more interested in doing either pure nonfiction, like memoir, or pure fiction. I feel like being a little ambiguous in the middle with autofiction has been really fulfilling and fun, but it makes me more curious to see what the extremes of either one of those things could be. So I’m working on something that’s pure memoir now and starting to think about something that’s more straight fiction for my next project. While it was really fun to live in the ambiguity for a while, I’m kind of sick of gray areas of autofiction and what’s real, what’s not, what happened, what didn’t. Instead, I think it’ll be fun to take a turn doing the extreme of both of those things.

How has your approach to writing the second book been different or similar to the first?

It’s been very different. When I wrote the first book, I was actually not intending to write a book. I didn’t really know what it was. I started with a lot of fragments. It was kind of mostly journaling during this big transition in my life. And then I started seeing it a little more creatively after I read Bluets by Maggie Nelson, which really opened my eyes to the world of creative nonfiction and more artful writing about nonfiction. I had previously been biased against nonfiction books because I just thought of them as mass market, boring kinds of writing. Some big thing about marketing or whatever the subject was. I was like, “Nonfiction sucks.” But once I read more creative nonfiction—The Chronology of Water by Lydia Yuknavitch is another one that really inspired me, as well as Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett—once I started to read these things that were more creative, more meandering, it made me realize that I could turn something that was very fragmentary into something that was a self-contained unit.

I used those early pages to apply to a writing workshop called Mors Tua Vita Mea in Italy. And so really, I wasn’t intending to write a book, but I used the fragments I was working on to create a cohesive piece that was 20 pages for an application to a writing workshop. And once I was at that workshop, I got encouragement to continue it as a book. So it kind of just accidentally happened, which was, on the one hand, exciting, and I think helped me remove any mental barriers I might have had about how daunting it is to be like, “I’m writing a book now,” when I first started.

But it made editing an incredible chore, because I was not at all organized. I had no idea about the story arc, none of that. That all came later with massive, massive edits. I mean, I had hundreds of drafts. I worked on edits for years, so I would not want to do it that way ever again. And with the first draft of my second book that I’m working on now, I very intentionally went in knowing I wanted to write a book, doing a lot of outlining before I even sat down to write any of it. And cheated a little bit because a lot of the basis of that second book is stuff that I cut from the first one. So it was stuff that I cut but still knew I wanted to use somewhere. And then that kind of gave me an idea for the second book. Very different experiences.

Nowadays, how in-depth do you get while outlining?

Not super in-depth. I think I’m definitely somebody who likes to have a prompt or an idea of what a chapter will be about, but I have seen other writers’ outlines and it’s like they’re almost writing the entire chapter just through outline. And that’s just not really my instinct. I like better to just have an idea floating around, but then sit down and see what happens on the page when I’m just in the moment writing.

I find your writing so detailed and vivid. Thinking about the “auto” part of “autofiction” for this book that’s coming out, what are some memory mining exercises that you did in order to pull those shiny details from the depths and put them onto the page?

I’m very inspired by sensory writing. I think my first favorite writer was Francesca Lia Block, who’s a YA writer. I just randomly grabbed one of her books when I was a teenager at Bookshop Santa Cruz, and that changed my life. I mean, that’s what made me first want to become a writer. She, in particular, is so good about writing about food and clothing and just giving such a visual with poetic sensory writing. I think from the very start of when I ever tried to write, that was really an instinct for me. I was so attracted to that kind of writing that I wanted to be somehow involved in it. That was something I really trained myself to do in the beginning. I also just find it is so much easier to access the memory if you have an entry point, like a scent or a taste or something like that.

I often take down notes when something is happening: of what I was wearing, what I was eating, a song, some sensory trigger that will help me re-enter it later when I’m trying to write about it. It’s almost like when you’re trying to remember a dream and something will finally click that helps you remember, and you just feel like you’re living in it. You’re in the alternate universe of the dream when you finally remember it. That’s what it’s like for me when I use these sensory triggers and when I keep these notes of things. It’s like I’m trying to reenter the dream of what the memory was.

A lot of writers will take notes in the way you’re describing, but they’ll often never return to them. It sounds like you have a note-taking and a note-returning practice, which is a crucial part of it. Can you describe that part of the practice?

Absolutely. I take written notes in my phone and in a notebook. It just depends on what I have with me. I also do a lot of voice memos to myself on my phone. They sound psychotic, and it’s humiliating to listen back to them, oftentimes because I’m in a public place when I record them, trying to whisper them, but I often can just talk into my phone more quickly than I can type. I made my best friend promise me that, if I die before her, she will use my dead thumb to open my phone and delete all my voice memos because they sound so insane. They make perfect sense to me, but if anybody was to hear them, they’d be like, “Oh, no. She’s not okay.”

I don’t write every day. I like to write when I have something to write about. I don’t like sitting in front of a blank page trying to think of ideas. I like to almost create a scarcity of time for myself to write, because I like to collect a bunch of notes and voice memos and then be dying to sit down to write them. Then I’ll let myself sit down to write and there’s so much that comes out. I find that to be much more encouraging than sitting in front of a blank page. I don’t know how anybody does that. Props to anybody who can. I think living in the thoughts of those notes helps me start to formulate ideas or notice patterns or things like that, that once I’m finally writing, that stuff all comes to the forefront much more easily since I’ve been ruminating on it.

In terms of subject matter, you write really, really close to the bone. For instance, your new book is based on the aftermath of your divorce. When you’re writing about hard things that have happened to you, what measures do you take in order to take care of yourself from a mental health perspective?

I time my writing around when I can have a good amount of free time afterwards to kind of just do whatever will help me in the moment. I’ll schedule time to write when I have a day off, and I will only write for an hour or two at a time. After that, I can do whatever it is that feels okay. I also time my writing sessions around my therapy sessions so that, whatever comes up for me, I can immediately go to therapy and talk through it. That’s definitely something that, as I got towards the end of writing the book, I really needed to rely on. I had to be really strategic about when I was writing and make sure that I was taking care of myself.

I would say that your book is in large part about codependency. I think about the role of codependency in art-making a lot in terms of considering the reader or the viewer or the listener more often than we consider ourselves in our creating practices. Is that something you think about, too? If so, what have you done that’s helped you center yourself in your own writing practice?

That’s something I’m still trying to figure out. I’m not good at it. I completely agree with your premise, and that’s something that I really love about the book Drifts by Kate Zambreno: it hits so well on codependency in a writer’s life. I wrote a lot when I was a teenager, a little bit in my early twenties, and then I didn’t write for over a decade. And it was only once I was out of my marriage that I started writing again. And that sucked. It’s because I didn’t ever take time for myself to do the things that interested me. And that wasn’t just because of my relationship. It was also because of the jobs I had and where I was in life in general. I have not lived with anybody since then, and that is a huge part of why I think I have the freedom and time to write as much as I want to.

If I stay at my boyfriend’s place or something, writing is the first thing that goes away. So I am still trying to figure that out. I’m still very codependent despite all the therapy, despite writing this book that’s very much about codependency. I just have a really hard time. I’m a very obsessive person, so I find it really hard to dedicate myself to anything else except for the person that’s in front of me or whatever it is that I’m super into. The opposite can be true sometimes, too, though. When I was editing this book, I didn’t talk to or see anybody else for a month. I was just like, “I’m going into a hole and I’m not here. Take me off your list. I’m out for the month.”

You don’t have an MFA and you didn’t go to college. What’s been helpful for you in terms of finding a writing education and community outside of those gigantic, expensive institutions?

The first step for me was just finding writers I really liked. I read Chelsea Hodson’s first book, Pity the Animal, and just felt so connected to it. I started following her on Twitter, and shortly after I started following her, she tweeted about a workshop in Italy and that she and Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books were accepting applications. That kind of thing was something I’d never even considered. I didn’t really even know that workshops existed. I don’t come from any kind of writing community or world at all. So I was like, “Oh, what’s that?” I had no idea what workshopping was at all. So when I got accepted, and she sent us all our manuscripts and we had to take notes and stuff, I was like, “I don’t know how to do this.” To me, I was like, “Oh, this is like English class, and I’m reading someone else’s paper.” But the last time I did that was in high school, over a decade before. I think part of the reason I was attracted to Mors Tua Vita Mea was because it felt accessible to me. Other workshops and residencies seem much more academically rigorous than what I personally prefer writing to be like. I like feelings better than structure.

With indie lit, some writers have all this academic achievement, some don’t. Some have a mix. This is a community where somebody can find their spot no matter what their background is. And everybody has just been so welcoming. I mean, I can cold-DM a writer that I like, and they’re always so warm and friendly and welcoming, and I’ve been constantly amazed by that.

And right now, I’m putting readings together and just cold emailing writers I like in the towns I’m going to. Everyone has been so kind and so excited. So I don’t know what other people’s experiences have been like, but for me, I’ve encountered nothing but warmth.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I started the book as a memoir, which I think allowed me to be really clear with how comfortable I felt sharing certain truths. And so I felt, when I was writing it as a memoir, it had to be really true to my experiences and really true to other people who were characters in it. I know that my account will never be their version of events, but I felt a major responsibility to be as accurate as I could.

I was surprised by how different I felt about the book when I decided to turn it into a novel. I felt really liberated at that point to turn people into characters, to turn certain traits up, to exaggerate certain parts of the story, to move timelines around.I’m sure people do that with memoir. I just didn’t feel okay doing that because I’m such a rule follower. I’m such a rule follower that I was like, “Oh, I’m just reporting it. It has to be a newspaper, like journalism.” Then once I decided to turn it into a novel and have it be more autofictional, it really helped me see it as more of a story arc, and that really helped make it more of a self-contained thing.

I had a really hard time ending this book because there isn’t a clear ending when you’re just living it. So I think turning it into autofiction and making it a novel helped me see ways that I could end it or ways that I could turn it more into a story with different arcs that would naturally come to an end.

Do you feel like the book lost anything by leaning into fiction? Is there anything you felt like you had to sacrifice from the angle of memoir?

No. As a matter of fact, it helped me realize what was really not necessary. I had a lot of things in it that were more logistical, that were like, “Okay, well this happened, and then this happened…” I was just trying to be true to real life. Once I saw it as a novel, and I think also just with time and space—it’s now been five or six years since all these events happened in my real life—I think I started to become clear about, or saw more clearly that, certain things that really mattered to me at the time actually didn’t even need to be in there. It was just a logistic thing that nobody would give a shit about, so it was fine to remove it.

Do you think you’ll keep working in autofiction, or do you find yourself more drawn to pure fiction or nonfiction moving forward in your writing life?

It’s funny. I think it has made me more interested in doing either pure nonfiction, like memoir, or pure fiction. I feel like being a little ambiguous in the middle with autofiction has been really fulfilling and fun, but it makes me more curious to see what the extremes of either one of those things could be. So I’m working on something that’s pure memoir now and starting to think about something that’s more straight fiction for my next project. While it was really fun to live in the ambiguity for a while, I’m kind of sick of gray areas of autofiction and what’s real, what’s not, what happened, what didn’t. Instead, I think it’ll be fun to take a turn doing the extreme of both of those things.

How has your approach to writing the second book been different or similar to the first?

It’s been very different. When I wrote the first book, I was actually not intending to write a book. I didn’t really know what it was. I started with a lot of fragments. It was kind of mostly journaling during this big transition in my life. And then I started seeing it a little more creatively after I read Bluets by Maggie Nelson, which really opened my eyes to the world of creative nonfiction and more artful writing about nonfiction. I had previously been biased against nonfiction books because I just thought of them as mass market, boring kinds of writing. Some big thing about marketing or whatever the subject was. I was like, “Nonfiction sucks.” But once I read more creative nonfiction—The Chronology of Water by Lydia Yuknavitch is another one that really inspired me, as well as Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett—once I started to read these things that were more creative, more meandering, it made me realize that I could turn something that was very fragmentary into something that was a self-contained unit.

I used those early pages to apply to a writing workshop called Mors Tua Vita Mea in Italy. And so really, I wasn’t intending to write a book, but I used the fragments I was working on to create a cohesive piece that was 20 pages for an application to a writing workshop. And once I was at that workshop, I got encouragement to continue it as a book. So it kind of just accidentally happened, which was, on the one hand, exciting, and I think helped me remove any mental barriers I might have had about how daunting it is to be like, “I’m writing a book now,” when I first started.

But it made editing an incredible chore, because I was not at all organized. I had no idea about the story arc, none of that. That all came later with massive, massive edits. I mean, I had hundreds of drafts. I worked on edits for years, so I would not want to do it that way ever again. And with the first draft of my second book that I’m working on now, I very intentionally went in knowing I wanted to write a book, doing a lot of outlining before I even sat down to write any of it. And cheated a little bit because a lot of the basis of that second book is stuff that I cut from the first one. So it was stuff that I cut but still knew I wanted to use somewhere. And then that kind of gave me an idea for the second book. Very different experiences.

Nowadays, how in-depth do you get while outlining?

Not super in-depth. I think I’m definitely somebody who likes to have a prompt or an idea of what a chapter will be about, but I have seen other writers’ outlines and it’s like they’re almost writing the entire chapter just through outline. And that’s just not really my instinct. I like better to just have an idea floating around, but then sit down and see what happens on the page when I’m just in the moment writing.

I find your writing so detailed and vivid. Thinking about the “auto” part of “autofiction” for this book that’s coming out, what are some memory mining exercises that you did in order to pull those shiny details from the depths and put them onto the page?

I’m very inspired by sensory writing. I think my first favorite writer was Francesca Lia Block, who’s a YA writer. I just randomly grabbed one of her books when I was a teenager at Bookshop Santa Cruz, and that changed my life. I mean, that’s what made me first want to become a writer. She, in particular, is so good about writing about food and clothing and just giving such a visual with poetic sensory writing. I think from the very start of when I ever tried to write, that was really an instinct for me. I was so attracted to that kind of writing that I wanted to be somehow involved in it. That was something I really trained myself to do in the beginning. I also just find it is so much easier to access the memory if you have an entry point, like a scent or a taste or something like that.

I often take down notes when something is happening: of what I was wearing, what I was eating, a song, some sensory trigger that will help me re-enter it later when I’m trying to write about it. It’s almost like when you’re trying to remember a dream and something will finally click that helps you remember, and you just feel like you’re living in it. You’re in the alternate universe of the dream when you finally remember it. That’s what it’s like for me when I use these sensory triggers and when I keep these notes of things. It’s like I’m trying to reenter the dream of what the memory was.

A lot of writers will take notes in the way you’re describing, but they’ll often never return to them. It sounds like you have a note-taking and a note-returning practice, which is a crucial part of it. Can you describe that part of the practice?

Absolutely. I take written notes in my phone and in a notebook. It just depends on what I have with me. I also do a lot of voice memos to myself on my phone. They sound psychotic, and it’s humiliating to listen back to them, oftentimes because I’m in a public place when I record them, trying to whisper them, but I often can just talk into my phone more quickly than I can type. I made my best friend promise me that, if I die before her, she will use my dead thumb to open my phone and delete all my voice memos because they sound so insane. They make perfect sense to me, but if anybody was to hear them, they’d be like, “Oh, no. She’s not okay.”

I don’t write every day. I like to write when I have something to write about. I don’t like sitting in front of a blank page trying to think of ideas. I like to almost create a scarcity of time for myself to write, because I like to collect a bunch of notes and voice memos and then be dying to sit down to write them. Then I’ll let myself sit down to write and there’s so much that comes out. I find that to be much more encouraging than sitting in front of a blank page. I don’t know how anybody does that. Props to anybody who can. I think living in the thoughts of those notes helps me start to formulate ideas or notice patterns or things like that, that once I’m finally writing, that stuff all comes to the forefront much more easily since I’ve been ruminating on it.

In terms of subject matter, you write really, really close to the bone. For instance, your new book is based on the aftermath of your divorce. When you’re writing about hard things that have happened to you, what measures do you take in order to take care of yourself from a mental health perspective?

I time my writing around when I can have a good amount of free time afterwards to kind of just do whatever will help me in the moment. I’ll schedule time to write when I have a day off, and I will only write for an hour or two at a time. After that, I can do whatever it is that feels okay. I also time my writing sessions around my therapy sessions so that, whatever comes up for me, I can immediately go to therapy and talk through it. That’s definitely something that, as I got towards the end of writing the book, I really needed to rely on. I had to be really strategic about when I was writing and make sure that I was taking care of myself.

I would say that your book is in large part about codependency. I think about the role of codependency in art-making a lot in terms of considering the reader or the viewer or the listener more often than we consider ourselves in our creating practices. Is that something you think about, too? If so, what have you done that’s helped you center yourself in your own writing practice?

That’s something I’m still trying to figure out. I’m not good at it. I completely agree with your premise, and that’s something that I really love about the book Drifts by Kate Zambreno: it hits so well on codependency in a writer’s life. I wrote a lot when I was a teenager, a little bit in my early twenties, and then I didn’t write for over a decade. And it was only once I was out of my marriage that I started writing again. And that sucked. It’s because I didn’t ever take time for myself to do the things that interested me. And that wasn’t just because of my relationship. It was also because of the jobs I had and where I was in life in general. I have not lived with anybody since then, and that is a huge part of why I think I have the freedom and time to write as much as I want to.

If I stay at my boyfriend’s place or something, writing is the first thing that goes away. So I am still trying to figure that out. I’m still very codependent despite all the therapy, despite writing this book that’s very much about codependency. I just have a really hard time. I’m a very obsessive person, so I find it really hard to dedicate myself to anything else except for the person that’s in front of me or whatever it is that I’m super into. The opposite can be true sometimes, too, though. When I was editing this book, I didn’t talk to or see anybody else for a month. I was just like, “I’m going into a hole and I’m not here. Take me off your list. I’m out for the month.”

You don’t have an MFA and you didn’t go to college. What’s been helpful for you in terms of finding a writing education and community outside of those gigantic, expensive institutions?

The first step for me was just finding writers I really liked. I read Chelsea Hodson’s first book, Pity the Animal, and just felt so connected to it. I started following her on Twitter, and shortly after I started following her, she tweeted about a workshop in Italy and that she and Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books were accepting applications. That kind of thing was something I’d never even considered. I didn’t really even know that workshops existed. I don’t come from any kind of writing community or world at all. So I was like, “Oh, what’s that?” I had no idea what workshopping was at all. So when I got accepted, and she sent us all our manuscripts and we had to take notes and stuff, I was like, “I don’t know how to do this.” To me, I was like, “Oh, this is like English class, and I’m reading someone else’s paper.” But the last time I did that was in high school, over a decade before. I think part of the reason I was attracted to Mors Tua Vita Mea was because it felt accessible to me. Other workshops and residencies seem much more academically rigorous than what I personally prefer writing to be like. I like feelings better than structure.

With indie lit, some writers have all this academic achievement, some don’t. Some have a mix. This is a community where somebody can find their spot no matter what their background is. And everybody has just been so welcoming. I mean, I can cold-DM a writer that I like, and they’re always so warm and friendly and welcoming, and I’ve been constantly amazed by that.

And right now, I’m putting readings together and just cold emailing writers I like in the towns I’m going to. Everyone has been so kind and so excited. So I don’t know what other people’s experiences have been like, but for me, I’ve encountered nothing but warmth.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I started the book as a memoir, which I think allowed me to be really clear with how comfortable I felt sharing certain truths. And so I felt, when I was writing it as a memoir, it had to be really true to my experiences and really true to other people who were characters in it. I know that my account will never be their version of events, but I felt a major responsibility to be as accurate as I could.

I was surprised by how different I felt about the book when I decided to turn it into a novel. I felt really liberated at that point to turn people into characters, to turn certain traits up, to exaggerate certain parts of the story, to move timelines around.I’m sure people do that with memoir. I just didn’t feel okay doing that because I’m such a rule follower. I’m such a rule follower that I was like, “Oh, I’m just reporting it. It has to be a newspaper, like journalism.” Then once I decided to turn it into a novel and have it be more autofictional, it really helped me see it as more of a story arc, and that really helped make it more of a self-contained thing.

I had a really hard time ending this book because there isn’t a clear ending when you’re just living it. So I think turning it into autofiction and making it a novel helped me see ways that I could end it or ways that I could turn it more into a story with different arcs that would naturally come to an end.

Do you feel like the book lost anything by leaning into fiction? Is there anything you felt like you had to sacrifice from the angle of memoir?

No. As a matter of fact, it helped me realize what was really not necessary. I had a lot of things in it that were more logistical, that were like, “Okay, well this happened, and then this happened…” I was just trying to be true to real life. Once I saw it as a novel, and I think also just with time and space—it’s now been five or six years since all these events happened in my real life—I think I started to become clear about, or saw more clearly that, certain things that really mattered to me at the time actually didn’t even need to be in there. It was just a logistic thing that nobody would give a shit about, so it was fine to remove it.

Do you think you’ll keep working in autofiction, or do you find yourself more drawn to pure fiction or nonfiction moving forward in your writing life?

It’s funny. I think it has made me more interested in doing either pure nonfiction, like memoir, or pure fiction. I feel like being a little ambiguous in the middle with autofiction has been really fulfilling and fun, but it makes me more curious to see what the extremes of either one of those things could be. So I’m working on something that’s pure memoir now and starting to think about something that’s more straight fiction for my next project. While it was really fun to live in the ambiguity for a while, I’m kind of sick of gray areas of autofiction and what’s real, what’s not, what happened, what didn’t. Instead, I think it’ll be fun to take a turn doing the extreme of both of those things.

How has your approach to writing the second book been different or similar to the first?

It’s been very different. When I wrote the first book, I was actually not intending to write a book. I didn’t really know what it was. I started with a lot of fragments. It was kind of mostly journaling during this big transition in my life. And then I started seeing it a little more creatively after I read Bluets by Maggie Nelson, which really opened my eyes to the world of creative nonfiction and more artful writing about nonfiction. I had previously been biased against nonfiction books because I just thought of them as mass market, boring kinds of writing. Some big thing about marketing or whatever the subject was. I was like, “Nonfiction sucks.” But once I read more creative nonfiction—The Chronology of Water by Lydia Yuknavitch is another one that really inspired me, as well as Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett—once I started to read these things that were more creative, more meandering, it made me realize that I could turn something that was very fragmentary into something that was a self-contained unit.

I used those early pages to apply to a writing workshop called Mors Tua Vita Mea in Italy. And so really, I wasn’t intending to write a book, but I used the fragments I was working on to create a cohesive piece that was 20 pages for an application to a writing workshop. And once I was at that workshop, I got encouragement to continue it as a book. So it kind of just accidentally happened, which was, on the one hand, exciting, and I think helped me remove any mental barriers I might have had about how daunting it is to be like, “I’m writing a book now,” when I first started.

But it made editing an incredible chore, because I was not at all organized. I had no idea about the story arc, none of that. That all came later with massive, massive edits. I mean, I had hundreds of drafts. I worked on edits for years, so I would not want to do it that way ever again. And with the first draft of my second book that I’m working on now, I very intentionally went in knowing I wanted to write a book, doing a lot of outlining before I even sat down to write any of it. And cheated a little bit because a lot of the basis of that second book is stuff that I cut from the first one. So it was stuff that I cut but still knew I wanted to use somewhere. And then that kind of gave me an idea for the second book. Very different experiences.

Nowadays, how in-depth do you get while outlining?

Not super in-depth. I think I’m definitely somebody who likes to have a prompt or an idea of what a chapter will be about, but I have seen other writers’ outlines and it’s like they’re almost writing the entire chapter just through outline. And that’s just not really my instinct. I like better to just have an idea floating around, but then sit down and see what happens on the page when I’m just in the moment writing.

I find your writing so detailed and vivid. Thinking about the “auto” part of “autofiction” for this book that’s coming out, what are some memory mining exercises that you did in order to pull those shiny details from the depths and put them onto the page?

I’m very inspired by sensory writing. I think my first favorite writer was Francesca Lia Block, who’s a YA writer. I just randomly grabbed one of her books when I was a teenager at Bookshop Santa Cruz, and that changed my life. I mean, that’s what made me first want to become a writer. She, in particular, is so good about writing about food and clothing and just giving such a visual with poetic sensory writing. I think from the very start of when I ever tried to write, that was really an instinct for me. I was so attracted to that kind of writing that I wanted to be somehow involved in it. That was something I really trained myself to do in the beginning. I also just find it is so much easier to access the memory if you have an entry point, like a scent or a taste or something like that.

I often take down notes when something is happening: of what I was wearing, what I was eating, a song, some sensory trigger that will help me re-enter it later when I’m trying to write about it. It’s almost like when you’re trying to remember a dream and something will finally click that helps you remember, and you just feel like you’re living in it. You’re in the alternate universe of the dream when you finally remember it. That’s what it’s like for me when I use these sensory triggers and when I keep these notes of things. It’s like I’m trying to reenter the dream of what the memory was.

A lot of writers will take notes in the way you’re describing, but they’ll often never return to them. It sounds like you have a note-taking and a note-returning practice, which is a crucial part of it. Can you describe that part of the practice?

Absolutely. I take written notes in my phone and in a notebook. It just depends on what I have with me. I also do a lot of voice memos to myself on my phone. They sound psychotic, and it’s humiliating to listen back to them, oftentimes because I’m in a public place when I record them, trying to whisper them, but I often can just talk into my phone more quickly than I can type. I made my best friend promise me that, if I die before her, she will use my dead thumb to open my phone and delete all my voice memos because they sound so insane. They make perfect sense to me, but if anybody was to hear them, they’d be like, “Oh, no. She’s not okay.”

I don’t write every day. I like to write when I have something to write about. I don’t like sitting in front of a blank page trying to think of ideas. I like to almost create a scarcity of time for myself to write, because I like to collect a bunch of notes and voice memos and then be dying to sit down to write them. Then I’ll let myself sit down to write and there’s so much that comes out. I find that to be much more encouraging than sitting in front of a blank page. I don’t know how anybody does that. Props to anybody who can. I think living in the thoughts of those notes helps me start to formulate ideas or notice patterns or things like that, that once I’m finally writing, that stuff all comes to the forefront much more easily since I’ve been ruminating on it.

In terms of subject matter, you write really, really close to the bone. For instance, your new book is based on the aftermath of your divorce. When you’re writing about hard things that have happened to you, what measures do you take in order to take care of yourself from a mental health perspective?

I time my writing around when I can have a good amount of free time afterwards to kind of just do whatever will help me in the moment. I’ll schedule time to write when I have a day off, and I will only write for an hour or two at a time. After that, I can do whatever it is that feels okay. I also time my writing sessions around my therapy sessions so that, whatever comes up for me, I can immediately go to therapy and talk through it. That’s definitely something that, as I got towards the end of writing the book, I really needed to rely on. I had to be really strategic about when I was writing and make sure that I was taking care of myself.

I would say that your book is in large part about codependency. I think about the role of codependency in art-making a lot in terms of considering the reader or the viewer or the listener more often than we consider ourselves in our creating practices. Is that something you think about, too? If so, what have you done that’s helped you center yourself in your own writing practice?

That’s something I’m still trying to figure out. I’m not good at it. I completely agree with your premise, and that’s something that I really love about the book Drifts by Kate Zambreno: it hits so well on codependency in a writer’s life. I wrote a lot when I was a teenager, a little bit in my early twenties, and then I didn’t write for over a decade. And it was only once I was out of my marriage that I started writing again. And that sucked. It’s because I didn’t ever take time for myself to do the things that interested me. And that wasn’t just because of my relationship. It was also because of the jobs I had and where I was in life in general. I have not lived with anybody since then, and that is a huge part of why I think I have the freedom and time to write as much as I want to.

If I stay at my boyfriend’s place or something, writing is the first thing that goes away. So I am still trying to figure that out. I’m still very codependent despite all the therapy, despite writing this book that’s very much about codependency. I just have a really hard time. I’m a very obsessive person, so I find it really hard to dedicate myself to anything else except for the person that’s in front of me or whatever it is that I’m super into. The opposite can be true sometimes, too, though. When I was editing this book, I didn’t talk to or see anybody else for a month. I was just like, “I’m going into a hole and I’m not here. Take me off your list. I’m out for the month.”

You don’t have an MFA and you didn’t go to college. What’s been helpful for you in terms of finding a writing education and community outside of those gigantic, expensive institutions?

The first step for me was just finding writers I really liked. I read Chelsea Hodson’s first book, Pity the Animal, and just felt so connected to it. I started following her on Twitter, and shortly after I started following her, she tweeted about a workshop in Italy and that she and Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books were accepting applications. That kind of thing was something I’d never even considered. I didn’t really even know that workshops existed. I don’t come from any kind of writing community or world at all. So I was like, “Oh, what’s that?” I had no idea what workshopping was at all. So when I got accepted, and she sent us all our manuscripts and we had to take notes and stuff, I was like, “I don’t know how to do this.” To me, I was like, “Oh, this is like English class, and I’m reading someone else’s paper.” But the last time I did that was in high school, over a decade before. I think part of the reason I was attracted to Mors Tua Vita Mea was because it felt accessible to me. Other workshops and residencies seem much more academically rigorous than what I personally prefer writing to be like. I like feelings better than structure.

With indie lit, some writers have all this academic achievement, some don’t. Some have a mix. This is a community where somebody can find their spot no matter what their background is. And everybody has just been so welcoming. I mean, I can cold-DM a writer that I like, and they’re always so warm and friendly and welcoming, and I’ve been constantly amazed by that.

And right now, I’m putting readings together and just cold emailing writers I like in the towns I’m going to. Everyone has been so kind and so excited. So I don’t know what other people’s experiences have been like, but for me, I’ve encountered nothing but warmth.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

Well, just a couple of things. It’s not that the importance of the glimmer is not apparent to me right away. It’s that the reason for the importance is not apparent to me right away. And that’s kind of an important distinction, because I trust so much the process of noticing the glimmer, even if I don’t know what it means or why I’m noticing it.

And so I do know that it’s important. I just don’t know why, and I don’t really care if I ever know why. I mean, usually in the course of using it in writing, the reason it was important to me will reveal itself, but not always. And that’s okay with me because I believe in its power to carry its meaning to the reader, even if I’m not in control of that transfer, if that makes sense.

It does. What’s the most recent glimmer you’ve come across?

My husband and I went on a walk with the dogs this morning, and he found a wild onion in the pasture and he broke it off and handed it to me to chew on. Is that vitally important to any story I will ever tell? I’m not sure. But that was what popped into my mind when you asked, and it happened just about an hour ago. They can happen constantly.

The last glimmer that I think I’ll probably use in my writing, though? Let me think about—oh, I know. That’s an easy one, too. On Sunday—no, Monday morning—I gave a reading. I went out to Yosemite for about 36 hours to give a reading at a historic lodge there in Tuolumne Meadows. And even though I knew it was going to be tight in my schedule, I wanted to go because I knew I could stay up there in the meadows with the ranger, which would mean that, in the morning after my reading, I would be the only person in Tuolumne Meadows basically. And it was every bit as perfect as I imagined it being, to be there, in a place that’s visited by so many people, all alone. But I wasn’t alone. I saw a whole lot of deer, including several does with fawns, including a doe with two tiny spotted fawns who were just having the zoomies all over the meadow. It was just so cool to see that place without people, even though I was sort of wrecking that. They weren’t really scared of me because I was only one of me, and there were so many of them, marmots and pine martens and all kinds of birds and all these deer. That would’ve been the last thing that I know I’ll write about.

How do you know when a glimmer is going to make its way onto the page? What’s the difference between the morning in the meadow and the onion in the pasture?

Well, I don’t know. I don’t know until it does. It’s important to me to be in the practice of noticing constantly. That’s really the important part of my practice. And if I were being Buddhist about it, the onion would be equally as vital as the morning in Tuolumne Meadows, but I’m not a Buddhist, nor do I exactly strive to be. But the most important part of the practice is to notice and, no matter how big or small or major or minor, to keep a running recording in my head or on the page.

Having said that, there are just things that feel more significant, either because they’re a major life event, like falling from a horse and not dying at a full gallop, or if it’s something that’s more daily, like the onion in the pasture. Sometimes those daily things can be just the metaphor. The honest answer is I don’t spend a lot of time evaluating them because I think that’s counterproductive to the process. The process is really about collection and having them at my disposal if I need them later.

There are certain glimmers that seem like the reason to write an essay. They will propel me into an essay because I so believe in how big they are for me. But aside from that, I sort of feel like they’re all kind of equal. And getting to be alone in Tuolumne Meadows after this very wet spring, the road just opened a week ago, and here we are in August. They had 15 feet of snow up there. Everything was all renewed and revitalized. That all feels big enough to propel me into an essay about the earth and its potential for rejuvenation if we would leave it alone. It’s got a lot of big ideas in it, and I feel like I could write that essay today, but at least equally important to the process is just collecting little things that are going to be momentary drop-ins in other pieces of writing that might inform it or change it or reveal it.

Have there been seasons of your life where you’ve fallen off the practice of noticing?

Honestly, I’m pretty good at it. Certainly there have been times, but it’s my driver. It’s kind of the definition of me. Wherever I am, I want to go for a walk. I want to go out and look. I want to go see. It’ll say on my tombstone—not that I will have a tombstone—but it would say, if I were going to have one, she always wanted to go see. So it is something I’m good at. I’m not that good at sitting down and writing, honestly, but I’m quite good at noticing. And I think the reason I’ve been a writer all these years is because I’m good at noticing, because I am not good at sitting in a chair.

I guess one time that was really scary in recent memory was when I had long Covid for about a year, and I had so little energy. The thing I’ve always had in abundance is energy, I can always go for a walk. I can go fly in somewhere to give a reading, and even though I’ll only be on the ground for eight hours, I’ll still find a way to go out and walk around and look at wherever I am. That’s really important to me. Whether it’s a city or a beautiful natural area, it doesn’t matter. I want to know where I am. I want the details of it. I eat them. I am always hungry for more of that.

When I had long Covid, I didn’t have energy for that, and it was scary. I couldn’t get off the couch. I had such deep fatigue, which I had never had in my life. I didn’t know anything about it, because I’ve never had an autoimmune disease or anything, and I have many friends who have. The idea that I couldn’t take the dogs for a walk or cook dinner or anything–I was scared. And honestly, I was so scared that I wasn’t even living that it honestly didn’t freak me out that much that I wasn’t writing, because the living part was so much more important to me. Even though the writing’s very important to me. It was sort of the first time in my whole life I gave myself a break for not getting writing done because I couldn’t even take a shower.

I think my brain is still a little weird after that, and I think my heart’s still a little weird, but basically I’m like 80 percent better, which I’ll take. 85 percent maybe. I’m not as good at multitasking as I used to be, which I think is probably the good news. Ultimately, I think multitasking is probably not that good for us, but I am easier on myself as a result of going through that, in two ways. I’m easier on myself if I don’t do every single thing I think I’m supposed to do, which feels good at 61. And also, I’m kind of easier on the writing. Not that I don’t want it to be excellent, but there’s less negative self-talk than there was before Covid. There’s less, “Oh, that’s so stupid. Oh, that’s so boring. Oh, you’re boring everyone. Say something interesting or get up and leave the computer behind.”

All that sort of self-hating talk, which I used to think was just what my friend Fenton Johnson calls “the price of admission for being a writer.” It’s calmed down some. I mean, not entirely, but just being able to write again, having the energy to write again, not to mention having the energy to go out in the world and collect glimmers—I feel so grateful for that. I don’t want to spend energy on the super self-criticism, which is not to say I won’t revise and revise and revise. I’m a compulsive reviser, but just in terms of getting the first draft down, I’m easier on myself, which I think can only be good.

I’m so glad you’re continuing to recover. Now, I know you’re a writer who loves a good metaphor. When I write, I always feel like I’m wrestling metaphors onto the page. For you, is it a matter that the metaphor will come together on the page?

Glimmers are my source of metaphor. We’ve all had times where we’ve witnessed something or been involved in something and we go, “Oh my god, that’s such a metaphor for life,” or, “That’s such a metaphor for what I’m going through right now.” I was just teaching and writing near the Great Sand Dunes, which is a national park near me, and there’s this one dune that’s way up on the side of the hill, and it’s called an escape dune. So there’s the huge dune field, and then there’s this escape dune that got away, and I swear to god, every single student put it in their piece the next day. It was such an appealing metaphor to everyone. There are going to be times like that, where a metaphor suggests itself to you, or you even have a scene that you feel wants to be a little more visual or lyric, and you go searching for a metaphor, which is when it can feel like you’re forcing them.

That’s why I start with the glimmers. We’re back to that little onion now. I don’t know what it is or what it means, but if it turns out that I put my husband breaking it off for me to taste it in a scene, I have to count on the fact that that meaning is going to get conveyed to the reader without me having to ram it down their throat. For me, the best metaphors are the ones that grow naturally out of the scene or out of the glimmer without me having to go, okay, what metaphor goes here? Because then it starts to feel a little mechanical or a little forced or a little overdetermined. I like the meaning to float a little. If the glimmer makes it all the way to the reader without me even really understanding its meaning, then I know I haven’t manhandled it.

Are you a daily writer?

I’m a daily writer right now because I have a book deadline, this mini book I’m doing on Roe v. Wade. I don’t do that very often. I usually just try to let it come when it comes, except when I’m on deadline and I’ve sat down and I’ve just made myself write 500 words a day no matter what. Again, this is so not my writing style. I’m just trying it, and it’s going okay. And I think that’s connected to what I said before about not being so hard on myself. When I get this book done, which I will in the next month or two, I might try to continue at this pace. It would be the first time in my life that I did daily pages. I’ve never done it. I’ve rolled my eyes at the idea, honestly.

What about it has made you roll your eyes?

A few reasons. One is because teaching is super, super important to me, and my identity is really bound up in teaching, and that’s the thing I do every day. I mean, of course I don’t do it every day, but my dedication to teaching never wavers, and there’s always student pages to read. But I also think I rolled my eyes at it because I was so sure I would write badly if I forced myself to write every day.

I don’t like writing badly. Some of my good friends who are writers will write 10,000 words to get to a thousand, and I’m not like that. I like to get it in the room the first time. I do revise incessantly, but it’s kind of going from eight to 10 instead of from two to 10. And I think I always thought that going from two to 10 was just a waste of time. If I don’t have anything to say, why would I even sit down?

I’m now rethinking that. Even in these 500 words a day, a lot of them suck. But there’s good ones in there that have arisen because I made myself sit down and write 500 words, which I realize is what every book on writing has said since the beginning of time. I just didn’t really believe it.

You mentioned your dedication to teaching. How do you keep writing in spite of the fact that teaching can feel so much more satisfying?

It is so much easier to put my students’ writing first, especially now. I’ve had my moment. I’ve had my say, and they’re all coming to try to save the fucking planet. Of course their work is more valuable than mine, particularly my students at the Institute of American Indian Arts, but not exclusively. The work I do with mentoring these books into the world—I just feel like they’re so much more important just by virtue of being new. It’s new ideas and it’s new reactions to the world.

That said, that set of feelings can be convenient when I’m really afraid to write or when I’m not making the time to write or when I’m afraid of the thing I’m about to write. But I have all these things in the queue that I want to write, which feels like happy news. I have eight or nine essays, and some of them might turn into short stories, and I am excited to write for the first time in a while.

You said that some of the essays might turn into short stories: is that how your work typically starts? Does it begin in essay form, then turn into fiction if you decide you want to take more liberties with it?

How it usually works is that I just start writing something and I don’t worry about it. I don’t worry about whether it’s an essay or a story. I’m usually just playing a shell game with glimmers, and then they sort of fall into connection to each other. Then, somewhere in there, I decide whether it’s a story or an essay, depending on how it’s going, depending on whether it wants made-up characters or not. I mean, I wrote the book Contents May Have Shifted, got all the way to turning it in and said, “I don’t know what you want to call this.” The character’s name is Pam, but I made a lot of shit up. Sometimes the work really never identifies itself. Or sometimes, like with a short story I wrote recently, a dog starts talking, and then it’s like, okay, this must be fiction. There’s a few things in the queue, and I keep bouncing back and forth as I’m thinking about them while I’m driving or whatever. That’s just a way to keep my mind active around them. I won’t really know until I start writing.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I think I was talking about being very careful about using the right word. Taking time with language. Some things are intentionally unclear, though. I think about that myself, and I talk about that in terms of being as precise as possible. Sometimes in class, I’ll ask questions about what is actually going on here under the surface, as in, “What are you getting from this?” It all comes back to clarity. Thematic clarity.

One way to get clearer is to step outside and try to see the work with new eyes. One idea is looking at the writing from the perspective of a different character within it. Just a way to compel looking at what’s going on from a different angle and to remember that there are different angles.

With your own work, when you feel like you’re really, really close to it, how do you get some distance?

Sometimes things are very simultaneous for me. The idea of figuring out the structure is very much connected to figuring out what the story is about. It takes me a really long time sometimes just to figure out what the structure is. I’ll think I know what I’m writing about, but then when it comes to how I actually express it or represent it on a page, I realize that clarifying to myself what it is I want to say is really intrinsically tied to how I mean to say it, or how am I going to actually put all this together in a way that makes sense and also feels right to me.

I tend to overwrite, and I tend to just do that out of habit. I’ll look at things from as many different angles as possible. For me, it is very connected to, I guess, sort of a search for clarity. What is the proper shape? I feel like a lot of times when I’m writing, it’s like I’m trying to figure out what I think about something. It will be something that I’m kind of obsessed with or an image or a person or some dialogue or something that’s going on in the world, and trying to write it is really part of the process of trying to understand what it means to me.

What does your day-to-day writing life look like?

I usually wake up really early and try to write for at least an hour or two every day. I try to get up at five every day. I’m in a much better mood for the rest of the day if I do that. It’s good for everybody involved if I just try to carve out some time in the beginning of the day to write before I have to drive my son to school and stuff like that. That’s what I try to do.

Before I started recording our conversation, you told me you did a month-long residency this summer. What did your writing schedule look like during the residency when you didn’t have anything else going on?

It was really nice to be able to do that and to not have to necessarily get up at five. No, it was great. It was really great. It depends on your situation at home, but certainly for me, because I have three kids, it was just a revelation like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing ever.” You can actually make your own schedule and stuff like that. Residencies have been really important for me to get a lot of work done.

A lot of writers, myself included, can get intimidated when met with that much sprawling time to work on something at a residency. My reaction to that is putting pressure on myself and setting overly ambitious goals, like, “I’m going to draft a whole novel in three weeks!” But then I realize, no, that’s impossible. How do you set realistic expectations for yourself during a residency?

Oh, I don’t know. I remember when I was younger, people would say, “Oh, I procrastinate so much,” and dah, dah, dah. When I’m in residency, I’m very aware that this is borrowed time. It is really precious. Again, I think so much of writing for me often is trying to figure out what it is I’m trying to say. Maybe it is because I overwrite, and at this point I am aware of how I work, trying to look through different scenes and find what will work for me. That actually takes most of the time, probably, in terms of writing novels. I just try to do that and ask myself different questions or put characters in different scenarios.

I definitely set deadlines for myself and goals for myself, but I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m also very aware that I have to figure it out before I can do all of that. I feel very happy and satisfied if I can just get it clear in my mind. It’s not that I don’t wish I could write faster sometimes, but it doesn’t really help to write fast, and then I can’t feel it. It’s not really what I wanted to say, or it just doesn’t feel right, or the language doesn’t sound right. I personally have nothing to do with what anyone else thinks about it.

Writing every single day no matter what—for you, it sounds like it’s all about discovery and being immersed.

It really, really is. I know everybody has a different process and a different relationship to writing, but that kind of is what mine is. That doesn’t work for some people, but it depends on your relationship to what you’re doing, and everyone has a different process. You try to figure out what works for you and what is really satisfying for you. That’s a question that’s really personal, and you have to figure it out for yourself.

I want to ask about setting and place in writing. The settings in your work are so evocative. You spent time in a lot of different places growing up—has that had an effect on the way you incorporate a sense of place in your writing?

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then, when I was two, we moved to Oakland, CA. Then when I was around seven, she moved to the Virgin Islands. Then I came back and I actually went to high school in Poughkeepsie, NY. My mother moved around a lot, and I think in part that’s probably why I write about Florida so much—every summer, I would stay with my grandparents in St. Petersburg, FL. Even though that was not where I lived with my mother, Florida had some continuity for me.

Moving so much and being in so many really different social contexts made me aware of how the way people respond to you can be so radically different depending on where you are. It made me aware of how identity changes, depending on where you are, and how people respond to you. How people interact with you can be very, very different depending on where you are and what they think of you. That’s part of, I think, my own sensitivity to setting: how it affects the interpretation of identity.

That’s part of the reason why my kids and I have lived in different countries. I really wanted them to understand that there’s not really sort of a fixed definition of how they would be perceived in the world or who they were. There are so many different definitions that exist now. I never wanted to feel very fixed in terms of, “Because I am this race, this gender, this, that, this is how I’m perceived, this is who I am, and that is a specific set of circumstances that I have to contend with.” I think that it made me very aware of that.

Being a teenager in Florida versus being a teenager at a really tiny Quaker school in Poughkeepsie versus being an African-American on an island where everyone looks like me but isn’t culturally alike but we’re not culturally—it wasn’t even like, “Oh, I feel alienated.” I think it very much impacted my awareness of the relationship between character and setting.

It’s interesting hearing you talk about this, and I find myself thinking about it through the lens of your most recent book, which is a collection of linked stories set in the same place, exploring one community over the course of several decades. I want to ask a question about that book: what made you decide to write it as short stories rather than a novel?

See, that’s really interesting. I started thinking about it when I was much younger. My mother was so excited when Obama was elected, and I could not quite muster the euphoria that she had. Writing that book was almost like an investigation of my own cynicism about what was going on in the country at that time. It sort of stayed with me.

Also, I was really interested in the ways that, in the eighties and nineties, people talked about race and class. Just thinking about how language has changed. I always say that book was, for me, about communal grief, but I think it also had to do with a loss of language. The emptying out of a lot of words and terms that I feel like, maybe 20 years prior, had been a really potent means of expressing yourself. I just felt like the language had been so eroded. I wanted to talk about that as a communal issue. Maybe you can see that as part of my process itself, because it’s told from so many different perspectives.

All of the stories in that book are really, really different in terms of structure, and that was part of what was the hardest thing to write: to be as true as possible to each specific perspective in terms of how those stories were shaped.

Does revision usually look similar from book to book for you, or is it drastically different for every project?

It’s different for every project, but most of what I’m doing is revision, if I’m honest. There are initial ideas, and then it’s like, maybe in the morning, I’m just writing to myself and trying to work through characters, but most of it really is revising and trying to figure out what the point is, and then find the clearest and cleanest way to get to it, the most immediate way to get to it. A lot of times I’ll have an idea and a basic sense of a shape, but then it’s like, how do you actually figure out what you’re saying and actually put it on a page that makes sense to you? That, as you know, can take years.

Most of it is really revising. We said that everybody has a different approach, but I must find, on a certain level, something deeply satisfying about that process. I do it every day.

When you draft, are you usually going back and changing a lot before you move forward? Or do you try to push through to the end of a draft and then look at it and start again?

I’ll get very hung up on the language, so if the language doesn’t feel right, it’ll be very hard for me to push forward. Sometimes I try to force myself to just get through the whole thing and not do that. Then it’s really just a summary. Sometimes, when you look back, that’s really helpful. A lot of times I’ll put things down, and then when I look at them, I don’t know, months later, I’ll be like, “Oh my god, I’m so glad that at least I wrote it all out.”

Is that the most amount of outlining you’ll do, or do you do traditional outlines?

I usually don’t do outlines aside from that. It just feels like a really rough summary. “Then they went there and they did this, and this happened, and somehow they wound up over here.” Again, it’s like a revising thing when I understand everything, but I just want to check in terms of themes or if there is repetition of images or something like that. It’s just to keep track of everything, but usually that’s very close to the end that I can.

I’m trying to be honest about my own process here. Again, everybody works so differently. I understand that, and I respect that, but this is what works for me, and I think that’s a big part of it. Just taking yourself seriously as a writer wherever you are in your career can be hard enough, and part of that is respecting what works for you and knowing you don’t have to do anything the way anyone else does it. Just whatever works for you: that’s right and good.

It’s a lot of work to take writing seriously for a very long time. You’re not getting paid for it, but it is work. It’s literal work that you’re doing. I think it’s important to cultivate. It’s also important for your own writing and just allow yourself to be the writer that you are. You don’t have to be anyone else. You don’t have to write about things that other people write about. Just figure out what you are doing and respect it, because it’s important. I think it makes you a better writer, actually.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I feel like that’s my actual profession: to get stuck and then get unstuck. That’s what I actually spend most of my time doing. It happens mostly in fiction for me. But maybe that’s what we all are doing all the time. That might be what life is, I feel like, is taking something as far as you can and then being like, “I actually don’t know what to do next.” And then, having to figure out, “Okay. So how is that an opportunity?”

I remember early on, especially in my first draft of my first novel, where it just felt so scary to get stuck. I felt like, if I got stuck, I would discover that it was not going to be possible for me to do this project, because if I didn’t know how to fix this one thing or I didn’t know how to move forward from a particular scene or situation, then that might mean that I couldn’t be a writer. It felt like the stakes were just impossibly, horribly high.

And as I’ve gotten further along, I’ve come to feel really differently about that. I still have the moments of, “This might fail.” But now, first of all, it’s like, “This situation might fail, this scene, this character, this idea that I have for a story. That might not work the way I thought it would.” But it’s no longer attached to, “Will I be able to keep writing?”

There are so many ways to re-energize something and to come in with a completely fresh perspective, then layers and layers and layers of that fresh perspective is what makes something feel big and whole and nuanced and complicated and finished. That’s the only way it gets to finish. I think it would be not just impossible for me to start at point A and go in a straight line to point Z, but it would also mean that I’d only drawn one line. And that one line does not make a story. That’s just a line. So we have to have that. Getting stuck is part of the process. It’s necessary and it’s good.

Do you feel like you’ve re-trained your brain through the years so that, when you do get stuck, instead of panicking, instead of feeling like the stakes are so high, you can pretty immediately see it as an opportunity? Or do you still feel a little bit of panic and then find the opportunity angle?

There’s definitely still some panic. And it’s harder the farther in I get. I feel very little panic in the short story writing process in general, because it’s small enough that I can hold it in my head at the same time, and if it should happen that that story never goes anywhere, that is okay. I have a few pages of lots of stories that I’ve never finished, and that does not cause my heart to shatter. It’s fine. It cost me a few hours. It’s all right. We could move on. Maybe I’ll even dig back through that folder and resuscitate that story someday. All good.

The panic is more in the novel writing process, especially as I get really far in. In my last novel, I had a moment where I realized that one of the characters needed to not be alive—one of the main characters—because he was doing nothing for the book. He was just a shadow of his wife, basically. And he sort of repeated her things, but he didn’t add anything. And I realized that if he was dead, he would suddenly become a very important force. He then becomes an absence that everybody is circulating.

And that was a really scary decision to make, and it felt like the kind of decision that really makes you wish that an official source would pop over your shoulder and be like, “Yes, ma’am. You should do that. That’s a good idea. It will work,” because it’s going to be a bunch of work to go through every page of the manuscript and not just remove him, but make his absence a presence and then recirculate the whole story around that absence. It was a humongous undertaking. And what if it doesn’t work? Then I’m back to starting over again. So that’s where the panic of, “Should I try it? What if it fails?” That definitely enters the frame.

But usually, my sort of medicine for that is, “Yeah. This totally might fail.” And there’s no non-effort way to move forward. There’s nothing in writing that’s ever just like sliding gently down the hill into a lagoon of warm water. That is just not what it is. Maybe every once in a while that happens for a second, but mostly you’re trudging and climbing and effort is being expended no matter what you do. So, “All right. This month’s effort is what if we kill off a character and see how that feels?” And I might spend a whole month on it, and it might go nowhere, but then I will have learned something. No matter what happens, I will have learned something, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll come back with a new perspective.

In that case, it totally worked, and it was like now it is unimaginable that the book could ever have existed with him alive. It’s so core to what the novel is, and that happened in the, I don’t know, maybe the eighth draft. I was so far along.

Wow.

But I just didn’t know until I knew. And then, I had to trust it and try it and commit, even though I wasn’t ever going to be sure whether it would work.

How long does it take you to develop a sense of trust for a crazy, huge change like that?

It really depends. Sometimes it’s very obvious, very quickly. The same thing happened when I was working on my first novel, which was at first written in first-person plural, so a “we” voice for the entire book. And being a first-time novelist, I had no idea what I was doing. And that is a hard-ass point of view to take on, but it also felt very important because it was the teeth of the whole book for me. It was this collective village, and they were speaking together. So I knew I needed it, but it was just making it really hard to enter the book. So I had the same, “I think I need to try it where I have moments of that voice, but also we’re settled with one character.”

My husband and I were traveling at the time, and I had us pull over on the side of the road on our trip. We were in Egypt, and I was like, “We’re just going to stay in this tiny little shack that we’ve rented on the coast, and you’re going to go snorkeling, and I’m going to sit here at this miniature desk and look out at the ocean and I’m going to try this. I’m going to just change the point of view. I’ll just give myself a week. I’m going to try it.” And I could feel, within three pages, the way the book was opening up. I was just like, “Oh, for sure, this is definitely the right thing to do.”

I always try to give myself enough time to go far enough with it that I feel like I really can see what I’ve done. I won’t let myself panic and back out of an attempt after a day or two days or a few pages. You’ve got to really mean it and try, because otherwise, it would be too easy to almost try a thousand things and never long enough to see whether they’re working. And that’s just more work. You’ve actually just added so many jobs. It’s much harder to try a thousand things for a second than one thing for two weeks.

Do you often bring in outside readers into your work when you’re a few drafts in? What does that process look like for you?

I like to work for quite a long time on my own. I’m the kind of messy discoverer. I don’t enter with an outline. I really don’t know how it’s going to work. And I really need a lot of safe, private space to do that discovery and to make big messes and to add a character, drop a character, change a point of view, move the setting, jump to a setting that seems to make no logical sense but which feels interesting to me, where a reader from the outside would read all those things and just have so many logical questions. They’d be like, “Wait. Huh?” And I don’t need those. Those questions are not helpful to me because I know that I don’t know those things yet.

Right.

So I like to have a big swath of space and usually a few drafts all on my own, where I’m just in that playful, safe discovery mode. And then, once I feel like I’ve kind of got the world—that it exists, it’s alive, and nothing anybody else could say would make it not be alive—that’s key. My greatest fear is that I would show somebody something and they’d be like, “I don’t think it’s a thing,” and all the air would leave and I would not know how to revive it. So I want to wait. I want to be past that, where I feel connected enough to it and it feels alive enough for me that, no matter what anybody says, it will not just perish and wilt into the sand.

I have a group of readers in L.A. who are friends from grad school, and we meet kind of whenever anybody has something. So we don’t meet regularly, but when one of us has a manuscript—short, long, whatever it is—we just sort of send up the bat signal and we all get together. So they’re usually my first readers. And I love them because they really care about me and they really believe in me, but they also hold me to a really high standard and they’re really excellent writers. So I want to give them something that will be at that level. I feel like they give me permission to reach higher than I might if I was handing it to some lady down the street.

And then, my husband usually reads the novel, or if it’s a short story, I like to read it aloud to him. He never writes me any long comments. I don’t ask. He’ll fix things, like proofread, as he’s reading, and that’s helpful. But he’s more of the person that I can puzzle things out with. So I think it’s really great to have a reader where you can be like, “Okay. What if the guy’s job was, he’s a pilot. What would that do?” After that, it usually goes to one other writer friend and then my agent. So it’s kind of a small little circulation, but I know that system by now. And I love that I feel like I have confidence in between this sequence.

What recommendations do you have for writers who are looking for readers for their work and maybe don’t have that infrastructure of an MFA cohort?

I live in Colorado, and we have a really wonderful workshop called Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, and they have short and long classes as well as full-year manuscript classes. But there’s a lot of stuff that happens online now. I really like writingworkshops.com, and they have lots of classes online with really great writers who are serious and mean it and are there to actually help. So just like if you find a reader in any of those kinds of places where you’re like, “I feel like you get what I’m trying to do,” make friends with that person and do not ever let them go. And know that that person probably needs you just as much as you need them.

I went to grad school, and then we all left and didn’t trade work for a long time. And I was working on my second novel and feeling so lost and distressed and lonely in it. And my husband was like, “You know you have writer friends. Why don’t you call them and see if they would like to talk about writing with you? Because I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m happy to help, but I’m not the person that I think you need right now.” And it felt scary to reach out to them, but I sent an email and within five minutes all of them had responded like, “Oh my god. Thank you. I’m so glad you wrote. I’m dying here. This would be the best thing ever.” And we were all living in Southern California for a few years, so we would meet every month. And whole books have been written because of that group. We all needed each other. So trust that it feels scary to reach out to somebody—a reader that you like and somebody that you feel like you could be useful to each other—but they want that, too. It’s so important for everybody.

Are you the kind of writer who sets deadlines for herself?

I do. I really need to have some structure for things, partly because, of course, the deadline makes me actually do it. But it gives me sort of a container for the project, especially if I’m working on a first draft. I like to write first drafts kind of quickly so that I can get past all of the parts of my brain that will try to stop me and be like, “But we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know what this scene is, so how could we possibly write the next scene?” And I’ll be like, “Shh. You have no place here, reason brain. Please sit down over there. I made you a cup of coffee. You need to stay still, because I have five pages to write today, so we don’t have time for those kinds of questions.”

I like to write a first draft kind of quickly, but what that also means is that other parts of my life take a backseat during that drafting process. So if I’m writing a draft of a novel in eight weeks, which I’ve done a couple of times, then it means that I will be slower on emails that are not necessary. I will not be making tricky dinners. I will be doing the minimum. I won’t be hanging out with friends as often. But it is important for me to know that, at the end of that eight weeks, all of those things come back and take their place at the center of my life again. So I feel better about saying, “I can’t blurb right now,” or, “Let’s meet in October, because I’m in a writing moment right now and need to protect this time.” The deadline partly works as a way for me to structure that and then feel less guilt and less discomfort with all of those things that are sort of stacking up on the side. And it just gives me bravery. I don’t have to know what I’m doing, but I do have to do it because I made that agreement with myself.

Do you find that it’s helpful to manage other people’s expectations in your life when you’re going through a writing moment like that? Letting them know, “Hey, I need some space right now,” that sort of thing? I know you have a family, and I know you teach as well, so you have a lot of people in your life that could probably be affected by something like that.

Yeah. Exactly. Completely. I have a colleague, Camille Dungy, who’s an amazing poet and a nonfiction writer. I really admire her in every way, and she’s very clear in her communication. During the summer, her email responder was, “I will check emails once a day starting on August 1st until school starts. That is what you can expect, for me to check my email once a day. So if you respond again, you will not hear from me until the following day.” That’s so wonderfully clear. And it’s a sign of respect for other people’s time. It’s not just like, “Sorry, everybody. I’ve got the most important thing going. All of you can suck it.” But, “No. I respect your time, and this is what you need to do to respect my time, too.” So just being really honest and clear about that, I feel like, is helpful for everybody.

How do you conduct research for the fiction you write without being totally pulled under by it? Research can be such a form of distraction for me, and I don’t really know how to juggle it with the writing process.

I feel like we all have to solve it our own way. I know people who do months or sometimes even years of research first and do no writing in that time and are just in research mode, collecting information, gathering sources, putting it all in organized files and folders in Word or in apps or whatever. And I think that’s so cool, and I do not know how to do that. I don’t have the kind of memory where enough of that would stay with me to be useful to me over that timescape. So I like to do research and apply it more quickly and be in a smaller loop.

I keep a list of things that I need to look up. Sometimes it’s small things like, “Oh, what was the song that came out in 1994 that they might’ve been listening to in this moment?” or, “What kind of knives would a chef who’s in this sort of restaurant carry home with him?” Those are little facts that I’d like to have in the book, but I do not want to stop in the middle of a writing day to look them up, because then I will also look at those weird sandals that that other mom at dropoff was wearing. I try to keep it really straight, like, “I’m just writing right now.” I switch off the wifi on my computer. So all week long, Monday through Thursday, I’m keeping my list of all the things that I need to look up. And then, Friday is just research day. I am not writing. I’m not trying to produce words. I’m just doing all of that stuff, and I’m going back and I’m popping them in. And it feels very satisfying because I’ve got my nice long list. And then it’s like, “Ooh, research is fun.” It feels like a break from writing, but I’m doing all the useful stuff at the same time. And then, Monday, I’m back to writing.

Research is being folded in, and I dip back into the land of facts. The world is tremendously strange and beautiful, and if you use research well, it will provide more energy and things from the outside that swoosh in and change the kind of color of a project in a really beautiful way.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

Not everybody who reads Refuse to Be Done is doing it because they’ve ever read any of my fiction. A big difference in promotion that was interesting to me is that Refuse to Be Done has this direct applicability to the reader. The people who read it are trying to learn how to write a novel. Promoting an actual novel, that sort of urgency is less evident. Readers might ask, “Why is this the novel that I need to read right now?”

I really privilege the conversations I had around each book, which were obviously different. With Appleseed, we talked a lot about climate change, about some of the intellectual ideas about the book, things about manifest destiny and other topics that are interesting or fun. To be in conversation with someone who was thinking on top of that kind of work with me was enjoyable.

Events for Refuse to Be Done were more teacherly events. That book grew out of a lecture I’d been giving for 10 years, so it was sort of interesting to have that lecture go back out in that form. It’s been interesting to watch both books find their audiences. I think both have done similarly well, though the Venn diagram of people who read both books is smaller than it might be if I’d come out with two novels in the same year.

Did you find that you enjoyed talking with audiences about one book over the other?

In some ways, the novel is the thing that means the most to me—my own words. You never know who’s going to be interested in your novel. The conversations that happen around a novel aren’t always the things you think as you’re writing it. With Refuse to Be Done, I knew the questions people would ask because I’ve been teaching novel-writing for a long time.

If money wasn’t a factor, do you feel like you would still be a writer who teaches? Or would you focus more on your own creative work?

I really like teaching. I get a lot out of teaching for my writing. I’ve been teaching for 15 years or so, and I often think, if all things were equal, if I didn’t have to teach, I would still want to, but maybe I’d do it entirely on my own terms. The thing I would quit from academia is not teaching, but administrative meetings. I love the teaching. And one of the things about being in a good MFA program is that every year, a new group of smart, interesting young writers moves to town and talks to me about writing. It’s restorative and interesting. Even in the short time I’ve been teaching, I’ve observed that different eras of students have different concerns and different interests, and that’s invigorating. There are certain things in my own writing that I would not have thought about if I hadn’t been in these sorts of conversations.

Also, I was a reasonably poor undergrad student. I graduated undergrad in eight years at three schools. But I liked being on campus and I liked being part of the university life. I like that there are events and lectures and different things happening all the time. The university has given me access to lots of other people’s ongoing thinking in a way that’s great, especially as someone who doesn’t live in New York City or Los Angeles or San Francisco. Phoenix is great on its own, but it’s obviously a different cultural space.

Being a novelist doesn’t always feel super useful, either, and being a teacher does—even if I’m teaching other people to be novelists, which is not useful! I totally believe that a life of making art is super useful, but it doesn’t feel like it every day.

Since Refuse to Be Done was released, you seem to have taken on a beat as “the novel revision guy.” Some folks have called you “a writer’s writer.” I’m wondering how you feel about a term like that.

Oh, I’m not going to argue with that. You can become an expert in something by deciding you are one, to some extent. You can publish a book on novel revision, and then people ask you questions about novel revision. That feels good. It’s been great to see people find the book useful and to see people achieve things that they want to do through it. Refuse to Be Done has helped people I admire finish their novels, and I think that’s just great. Anything I can do that makes things more achievable for other people seems fantastic.

I feel the same way about the craft books I love most. There are books that help me think about things or show me the way or clarify. And there are lots of ways to be in community with people, and one of the ways is the ways in which you’re helpful or useful or adding something to your community. And it does feel like Refuse to Be Done achieves that in a way that’s different than my own fiction does.

What you’re saying about community is interesting, because you’re one of the more extroverted writers I’ve met. I don’t know if you identify as an extrovert, but you’re certainly a lot more bubbly and outgoing than most writers.

[laughs] Sure, yeah.

And it makes me wonder, thinking back to when you first started writing, if you felt like you wanted to utilize that part of your personality as someone who also helps other writers, or if you were more focused on your own writing and teaching somehow found its way into that.

I like talking about writing. I know there are writers who are like, “That’s, like, the worst thing.” There’s sort of a false modesty thing, and we live in a culture that considers the claim that you want to be an artist or that you care about art is somehow verboten—even among other writers, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You’re in a room full of people who are all writing, and you have to pretend that you have no ambitions and you’re not trying hard? That seems a little silly to me.

I’m enthusiastic, and I do think that’s part of it. If writing was miserable, I wouldn’t do it. If I didn’t enjoy talking about this, I would talk about something else. I write because I think it’s fun. It’s an entertaining thing to do. It’s an interesting problem to wrap my head around. Talking about those things is useful.

Plus, it’s amazing how often just talking about what you’re doing is helpful to other people. Some of it’s just making the way the thing is done visible. I feel like the way creative writing used to be taught was like, there was a genius in the room and you just spent time around that genius, who didn’t necessarily ever teach you anything directly or talk about how they did things. And that seems a little ridiculous to me. It seems like it can be more direct. It doesn’t diminish my process to share my process. In fact, talking about writing has made me a stronger writer.

Is there anything you find challenging about being open about your process with students and other writers?

There are two things that are hard to teach. The first is the stuff that you do most naturally, because you don’t have to think about it. So then you go to teach that part of the process, and it’s often very challenging to put it into language. The second is the stuff that’s hard for you, that you can’t talk about because you don’t know how to do it yet.

There are things that I realize I teach poorly just because they’re hard for me. For example, I don’t think I’m the most natural dialogue-writer. I work hard at dialogue, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. And when I first started teaching creative writing, I’d think, “Well, it’s probably time for a dialogue lesson.” But then I’d show good dialogue and ask my students, “Why is this Denis Johnson dialogue good?” I couldn’t even explain it.

You said earlier that being a novelist doesn’t always feel useful, but being a teacher does. How do you manage that feeling in terms of your approach to your own creative work?

When I’m writing long-form fiction, the book is mostly bad the entire time I’m working on it. The big satisfaction comes very, very late for me, but there’s daily pleasure in surprising myself and playing with language and writing a sentence, trying to get seen and making a thing that is well-constructed, indulging in my weirdness. A huge part of the daily process for me is creating a space in which to think my own thoughts. That’s incredibly gratifying.

A lot of the satisfaction from teaching is watching people take these sorts of leaps in their work, and it’s fun to be around that. It’s fun to be around their enthusiasm, to feel the kinship of a bunch of other people who are trying to do the same difficult thing. When I teach novel-writing, I teach it in a generative fashion. Students usually start from scratch and write forward together. The idea is that they go through the stages at the same time. They hit similar problems. For example, first chapters have similar issues when they’re in a generative phase, and I have enough experience to lead students through those stages. But it also is good to be reminded, “This is what everybody’s first draft looks like.” Teaching keeps me from getting discouraged in my own work.

Speaking of students, I recently heard you speak on a panel with the writer Allegra Hyde.

Oh, she’s so good.

She’s so good! She’s had marvelous success over the past couple of years, and she happens to be a former student of yours. I’m wondering how it feels to watch a former student achieve in that way.

It’s always exciting to see students go on to succeed. The best students, of course, just keep getting better after grad school. I think it is reasonably hard to guess who those students will be, though I’m not surprised that Allegra turned out to be one of those people—she was publishing extraordinarily well as a grad student, and it was sort of obvious that she was on the path. I do think there is a sort of Venn diagram of ambition and drive and raw talent, and you just have to make that whole thing come together.

The early career’s an exciting place. They’re really more interesting at the beginning than they are in the middle! The middle is actually the hardest part. Most people who want to publish a book can eventually, as long as they have a certain baseline of talents and work at a certain level. I really do believe that. I think a lot of people have the talent to write a book, but I think fewer people have the long-term persistence to publish, like, five books, which is half marketplace stuff and half—well, they’re hard. You finish a book and you’re like, “Am I going to do this again?” I’ve had some of those checks in my own career, which has gone as well as I’d wanted it to, where I’m just not sure if I have it in me to do it again, because it is so much.

It interests me to hear you say that, because I notice that you tweet a lot about long-distance running. I saw a tweet of yours a few months ago that was like, “Heading to the airport, just ran 20 miles,” and I was like, “What?!” I would just never, ever do that. You’re clearly someone who is really accustomed to endurance, and I’m curious how you became that way both on and off the page.

I’m hard to discourage, so maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know that I feel overwhelmingly confident, but I do believe that effort over time adds up. Every novel is just a certain amount of effort expressed over a certain amount of time. I didn’t become a runner until my mid-thirties, but it does feel fairly similar in mindset to writing books.

I think the writing is the part you can control, and running is the same way. There’s a book on ultra-running called Relentless Forward Progress, and that’s all you have to do: continue to move forward at pace for a long time, and you can run any race. I think there’s something similar in the writing light. It’s not about who writes a book fast. It’s not about who publishes first. You just continue forward in your practice over time. That seems to me to be the real goal in my own work.

What is your writing schedule like during the teaching semester? Are you the kind who packs in more writing time during the summer and winter breaks, or do you try to keep a fairly steady pace throughout the year?

It depends. Ideally, I write from breakfast to lunch, five days a week. Even during the semester, I do that a lot. I’ve been lucky to teach in the afternoons and evenings and do a lot of my other work there. And so I do, more often than not, have that time, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t always get lost to catching up or something else.

When I’m drafting, I think I can only productively draft two or three hours a day anyway. That’s the farthest I can see to the book. My brain gets sort of sloppy after that. I’ve had some experience at residencies and stuff where I can write really long days, but that requires all of the rest of life to be cleared out of the way. In the summer, I might do a little more, but not a lot. I just read more and things like that.

At the end of a draft, and certainly in deep revision, I work really long hours. That’s the phase where I need to be able to see the whole book. In late-stage revision, I can work eight to 12 hours spread over different parts during the day, but only for a couple of weeks. That’s the phase where I’m most like a writer in a movie. I look a little haggard. I’m not fun to talk to. I’m drinking and eating too much. I don’t want to do that all the time.

Mostly it’s a couple hours a day, and then I do everything else. That way, I don’t spend the rest of my day going, “I wish I was writing.” I don’t resent being in the classroom. I don’t resent being with my students or doing errands around the house or doing other things. I don’t need all day to write, but I do need my time. And when I’m not getting that time, I feel pretty frustrated. But it doesn’t have to be eight hours a day. And I don’t even think that would be useful most of the time.

Aside from that privileging of creative time, what advice do you have for artists who help fellow artists? How can they keep their own projects afloat while helping others with their work?

I think you have to be sure that you’re doing what you want to do, and you have to be willing to say no. One of my own guides for that is imagining when it comes time to do the thing that I’m being asked to do and asking myself, “Will I resent doing this? Would I rather be writing? Would I rather be doing something else?” I think I’m a little wiser about knowing which opportunities are okay to let somebody else do. It’s easy to fill your life with service to other people, and I do a fair bit of that, but I try to do it in a way that helps me finish what I want to do.

That’s always an ongoing balance, and I get it wrong, of course, all the time.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I think it is. Most of my life, I’ve lived in fairly isolated spaces. Small towns. Not necessarily where everybody knows everyone explicitly, but there’s a sense of the wires of connection between you and the people you interact with. Where I grew up, even if I didn’t know the person, I had some sense of the degrees of separation between me and them. And so I think it was a little anxiety-inducing as a child because I always had a sense that my actions had reverberations that I could chart more than I could have in a city. So it impressed upon me that, even within this isolation, there was a slightly tighter constraint placed upon me and fewer places to hide within that constraint.

So even this small, isolated, rural space still felt big and overwhelming. I think that shaped me in my creative process. I’m always seeing something small and trying to figure out if I can make it smaller. I’m trying to find a place to wiggle into.

Now, I made it up the mountain in the county where I’ve lived for most of my life. There’s a university here of 1,700 students. There is a community beyond that who live here year-round. We have these distinct places, and I live in both of them, but then I’m also always trying to find little spaces beyond that where I’m not touching any of that stuff. I think that informs the way I write, too, reverberating in the stories that I try to tell.

Your writing is known for its Southern-ness, but the Southern-ness is not so overt. It never feels like a caricature. What is your approach to writing the South?

I appreciate that. But I didn’t grow up in the kind of South that I think people think of as being evocative of Southern literature. I think people still hold onto a kind of idea of the South that’s long since passed in a lot of ways. I’m not sure that it’s present in many places anymore. But I know that I’m distinctly Southern, and a lot of the writers who shaped me were Southern writers, and I was interested in the way they perceive their landscape and their history. I absolutely think of myself as a Southern writer, but I think of myself more as a rural writer. Rurality is what’s more important to me and the way I shape stories.

Where I live, there’s still agriculture, but it’s bigger, more corporate. We have Walmart. We have McDonald’s. It’s not a kind of William Faulkner landscape. And so I’m interested in how we can hold onto distinctly Southern or rural elements, even as these things start to appear that connect us to the larger world. I think that feels different from the South that people think of.

You’re known for the humor in your work, which often feels distinctly Southern. What is Southern humor to you?

A lot of times, what’s overt about classic Southern writers is a kind of seriousness and embrace of darkness. When I read them, I’m like, “Where is that humor coming from when I see it?” I think there’s an embrace of absurdity. Within that darkness, there’s at least a tone of absurdity that, and if you embrace it the right way, can be funny. If you know how to twist it and bend it, you can embrace the absurdity of a situation and kind of morph it into what you need.

For me, a lot of humor is based on setting. So much of it comes from thinking really closely about the setting in which the story is taking place and then looking at it through a lens that allows you to fully embrace and play with the absurdity of that setting in a way that, to another reader or to a person not familiar with that landscape, they’re not going to perceive necessarily as so overtly over-the-top and comical that it feels like a stereotype. It’s more like just trying to embrace these small little absurdities.

You got a lot of buzz in 2019 when a New York Times article came out saying that you wrote your bestselling novel, Nothing to See Here, in 10 days. Have you continued to write in those kinds of concentrated bursts?

Never again will I write that fast, I don’t think. I do write in bursts and I do write super fast, but the way in which I’ve done that is based on process and evolution over time.

I had to write my first novel crazy fast because the original novel I’d turned in had been rejected, and I had a deadline to deliver a book or I would have to give the money back. And so it wasn’t about the creative process. That money was already spent, and I had to write a book. And so I moved really quickly.

When it came time to write my second novel, I had more time and I made it huge. I made it take place over 10 years. I had a ton of characters and actually would forget the names of the characters sometimes. It took me longer to write it, and I’m proud of that book, but it was a very, very difficult thing to try to manage it because of how I write, which is in short bursts. And I was like, “Okay, now what I’ve got to figure out is how to marry process to circumstance.” So I started reducing the time within the story. I reduced the number of characters. I reduced the setting. That all helped me set myself up for success.

Where does your concentrated-burst writing process come from?

I have a full-time job. I’m a dad. I’m a husband. The kids take up so much of my time, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. They just do. And I don’t want to not do that. When I teach, that takes up a lot of my mental space, too, trying to help my students. So rather than try to write every day for two hours, which would kill me, I don’t write at all for months and months and months. I probably only write two or three months out of the year. I just save it up.

Then, that whole time that I’m not actively writing, I’m just writing the story in my head. In the little moments of time where I couldn’t actually be at a computer writing or even in a notebook, I’m just thinking it, organically letting it just circle around in my head, so that when summer comes or I have a small break, my wife and I trade off. We each go away for 10 days a couple of times a year to write. 10 days is the most we can do where one of us takes care of the kids by ourselves. And so we do that. When I get there to the cabin for 10 days, it goes super fast because it’s just been waiting in my head for six months. And that isn’t necessarily the way I would like to write. In a perfect world, it would be a little more organic and spaced out over time, but I’ve had to make it fit the needs of my life.

How do you envision your writing life changing once your kids have grown up and moved out?

I’m sure it will change in some ways, but I’m realistic about the fact that I might just run out of ideas. And so then I’ll have all this time, but no real spinning of the wheels in my head because I’m kind of running, trying to figure out what’s important enough to me to spend this much time working on it. I might just fall off. Everybody does eventually, and I might just lose it. So I try not to think too much about what the future’s going to be.

I love writing. I love this so much. It’s the thing that makes life tolerable in a lot of ways. So, how can I make sure that I don’t lose it? But also how can I make sure that it’s not a chore? I make money. I have a career in writing, but it’s not my only thing that I do, so I don’t want it to feel like something that I have to do. I can keep it as something that’s meaningful to me, and it’s special when I get to do it. And there’s nothing attached to it other than the pleasure of making the thing.

You mentioned a cabin. Where do you typically go to write?

I used to do residencies, like MacDowell or Yaddo, but the ability to plan that far in advance is really difficult with kids and with my life. So now I just find the cheapest Airbnb I can find in a town that’s not too far away, and I just sit in that apartment or cabin for 10 days and I work. I don’t have to walk the dogs. I don’t have to feed the kids. I don’t have to fold laundry. If you excise all that stuff from my day, I can write for 16 hours without stopping because I don’t have anything else telling me I got to go do it.

I’m sure that staying within the South for those concentrated bursts of writing is obviously beneficial for you from an economic perspective, but do you feel like it’s also important for the writing itself to remain in the South?

I’m most comfortable in rural spaces. I’m comfortable in the South partly just because I kind of know the mechanics of how the roads in Southern towns are set up. I kind of know what a town square’s going to look like. I kind of know that I’m not going to get too lost. I also know not to go too far down certain roads. You know what I mean? Even when I’m in a cabin writing, I like knowing that, if things go haywire, I can get where I need to get. And that’s really rewarding to me.

And that familiarity shows up in the writing. I don’t know what Montana is. I don’t know what living in Minnesota would be like. I can’t write that accurately. I stay with the setting that I know so I can write the story and the characters that I don’t know as well. Once you know the weird spaces of a setting, then it becomes easier to move your characters through those spaces and get a sense of what you can get out of it.

You mentioned that your wife is a writer, too. What are the unique benefits and challenges of being partnered to someone who works in the same medium as you?

She’s a poet and I’m a fiction writer, so there’s absolutely no jealousy involved. Anything that she gets is not something I could have gotten, and same for her. Maybe if we were both fiction writers, it would feel a little weirder—maybe we’d be trying to get the same agent or something. But we work really well in that respect. It’s just nice to know that I can talk about my needs for what I want to do creatively and have it not seem silly or overly dramatic. When I’m upset that I didn’t finish the work I needed to get done, or that I’m going to have to completely rewrite a scene, it doesn’t feel like I’m an absurd, dramatic person.

I think I would feel way more guilty going away for 10 days if she also wasn’t like, “Yeah, go, because I need to go, too.” I need that space to do what I’ve got to do. You can have a family and be a writer, but I just hate that feeling of being like, “Daddy’s got to go write the Great American novel, so bye-bye.” That stuff feels so weird to me. This is a fun thing that I love doing, and it helps me, and it’s necessary for me, and it makes me a better person when I come back into the world that we’re making.

Plus, the freedom to just speak technically about work that may seem esoteric or mundane allows me to be open in a way that maybe I couldn’t be otherwise. A lot of times, Leigh Anne is like, “I know who you are and what you want in a way that other people don’t, so I think I have a sense of what you’re trying to do here with this story.” And that’s just super helpful.

Speaking of relationships, you have friendships with many writers who live in the South and write about the South, such as the writer Ann Patchett. How do your relationships with fellow Southern writers impact your own writing life?

In so many ways, it’s helpful to see how other people perceive the world and also how they stylistically shape it. Ann is one of my best friends and is like family to me. She’s taken care of me in so many ways, and we named our son after her. But what’s also just been really lovely is, the more that we learn about each other and the more I understand her desires and her personal history, when I then read her books, I’m like, “Oh, this is how she’s getting that stuff into her fiction, and here’s how those themes that she’s interested swirl around.” What interested me about her work at first is that so many of her books are about people from disparate situations, being forced in uncomfortable situations to hold onto each other, to make a little makeshift family. That happens again and again in her books. The more I get to know her, the more I get to see why that impulse is interesting to her and why she’s such an omnipresent person in the lives of so many people, because she’s a community-minded good person. Being close to other writers, the more you get to know them as people, the more you’re getting a sense of how their process accommodates their impulses that they want to make.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I actually had never, ever planned to write nonfiction, and I am still shocked that my first book is a memoir in essays. At Lesley, they have you do an interdisciplinary course outside of your genre. At first, I did a graphic narrative course—I was an artist before I ever started writing, and there are graphic narrative pieces in the book—and then I wanted to write a nonfiction essay that I had in mind about my friendship with David Sedaris. I asked a mentor to do that course with me, and it was like the floodgates opened. I started writing essays constantly. And every time I felt excited to write, I was excited to explore an idea for an essay, not fiction.

You’ve come back to writing fiction since then, though. What made you decide to return?

It was outing myself as a heroin addict in my first book. With fiction, you can say, “Well, people can assume it’s true or not.” I wrote a novel last summer, and it just was coming along more slowly, so I’ve gone back to nonfiction for a little bit and shelved the novel for now. I think I’ll always sort of go back and forth. I haven’t exhausted the things I want to say in nonfiction yet, so that’s where I am right now.

In your memoir, you write very frankly about drug use and family. I know so many writers who hold themselves back from writing about these topics, at least in a nonfictional sense. Did it take time for you to keep from holding yourself back from writing about these parts of your life?

Yes, and that was part of why I never thought I’d write nonfiction. I thought I could only write about those things while hiding behind the fiction label, never having to actually confront some of those things. I never wrote about either of those topics as nonfiction, and then once I did, it became less and less scary.

One of the first things my students want to talk about in memoir class—something that comes up over and over again in a 10-week course—is how to do this. They think I’ve worked this part out. But there are things I did not put in my book because I’m not ready to write them yet. When it comes to outing myself, I’m okay with that, but writing about other people is still a tricky thing for me. Whenever I see an interview with a writer who’s talking about it, I immediately read it. I’m still looking for the answer. The formula.

The hardest part was writing about my son, because he’s a minor, and he’s the person I want to protect most in the world. The way I resolved it with my son was by hiring a child psychologist to read the book as his advocate. I also let my son read the book, and he read it many, many times. There were a couple of things he asked me to take out, and of course I said yes, so I feel like I worked out that one piece. But my family of origin is still very tricky for me to write about.

There’s the Anne Lamott quote that goes something like, “If you wanted me to write warmly about you, you should have behaved better.” That’s one end of the spectrum. Then there’s the Melissa Febos take on writing about real people that’s more along the lines of, “I have a the platform as a writer, so there’s an imbalance of power, and it’s not fair for me to tell my side of the story when they don’t have the platform to tell their side.” I fall somewhere between those two places.

I know so many writers who half-jokingly say, “That person needs to be dead before I can write about them.” How should writers go about writing about family in spite of that fear? Or do you even recommend that?

You can change names and disguise the people a little bit. That helps. It can also help to imagine the worst-case scenario. “If I did write about this, then…” A lot of times, it isn’t going to be as bad as we imagine. We just think it’s off limits, but there are times where people will actually feel okay about it, and we couldn’t have anticipated that. But other times, it’s harder than that, and I wish I had the answer. I wish I could say, “Here’s your brochure. This is how you do it. Follow all the rules. You’ll be fine,” but it’s just not easy.

It’s helpful to know that there is no tidy answer to that question; that everybody’s grappling with it, even when you have a book out. You mentioned your son, Atlas, who is 15 now. I’m wondering what kinds of conversations the two of you have about including him on the page and how he’s responding to that now versus a few years ago, before your book was published.

I’m a little more careful now about what I write about him. There’s been a shift, in part because he is closer to being an adult, but the other funny thing is that he’s writing, too, and he’s in an art school in the creative writing department. I tell him, “You can write anything you want about me. Anything.” And I also tell him, “You don’t have to say that same thing to me, though.” At one point, he said, “I don’t care what you write about me when you’re reading on stage; it’s if it’s in print, though, someone can find it on the Internet.” So, if I read an essay on stage and I don’t publish it, he doesn’t really care. And he understands that, for the essays that I read on stage when I open for David Sedaris, I’m trying to get laughs, and he’s so funny, so I use him a lot in those, and he’s good with that.

He’s in my next book a little bit less, but part of that is just because he’s older and our lives don’t intersect in the same way. When a child is young, they depend on you for so much and are with you constantly, but he has a whole other life separate from me now. But, in the pieces that he’ll be in, he’ll read them. We do the same process, where he really gets to veto whatever he wants. And I’m not saying that because I think that’s the answer. I don’t think that you can hand your book to anyone and say, “Take out what you want.” I think we have to write what we have to write, but for Atlas, that’s the one rule I have for him—that he can veto anything.

What are some of the unique benefits—or maybe even challenges—of parenting a child who’s learning to work in the same medium as you?

Atlas showed writing chops at age five. He was writing poems. His teacher at the time was shocked and kept saying how great these poems were, so I always had this feeling that maybe he’d be a writer. And there really isn’t a downside to that. During the pandemic, he was writing a lot, and I felt like he needed other adults who were not his mother to push him. I can’t be in that role. He ended up getting into the school, which has been so good for him. He recently wrote his take on an image that I also included in my book, and I was just welling up in the audience listening to him read it. All I could think about was the absolute gift of knowing my own child as a writer. The hair on the back of my neck stands up when I read something he’s written. It’s like a whole other way of knowing him, and I can’t even believe how lucky I am.

What advice do you have for parents who are also writers who are curious about the ethics of including their children in their writing, who are maybe a little wary of doing that?

Definitely hire an outside professional, like a child psychologist. There are things that a parent can miss. There are things that might be problematic later that we might not think of, but a psychologist will think of it. When I did that, it gave my son the message that I’m taking this really seriously, and I care about how this might affect him. I’ll do it again for my next book.

You mentioned an essay from your book that’s titled “I’m Here to See David Sedaris.” In that essay, you write about being Sedaris’s writing student long before he was ever really known as a writer, and you remained in very close touch with him as he gained popularity. He encouraged you through some difficult moments of your life. I’m curious what you might say to other writers and artists about being mentored and encouraged in that way. What’s the best thing that creative people can do when presented with an opportunity to be mentored like that?

Just grab it, and do everything the person says. If you respect them, just live to please them. I grew so much because I listened to David, who was full of practical advice. When I started doing readings in my twenties, he said, “Don’t let the audience see how many pages you have. Don’t set them up to be like, ‘There are so many pages!’” That is a really practical, good thing to know; to have your work in a folder so the audience can’t dread how long you’re going to be reading.Having a mentor is a way of learning that’s even more intimate and lasting than, say, getting an MFA. If you have someone who’s willing to give you that, treat it as the gift that it is. Be respectful. Honor your word. If you say you’ll send them something at such-and-such time, do it. Treat it like a really sacred thing.

Sedaris is also very well known for his essays about his family’s complicated dynamics. What has he taught you about writing about family and other real people in your life?

He gets approval from his siblings if he’s writing about them. Very rarely will they ask for changes, but he’ll do it, which is kind of how I approach writing about Atlas. David did hold off on writing about his dad until his dad died. It just goes to show that every writer has to make their choices about what they’re comfortable doing on the page. But now, David’s new essays about his father are some of his deepest, most profound work. When his sister died, too, he wrote an incredibly moving essay, so it’s just something everybody has to decide for themselves. I’m grappling with that myself, though, because I feel like I just can’t wait for people to die. I might need to write something before that happens.

How have you applied what you’ve learned from Sedaris to your own process of writing about family?

When I was in the middle of editing my book, after I had sold it and was working with my editor at Simon & Schuster, I decided that I’d send essays that were about certain people to those people. Not so they could veto them, but sort of like a heads up. It wasn’t that anything I had written about them was bad or anything; they were just mentioned, and I was shocked by how open and gracious and even happy they were to be included.

I wrote about my father’s side of the family, which had three deaths in a row—two suicides and a drug overdose. I had asked the family if I could write about those deaths, and then I sent them the final essay, and they were unbelievably lovely about it. I just love them so much for being open to sharing their stories. My cousin who killed himself, his wife and children ended up being so happy that their dad’s name was in my book. You know, you want the name of the person you love to not just disappear. It was incredibly positive and generous.

Do you think if you hadn’t sent those essays to those subjects who were mentioned in the book ahead of time, just to give them the heads-up, that the reception of those essays would have been different?

It might’ve been, because that is really touchy territory. That is sacred ground. They experienced huge losses. My cousin Karen lost both of her sons, and when we were talking about it once, I said, “If I wrote about this, would you be okay with that?” I think if I had just asked her all these questions and then came home and published a book and it was a surprise—if someone did that to me, I would feel very funny, even if I wasn’t opposed to anything in their writing.

It also sounds like you and Sedaris have been terrific at keeping in close touch with one another through the years. He lives in a whole other country now, and you’re still very close. A lot of creative folks get intimidated by the idea of connecting with someone who’s better known than they are, who think, “I don’t want to bother them, and besides, what’s in it for them if they help me?” Have you ever had those sorts of thoughts?

As a teacher, when I see a student come back with an edit that is so good, I die. I’m heavily, heavily invested. Being on the other side of it now, I know that mentors get so much out of helping, or else they wouldn’t offer. I think the rule is that, when you’re on the other side, you can mentor somebody else. You get it, and then you give it back, and everybody sort of is okay with that, I think.

Eventually, David started asking me for feedback, and I was shocked. I would go to his shows and watch in the audience, and he would email me and ask me what I thought about the ending of an essay or something. I remember being like, “Oh my god, he wants my opinion!” At first, I didn’t feel okay about critiquing him. But now, I go to every show with a notebook and take notes, and I email him that night with feedback. I don’t know if my feedback is that great. He doesn’t really need that much help, but it does make me feel like I’m giving a little bit back to him now. So don’t be too worried about the give-and-take, because it will balance out in some way, even if it means just paying it forward. That’s part of what we’re here for—that connection. There’s no writer who can do it all by themselves. That’s part of the beauty of this life of being a writer. Embrace any mentor offers, value the relationship, and bake a loaf of banana bread once in a while and bring it to your mentor. That’s helpful, too.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.