“It Was a Skeleton of a Book.” Marisa Crane on World-Building in Their Debut Novel
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
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In this episode, Marisa Crane talks about their debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, establishing a world right away, being a “tragically first-person writer,” BookTok, parents reading their children’s books, and more!
From the episode:
“[Revising] looked like opening a blank Word document and just starting from scratch. I did that two or three times. I referred back to [the original draft], but it would be interrogating each fragment for whether I liked it and whether it was necessary and if it was where I wanted to go with the story. It was one fragment at a time. There’s something freeing about a blank Word doc for me. It sounds very daunting, but it’s also very freeing.”
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Marisa Crane is the author of the novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself. Their stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Joyland, The Offing, No Tokens, The Florida Review, TriQuarterly, Lit Hub, Catapult, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. An attendee of the Tin House Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and an American Short Fiction Merit Fellow, they currently live in San Diego with their wife and child.
