Soon After First Light: Lara Vapnyar
Soon After First Light is a series where we talk craft, process, and pandemic with Columbia's accomplished writing professors.
Here, we talk with Adjunct Associate Professor Lara Vapnyar about periods of misery, listening to your intuition, and writing about immigrants.
Lara Vapnyar came to the US from Russia in 1994. She is the author of the acclaimed novels, Memoirs of a Muse, The Scent of Pine, Still Here, and Divide Me By Zero, as well as two collections of short stories, There Are Jews in My House and Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, and the Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, and The New Republic.
What is a typical workday like for you when you’re in the middle of a project?
Lara Vapnyar: I usually get up early and have my coffee and then I go on a really long walk. That's how I compose sentences or think about plot or about characters. Then I come home and I write for a few hours. After that I take a break and maybe go for another walk. Usually after that nothing happens, but I'm hoping maybe inspiration will strike again—usually it doesn't, but sometimes it does. So that's my good working day. Most of the days, however, when I’m not teaching, I wake up early and I have my snack and I just stay in bed, watching whatever is streaming, hating myself, eating constantly. Finally, I force myself to go outside on a walk. While on the walk, I try to focus on my writing to come up with new ideas. But instead I'm thinking about domestic stuff, like, What should I buy? What should I order? What should I tell my children, my husband? Then I come home very frustrated after this walk—and this will happen for long periods, like months long.
My experience of being a writer for many years tells me that this spirit of misery will end sooner or later, and I will have a moment of inspiration. When I get truly inspired, I have experienced highs so enormous that it's almost worth all the months of wasted time and months of misery; but while I'm in the spirit of misery, of course, it's hard to think It will end. My periods of writing are usually shorter than periods of misery. So, in order to complete a novel, I'd say I need three good periods of a couple of months each. So if you look at it like this, I could complete a novel in just six months of writing. But the six months of writing never come together. There could be years between them. But good periods will come.
When you're in the middle of one of those bad periods, do you have any tricks that you use to try to feel inspired again, or is it just a matter of being patient?
LV: It depends on how deeply you are in your misery. If you are somewhere close to the surface, like you're miserable, but it's not hopeless, then there are certain tricks that will get you going. I like simple, descriptive, little tasks, like writing just a sentence that captures something. If I do that, I feel better by the end of a day. At least I haven't wasted my time entirely. Or I could read something. But if the misery is deep-seated and serious, then I think it's best not to force it. Just live your life, wallow in your misery if necessary, do work that you can do, but don't force yourself to write because it will only make you feel worse about yourself when you look at your writing and it's horrible. So if you feel like you have the strength to rise quickly above the surface, then you do these little tricks, little exercises. But if not, I mean, it's okay. It's part of a process. It's part of the life of a writer.
Another excellent way to fight a writer's block is to edit. When you cannot write anything you can still edit and it helps sometimes. You get into a piece and you can write new stuff.
Is walking where you normally find inspiration for your work?
LV: I used to live in a crowded household, so I started walking because it gave me an opportunity to just be alone. Now, my children are grown up and they live separate lives and I have all of the space and time to just work in my room; but it never worked for me, maybe because I'm used to going away to think. And I need certain conditions so I can think about writing. I need to be walking in a comfortable, safe space where I'm not stressed out by my surroundings. For example, when I'm climbing a mountain, I can’t just think about writing because I'm focusing on not falling. But when it’s safe, something about walking and being in nature stimulates me.
What is your relationship to drafting/editing? What is your advice for writers who may find the editing process daunting or difficult?
LV: I'm a visual writer. I see things and I hear things and I write them down, and these scenes are disjointed. I could start with something that ends up at the end of a novel and continue something that becomes the very beginning of a novel. When I have enough scenes, I can see an outline emerging and then I discard what doesn't fit this outline and add stuff to make it work. The interesting thing is that we are all very different people with different personalities—even when we're all writers—and we all have different processes. But even if we take the same person, myself for example, I have different processes for different works. Sometimes I have this enormous sense of inspiration and I will finish a short story in a couple of weeks. And then I have one short story that it's taken me seven years to write—a short story! So it's different even for the same person.
Considering that you find inspiration through walking, has your routine changed at all in the pandemic lockdowns?
LV: I'm actually embarrassed to admit that my life has not changed so much. Some things changed and they're awful, but my routine was always like this. I walked even more when the pandemic started. Something about walking clears your mind when you're stressed. When the pandemic started and we had no idea where it was going, it was a crazy stressful time. So I would go on these really long walks, usually like three hours.
I also do long distance swimming. I like to swim across a lake for a couple of hours across and back. When it's perfectly safe and calm, I can concentrate on thinking about writing. It's second best to walking. I swim very slowly with my head above the water, so I look around—it's basically like hiking in the water. So I found the perfect place—Brighton beach. It takes me an hour by subway to get there, and on the long train ride there, I think about my writing. For some reason it’s very stimulating. Last summer I would go there and swim for hours. There would be old Russian ladies—like me in the future (laughs)—that wore full makeup, bright lipstick, eye shadow, jewelry all over and hats, straw hats, beautiful hats. They would swim like me and they would be so courageous. They would go far out, to places that I wouldn't dare to venture. Sometimes we would swim together and talk about politics, things like that, or I would swim past them and hear bits and pieces of conversation. I haven’t tried it yet but I am planning to write about them.
In much of your work, including in your most recent book, you explore the realities of characters who immigrate to the United States and how they deal with the alienating effects of being in an unfamiliar country, the pressures of assimilation, and more. How much of your fiction is drawn from your own life experiences?
LV: It's been really hard for me to assimilate and I'm not sure if it's because I came here as an adult or just because of my personality. I am sure that a lot of writers and artists born here will share this problem—we are introverts. It's hard for us to assimilate into any new group. So I was under enormous pressure to assimilate and I felt that it was my fault that I couldn't. I felt really badly about it. Then I just gave up on it and that was an enormous relief. I live my life as this weird, half Russian, half American person. And it's okay, it's perfectly fine. I came to peace with my inability to assimilate fully. For people who can assimilate, I highly recommend it. It's very useful (laughs). But for people who struggle like me, they have to ask themselves, Do they really have to? because if something is simply not possible, it's painful to waste so much energy trying to do something impossible. So it's better to accept what you are. In terms of writing about immigrants, I feel in my life like a double outsider. I am not Russian anymore. When I visit Russia, I feel that I'm possibly less Russian than I am American. And here I don't feel fully American. So from a position of a double outsider, sometimes you see things that are at the heart of simply being human, outside of culture. That's what I aim for. When you write about something familiar—something from your culture, from your tiny mountain village, or from a neighborhood in your big city—you describe unique, specific details and you're able to transcend them in order to arrive at some larger experience of humanity. This is what we all have to aim for.
I always encounter this question from my students who are also like me—first generation immigrants or children of immigrants—How much do we need to explain about our culture to the majority culture? I’ve thought about this question a lot and I have come to that conclusion that you don't. Just describe what you see and people will get it. Even if they've never experienced anything like that in their lives. If your description is good enough they will understand the way of life. Just show, don't explain.
This wisdom—that you simply don't have to explain anything—didn't come to me right away. When I started writing, I spent years and years and years over-explaining. I barely spoke English when we came here, and I was completely isolated. I lived in this Russian community with a husband (now ex-husband) who did not understand me. So I met an American man and I wanted to explain myself, I wanted to be understood by this one particular man. That's how I started thinking about writing in English. So it wasn't even that I was writing for Americans. I was writing for one specific American. That's how I started. Once I started like this, it was very hard to get rid of this subconscious, apologetic desire to explain. Subconsciously it's admitting that we are lesser people and we need to explain ourselves—we are begging to be accepted by this majority culture. It took me years and years to get rid of that feeling and now I feel liberated.
Did you ever write back in Russia?
LV: No, it was an impulse—a deep need to be understood by this particular person.
So why fiction?
LV: It's a great question. No one's ever asked me that and it makes sense, because if I wanted to be understood, why didn’t I write a memoir? Why didn’t I write nonfiction? I found that my personality will not allow me. I cannot tell a story without lying, without making things up. I think it's because I struggle to accept life as it is and I need to fix it. I need to make sense of it, because when you look at life in general, it doesn't make sense. I think the purpose of fiction is to make life make sense, to make it more palatable. Not to make it easier. Some fictional works are really hard, really heartbreaking, but they do give you a certain freedom of expression. When you lie a little bit about something, you can be brutally honest about something else, because you feel protected by fictional status. Like I am being brutally honest about the darkest moments in my life in my work, but uh, I’m not exposed. I can always say that it's fiction.
What would you say to young writers who are both afraid to and compelled to use their own experiences as material in their fiction?
LV: You can't force yourself to write about something or to write in certain ways. It has to come out in a natural way. In my classes, I tell students over and over again—the most important skill that you can learn is to listen to your intuition. Right now you have the workshop environment. You're used to getting opinions from other people, but what lies ahead is the lonely life of a writer, and you have to be prepared for it when the only person you can trust is your own intuition. So it had better be good, it had better be working.
How can emerging writers train themselves to listen to their intuition?
LV: I try to make them train it. For example, my final assignment in my class is writing a scene then analyzing the scene yourself, like basically workshopping the scene for yourself and criticizing it yourself—because that skill is very important. People know how to do it, they just lie to themselves and think that they don't. It’s like this: I write something and it's horrible. And I don't want to admit to myself that it's horrible. So I think, oh, maybe I'm too hard on myself. Maybe it only looks horrible to me, but other people will love it. No, no. That’s not how it really is. Sometimes it's hard to listen to your intuition, but it's necessary.
What are you working on now and what’s next?
LV: I’m in a period of misery right now. I finished my last novel around two years ago and it was so personal, so draining. Even without the pandemic, I think I just needed time to rest after it. To recuperate. I’m starting to feel the pressure of knowing I’m not working and asking myself what I'm doing with my time. I need to start working. I need to come up with ideas, but it doesn't work. You cannot force yourself to come up with ideas. Ideas are like gifts from God or like miracles—they will come if they are right for me. If for some reason they decide not to come to me, they will go to another writer. Or they will come. I just have to wait.
What advice would you give to artists who are just starting to figure out process and routine?
LV: I guess I don't have one ‘best piece’ of advice. I have so many, I don't know which one is better than others (laughs). For now, I will say that this will pass. These dry periods in the life of a writer, they pass. I know it from experience. I've been in the deepest misery and I have emerged again. And there's a more important piece of advice: writing good work is more important than being successful. I've been undeservedly praised and I've been undeservedly neglected, and I know the difference—it's so much better and it gives you so much more happiness and satisfaction to write a really great work than to be praised.