864. Lauren Groff

[Music] you're right both of those books V wilds and Matrix were written during the Trump presidency let's just hope it's the first and only uh Trump presidency when I don't know about you but every time I turned on NPR or open the New York Times They just felt waves of dread and angst and fear and it was inescapable it was like a shadow a second shadow Shadow just sort of following um me around I could not see the world that we were in I was too full of dread right it was it was just it overhung everything but I did want to write about the Contemporary world so I I was caught within a paradox right so I was um I do think it's the the job of the contemporary artists to write about the world in which they're living right to to define the parameters or push against the parameters of the Contemporary World um and I I have very real issues with writing into the future um and so my only option was uh writing into the past right um uh but wait you have issues writing into the future oh yes why well okay with climate change when you write into the future there is the automatic assumption that humans Will Survive what's going on and I find it because the there's a story being told which implies the teller of the story which implies a listener to the story being told which um implies survival right but I think that might be a false representation of what uh will be happening in the world unless we actually do if we get our act together right now um so it feels to me like a false catharsis um Ju Just Baked into writing into the the future I did do it with Arcadia um but I only wrote a few years into the future um and it was a and like it there was a coid like disease happening in 2019 in this book that I wrote um that was published in 2011 um I so I do I have issues writing into the future I think that um for me it is a morally suspect thing I think that it is uh I'm not I I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unethical or immoral but it's not it's not it's not right it doesn't sit right for me but I do think that we can write about the Contemporary World by writing about history or a historical period because things happen in Cycles right I mean history happens in loops and spirals we are now in a very strange lipin spiral but you can look at times in the past when we were Humanity at least what western civilization was in something like this not exactly the same but something similar so um and I think that those compressing those periods of time this sort of Ellipsis where you can actually talk about past and present at the same time is uh kind of a beautiful tool right because it can alleviate some of the initial discomfort in the Contemporary reader uh when they are picking up a book right I think sometimes I have a hard time even though I am acutely aware of climate change I have a hard time picking up contemporary narratives even non-fiction fiction whatever about climate change because I'm already so subject to profound dread and angst and fear about all of this that I just don't want to add more with other people's narratives but you can do it by talking about the past because climate change isn't only what's happening now it is what has happened through the course of human history so you can talk about what's going on now through a lens of the past upon the past and then back and forth right so time can sort of reverberate it could be like a tuning fork back and forth um singing uh so I I embraced full scale historical fiction which I think about 10 years ago I confidently said I would never be writing again but I did it anyway yeah right never never make like such like proclamations you know it's never safe so and I want to say you wrote vast Wilds or at least started it before you began Matrix right so these the sequencing of these two novels is interesting to me and you were working on bastor wilds and I think you have said that you kind of wanted to write a version of Robinson cruso or your version of Robin Robinson cruso but then I mean not not to get to wooooo here you had a kind of visionary moment that led you to write Matrix and publish it first I have to ask I know you've talked about this but I have to ask you to describe what happened to you that led you to kind of Veer off the vaster Wild's path momentarily and then write Matrix yeah and just for clarity I was writing both of them at the same time it's just that vaster was sort of at a low simmer while I was writing M Jax at a white heat but um what happened was I had this incredible fellowship at the Radcliff Institute for advanced studies at Harvard and it was just it's a Once in a-lifetime chance to go and sit among brilliant people in vastly different um uh academic Fields there were sculptors there were um filmmakers there were geologists you know uh physicists just really brilliant people deeply invested in their work and every week there are two or three lectures and so you would go as a fellow to your fellow fellow's lectures and my friend um Dr Kitty bookish who works at Notre Dame she's a um an expert in medieval nuns and she loves these nuns so profoundly she just radiates love for these humans that of course she doesn't know she only knows through the texts that they wrote and whatever they left behind so she gets up on stage and she's just like so so profoundly eloquent about these people and I'm sitting in the audience Feeling Just deeply moved by what she's saying and I remember my studies at uh University I um I was a dual French literature in English literature major and in French literature I took a couple of um courses where I would translate medieval French or an FR into English and I remembered the Le of Marie De France who is the first published female poet in the French language and nobody knows exactly who she was but as I was sitting there listening to my friend I also remember M flance and as it happens these things sort of swirl together and sort of clash and cide and I was having it was a secular Vision it wasn't a religious Vision but I had the book in its entirety given to me while I was listening to my friend Kitty give a a speech that has never happened before I've only gotten two short stories dropped hole into my brain and I feel very grateful that that happened at all um but yeah this is this is the only time that a novel uh took precedence and as soon as that it was born in my Consciousness this this novel uh I realized that Matrix and the vaster wilds and then a third book that I pictured as I was sitting there as well less completely uh they were part of a Trilogy not a Trilogy a tripti a Trilogy implies a continuation of character or story arc or um even theme or I mean I have thematic elements that are are similar in all three but they're all sort of singing to one another in vastly different uh periods and time so of course Matrix is the first chronologically second 1609 Jamestown is uh is the vast wilds and then the third one is more con contemporary um and this one is the one that's actually actively driving me to my deathbed it's actually right now it is so hard to write I think I've written um at this point nine complete separate drafts of this thing throwing them out in between trying a new form um a new architecture and being unable to really nail what I'm doing so maybe it'll be just a a dip tick and not a CHP tick but we'll we'll see wow so when you get this secular vision of Matrix when you're at Radcliffe it comes to you whole you can see see basically the entire plot Arc You Know How It Ends I mean how whole is whole and then what did you do after this speech by your friend Katie like did you like run out of there and start writing what did you did you type it into your phone you know what I'm saying or was it just all kind of was it all kind of here so it wasn't whole whole because I had to do a great deal of research in order to get to the point where I could write the book but I I saw this character I saw who she was I saw um the what the Abby was going to go through I saw the The Arc of the life and the structure of the life and just the day before I was on a plane and I was uh watching this incredible 1949 film by George ker called uh the women which is so ahead of its time and exactly of its time in brilliant ways but it's it's a it's a film that's unbelievably great writing I mean the writer Anita loose um who wrote Gentlemen Prefer blonde um the the novel was also a writer on this film so it's so good uh and the whole idea of this this film is that the only characters in it are women but because it's from 19449 the only thing that these women talk about is men so like it doesn't pass the beell test even though the only characters in this film are women which is so devastating right um so uh so I'm I'm sitting here on a plane watching and I'm like oh my god there it almost is a perfect movie right it's not quite perfect and then the next day I had this Revelation and I realized as sitting there that there were going to be no men at all in my book and um uh we would just sort of write a skirt around the the this world of women this Utopia of women and like almost um right men as Shadows along the wall they're present but they're just not individuated uh just like women have been for centuries and centuries of literature well I think one of the things that vastor Wilds is is definitely concerned with I mean your protagonist voices this on the page but I think this would apply uh to Matrix as well has to do like thematically and even spiritually with this idea that human beings and so much of the trouble that we are in now and so much of the trouble that we have been in throughout our history on this planet uh at least our modern history on this planet has to do with this misperception of Genesis with the ways in which patriarchy and um this kind of misunderstanding of scripture or of higher philosophical takes on how we should be operating on this planet have kind of led us into this kind of Fallen state of confusion did I say that with any degree of accuracy it's this idea yeah this idea of this idea of dominion over the Earth and all of its flora and fauna versus domination you know we live in a I think uh it can be called the Dominator society and it's not working out great for most of us yeah I mean even the billionaires will die from climate change unless we change so it's it's not going to work out for anyone um even if they hoard everything uh so yeah no that's exactly what I've been thinking through in at least these two books um this idea that you know in Genesis when God gives Adam and Eve dominion over the the fish of the water and the birds of the the sky um Dominion's been misread right it's been misinterpreted as uh crushing right as a sort of not um it's a like strip mining it's been dumping nuclear um water into the ocean right it's it's not um caring for it's not um thinking through it's not loving right it's it's the opposite of loving so I do that is something that joins these two books profoundly and the third one as well um I do trace a lot of the ills of the um anthropos scene uh to religion and the dominant religion of Europe and the North America uh yes yeah that's one of the projects of this book is sort of leapfrogging almost skipping those I like a stone through time and seeing the dominant religion Through The Eyes of these women that are at the center of my books and like having having written these two books and kind of explored this terrain like obviously this is just kind of a question uh I don't know this feels like something that I found myself wondering as I was reading and I was kind of aming like obviously we need more parity between the genders and I feel like um there needs to be a more Equitable world and in a variety of ways the question that I wonder about is like how much better better would it be if like just women ran the show because I think I've brought this up on this show before and I actually kind of got slapped down like my guest if I'm remembering this right was like that's simplifying things too much women are complicated beings too and have you know they're human so a lot of the things that plague us now as humans would plague us even if the shoe were on the other foot but for somebody who's spent this much time meditating on this stuff and has done as much historical research as you have done I'm just curious what your take is on it I mean that's at the heart of Matrix right I mean I think that Marie's um she is female um she's a nun uh in a world in the book that is solely female and yet she and she's a rebellious person right she Rebels against the hierarchies and the structures of the church and the patriarchy all around her and in fact she Rebels so much that she creates this this physical earthw Works to keep everyone out but I do think um we are human we do internalize a lot of the same lessons from life and um sometimes I think power manifests its um the the fact that it goes bad it goes sour in people when the people suddenly empowers start uh imposing upon the people around them the things that they are themselves resisting so Marie though for most of her life she resists the patriarchy of the church she starts imposing a Hier like a very profound hierarchy upon her her nuns all around her too um even though she would not have recognized that herself so whoever your mystery guest was who slapped you down I'm not slapping you down but I am saying that uh yes I I think that a lot of the same problems would exist if women were in power um just look at I mean I like Angela Mel a lot I mean she but you know Germany is not as radically great as it could be um I don't I do have to say though I think some things would be different right I think and maybe it is um gender as um artificially imposed social norms but in the way that the world is set up now um since women are not the ones who start who are the serial killers right women very rarely are the murderers of the world um or the the rapists of the world it is possible that just I don't know what that would be maybe it's it's social maybe it's probably not um biological but maybe things would be less bad um they'd still be you know subject to immense appetite and greed and um sorrow the way that we are now but maybe it wouldn't be quite as bad I don't know though we'll never have the chance to prove this so unfortunately at least not in our lifetimes at least not in our lifetimes but I uh i' I've said you know in the past if nothing else like we've seen the results of letting men run the show wa we've got the evidence there so it's like at least worth a shot try something else like well Mexico you he this Mexico is about to elect its first woman she may be a bad woman she may be the good one at least that's a woman well but it's like uh this woman in this woman that they elected in Italy who was not so not so great right like considered but like has it gone but has it gone as bad as it went here when we elected Trump I feel like maybe it's like a little bit less toxic so even the the point is that even like even the tyrannical bad women are maybe less are likely to be less tyrannical and bad than the male version of that you know makeup maybe I don't know who knows the only way knows try let's try that's right so another question that occurred to me as I was reading your novel has to do with like I I this is something that I'm fascinated with in general and I've asked of many of my guests but you seem uh to be a particularly good person to ask because it seems like a real concern of your work is to just talk about like where you are spiritually because I feel like you're wrestling with that stuff in your fiction and I know from poking around a little bit that you grew up in a Christian tradition but then moved away from that uh in your adolesence and have sort of stayed away I think but you're still grappling with it and I relate to this I was raised Catholic and never really took but of course it never really fully leaves you either because you're sort of born into this stuff and indoctrinated and so on so I'm just curious to know like how you conceive of that stuff now uh at this point in your life and in the wake of having written all of your books but in particular Matrix and bastter Wilds yeah I was I was a deeply fervent deeply religious kid not because my parents forced it on me but because I wanted to find an Outlet I think for that that urgency in me as a child so uh I was the child who had a Bible on her nightstand and read every single night because Also let's be honest there are really incredible stories in the Bible right it's a it's a treasure Trove of strangeness um and uh I really enjoyed that a lot um but that fervency went away in adolescence as you said because I I started to chafe I started to think that um religion felt so small right it felt so it felt like an under imagination uh under imagining of the vastness of God whatever God means like the Eternal Mysteries right the the the swirling um infinite Beyond uh human comprehension and the idea of minimizing the an impossibly large thing into language and story felt started to feel wrong so I turned my fervency toward uh literature right I I started to read poetry to sort of feel the same um feelings of radical attention right and and radical um care um that I had felt in religion and then to to fiction as well of course and I stayed there for a long time and then another change happened when my my boys were born my little children and there's something I don't know I one does not have to of course have children or have had made children within their own bodies in order to to feel this but that this is what occasioned it for me I had this shift toward um a yearning again for much larger feelings of spirituality right it's not that literature can't give you that but that literature's um attention to um this sort of vast feeling comes only sporadically if you're lucky a few times a year um but I want to that that ecstasy that I had felt as a child almost every day I wanted that more right I wanted that in my in my daily life um so I started thinking and I started writing and I started searching and I started going to different churches the the one that came the closest for me was a Quaker Meeting that I would attend um up in Boston and the the thing I love so much about it is that there really is no hierarchy right there's no one standing on a box yelling at you right there's no one um it's just the whole Community together turning uh turning the people in the community breathing together in silence into a hive of bees in some way right all alone but directed toward a a silent common something and that's something yeah may I interrupt like because I've never been to a Quaker Meeting when you go to a Quaker Meeting there's no priest or hierarchy as you say and then you sit there together in silence is that what a meeting is yes until someone feels the need to stand up and say something that has been pushing at them for a while and when they do stand up it is so moving and eloquent right often it's one or two times in a meeting sometimes it's a few more but there's short little speeches maybe five minutes long sometimes they're longer sometimes they're shorter um where where people really try um very hard to articulate profound feeling um and and that is it's anti-h hierarchical in a way that I really loved and I really responded to right and uh the the other the people other people in the the Quaker Meeting they were you know Buddhists um atheists they were Jewish they're you know Catholics uh it's non- denominational which I love because I do feel like you know God is so the idea of God or whatever we're calling you know calling by the name of God is unimaginably vast um and religion um for me this is just personal feels um feels wrong because it's like it's trying to cage these vast feelings and words right and and um religion is an interpretation of God that one that I don't have yet um found adequately represents my own interpretation of God right um so so I love this idea that all of these other people with different disciplines and different beliefs are together just breathing together there's no singing you know it's just it's it's communal and it's very very beautiful but it's still not quite what I'm longing for and uh the closest I've come to to the things that I've been yearning for are those moments of beauty when something slips from The Real World and you're writing and you write into that beauty right like that happens once in a while or being in nature and often just spending 3 hours on a hike some sometime after two and a half hours um I I will feel it you know I'll feel whatever that that mysterious movement is those are the the places I've been finding it recently so what's interesting about what you said earlier is how as a child you gravitated toward this stuff without too much prodding from your folks like this is something that you found on your own yeah I mean we went to church every week my dad was a deacon in the Presbyterian Church I mean this like but church was I mean church was to me like a um really tight Woolen stockings that slowly slid down my legs so that the crotches at the knees right like church was like really hard pews that I had to sit and stand and sit and a A Chorus that did their very best um and you know like the cold and um I think we lived for the cookies at the end right I mean like church was not the same thing as as God which is for me I found that in my like late night readings in the Bible um as a seven eight ny- old yeah what was your F like any any like greatest hits in the Bible like you have favorite books or chapters or passages I think the whole of the Old Testament is so amazingly strange right it's it's incredible you can smell the desert son sort of rolling off of the pages and all of the bats for some reason bat as a word just makes me laugh what wait what is a bigat like got a you don't know what bigat is so like um it's it's like a man has a child so he SES upon a woman a child so he begets a child um oh oh right okay I was thinking yeah I was think TR a bread loaf it's not a bread loaf but it's a verb right yes it's a verb it's not a bad okay yeah So speaking of nature uh it's a good place to really get into vaster Wilds I mean it's right there in the title this is a novel that among other things I read this in a review and I was it was like I thought a great insight into your book is that it's an imagining of the implications of the settlement of the so-called new world and all that that tailed upon people who are often lost to history the women the children the disabled the domestic workers you know history is what do they say history is written by the winners or whatever and usually the versions of history that we get that cover this stuff cover the men in power with their like powdered wigs or whatever and like this book is entirely about somebody who is so sort of you know irrelevant to such people that she barely even has a name I mean her name is is Lamentations uh like she's given the name Zed which is also the name of her um master's like pet monkey and I mean you know she's she's almost like a a ghost person and yet she is the hero or the heroin of your novel was that something that was conscious to you as you said about to write it like this is like kind of a corrective to history or like what history has left out an imagining of that something like that yeah I mean I think that's something that ition can do there's this incredible cultural um historian or um n named um Sadia Hartman uh she's at Columbia I believe um but she she has this thing called critical fabulation where she is really deeply beautifully engaged with the archive um but of course the archive as you said was written by The Victors right is written by people who have a very specific idea of what is important enough to to put into the archives so she creates um out of she has a name for instance of an enslaved young woman in say New Orleans in the the 18th century and even though the rest of the details of this young woman's life are lost to history because nobody thought she was important enough to write about um she still builds a life for these people out of a a very deep understanding of all of the the cultural warp and weave and tissue that's happening around these people so it's this beautiful way of using uh projection um out of reality to create um a space for people who've been forgotten I think that's something that that history can do you know I was I have always been interested in the frontier narrative I um I'm from coopertown New York James fenmar Cooper is our first Frontier great novelist in America uh and you know I could like two blocks away I could sit on his knee in Statue form right I mean like I he I he's my kin in some ways I loved those books as a kid even though Mark Twain is right I mean he his characters are wooden and his English is um a little diminished um it's still Frontier uh so I've always been interested in the frontier narrative and yet I'm always been um angry about the frontier narrative because it's so exclusively masculine in in all of our thinking right you think of a FR a western what do you think of but like the laconic Cowboy who's emotionally constipated and like murders Native Americans for for lands right I mean this is this is what we think of so it's uh that is a really um backward looking kind form the mere act of putting a woman at the center of a frontier narrative seemed to me um a way of of changing it uh in some ways I mean other people have done it of course but um just bringing this this servant girl illiterate uh foundling she um of course she has no money she had no right to say that she didn't want to come to the New World nobody thought to ask her and she didn't think to wonder whether or not she wanted to come either right because she had internalized this understanding that she was not worth very much um so so here she is and she's set free and um she is in the beginning of the book really caged in a lot of the um the received ideas about her culture her people herself uh that have just been handed to her pressed upon her almost un with un unbearable weight and as she's running through the woods she's able to cast some of these off they sort of fall off of her or she inverts them within her with this um extreme uh survivalist um run through the woods yeah I mean and this is another part of this novel that I quite loved like I love being outside it occurred to me as I was reading it I was like I'm really not outside all that much in my reading of contemporary fiction you know and this book is this book is in the mud I mean she's eating like bugs and I mean you know it's just there and uh I admire it too at the level of plotting because there is this run through the woods that runs all the way through the entire narrative like we're following her wondering if she's going to get to safety or to wherever she she wants she's headed north she wants to go I think to Canada where the French people are right I mean it's like this is her she knows vaguely that there are French people in the North she doesn't know how big the new world is right like because she's illiterate and nobody taught taught her or nobody knows even right this is just all kind of up in the air she's running toward the French okay well it's like it's funny like taking into consideration what we talked about at the outset about you know the Trump years and not being able to Grapple with contemporary life it does make some sense to me that your heroin would be running for Canada right did that occur to you oh during the pandemic I had so many apartments like um tabbed uh in Montreal all I wanted to do is go to Montreal and just like live there for the rest of my life I still do yeah right right right you speak French we you do okay well that helps uh you're all set in case it ever happens but um so I also want to mention I mean I really love the best character um you know I said that we don't often see nature like this this hardcore a depiction of nature in fiction there's a lot of interiority and like you know a lot of stuff happens inside in in contemporary fiction people need to get out of the house but uh you also have very sweetly drawn a disabled child into your novel and I'm a parent of a disabled child I can't think of a book where a disabled child has appeared in recent fiction that I've read you know in recent years so I appreciated that and it's very like compassionately drawn and she in some ways she's she's sort of the heart of the book or part of the heart of the book so I appreciate part of the book she's the best character of the book right I mean she is she's the the one who knows what is going on and the one who is able to resist did in a very sad way but yeah I love the girl bass I love girl B I worry about how these how do these characters occur to you like do you have do you have like a a recognition of it I mean I know this stuff sort of happens while you're sitting there at the page and it's very it can be mysterious but when you talk about your heroin Zed or Lamentations and you talk about like a best character like can you remember where this stuff came from no well I mean I think um Zed came out of her circumstances I knew that um the the central character had to be a foundling right I knew that she she had to be powerless as powerless as possible um because history is actually built out of people who have vanished into history without a ripple um it's not built out of Napoleon standing on a hill right it's about it's about the the humans at the the base of the mountain who brought the oxen for the feast that night so um I knew that I knew her she came out some some of um my rereading of Shakespeare in order to get the language of this book the sort of the Elizabethan music to it I had to go back to Elizabethan um the best Elizabethan I know which is of course Shakespeare and so uh just over and over again in his plays there's this character of almost a Sprite um Ariel of course is someone who comes up a lot but there are these um these quick hearted um peripheral figures that that happen over and over again and so she came out of that um the girl best came out of a longing that my character started to have for someone to love right that she's basically the only person person that that this my my protagonist loved um well not the only um just about she's she is the heart of the book so so I don't actually remember I mean the the problem with the way that I write is that I write in um really like rough drafts over and over again and so ideas start as just an a tickle at the back of one draft and Bloom about four drafts later into a full-fledged idea uh but uh yeah no I love those two characters I wanted it to be a stripped down book so everyone in it had to kind of matter really intensely yeah well and also stripped down plot in some ways because and and you know actually that's not the right way to characterize it and I'm going to push back against some of the reviews that I've read that are like oh it's nature and it's the you know she just keeps running and I'm like yeah she's outside she's living in nature like I you know again my listeners who have been listening for years will make fun of me because I've brought this up perhaps more than anything else because it's the only cool thing I've ever done but I hiked a good chunk of the Appalachian Trail after college I have lived outside I know what that's like to be it's there is a monotony to it m there is and I I of course was getting care packages of like dehydrated fruit sent to me by my mom so not quite as hardcore as Zed but you know food when you're like burning that many calories every day it becomes more Primal than it would be otherwise if you're like in your kitchen or at like Denny's or something so I was riveted by it and had no issue with it and that is what you are writing you're writing a story in nature and I think maybe in our modern world we're so like acclimated to constant stimulation that the notion that we would that a person would live like this is just like you know it's Unthinkable but uh I loved it and I found it inherently dramatic just this day-to-day survival so a couple of questions and they're sort of related you mentioned a minute ago going back to Shakespeare to sort of get into the music of this language and to get into Elizabethan pros and people listening who have not had a chance to read should know that there is something Antiquated about the delivery the voice on the page in this book feels from another time and feels to me anyway accurate I'm far from an expert on this stuff so I bought it though and it's like just really beautifully rendered other things I thought of and maybe this is just me projecting onto your work but I certainly thought of cormack McCarthy and I even thought of Hemingway I thought like there's a muscularity and like a just a real like Mythic music and a command that I guess I feel in their work that you know it feels like someone's like speaking from like outside of time or something you know I don't know it's hard for me to characterize it but in addition to reading Shakespeare and getting that music and that syntax down was there anything else that you did were you reading uh you know historical narratives or non-fiction to sort of you must have to get the plot details down m and then just to complicate this question even further like a second part that I would add to it has to do with the nature details and the survival details as they pertain to early 17th century America or wasn't even known as America then but you know what I'm saying like to get those details right had to have involved some deep reading too or was it just purely you're imagining have you did you do some field work did you do some field research like get outside with a a knife and a a comper cup and try to figure it out I did not no but I feel like I could at least survive for two or three days in the woods if I had a knife so that's pretty good um no so okay so I'm so happy you mentioned Cormac McCarthy whom I absolutely adored I think he's extraordinary I unfortunately read the road when I was about to have my first son and so that didn't poison my life per se but it definitely made it much darker um and there are certain parts of this book that are small homages back to the road uh even though it's a vastly different book um and of course you know when I was a kid I I probably read My Side of the Mountain 500 times right I loved Hatchet by Gary Paulson right I love naked unraid um I love um I love survivalist text even though a lot of them are uh like so radical right-wing um texts these days uh but I really like to collect them I have a whole shelf in my library based on like what to do if you know you have to camp out in uh the forest for as long as you need to um so the these are things I'm just obsessed with this I I I I think about it a lot I like I read about a lot um yeah I I did a lot of you know reading all over the board I read primary sources from the founding of Jamestown and then Scholars uh critical um papers and books sort of putting things into context uh yeah I I read about um what the force would have looked like um by the time the colonizers came um and they weren't just wild of course I mean the Native Americans had been caring for them and gardening them basically for tens of thousands of years um but you know the these were all questions that I had to figure out and and smooth into a narrative eventually over time but it was you know I would love to spend my life just in the archives I love it I love it I love it so much but at a certain point you think if I spent any more time researching this I will never write the book that I need to write and so you just have to write it and figure out what the gaps in your knowledge are and try to fill them and then make mistakes and then you know do your best yeah yeah did it ever in did it ever like bleed over into your day-to-day life you suddenly talking to your children in like Elizabeth in English no but I do have to say Okay this is the fun part about this because I write really fast rough drafts in the very beginning in the first four four or five drafts um one of the drafts I just decided to write in I AMS so it was all I Amic the entire thing it was so much fun I've never had so much fun writing a draft of a book in my entire life it was a disaster none of it worked but the the thing about imposing formal rules on um fiction in particular is that it it releases really strange ideas that you had noide aidea were lingering underneath the text right um I uh I started writing as a poet and I really love formal poetry too and so taking architecture some sort of um super structure and putting the book that I thought I was writing into that super structure really changed the book radically in a really really really fun way so um no there was a time when I probably was speaking in IM AMS but luckily my kids are not um sh SP Scholars so they don't they don't know they don't realize well it's a good U like in in the interest of time it's a good moment to kind of shift and you sort of just started us off to talk a little bit about how you work because I do think it's interesting uh this idea of writing drafts I think you you draft in your at least early drafts by hand or you did you still do that oh all of them up until the very end yeah you write in a notebook yeah yeah and you're writing quickly how quickly is quickly like how quickly do you get an early like first draft of this novel done so this particular it all depends on the book but I knew that I wanted this book to be not short but economical um so this one I gave myself I think one month for the first draft and it's a real draft right I mean people's names change what happens doesn't make sense it's really just throwing out as many ideas as possible on the page and seeing which one is actually alive and then taking those living ideas um and in the gap between the the previous draft and the next one uh it's really you start to see which of your ideas that you really attached to um have a place and which do not have a place but you just egotistically holding on to them and so it's it's you know forest fire coming through clearing out everything all the underbrush and then you've got the living big strong stuff for the next draft um and it happens over and over again and I really like this method because otherwise uh I don't I don't love technology I'm not a big fan uh and I think writing for me at least on the computer does not allow me to make mistakes that I want to make right um it uh it looks too much like the printed page um I really need to make a lot of messes and I if it's on the computer I will ReRe read it if it's written by hand I can't reread it because I can't read my own handwriting uh beautiful strategy yeah you got to work with your weaknesses right um yeah so I I don't want to read the first few drafts I do want to build the story in my head kind of the way a painter would um make studies of the the larger painting that they're eventually going to do you know working on certain elements and um trying to figure out the overall plan of the the painting so yeah it's just a different way of working than a lot of people I know but doesn't make it any better or any worse it's just it's the way that I work so okay so let me ask you you write a draft in a month by hand you fill a notebook or two you then have to sort of parse through it somehow you are reading it right it's not like it's truly ilg read it no I genuinely cannot read it okay so then you just remember whatever sticks like like whatever's good sort of is still up here everything else Falls by the wayside yes and then you start over from scratch basically and just redraft yeah which is and you do that you do that how many times you do that nine times I think you said you're on the book that you're working on now right um yeah so F and Furious was 13 times 13 was the the time that I actually had enough that I could try to reread my handwriting and try to put it on the computer of course what that does is it allows um s the elements of uh surprise to come in because I may have written a very pedestrian word but my brain is trying to parse it and it comes up with something really strange and unusual and exciting instead that may be a better fit for the feeling of the scene that I'm working on whatever so yeah um it's over and over and over again and for I think I think I do this in order to break my Hunger for for um products right I mean a book is a process unfortunately it's not a product and I think if you think of it as a product a finished thing I think too early I think that I um won't take that that book to the place where it is best right I only get it so far I don't get it any further than um than I than my original ideas but it if it is a process right if it is writing and and putting to the side and starting over again putting to the side then it becomes the act of writing is the thing that matters the most and not necessarily the finished product when I do stop it's become it's because it's come as close as possible to my platonic ideal um and I can't take it any further and I need someone else to to weigh in on it that's when I stop writing hand hands written drafts and try to put it on a computer but beyond that I think I would do it forever okay so when you get to the end of your handwriting process let's say you do eight drafts by hand each one is its own Beast you're not actually rereading or using verbatim any of the drafts they are complet they're completely discarded when you get to the point where you need somebody else to look at it it is at that point that you go to your computer and type the thing mhm and you are not transcribing you were then redrafting again from scratch but this time typing it I think I'm trying to transcribe but since I can't write read my own handwriting I'm basically rewriting it based on a like a vague memory of what I'd written there I mean that's wild like you're almost like remember I mean you at that point you write I mean I do I think when you spend a long time with a project whether you're doing it this way or you're just looking at the same word document over and over again you do develop an intimacy with it especially if you're working on a regular daily schedule to to the point where you can almost remember passages or you know you have that working knowledge so I guess that would work then you know you have all these handwritten drafts you get to the keyboard and you can render it mostly intact with some new flourishes and then you share it with an editor or your first readers yeah I'm the kind of Storyteller in real life that uh the first few times I tried to tell a story it's horrific and really bad but eventually as you tell it over and over again it starts to it becomes a remembered story in a a completely different way and you start to to develop layers and um different ideas and the story becomes much better the more often you tell it so yes uh that's exactly right it's it's a remembered Story by the time it it ends up in in the final draft well uh reading up on you a little bit there was something that I read where I guess a the person who had written it I think this was in the Atlantic had sort of spoken to colleagues and friends of yours and the word that kept coming up over and over again was driven um I certainly get that sense from talking to you and knowing you know knowing how productive you've been over this past 15 years or whatever it is writing like you've published a lot of books I also read that you get up at 5 uh and write every day that you're a runner that you read 300 books a year and keep a l of it in a Excel spreadsheet I mean this this is like Herculean that's intense is that true it's my only job right my only job is to do these things so I don't have I mean and I'm a mom but like the kids are fine without me they but I neglect is good um no yes um I do have to say being driven is not necessarily a pleasant thing right I mean there's always a demon chasing me with the whip um I'm never at ease in the world or with myself so yes it's it's true I get up at 5 and I read a lot of books but um I'm really tired a lot that's almost a book a day yeah books a mon audio books and audiobooks count for me um because you're interacting with the book just in a different way so yeah if I go on like a um a 2hour run uh that's like four hour two hour run well I mean I'm for two hours I'm a very slow Runner yes okay okay yeah very slow um and I stop and I walk some too so yeah all right so I know we have to wrap up because you've got other stuff going on but I think we talked about this in our last conversation I think a decade ago or so but I know that uh your sister I think at the time your sister was getting ready to go to the Olympics and I was like wow you know like this is amazing you've got an Olympic athlete in a family and like a really good novelist in a family uh and then I think your brother is a doctor like you come from a family of like super high Achievers it seems like and you have this drive and you say like you're not at peace and you do all this stuff with such Discipline Do you know where that comes from like was this enforced upon you is this self-derived and the fact that it or maybe it's just genetic I mean it's all your siblings are all you know High Achievers like do you have you thought about this yeah I think we are people who feel things very very deeply and I think we sublimate really deeply in response right I think that um in order to cope with being alive we all have to just um uh do the things that feel the least um destructive in order to be to be humans on the planet my sister is now she's 41 I'm so proud of her I this is this makes sense because this book is dedicated to her but uh she is 41 I was gonna say I was gonna say yeah she's in a PhD program she has a toddler and she keeps winning Iron Man's like she's going to Kona this year she's freaking amazing and she had been into Olympics right she just kept going she's so strong she's such an En an endurer um and she's able to deal with pain more than any human I've ever met in my entire life and and sort of Love pain in a way um I am too wimpy to love it yeah it's very cool well but there is a pain involved in getting up at 5:00 in the morning and writing books that's Joy I mean I'm not Joy right I'm not doing Neurosurgery I'm I'm getting up and drinking my coffee and like engaging with my imaginary friends it's totally fun there's nothing painful about it well it is a delight to talk with you and I congratulate you on not only the success of the vaster wilds and its publication but just all of the success you've had like you've been on quite a ride since we first spoke I mean you know I think that was for Arcadia I think that was the book that was coming out when we spoke last and uh I just commend you and it's an inspiration to see somebody who is working at such a high level and producing all these books so kudos to you and thank you so much for the time thanks Brad it was such a delight again to be on your [Music] show

Channel: Otherppl with Brad Listi Podcast

Views: 1,296

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Id: v3lWgXR0BcU

Length: 57min 54sec (3474 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023