For years, my writing mantra has been Be fearless. By that, I mean Be honest. Tell the truth. Don’t shy away from the details. Don’t flinch. Every time I sit in front of my computer or pick up a pen, I strive to Be fearless.
Laura Bogart embodies that fearlessness—read her most recent essay here—and she owns the English language. Her work has appeared in Salon, DAME Magazine, IndieWire, and The Rumpus, among other publications. She’s a recipient of a Grace Paley Fellowship from the Juniper Institute at UMass Amherst and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel titled Your Name Is No.
Q: Because everyone always wants to know this: Describe your writing environment and your work habits.
A: I generally write at home, and I eke out time after work in the evenings, and fairly extensively on weekends. My goal is to try and write almost every day, even if I can’t fit in large chunks of time. I also try to end that day’s writing by mapping out the next thought I want to express in an essay or the next character interaction that should occur in my novel.
Q: What are must-haves and must-not-haves in your writing space?
A: I must always have a clean space; I absolutely can’t abide by clutter, and I find that I can’t relax enough to think well if the area around me is dirty or disorganized.
Q: What compels you to write?
A: It’s too painful not to.
Q: Describe your evolution as a writer. What was a turning point for you?
A: I started out doing short stories, which I would like to return to, and then branched out into essays. I’d say my turning point came in a piece called “What the Hunger Games Gave Me,” which appeared on The Nervous Breakdown in 2012. That piece fused memoir with a pop-cultural and literary analysis of The Hunger Games, which is one of my most beloved books. I got a lot of attention from that piece, and it led to publications elsewhere.
Q: Writing is an exchange. What do you want your readers to bring to your work, and what do you want to bring to them?
A: I want to provide my readers with a safe space to have the kind of feelings they can’t admit to in polite company. And I want them to bring a ferocious openness when reading my work.
Q: What feeds your writing?
A: Whenever I need literary nourishment, I go back to the one true supreme, Mary Gaitskill.
Q: What is the most valuable advice you ever received as a writer, and what other advice would you offer emerging writers?
A: The best advice I ever got was that writing isn’t just what happens when you sit down at the keyboard (although that’s a big part of it); it’s what happens when you walk the dog or take a long drive or cook dinner and just think. The other thing to remember is that success isn’t a race. I think, as writers, we often get caught up in a mentality that we must break out of the gate faster than our peers. We need to have more bylines in bigger publications; we need a book deal that will become a movie deal. That doesn’t help us, only holds us back. What we need to do, really, is knuckle down to the work that only we can do, and that is our work.
Q: What are you currently reading, and what do you think of it?
A: I’m reading Rainey Royal by Dylan Landis and I love it. She writes sentences that I wish I could just hold in my mouth and savor.
Q: What makes something a good read for you?
A: I am a prose snob; I love language. I want language that is rich and inventive, and serves to describe and define the characters and their world.
Q: Do you have creative doubts or fears? What are they, and how do you overcome them?
A: I’ve been working so hard on my novel for the past two years, and at such a deep, intimate level, so I often worry that I’m building scaffolding that won’t sustain itself. My solution is to get at the core elements of the story I’m trying to tell and cleaving out anything that doesn’t somehow strengthen those elements. I also trusted my work in progress to a dear friend, the brilliant writer Sarah Einstein (whose memoir, MOT, won the AWP non-fiction prize, and is forthcoming in 2015), who was able to give me some macro-level comments about the work.
Q: We don’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration. What do you do when you’re not feeling the mojo?
A: Honestly, I battle through it. There are days when my only input is a single sentence or a thought, but it’s always a hard-won sentence or thought.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My novel, which is tentatively titled Your Name Is No.
Q: What’s the secret to writing unforgettable characters?
A: For me, it’s two-fold: Think about the people who may shock and scare you, the people you’d either love or hate (or want to be); the people you grew up with and knew too well, or the people you never had the nerve to speak to. Then think about who they really are: what shocks and scares them, what do they love or hate (or want to be).