Christine Sneed‘s books include Pleased Be Advised, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, Little Known Facts, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Paris, He Said, and she is the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and numerous other publications. She has received the Grace Paley Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She teaches graduate creative writing for Northwestern University and Regis University.
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Meredith: Are you ever frightened of your own ideas, or what’s inside you? Or maybe the question should be, are you scared of putting them down on the page?
CHRISTINE: I don’t know if I’m afraid of some of my ideas or of putting them on the page, but I have noticed as I’ve gotten older that I write fewer sexually graphic scenes. This is perhaps a picayune example, but it is something I’ve noticed in my work in recent years.
That said, in the fiction anthology I edited recently, Love in the Time of Time’s Up, another contributor described the story I wrote for it as X-rated.
Er…she’s probably right—it is quite racy, but in this story, sexual explicitness felt organic/inevitable, and I found myself going with that impulse (the story includes an encounter between a sex worker and a client, and when I was writing it, I realized I wasn’t going to shy away from some of the technical aspects in the scene.) I did tell my father not to read the story when the anthology was published last fall, but he did anyway, and later I had the impression from my mother that he was a little concerned the story was autobiographical (it wasn’t—this is one reason why I don’t usually write autobiographical fiction. For one, I am reluctant to worry family and friends, and I also really do like to write traditional fiction, i.e. stories with characters who aren’t based on myself or people I know.)
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Meredith: The writer Lydia Kiesling wrote in The Cut’s “Write It” series, a piece called “What Drives Me to Write?” I related to the parts about writing for love versus writing for money. She wrote: “Treat it like a job and Divorce it utterly from all notions of a job: Both things are true.” What drives you to write and keep going?
CHRISTINE: I can’t remember who said the following—maybe Flannery O’Connor? “I write to discover what I know.” This is one of the main reasons why I write too, and keep writing – I don’t always have a clear idea what I think or know about something until I start puzzling it out on the page. Or alternatively, I think I know what I think about a subject, but then I start writing about it and realize my feelings are different or more complicated than I previously realized.
In another interview I did last year, I said that my hunch is we’d have quite a different country if we were all required to read two books each month. Can you imagine? (Most people don’t read books, or if they do, it’s the same one or two mega-selling books each year that everyone else is reading, i.e. Where the Crawdads Sing or Becoming). I mean…it’s kind of mind-boggling. I don’t think there’d be as much intolerance, for one, and willful ignorance or xenophobia. It’s not that writers aren’t prey to these flaws too—certainly we are, but reading ideally can make us more tolerant of differences and more curious about other people’s experiences—especially if we’re reading fiction and poetry.
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Meredith: I was trained as a therapist and as a result was trained to strike a delicate balance of letting the client guide the session but also encouraging growth and change. There are, however, times when the therapist, in order to help the client move forward (or deeper), must raise issues to keep the process from stagnating. How do you see this playing out for the creator/writer? For you?
CHRISTINE: Reading the work of authors I admire inspires me to keep writing. I’ll read a new book of short stories, e.g. Ling Ma’s recent collection Bliss Montage, and I’m reminded why I love the form. Seeing good films also helps, or TV. I remember when I watched Mike Nichols’ Angels in America in 2004 and absolutely loved it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and kept writing about it in my journal too.
Minds greater than your own—that’s key—keep seeking out their work. And also try not to get overwrought if you can’t write on certain days. It’s not useful to beat yourself up. But I do think it’s good to make a plan and try to schedule writing time into your week if you find it difficult to sit down and do it fairly regularly.
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Meredith: Writing—or the dream of calling oneself an author or writer—seems, for many, to have this highly addictive, seductiveness about it. Like: I’d really be someone if I could write. Or be a writer, author, etc. But it’s not writing that imbues itself with these characteristics, it’s the person. Why, do you think, it’s such a seductive slope?
CHRISTINE: Like most professions that seem glamorous to observers—doctor, artist, writer, actor, singer—the reality is much different to those who are practitioners of the craft/profession. When I was a girl, I believed marriage was a state identical to the wedding—a magical event where people were happy, and there was dancing and nice clothes and music and gifts and cake! I literally thought that’s what marriage was. Of course I eventually learned that marriage is almost never all these things at once, and especially not every day.
The mystique of a famous author is similar—the handsome book jacket photo, the awards, the film versions of one’s books, the glowing reviews, the enraptured readers…for most of us, however, if we do have any of these experiences, they’re infrequent and unpredictable. Most of the time, we sit alone at our desks, hoping we’re writing something that tomorrow or next month will still seem interesting to us. There are also the Hemingways and F. Scott Fitzgeralds who live on in people’s consciousnesses—the mystique of the larger-than-life genius, awash in Jazz Age glamour. In reality, both men were emotionally and physically tormented. As most people know, Hemingway died by his own hand and Fitzgerald essentially killed himself too with his addiction to alcohol. Their bodies of work live on, as do their mystique, but from what I’ve read about both men, they were often miserable and were in fact tragic figures. I think many of us suffer quite a lot but I hope not on that level, and I think many writers do feel joy at our desks fairly often—or at least often enough to keep us coming back.
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Meredith: Using the six-word memoir approach, please give us your six-word description of how you write.
CHRISTINE: One word after another after another.
(You’ve probably seen that one before!)
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[Thank you, Christine.]
Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash