Elizabeth McCracken on the Joyful Mystery of Writing

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 Elizabeth McCracken about her new book, A Long Game.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Something I think a lot about that I feel is very mysterious – and a lot of people talk about on this show when talking about writing – is the sub subconscious and where is the material coming from? Sometimes you can trace it, but there’s a dreamlike element sometimes to writing. You write in A Long Game that subconscious intelligence is greater than mine, except I don’t believe in it, but in a way, you also do. I’m wondering if you can talk about that element of craft, because that is usually at the generative phase, and it’s so hard to understand how it works.

Elizabeth McCracken: Yeah, I don’t understand it myself, but I do know that when I’m writing well and when I’m enjoying myself, when I’m writing with some sort of sense of improvisation and I don’t think this is the only way to write. I think that there are brilliant writers who are very deliberate and who outline ahead of time and know every day they’re going to write for four hours, and then they’ll stop and write astonishing stuff. This is just how I write. If I can write with a sense that I am following the characters in the story, and maybe I know a few landmarks, either physical or emotional, that I’m aiming for, then it can feel like I’m not making conscious decisions about what is on the page. Often particularly with novels – short stories are most likely to surprise me in this way – but with novels, I can actually see patterns that I wasn’t aware of when I was writing, and that is so mysterious and joyful for me, that sense that if I am just in the world of my writing, that I will discover things. And again, I think the people who write every day are the ones who are more likely to say things like, you have to go after writing like it’s a job, or that writing is really difficult. It’s hard. You have to sit down and concentrate until blood appears. You have to you have to stare at the page until you’re so unhappy that you start writing. And I wouldn’t write if that was the way I had to write. Again, the resulting work for these writers can be astonishing, but I have to be able to enjoy myself and surprise myself.

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Elizabeth McCracken is the author of nine books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, The Hero of This Book, and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. She’s received grants and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.