Marisa Silver on Exploring What Strikes You

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 Marisa Silver about her new novel, At Last.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: You said at first you were writing these characters just for fun? Is that what you do? Is that how you find yourself writing books now, writing with no intention and wherever the wind takes you for a while?

Marisa Silver: More and more, actually. I used to write very much with this idea of, this is a novel, or this is a short story, and there was sort of a kind of impatience I had with the process, because if it didn’t feel like it was going to turn into a novel or a short story that I was brewing in my mind, then there was a certain degree of frustration. I think the more I write, the more I feel like I just take something that strikes me, in my heart, in my mind – the two of them have to be together – and then just explore and see what happens and not imagine that it should be a book like this, or story like that, but I let the idea become whatever it is going to become. It’s sort of a very freeing way to write. I allow chance to enter into the equation of my work much more. I have more of a sense of improvisation than perfection early on, and I think it’s allowing me to make a kind of fiction which excites me, which is one which feels not over directed or over managed by the author, but that feels somehow like the author just didn’t know it until it happened. I think that those are the kind of books that really excite me. There’s some kind of level of the unexpected or the surprise or the fortuitous, that sort of mimics what to me, life is like. You know, we don’t have narrative trajectories. I mean, we do, if we look backwards. The obituary version of our life might, you know, be formed to have a narrative trajectory, but life lived forward is pretty random, and meaning making is not really what we’re doing. We’re not trying to make meaning as we live. We’re just trying to do the next indicated thing. And so, all those ideas that sometimes we bring to shaping a piece of art, narrative arcs, and all those sorts of things, they’re wonderful, but they can sometimes feel overdetermined for me, and so being able to write in a kind of more open ended way without knowing anything, allows me to feel like I’m not overdetermining something, even as I’m trying to give it shape and create characters and do all the things that we do to make fiction which is not what we do to live a life.

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Marisa Silver is the author of the novels At Last, The Mysteries; Little Nothing, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice; Mary Coin, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award; The God of War, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and No Direction Home. Her story collections include Alone With You and Babe in Paradise, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.