← How I Write
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- [00:01]
A
Suleika Jawad says that if you want to write a good book, write what you don't want others to know about you. But if you want to write a great book, write what you don't want to know about yourself. She's had a lifelong love for words, ever since she was a little kid. But she started really writing for public consumption when she was diagnosed with a serious cancer in her 20s. And it was from the hospital bed that she started writing for the New York Times. And then from there, she wrote a memoir called Between Two Kingdoms and a book about creativity itself called the Book of Alchemy. So what are the driving themes, the driving questions of this conversation? How do you free yourself to be creative? How do you show up as your most unedited self on the page? How do you fight writer's block? And how do you live with curiosity, wonder, and enchantment? How do you open your eyes to the world? That's what this conversation is all about. The biggest thing that stood out in my prep was this idea of being porous and open to the world and cultivating that and just how intense and harsh the world can be and kind of maintaining that porousness. I don't know. I don't want to put words into your mouth, but talk to me about that.
- [01:10]
B
So I grew up in a tough pull yourself up by the bootstraps family, like, have thick skin. Both my parents are immigrants, and when I got diagnosed with leukemia at 22, I felt the opposite of whatever we associate with having thick skin. I felt so exposed, so vulnerable, so porous to everything around me, everything happening inside me. And. And it was this, at first, unwelcome force shift to having tender skin. But very quickly through my writing, I realized that there was something
- [02:04]
A
really
- [02:07]
B
conducive to my creative process and being. And embracing that sense of fragility and embracing what at the time felt very much like I was drowning in this ocean of uncertainty. And instead of writing from a place of trying to assert authority, to be in relationship with inquiry, to let the not knowing guide the work, it feels
- [02:47]
A
like there's two kinds of porousness. There's porousness in terms of your consumption of the world, and then there's porousness in terms of your creation. So porousness in terms of your consumption is just. If you're in an intense place, just feeling the intensity of that thing, right? You're at a heavy metal concert. Ah, this is too much. But, no, I'm gonna feel this. I'm gonna let it in yeah. And then it feels like the other kind of porousness is that there's things inside that we feel that we think that are like buried under some sort of sediment. And it's sort of the excavation of self that then just being able to go there and then put that onto the page.
- [03:26]
B
Exactly. And so I grew up in this very creative household. My dad is a professor of French and Francophone literature, my mom is a visual artist. And I had this great sense of creative freedom as a kid at my mom's studio was in the attic of our house and we'd make these giant messes. And I remember her always telling me when I did something on the canvas that I felt was a mistake, she'd say to me, no, that's where the energy is. Don't cover it up. Keep playing with the thing that you actually that makes you uncomfortable. And so I think the strange thing for me is that the first time I was ever published was at 22, in the context this, the New York Times piece, a weekly New York Times column and video series, which of course was a dream and felt like an immense privilege to have this opportunity. And it was terrifying. It was the kind of opportunity that lends itself to choking. And I had this impulse. Suddenly I'd open a Word document and I'd say to myself, like, I need to write something New York Times worthy. Which is a way to immediately kill any sort of creative impulse or inspiration. And so the focus on that feeling of porousness for me was trying to forget the word document, to forget, you know, imaginary or real readers, and to get back to that free flowing space that I was able to access, and I think many of us are able to access so naturally as children we were making something just because it's fun, because it's interesting to you and you're not focused on some kind of outcome or goal. You're not sorting things into, this is good art or this is bad art.
- [05:31]
A
I want to hear how you react to this because the word that comes to mind is a kind of unconsciousness or lack of consciousness. It's like you're obviously conscious and attentive and focused, but you're kind of unconscious about what it is that you're doing. There's not a grander narrative. There's just full presence in that space.
- [05:49]
B
I think there's always both for me. There's the conceit, the idea of what I want to create. And then I almost have to forget that and allow the subconscious to lead so that I'm not writing with an agenda in mind, but I'm allowing myself to follow a train of thought without having any idea where it's going to lead. Because what I found, you know, even in writing my first book, is that my first drafts were full of lies. And what I mean by that is that it was a surface story, an aspirational story. And the far more interesting story happened in the excavation. It was in interrogating the story I thought I was telling and digging beneath it to find the far more interesting story, the one that didn't fit so neatly into my outline or whatever notes I'd written for myself about how I thought the arc of a chapter might move.
- [06:56]
A
And do you feel like that process was the same in the hospital when you were sedentary? I don't. You could tell me more about what you were feeling then. Was it the same then versus now when you're working on something on the far side of that?
- [07:09]
B
So the ma. I was about to say the magic of being in the hospital. And I don't want to make it sound like I went to some day spa. It was hard and incredibly isolating and horrific. But prior to that New York Times column, for the first time in my life, I felt no sense of expectation from myself or anyone around me. And I started to write like I'd written as a child, which was to say, writing purely for the joy of it, for myself or to interrogate some question or something I couldn't quite understand, and to write toward that question. And all of that was happening in the privacy of my journal, which is as private of a container as it gets. And I found that I was using my journal as a kind of reporter's notebook. I found that I was writing toward the things that for different reasons I didn't feel I could talk about out loud, and that I was writing from the trenches of the uncertainty and the not knowing instead of trying to shape it into something. And the writing that unspooled in the privacy of that journal was exciting to me. It was interesting. I could feel myself learning. I could feel myself upturning certain assumptions or beliefs or convictions I had. I could feel my writing on a sentence level changing. And so when it came to writing the column or writing a book, ever since then, I write all of my first drafts in my journal to trick my long brain, longhand, to trick my brain out of that space of chapter one perfect sentence. The tyranny of the blinking cursor and the impulse to edit a thought or a sentence before you even really know what you're saying. And I think there's a kind of direct subconscious to page connection that happens when you're writing by hand. There's only so much crossing out and self editing you can do. And the temptation to edit on a computer for me is far too great to start making a sentence sound beautiful before I've even gotten to the heart of what I want to say.
- [09:59]
A
That's so true. I mean when you're handwriting there's a certain free flowness and also just being able to draw. Like I'm thinking of the little doodles that kids would do in school, like remember those boxes that people would draw, like the 3D boxes? Or people draw those really cool S's and there's this sense of play. I also feel that when I do voice dictation into my computer, I feel like I can often just close my eyes and I can kind of like unmind the mind. But there's something about the computer that demands this formality, this sort of right angleness of the brain. And saying what you were saying earlier, which is like this is my interpretation of it, is like the sort of the judge who instantly judges the creator. Like there's a role for the judge and the critic in the creative process, but it's way, way, way, way, way later. But when the judge and the creator are operating at the exact same time, you shut down the ability to access what's sort of under the kind of in the sediment of your mind.
- [10:54]
B
Well. And you hear many writers like Anne Lamott talk about the importance of a shitty first draft. But my question is always how to actually give yourself permission to write the shitty first draft. And so for me, what happens? And there's something about that tactile experience of hand on paper, of not just writing a word but like actually writing the A. And do you ever change your handwriting
- [11:31]
A
as you're doing it? And then you get like slightly different. Like I have like a side slant writing, I have like a more formal one.
- [11:38]
B
Marie Howe, who's a dear friend of mine, the poet, says that often when she's feeling creatively blocked, she'll write with her non dominant hand and a big scroll and she'll write I don't want to write about. And then she writes in jamad. And so to me I think all of this is about loosening the grip both on the idea of what it is that I think I want to execute, but also loosening the grip in terms of the ideas and the questions and allowing myself to write and write and write and write until I start to get to the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth.
- [12:29]
A
So as you're writing these books, how do you actually make space for that? Because in order to be able to loosen the grip, I think you need some space. And so as you're writing these, what are you doing on a day to day, week by week basis to give yourself that space and to have this the time basically to be present in the creative space without knowing there's going to be distraction or disruption and stuff like that.
- [12:53]
B
I'm a very introverted person. I spend a lot of time in nature. I've. You know, when I was writing Between Two Kingdoms, I reached out to everyone I knew who had a house somewhere remote and offered dog sitting and house sitting services. And I would go and do these sort of self styled residencies because I needed that space. I needed that space away from my own life and the many responsibilities in it. I needed to be alone in my own brain. And when it comes to distractions, I remember specifically while writing Between Two Kingdoms, I had this ritual where I'd wake up, I'd walk my dog and I would leave my phone in the mailbox, go back to the house, write. And once I had written a couple of hours worth of material, then I'd go back on a walk with the dog and retrieve my phone. You know, I know lots of people use apps and all kinds of other things like that.
- [14:09]
A
I have to watch iPhone a timeout every day I have this thing called the brick.
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B
The brick.
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It's on my fridge and I tap the brick and then I leave and I can't do any of the distraction. And I come back, I tap the brick and I get my phone back.
- [14:23]
B
And so, you know, it may seem inefficient to write first drafts by hand, but what I find actually when I start typing up what I've written is that's when the editing begins to happen. And because they feel almost like two different genres, computer writing and notebook writing, I'm able to see them with a little distance versus editing within the same document where I've been composing that first draft.
- [14:56]
A
In writing a memoir and then writing not a memoir, did you feel like you got stuck in different ways as you were working on those books?
- [15:05]
B
Hugely. I knew with Between Two Kingdoms, my dream, like a lot of writers, was to write a book someday. And I felt this intense amount of pressure to honor this beautiful, privileged opportunity that I had to write this manuscript. And I really struggled. It took me about six months to let go of the idea I'd outlined in my book proposal.
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A
Oh, really?
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B
And to understand that many people do not write what they write in a
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A
book proposal, why'd you need to let go of it?
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B
I think it's the part of my brain. It's a part of me that wants to be a good student.
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A
Yeah. I did not have that part of my brain.
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B
I have these two worrying parts of my brain. I have like the good student part of my brain and then the hellraiser part of my brain. But the other thing I didn't understand is that when you're writing a memoir about trauma, there's a way in which sometimes you return to a scene not as the observer of it, but as the inhabitant of it. And I think. When you write about a traumatic experience, you can re traumatize yourself in the process. And so I would work on the book, and every day, by 3 or 4pm, I'd find myself on the floor just curled up like something was coming for me, even though the only threat was that blinking cursor. And I didn't understand. Understand what was happening. I didn't understand that I was having a trauma response to what I was rendering. And writing about a traumatic experience forces a sort of dissociation from the experience itself, where you're not just rendering a scene and reimagining it, but you're also having to make stylistic decisions. You're moving paragraphs around, you're cutting things. And so it forces a kind of distance while also creating a sense of immediacy that I think can be confusing. And so it took me a long time to write Between Two Kingdoms. I think I was two years late on the book, and the more I struggled, the harder I worked. And in retrospect, what I really needed was distance. I needed to give myself permission to step away from the work, to process the scenes that I was writing so that I could actually have that distance instead of sort of bullying myself and muscling my way through there. And I remember there was a particular breaking point for me. I'd limped through about 150 pages of the manuscript. I hadn't shown it to anyone. And I sent it to a trusted. To a writer I admire. And it was my first time sharing those pages. And they asked me, what kind of feedback do you want? And I said, tell me the truth. Is it as bad as I think?
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A
Which is an interesting first reaction, by the way.
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B
Totally. I've since learned be very careful about who your first readers are and what you actually want, because I think some part of me was hoping that I was wrong. And they wrote back and said, it's not working. And that was all. And I just remember feeling this deep sense of defeat. And I remember, you know, my impulse was to, like, double down, work harder, which was already what I'd been doing. And I just couldn't do it anymore. And I was like, fuck it. I'm going to the beach with friends. And I got in the car with some friends. We drove to the beach in Rhode island, and I was having a conversation about something completely unrelated. And out of nowhere, this thought came to me with surprising clarity, which was that I'd been trying to create this sense of distance and writing about the experience of the aftermath of illness and the past tense as if it was behind me, though I was very much still in the midst of that reckoning and that perhaps what I should try doing was shifting to the present tense. And I was so excited that I opened my laptop while in the car with my laptop bouncing on my knees, and I started shifting the first couple of Chapters of Part 2 of the book into the present tense. And suddenly it unlocked for me. And I hadn't felt that sense of energy and excitement in a long time. And I could feel the writing coming alive. And so that was a really important first lesson to writing this first book was finding that balance between rigor, discipline, button, chair, you know, working through what isn't working, and then also taking distance from the manuscript, not as a break from the writing, but as something that actually facilitates the writing.
- [21:09]
A
Totally. A lot of creative ideas come from our periphery. I have a friend who says if you're stuck, bed, bath, or bus, and bed is like, go to sleep, bath is just like, completely relax, Put your brain onto something else. Almost like put your brain into a kind of number one out of ten on the stove, kind of hibernation mode, letting it simmer. And then bus is just like, go on the road. And I think that there's. It's important when you're doing creative work to find a way to be honest with yourself about when am I distracting myself and running from the problem at hand, and when am I really out of juice, really out of ideas, and I actually need to kind of refill the tank.
- [21:50]
B
Absolutely. A friend of mine describes the temptation to either step away from the manuscript or to work on a different project as a mistress doing the Dance of the Seven Veils. And she says, if you're on record, as someone who has finished projects and seen them through, start to end, you can indulge that impulse. If you're not, maybe it's just procrastination or just distraction. I think for me, you know, the kind of distance that isn't. Would you say bed, bath and bust and bust is something I think of as creative cross training. It's stepping away from the writing itself, but sometimes it's shifting to a different mode of creative expression. It's painting, it's being on a walk in the woods with my dog. It's going to the museum, it's going to hear another writer speak.
- [22:59]
A
Do you still play music?
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B
I do still play music. It's listening to music or sometimes playing it. Um, and I find that that brings a different energy into the work. Um, I mean, music and. And visual art very much inform my writing process.
- [23:18]
A
Tell me about that. Tell me about the visual arts.
- [23:21]
B
I think I've always been a visual writer in the sense that I think in scenes. So with my first book, I began by writing 20 scenes. Stream of consciousness. Not worrying about if they made sense, how they fit, like the full scene
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or like a list of scenes.
- [23:43]
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Just 20 short scenes. Moments. Cool. And then thinking about the connective tissue between those scenes and writing into that. Um, before pursuing writing, I wanted to be a classical musician. I think about music all the time when I'm writing. I think about rhythm and I think about crescendos and decrescendos. I think about movements, I think about motifs that recur. And my favorite kinds of books to read have this sort of symphonic movement.
- [24:32]
A
It's really cool when it's not just the rhythm, which you can get a lot of that rhythm by changing up sentence length and by changing up paragraph length and all that. When I was teaching writing, we had this exercise called Reading the Right Edge, where basically, if you think of a paragraph, it's all together. What you would do is you take every single sentence and you put it on a new line and. And then you try to get it. What is it like an accordion, where some sentences are shorter, some are longer. And we would just basically teach people that go short, long, long, short, longer, longer, shorter, shorter, and all that. But then there's something beyond that that transcends that which is like, you have that rhythm, but it's the rhythm of voice. And it's like you can hear that rhythm, or you can see that rhythm on the page. You hear it in music, you see it in writing, and you're like, I know exactly who that is. And it's something that's inexpressible. Usually not Something you're conscious of as a creator, but when you're writing and you're kind of in the flow, you can begin to feel that. And you're like, yes, that's what I'm going for.
- [25:35]
B
I'm a big fan of reading a book while listening to the audiobook at the same time, especially if it's read by the author. Like, I want to hear the rhythm of the sentence and the way that the author intended it, and I feel like it sharpens.
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A
What do they emphasize? What do they enunciate? What do they pause?
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How are they thinking about punctuation? And how does that sound musically?
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A
Yeah. So what's interesting is that there's a part of your process which is all the way over here is the journaling, the editing. Just let it out, man. And then there's process all the way over here, which is the intentional refined. And that both of those need to coexist in order to produce a good book.
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B
Yeah, it's this, you know, constant balance between surrender and loosening the grip and revision.
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A
How do you think about theme? Because you're talking about motif, motif, theme. Like, when you're writing a book, how intentional are you about those recurring loops?
- [26:50]
B
I, in a first draft, tried not. I tried to let the themes announce themselves. And I think the clarification of the theme happens in the revision process. I think I'm someone who's. Who likes to write into a question that I don't know the answer to and sometimes don't arrive at an answer. But I like. I think for me, writing is where I puzzle through what I don't understand.
- [27:28]
A
What have some of those questions been?
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B
So with Between Two Kingdoms, it was the question of, how do I move on from this? I remember before writing Between Two Kingdoms, having a conversation with Cheryl Strayed and saying to her, I want to write a book. Whatever I write about, I don't want to write about illness. I'm so over it. I'm desperately trying to move on with my life from this illness. And she said to me, you know, when I went to write the book, that became wild. I kept telling everyone around me, I don't want to write about my dead mother. All I write about is my dead mother. And of course, the book she wrote ended up being about this hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. But it's also a lot about grieving her dead mother. And she said, you know, you have no business trying to avoid writing about the thing that you need to write about and the thing that you're Interrogating. And so this question of how does one move on from a massive reckoning, from a traumatic experience, is it possible to move on? Was something I was very much puzzling through in my life. And I was very much grappling with the collateral damage of that experience. And that became the thing I started writing into. And this feeling of in betweenness, of being between two kingdoms.
- [29:20]
A
How would you describe these questions? Do you feel like they're granted to you? Like they're almost gifted to you in sort of a divine way? Do you feel like they're like these core frustrations that are sort of gnawing at you, like, what should we be looking for?
- [29:33]
B
I mean, they're often the questions I'm asking myself, but then I'm asking the people around me. So between two kingdoms, it was a question I was interrogating privately, but also in conversation with my friends. Like, I have no idea who I am on the other side of this. I can't go back to the person I was before this happened, but I have no idea what this looks like and how. How to carry that collateral damage or how to get rid of it, ideally. And so it was the thing I was already talking about. It just didn't occur to me that it was a subject and it was the thing I was already writing about in my journal. And so I think oftentimes the question is right there. It just takes a minute to realize that the question you're already asking yourself might be the question that guides the
- [30:34]
A
writing, I think, to that point. I resonate with that so strongly. I always imagine that there's something right in the middle of our forehead. So it's just right here. You can put your index finger to your forehead and everyone else can often see the thing, and you're like, what are you talking about? And everyone's like, look, it's right there. And then sometimes you need some sort of change in perspective to see what was there. But there. Something strange about this is often these deep questions, the things that we're really yearning to write about are actually so close to us that we can't see them. It's not a matter of going. It's not a matter of going to hunt for them. It's a matter of seeing the thing that was there the whole time.
- [31:19]
B
Exactly. I mean, the second book, the Book of Alchemy, is exactly that I've been drawing from the time I could hold a pen. I have hundreds and hundreds of journals. I didn't want to write a book about it because it Felt unserious and just, I don't know, too easy almost. But it was the thing I was obsessed with. And keeping a journal for me has been the single most important part of my creative process, but has also been the thing that at times, and I say this, no exaggeration, that has felt life saving to me. You're exactly right. It's a thing that is right in front of you often. And I think this is true whether you're writing memoir or fiction or. Yeah, it's these questions, these curiosities that won't quit us that we're circling around that end up making for interesting work. A friend of mine, Johnny Miles, he's a brilliant novelist, says the novels that have a great one sentence premise that, you know, you're at a cocktail party and someone asked you what's your novel about? And you deliver some scintillating one liner that's like juicy and topical and people say that's great. Those rarely make for good novels. It's the things that are hard to explain that don't lend themselves neatly to a one sentence summation that I think end up, yeah, yielding something richer and more complex and nuanced.
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A
Can you tell me about prompts, why they're useful, how you think about them?
- [33:22]
B
When I was working on my first book and feeling incredibly stuck and frustrated, I noticed that because I was stuck in the same thought loops, my journal entries were similarly stuck in those, like recursive, recursive. I was getting bored of the sound of my own voice, bored of the same things coming up, and the temptation was to stop writing. And so I ended up reading the journal entries of different writers I admire. I read Susan Sontag's journals, I read Virginia Woolf's journals, Audre Lorde. And I would pick a page or a paragraph at random, and every time it would spark something, it had this sort of like kaleidoscopic effect of shifting the chamber ever so slightly and allowing the light to fall differently. And so I found myself being prompted in this way that made me feel like I wasn't stuck in my own brain. I was in conversation with these writers I admired. And sometimes it was the way a sentence was written that inspired. That inspired the entry. Sometimes it was, you know, the topic itself or the question that one of these writers was grappling with. And so I started prompting myself in that way when I felt stuck. I never formally studied writing, so I think if someone had instructed me to write to a prompt, I would have said, absolutely not. That sounds like homework. It sounds too Prescriptive. I'm not interested. But the more traditional notion of prompts arrived to me during the pandemic. It was early days of the pandemic. So much of that experience felt familiar to me as someone who spent a lot of time in medical quarantine at home, unable to, you know, hug or shake someone's hand without fear of, you know, getting sick. And I decided to start a newsletter that was essentially an extension of what I'd been doing for myself. And the premise was really simple. I invited writers, artists I admired to craft a mini essay and a prompt, and I sent those out daily and invited anyone who wanted to journal with me to journal alongside me. And within 24 hours, we had 40,000. 40,000 people subscribed to that newsletter. And this is early days of newsletter. And it was an early adopter of
- [36:28]
A
Was this on substack back then?
- [36:30]
B
Long before anyone had heard of substack. And so I'm still writing that substack. We have nearly 300,000 readers, which is wild. Um, and. And every week we have a guest contributor and a prompt. And. And I love the prompt so much because sometimes the prompt inspires me, sometimes I don't like the prompt. And I write into that. Um, I feel a sense of resistance, and. And actually, the pumps that I resist are often the ones that yields totally the most interesting things. But I think there's a lot of value in that kind of prompting, whether you're self prompting or actually seeking out prompts. And I return to a lot of those prompts in both the writing I do and the privacy of a notebook. And in my other work.
- [37:28]
A
Yeah, I tell this story all the time because I love it so much. But Brian Eno, the music producer.
- [37:33]
B
I love Brian Eno would draw or
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A
would basically put tape down in the middle of a recording studio, and he'd say, all right, you guys are stuck. You can only use this side of the studio now. Go figure stuff out.
- [37:44]
B
Totally. In fact, we did 30 days of prompts in January, and one of the prompts was a Brian Eno song, and you had to write for the duration of one of the songs, like one
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A
of the long ambient songs. Okay.
- [38:06]
B
I also love ekphrastic writing. So sometimes the prompt is just a painting. What's efrastic writing? Writing inspired by art. But so sometimes it's a painting and a question related to the painting. But I think we all prompt ourselves in ways, even if we don't call it prompting. That's how we call inspiration.
- [38:30]
A
Well, something you were saying earlier, that, I think is kind of the core meta question here is, what do you do in the recursive loopage of the mind? Because part of it is just keep going. And there's a way that you get out of the recursive loop over enough time. Even if the day to day feels recursive, often the month to month, you realize that there's actually been major progress there. But then you could also take the flip side of that, which is say I'm in a recursive loop. A prompt, a constraint gets me out of that because I can't move in the way that I've been moving.
- [39:02]
B
Exactly. Sometimes you write something and you don't know what the question is, and the prompt emerges from. So sometimes I'll say, I write an essay and I don't quite know where it's going. And then I think to myself, what would be the prompt here as the part two? And then I'll start over and write from that place. When I think about being stuck in loops, I think of my friend and mentor, Melissa Febos, who's someone you should have on. She's brilliant and a genius when it comes to craft, but she often talks about heat mapping. So in a first draft for her, the goal is not to say, this sentence sucks or this isn't working. It's almost like putting your hands over different paragraphs and saying, like, ooh, this feels warm. This is where the energy is. Keep running into that. And I love that idea so much. It's something I think about a lot.
- [40:09]
A
I love that idea. Yeah. In baseball, this is how they think about how players hit, where there are certain players who are good at low pitches on the inside and certain places who are bad at high pitches on the outside.
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B
And.
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A
And what they have is they have the grid of, like, inside fastball and all the grid, they'll have a heat map to show where they are in the strike. Zone. And to go back to editing, this would be such a cool way to do editing is like, imagine if you had a marker that just had the entire color wheel and then somebody just, like, drew on what you were doing to basically say when. Like, here are the emotions that I'm feeling or whatnot. And then when it's a thicker color, it's like, this is what you're trying to say. When it's a lighter color, this is what you're not trying to say. And there's something about it that's so nonverbal that you can communicate things in a. Basically a game of Hotter and colder.
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B
George Saunders talks about this a lot. I had the privilege of being in conversation with him for the launch of his newest novel. And he imagines a meter when he's
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editing the Y N. Yes. No. Yeah.
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B
The yes, no. And if it's. And he tries to just kind of unquestioningly just look at something, and if it's tipping, yes, he leaves it. And if it's tipping, no, he cuts it or changes it. And it is a very intuitive process.
- [41:41]
A
So I'm working on these scripts. This is for a film I'm working on. And so we're going through it. We're going through the first episode last night. And this is exactly what I did, is whenever I felt like there was a line that was, like, really captured the essence of what we were saying, I just. I underlined it in pink. And then I got to the end, and I had, like, six lines that just captured the essence. So you have 5,000 words down into six lines, and then you're like, if we can just orbit around these six lines, we got the essence of what we're doing.
- [42:16]
B
Exactly.
- [42:16]
A
And it's a very inoffensive way to edit somebody's writing.
- [42:20]
B
Yes. You know, it's the opposite of the feedback I asked for, which, when I first shared the pages of my first book, which is, tell me the truth. Is it as bad as I think? Instead of saying, tell me where the heat is, where the electricity is, and then my job is to push into that without fretting over what's not working.
- [42:46]
A
God, I love that so much. The other thing that's been helpful for me is whenever I ask for feedback, I say, give me a trunk, a branch or leaf. So if we're early on, hey, this is. I just came up with an idea. I want feedback on the trunk. Like, does this at a big structural level? Does it work? But I don't want to spend four months on something on, like, an essay, and then somebody gives me trunk feedback later on. Then I want the leaves. I just want the smaller little bits. And I find that to be really valuable. Like, how much should I zoom in versus think big picture?
- [43:22]
B
I realize this probably isn't the most environmentally friendly way of writing, but I often have to print out when I'm writing. Read it out loud, redline it. Sometimes I'll cut up paragraphs with scissors and move them around if I'm struggling with the structure. And I create a sort of jigsaw puzzle on my living room floor.
- [43:49]
A
Like a collage.
- [43:50]
B
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I Love a post it note. So what I'll do with like your six sentences is I'll write them on a post it note in one color and I'll put them up. I'll write maybe the different characters I'm writing about on a different color post it note. I'll write the themes I'll write, and I'll start to kind of map them out on my walls. But yeah, I think who you ask to read and the instruction you give as important, I think a lot about the ethics of writing memoir and how to write from your side of the door and the responsibility of writing memoir when you are narrating an experience for the people who may or may not be implicated in that scene certainly weren't living that moment with you thinking it was on the record. Right. And so I've had all kinds of readers. I had one of my best friends do a pettiness read on my first book because I write about a breakup I went through.
- [45:07]
A
So what's the pettiness read?
- [45:08]
B
She's looking for what, like any sort of descriptions or characterizations that are subconsciously a jab
- [45:24]
A
or so. Looking out for you, being petty.
- [45:27]
B
Yeah, got it. Yeah. Of course, we all have our blind spots, especially when you're writing memoir. But I feel it's my responsibility to become as aware of my blind spots as I can be. And a blind spot, by definition, is something you cannot see, and that requires someone else to come in and point it out to you.
- [45:50]
A
Given where you're at now in terms of, let's say, God forbid, something happened that caused a lot of grief in your life and you knew that it would. Right. Something difficult happened and you somehow had some awareness for the sake of the thought experiment that you want to write a book about that thing in the future, how much would you think about capturing things every single day as they're happening? The daily journal versus what we were talking about earlier, the stepping away, getting a little bit of distance, seeing it from afar. How would you think about writing that book if you had the awareness at the time?
- [46:24]
B
So to me, that's the value of the journal. I'm recording everything. Not recording everything. I'm not recording, you know, verbatim transcripts.
- [46:32]
A
Do you do it every day?
- [46:34]
B
I try to do it every day. Even if it's little details or moments.
- [46:37]
A
And when you sit down, what happens is 20 minutes, 30 minutes. You write for as long as you.
- [46:41]
B
Depends on how much time I have. Sometimes it's two minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes. I never imagined Writing in the first person. I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a journalist. I always loved reading memoirs. I read Nabokoff's Speak Memory in high school and I read Kay Jameson, the Unquiet Mind. I was always fascinated by stories told in the first person, but I never imagined myself writing in the first person. And so I am someone who very rarely, when I'm in a moment, thinks to myself, oh, cool, this is going to be a great story.
- [47:26]
A
Right? You're just like, I'm just living, dude.
- [47:29]
B
I'm living my life. I'm trying to figure it out. It's really only later that I start to think about if it's something I might want to write. But having that source material is so helpful. And I think there's a way when you commit something to ink, you're more likely to commit it to memory. So I'm so grateful to have these troves of journals where to some extent you have to take creative liberty when you're trying to write a scene about something that happened when you were 8 years old and you're not a journalist, you're not going to get all of those details represented accurately. But I'm grateful to have even. I find just. I have journals that are filled with to do lists. And the to do lists are informative in and of themselves. Both the things that are crossed off, but the things that never get crossed off that reappear or the, you know. Yeah, they. They tell you a lot.
- [48:29]
A
I avoid these things.
- [48:31]
B
I really don't want to do that.
- [48:33]
A
Right.
- [48:35]
B
Yeah.
- [48:35]
A
You're doing to feel lists, right?
- [48:37]
B
I love lists in general. I love writing in lists. Yeah. I do try to do a to feel list before I do a to do list. One of my favorite lists, which is actually a prompt that's in the book. It's called Just 10 Images. And it's written by this writer, Ash person story, who talks about being in the NICU with her adopted son and having no time to write, but also feeling so porous, so raw, like so much was happening and wanting to remember, you know, that feeling of clarity that comes with being in crisis, that comes with being close to the veil, where your priorities are very, very clear. And so she started writing down just 10 images from the last 24 hours.
- [49:31]
A
So what's an image that's like, hey, I saw the tulips outside.
- [49:35]
B
An image could be, I saw Bradley Cooper outside, which I believe happened to you today.
- [49:43]
A
That happened to me today.
- [49:45]
B
And an image. I'm thinking of images from my last 24 hours, an image could be one of my dogs coiling into a ball in a perfect spot of sunlight. It could be a conversation I had. It could truly be anything.
- [50:06]
A
Yeah, I had a stage last year where I would go out at night, I was traveling a bunch, and I would go out kind of at the end of the day and I would just get like. I don't know why, I really like doing it on receipt paper. And I would just write down little images, stories, and then kind of like one liner ideas that came to mind throughout the day. And I would just have to fill out the receipt paper. So I don't know, probably had 20 lines on it. But one of the things that I noticed is I would sit down, I'd be like, oh, nothing today. Drew a blank. And lo and behold, within 20 minutes you'd find the 20 lines. And you just kind of have the patience, have the patience, have the patience. And the similarity between this and the journaling is that you just sort of stick with it. Things come out and crucially, once you write it down, you just have a way of remembering it which then allows you to constellate ideas a lot better than if you had just internalized all of that.
- [51:02]
B
Absolutely. And there's a way in which memory begets memory, begets memory. I love getting to number eight on my just 10 images and being like, I've got nothing. And what usually happens is I'll remember some detail that not only would have gone unnoted, but certainly unremembered that ends up being interesting and surprising. And one of my favorite writers is Annie Dillard, who I think the way she pays attention to the natural world is so inspiring to me. But I think this prompt, much like her writing does for me, is something that teaches me to see.
- [51:53]
A
Holy cow, I love that turn of phrase, the way that she pays attention, because that is a lot of what writing is, is it's transmitting consciousness. And when there's a writer who you really like, you're like, I wish I could see like that all the time. But you know what? I can see like that for a few hours here, a few hours there.
- [52:11]
B
And one of my favorite things about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is it's not that she was, you know, in the wilds of Montana. This was a creek in her suburban neighborhood that she sat down and not just paid attention to, but paid attention to day after day after day that unspooled into what I believe to be one of the most magnificent books ever written. And. And again to return to that idea that sometimes the most interesting thing is the thing that's right in front of you and that therefore you don't see. I think, yeah, I'm interested in prompting myself to see what I don't notice and to see differently. Yes.
- [53:03]
A
Can you tell me more about the way that she pays attention? Like, if you were to put words to it, what is it that's so gratifying to you?
- [53:11]
B
You know, she'll take a moment with an insect and from that tiny little detail, you know, she's able to render this whole galaxy of experience and thought and the language itself, it's beautiful. But the insight and the attention she pays to the attention is so remarkable and thought provoking. And I think sometimes, especially with memoir, to those who aren't as familiar with memoir, when I started writing my first book, people would say, oh, you're far too young to write a memoir, because they imagine it as this sort of womb to tomb biography. But a memoir could be about a single moment or a single day in the life. It's less about, you know, the drama of the experiences than it is about the attention to an event or to the experience and the way it's rendered.
- [54:29]
A
I think that there's a real gift that you give other people when you've really paid att to something and you've put that into language in a really clear way. Like, I feel like I'm very alive to sinks and the different ways that sinks can show up in the world. Because of how David Foster Wallace writes about sinks in his Harper's Magazine piece about cruise ships.
- [54:57]
B
I was literally just thinking, there's like,
- [55:00]
A
he devotes like an entire page to just the sink and, like, the glossiness of it. And you're just like, I've never. I've looked at literally 10,000 sinks in my life, and I've never looked at one of those 10,000 sinks. Like, he just looked at them. But now he's given me a vocabulary that now I can apply to sinks. And at least I've seen what it looks like to actually pay attention to sinks. But I'm like, what if I could just have that for everything in the world? How much richer could my experience of life be?
- [55:30]
B
Absolutely. I'm thinking of John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay about going to Disney World. Am I interested in Disney World? Not really, but I am interested in Disney World when he tells me about it. And suddenly I become fascinated. And that's my favorite kind of. That's my favorite kind of writing to read and I think it's the kind of writing that made me want to write. It's that quality of attention that takes you on a journey in a way that is completely. Especially when it's about a topic like, am I interested in a creek in suburban Virginia? No. Am I interested in it when Annie Dillard tells me about it? Absolutely.
- [56:22]
A
And I bet you can see a creek now, though, in a way that you couldn't 15 years ago.
- [56:28]
B
I have never taken a walk the same way since my first experience of reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
- [56:38]
A
Yeah. What a cool gift to give somebody. It's not just delivering facts or information, but it's a way of processing the world. Because of how you've described something, you're now teaching other people how to look at the world with that level of receptiveness, whether it's a creek or a tree or a flower or a leaf.
- [56:59]
B
I mean, Mary Oliver's famous line of, you know, to pay attention. This is our constant work. I really believe that.
- [57:08]
A
This was awesome.
- [57:10]
B
Thank you.
- [57:10]
A
I can't believe this is already over so fast. You. I feel like we got to do part two.
- [57:14]
B
Let's do it.
- [57:15]
A
It was great to meet you.
- [57:15]
B
It was so fun. So happy to meet you.
- [57:18]
A
Thank you.
- [57:19]
B
I love this podcast. And yeah, to be continued.
- [57:23]
A
I feel like we're just getting started.