Learning from Other Writers How to Be a Writer
An interview with Laurie Stone + a poem inspired by Adrienne Rich
I once interviewed Adrienne Rich, when I lived in Washington, D.C. It was a highlight of my journalistic career – Jewish feminist writers were seminal in defining myself as a writer. She was in town for a reading, and I was a staff writer at the Washington Jewish Week.
I met a lot of famous writers then. Allen Ginsberg on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building reading “Howl,” for one. I have always loved to observe and get curious about how other writers approach their writing, how they weave experience into meaning. And talking with other writers helps deepen craft, examine voice, consider new ways of working with words.
Adrienne Rich read in a church on Capitol Hill, a dark wooden cross dangling over the small woman of strong stature and voice. Years later, when I asked if I could use the notes from our interview to write another article, she said. “That story has been written. Write a new story.” Do the work.
I am no longer a journalist mostly because I want to tell original stories. But this week, I’m doing a bit of reporting, and I think we’ll all benefit from it.
I’ve been fascinated by other writers’ missives. One of my favorites is the feminist writer Laurie Stone, who also happens to be Jewish. This week’s newsletter includes my conversation with Laurie. Learn all about her here.
Interview with Laurie Stone
Going back a long time ago, when the earth was just free of the dinosaurs, I knew some of them, and I went to Barnard College and then I met Kate Millett there, who was my teacher. This was in the mid-‘60s, and she ushered me into my life -- in the sense of early on, becoming a feminist and joining the women’s movement, as it was fledgling in those days.
I married at 19. I knew I loved the person, and he loved me, I knew in a lying cheating heart way, that was my nature and remained so, although now I don't do that, I knew that I wouldn’t stay, I just didn’t know how to get out. We needed to move out of the apartment near Barnard where I was living with a roommate, but Bruce, the person I would marry, was sleeping in my room with me, and because it was a little bed, he was getting burned from the radiator. He was in law school at NYU and we looked for apartments in the Village and we found a great apartment but they wouldn’t let us sign the lease because we didn’t have any money. My father said he’d co-sign the lease if we got married.
I went to graduate school in the same way I got married – Like, really, this doesn’t feel right but I didn’t know quite what I was doing. I never really do. I jump into things and then think about where I could jump out of them and go to the next thing to jump into. In my mid-20s I started getting published in a kind of whirlwind, which was so exciting. In one month, I wrote the lead arts piece in the Village Voice, and I wrote a piece in the NYT Book Review, and then a piece in Ms. Magazine, a piece in The Nation.
For 25 years, I was a Village Voice writer, and it was the most thrilling thing in the world. I never got tired of seeing my pieces in the paper. I loved the people I worked with. It got a little weird towards the end, and I was fired because I spoke out a little stupidly. I wanted so badly not to fall out with people there that I overrode my fractious obnoxious personality to such an extent that I cannot remember a time when I struggled with anyone. It was a miracle. I wasn’t fired for being horrible or obnoxious as I deserved to be in my personal relations.
And then my life changed again. I had already published several books. I decided to become a cater-waiter at 53, and I still am. I entered the professional food world of service work in New York City. It was fantastic, great, I loved it. I didn’t stop being a writer. I started to learn to become something of a teacher because I started to do gigs at colleges and universities as an alternative revenue stream. I wrote books. And then I started the Substack last year, and it’s been fabulous.
I’ve published 6 books, a couple more in the pipeline, and I have a wonderful agent named Joy Harris, she gets me and this next book will be drawing from the ‘Stack, because there are like 100 pieces now that I’ve published in one year. I’ve found a rhythm I can sustain. You have to find the measure where you can deliver your best work. And satisfy the people who are paying and make sure they get benefit for their money. And find new and interesting ways to give them extra benefits.
Know Who You Are to Know What to Write
I’ve been a feminist through the whole thing. It’s a way of looking – where is the sexual double standard that is not acknowledged, and how can I destroy it? I don’t always write directly about this subject, but in my writing, a feminist is always talking to you.
I write fiction, memoir, hybrid pieces, social commentary mainly about feminism. I don’t write about stuff I hate because it makes me crazy and unhappy. I do my understanding of how society can change by the way I look at it. I just do it. I don’t try to convince people.
I think the Stack is successful – and it’s astonishing to me that it is – because the feminism is out there, it's not hiding, not trying to trick you into thinking you’re not reading a feminist Jew old lady from the Upper West Side. Mostly you’re reading a long-term feminist who has been thinking about gender and sexuality and sex itself for more than 50 years. I’m going to be 77 in October.
Seduce the Reader
I’m writing dramatic narrative, even when it’s criticism. Thought-in-action in a way that a mind moves through time and memory. Or stimulus. Watching Succession and reacting to it. Or looking back. Richard and I just went to Yaddo. We met there. It’s like writing to prompts all the time. We have a writing practice, we write together in real time and read the pieces to each other. It’s performative, it’s really fast, it’s writing in the moment.
I’m not trying to do anything. I am interested in writing great sentences that make you have to read the next one.
I’m a seducer. I seduce you. You stay because the sentences give you pleasure, and they give you pleasure because they make you think about your life.
The narrator is not asking the reader for agreement or to care about her because she exists or because her experience is real or true. What she’s doing is showing you how her mind works as a stimulus to thinking about how your mind works. It’s a technique. I layer the sentences. It’s never it happened it happened it happened or I felt I felt I felt – there is never a time when the reader is saying why are you telling me this?
You get on the bus and the person sits down next to you and starts to talk. The narrator registers back to you what that moment in the past felt like to the creature who lived it, whether 5 minutes ago or 50 years ago, tells you what was going on for her in that moment, why it was important, why that moment stuck, and then she’s going to tell you why in the present moment, the memory is making her feel now. Every piece is about now looking back. Narrative is about something that has already happened that you’re contemplating.
Laurie’s Approach to Writing
· Layering of time frames – critical for narrative to draw the reader in
· Suspension of the need of the narrator to agree with her or love her
· Think about how each sentence can become a baby story
· Use jump cuts and imagery rather than designing meaning for the reader (jump cuts move around in space and time without telling you it’s going to)
Remember the Throughline
There has to be a throughline. Like music, like rhythm. Not a meaning throughline. It’s like making a collage – a good metaphor for my technique. What would happen if I put this next to that? Give it a try, see what happens, and then you see there are links you would not necessarily plan.
Mostly, I am taking things out. (This echoes Lynne’s assertion that Writing is 80% Revision!!!) Writing is mostly about taking things away and leaving the good stuff.
Memory is the enemy of story. The human wants to go over the stuff because it makes the human feel something. It’s never going to make the reader feel anything. The reader doesn’t care about anything that happened to you. The way you make the reader care is to make the reader feel the story is about the reader.
I am better now at knowing what to pluck from memory to make a piece work. Everything goes except for what works for story – does the reader need to know what she looked like the next day? Only on a need-to-know basis. If the person I was really with was wearing a hat and it was red, and I would never tell the reader that unless a bull was coming into the picture and the red attracted the bull. That’s what sustains the writer-reader relationship. I wait for the moment when the knowledge I have to tell you is going to amplify something after it in the dramatic moment.
A Poem by Lynne
After Adrienne Rich
This highway from Jewish suburbs through gray Indiana plains,
flat and ponderous under plain skies,
takes you past first, second, third Baptist churches at 55 miles per hour;
don’t speed or you’ll miss the signs telling you it’s not too late
to accept Jesus. Road rolling an aimless river
through Klan country south to the horizon and there
on that distant horizon, you’ll meet a lovely man and a half-starved dog
who watch the dust storms from the porch,
the chimney in their cabin smoking through summer.
You know that man.
You know that dog.
You built that fire.
And drive further to the ocean where this road drops off a cliff
into dark waters; the signs there, warning of the imminent end,
remind you just a little of Indiana churches and Middle America gray farms
and the Nikes you almost bought at an outlet along the way
but didn’t because of that never-ending credit card debt, the American way.
At the end of the road, over the cliff
what you owe matters little and what you remember matters not at all
and the river stops falling into a heavy platinum rain over the cliff
which you will avoid anyway, daring not at all to jump away from Life As You Know It
and the real truth, the real you, unfolds slowly like a new state flag
heavy cloth wrapping in wind around the flagpole.
(29 February 1996)
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Thanks for reading!! See you next week. Keep writing…
Love, Lynne