Lydia Millet

Lydia Millet is well liked around Joyland for her uncanny and beautifully wrought novels such as How the Dead Dream, and for giving us the story, Walking Bird, which can also be found in her new collection of stories, Love In Infant Monkeys. Millet’s generosity now extends to this, the first installment of The Joyland School for Creative Writing.

JL: How much outlining do you do for a project? Is too much planning harmful?

Millet: Not much anymore, sometimes a list of chapters with two or three words beside them. My outlines are so rudimentary and foolish-sounding that I delete the files with great relief as soon as I’m done. They read like a child’s misspelled Christmas letter to Santa: 1. BISICKLE. 2. Barbie KRowNE. 3. LiTE SAbeR.

JL: For me, a story is cracked once I'm able to hear a character's voice in my head. Is there a moment for you when you're able to say, "Aha, now I can write this"?

Millet: Not that I recognize, but there’s a moment when I say, Aha, now I can’t write this anymore. I’m usually writing, one book more or less flows into the next, or plows into the next. So for me the moment that is a break in that stream is at the end of a book, not the coming to the last page initially but the point of disengagement, when I can’t stand to look at it anymore.

JL: Between drafts, what do you find changes the most?

Millet: I mostly get rid of extra baggage — either throwaway characters or aspects of characters that deflect attention from where I want it to be and therefore are ungainly. There’s a whittling that occurs, when I’m lucky.

JL: Do you work on multiple projects at the same time or do you dedicate your writing hours to one book?

Millet: One book at a time, with smaller projects around the margins of the mother ship like tugboats, but I do set aside drafts of books while working on newer books and then go back and fix them later. Or go back and fail to.

JL: Which question about the writing process do you wish people would ask, but never do?

Millet: It sounds cheesy, but honestly: what makes me laugh while I’m writing, or cry. It’s not so much me I want asked that, it’s others, because I wonder how freakish it is that I make myself laugh aloud or sit there with tears filling my eyes as I do a book. I suspect it’s mental. And yet, I’m not particularly mental. I’m a rational, reliable type of person. I pick up my children on time at their preschools every day and we never run out of diapers or milk or gas. My friends criticize me for being too rational sometimes, make fun of me for my long words, complete sentences, and propensity for analytical dryness. But then I’m very easily moved, so what you get is a hyper-rational person who’s prone to easy tears and easy laughter. (But not radical mood swings so much, so don’t go thinking up pathologies.) Point is, I do laugh hard at things I write sometimes, aloud and briefly, or will cry if there’s a paragraph or page that flips a switch and takes me out of myself into the world of time and death and longing. I wonder how common it is to have those kinds of emotive reactions.

JL: I don't think you're alone in those reactions. For me they tend to occur on re-read, after the self-defense goes away: how did I write something funny? Where did that pain come from?

Millet: So the real interesting question, other than does that happen when you write, is why. What exactly is that mechanism?

JL: If we've inhabited our fiction thoroughly we'll always react to the events and the words as valid experiences and memories. The mechanism might be the writer/reader difference. The reader has to negotiate. The writer's response is involuntary.

(Interview by Brian Joseph Davis)