Abby Geni on Teaching the Instinctual
In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast
First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Abby Geni about her new short story collection, The Body Farm.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: You seem in some ways, like a detective. You’re following your scent. It seems like, as a writer you’re just kind of following what interests you and seeing where it goes. And then you have this sort of maybe fugue state where you’re writing. How do you teach writing when it’s so instinctual for you?
Abby Geni: Yeah, I love that question. And I’ve thought about it a lot. I love teaching for many reasons. I love seeing what my students are doing. I love hearing how they think, and I love learning how to articulate what it is that I do silently in a room in my fugue state. You know, people will say, How did you structure this? And I’ll think, how did I structure that? You know, people say, How did you find this description? And I’ll think, Okay, well, how did I do that? And I’ve come to so many realizations about my own process that I didn’t know I knew. So, there’s something about the articulation of a process that, up until that point, has remained unspoken. You know, it’s something that I’m doing. I’m making writing without paying attention to how I’m making writing. And so, teaching makes me think about how I made it, and that teaches me something as well.
MR: For people who might be really interested in writing and maybe they have a similar process, but they don’t know what to do next, what do you say? Or do you have anything to say?
AG: Well, the thing that I always tell my students first is that you are the only one who knows your story, and any feedback that you get from anyone is just an idea, and you need to run it by yourself first. I think a lot of newer writers and a lot of you know professional writers get overwhelmed by feedback and aren’t sure what to listen to. And I also think that one of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn in my life is to listen to my instincts the first time, because so often in my writing I’ll have a powerful instinct, and I will decide, you know, I’m not going to follow that, that’s not what I thought I was going to do. That doesn’t sound like the good idea. And then much later in the revision process, I realize, Okay, we have to go all the way back to that idea that we had so long ago. And I think the other thing that it’s taken me a long time to learn, and I will tell my students, is, I think a lot of people think of revision as being this sort of secret garden that you have to know the key to unlock and only some people have ever been there, and you know, you have to study and take lessons and learn the terminology in order to be able to do it. And that’s just not true. You know, we know what a good story is. That’s one of the most primal things about being human, is telling a good story and knowing when a story is boring or when a character isn’t fully developed, or when the setting doesn’t feel real. So, if you can write something and then give yourself enough distance from it that you can see it with the clarity of a reader, you have that ability already, revising is just seeing what’s good about the story and what needs work in the story. And you know you wrote the story already. So, you know how to write different parts of it and fix them. You know that that’s inside of you. We are all storytelling creatures.
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Abby Geni is the author of the novels The Wildlands and The Lightkeepers and the short story collections The Last Animal and The Body Farm. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequent Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
