“You Just Do Language.” Lauren Groff on Craft, Reading, and Her New Collection

For fiction authors of a certain stripe, a 2023 New York Times profile of the author Lauren Groff landed like an apple on the head. For others, it spilled like piping hot coffee across the laptop. Titled “How Lauren Groff, One of ‘Our Finest Living Writers,’ Does Her Work,” the profile, by Elizabeth A. Harris, described the unthinkably painstaking process by which Groff has created some of this century’s most acclaimed novels.

Groff told Harris that she works on multiple books at a time, writing longhand drafts in spiral notebooks. “After she completes a first draft,” wrote Harris, “she puts it in a bankers box—and never reads it again.” (…say what?) “Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory.”

Everyone’s writing practice is different. This felt very different.

The Harris profile accompanied Groff’s bleak-yet-lovely outdoors survival tale The Vaster Wilds. Groff’s next major release is this month’s Brawler, a collection of nine short stories, seven already published in The New Yorker, linked by an energy that she calls “oppositional and curious.”

The book is brilliant. Meanwhile, I’ve been dreaming of Groff’s banker boxes for nearly one thousand days. They haunt me like the Chokey from Matilda.

“Yeah, I still do it,” Groff says when I ask. “But with fewer drafts for short stories. Usually, because I’ve been thinking about [a given story] for so long, I’ve done a lot of the work in my subconscious. I spend so much of my day just staring at a wall. So it’s just a few drafts, four or five, as opposed to, like, eleven.”

It’s easy to be intimated by Groff’s process; it’s impossible to be intimidated by her in conversation. She comes off as a supreme empath, remarkably open about both her craft and career. These traits make her a natural teacher, and aside from being one of “Our Finest Living Writers,” Groff became one of America’s premier literary citizens in 2024 after opening The Lynx bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, a brick-and-mortar bulwark against the book banning agenda of Ron DeSantis.

This same moral resolve inspires the fare in Brawler. “I don’t build a collection story by story,” says Groff. “I just write the stories that seem urgent, and then at some point I take a step back because it feels as though there’s been enough said in a similar vein.” She chose this collection’s name not for adherence to that particular piece, one of the book’s shortest, but because “It was the story that had the best title. The title could unify all the others.”

This is to say that the characters in Brawler are embattled. And they’re not taking it laying down. “I’ll be honest,” says Groff. “We’re in a dark moment in human history. We’re caught between fight, flight, or freeze. I know that I can only live with myself if there’s an element of fight.”

In “The Wind,” a mother secrets her children away from their abusive cop father. “To Sunland” features a college hopeful navigating smalltown misogyny while accompanying her brother to a Florida behavioral facility. The title story focuses on Sara, and Sara’s bruised knuckles, and a mother right out of the Douglas Stuart Cinematic Universe:

Her mother drank nothing but vodka now; it killed the germs, she said. She no longer trusted water, certainly not tap, which had lead and fluoride and bacteria in it, but not bottled, either; who knew where bottled water came from? All she ate were her pills and sometimes a Popsicle, but only mango. Mango, she said, is the cleanest kind of fruit.

The central third of the collection is devoted to a knockout novella, “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” Groff says the piece was intended as a short story but bulged outward in progressive drafts until she had no choice but to shift her scope. “I think novellas are possibly the most difficult form,” she says, “because you don’t have the relief of constant constraint of the short story, and you don’t have the leg room of the novel.”

Groff doesn’t use the banker’s boxes for her short story drafts. They tend to fit in one notebook. “I just turn the page and start over,” she says. “But still, I don’t go back and read [the earlier draft]. Sometimes I set a timer, like a two-hour timer, and wherever I end up is where I end up. Then I have a clearer idea. I’ll get the emotional beats and some of the images. It’s not to work out word by word what it is that I want to do. It’s just massive discovery. And I try not to shut down the discovery phase.”

“We’re in a dark moment in human history. We’re caught between fight, flight, or freeze. I know that I can only live with myself if there’s an element of fight.”

By the time Groff properly distills a short story, it will resemble the stuff that’s made her a three-time National Book Award finalist. There’s a tremendous sense of movement to her prose, combined with a ground-level lens that brings to mind early 20th century modernists. Take the following examples:

Yes, ma’am, he said, and began moving in the rocking chair as she went down the steps and into her car, and the headlights were too bright for a minute, until she backed all the way out in the road and was gone.

The mist falls in starched sheets over the distant hills, the ones that press against the bay, and I can hear nothing but my own footsteps, my own breath, once in a while a peloton of cyclists whirring out of the morning fog that swallows them up again.

He could not bear to think of showering off the pond’s dark magic and so he put these awful clothes on next to his skin. When he looked down into the hall again, Bear had retreated, and so Chip slid down the banister and leapt off before the finial with its carved pineapple came up fast and clocked him in the groin.

Groff sprinkles this punchy, athletic syntax over a slew of intricate settings. She arrives at her linguistic balance through the discarded drafts but also through an editing method where she runs through a story (or, indeed, an entire novel) looking at only one distinct element at a time. “You go through and you just do language,” she says. “Or you’ll do character development. Or you do the quality of the sensory information.”

Groff uses a different color pen for each of these run-throughs, so as to keep all the data straight. Every edit centers around, as she puts it, “the words and how they sound.”

“You’re constantly calibrating closeness,” says Groff of her work, “whether it’s closeness of texture, meaning the level and granularity of detail, or it’s closeness of thinking, or closeness to the felt experience. Just like you don’t want to have the same verbal texture happening throughout the course of anything, you don’t want the same intimacy. Or else it gets claustrophobic. Look at someone like Proust. You have these long, elegant three page sentences, and then you have these really tight, very intense nuggets of information. It’s about flow. It’s about picture. And it’s about the sort of the rhythm of the story that you want to write.”

Mention of Proust brings to mind the other bombshell from Harris’s New York Times profile: “[Groff] estimates she reads about 300 books a year.” As with the dreaded bankers boxes, this number had some writers shaking their heads. Groff says that, after chairing the committee for the 2024 National Book Awards for Fiction, “I was so burned out, I could only listened to audiobooks. So last year was definitely not 300 books—I failed massively. But this year, I’m on track. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry and plays.”

As a cook expands their spice rack, this reservoir of literature allows Groff her pick of influence. “I feel like we all need to fill ourselves with the ghosts of other writers,” she says. “To have a teeming mass of voices inside of us.”

Playing dutiful gossipmonger, I venture that some of the authors I’ve spoken to choose not to read other fiction writers at all when ensconced in an early draft of their own novel, afraid that alternate rhythms might obstruct the flow.

“I have something that I want to say about that.” Groff puts on coy smile. “But I won’t be saying it right now.”

That’s just the thing: Groff isn’t trying to lord her process or persona over anyone. She seems to understand that her discarded longhand drafts are at least a little bit eccentric. The proclivity dates back, in part, to her early college years at Amherst, when she shifted from handwritten prose to a laptop and earned a B-plus rather than her usual A. Her professor asked if she’d typed it up, and then said, “Oh. You can tell.”

“It made me weep like a baby,” says Groff. “It cut me so deeply, I’ve been writing longhand ever since.”

Groff doesn’t volunteer the ins and outs of her craft as if they’re something to duplicate. It’s just the way that writing happens to work for her. Brawler is yet another indication that, in her hands, writing works pretty damn good. At 47 years old, quite young by standards of an all-world novelist, Groff is still on her way up. And if you read between the lines of her fiction, you’ll find little hints about how she does it.

“I listened, thinking it was odd that when Griselda spoke, she seemed not to be telling a story but rather to be reciting something that she had memorized verbatim.”