Q: What inspired you to write your first novel, What We’ve Lost Is Nothing?
Actually, people are surprised by this, but my only formal training as a writer has been in fiction. I got my MFA in fiction from Emerson College, and I had the good fortune to study under writers like Andre Dubus III, Tim O’Brien, Joe Hurka, and Jessica Treadway, among others. I fell into nonfiction because I published an essay in Mademoiselle magazine that I’d written in a random creative nonfiction class I took with the writer John Skoyles. I’ve actually written two and a half other novels that (thankfully!) did not get published. After grad school I began to write more and more nonfiction because you can make actual real dollars (not many, but a few) with nonfiction. I’d always traveled around the world, and I began to pitch stories to places like the Chicago Tribune, and Jane magazine and Glamour, and so whatever journalism I learned was on the job. But I knew someday I’d return to fiction. I actually feel so blessed to be able to operate in both these forms, because I love them equally. And I think they’re of equal value in our culture today. (Though this wasn’t my first novel; it was simply my first PUBLISHED novel. I have at least two and half others sitting in a drawer somewhere that will never — hopefully — see the light of day! But the practice was necessary).
I started What We’ve Lost is Nothing right after I published my first book Fugitive Denim. I was living in Cambodia — where I lived for six years — and I was pregnant and so couldn’t travel much or do the kind of journalism I’d been doing. So I started writing the book one weekend while I was on the south coast, at this amazing place called Knai Bang Chatt (I also got married on an elephant there in 2007) and the characters and premise came together almost immediately. The omniscient voice, the ensemble of characters — these elements were there from the start. I worked on it for a few months, and then put it away because I gave birth to my daughter in Bangkok, and then we moved house, and I was sort of enjoying early motherhood, and didn’t pick up the novel again until we moved from Phnom Penh to DC in the summer of 2009. After that, I worked on it pretty solidly for another two and a half years or so.
Q: What was the process like to create the work of fiction? How long did it take?
In some ways, it wasn’t all that different from nonfiction. I tell people that the fiction writer’s nemesis is the blank page, and the nonfiction writer’s nemesis is the stack of information already lived or researched. But the manner in which that information is organized — around a narrative arc, with characters and conflicts and tension and stakes — that all exists in either form. So I just sat down and wrote, and rewrote and rewrote. Some writers have to have each sentence perfect before they move to the next, and I’m not like that. I have to have a really terrible first draft done, and then I go back and whittle and expand and reorganize again and again.
Q: How was the process different/same than your first book Fugitive Denim?
The biggest challenge for me on Fugitive Denim was organizing the vast amount of information I had. I didn’t know if I should try to do all the research and THEN start writing, or write as I was going along. I finally decided that for my own sanity, the latter was better and so that’s what I did. But it’s always the responsibility of the writer to determine which moment captures the complications best and then use that moment — and perhaps ONLY that moment. I often see student writing that makes the same point over and over again, or multiple scenes in which the same conflict or character trait or plot point is made repeatedly and it’s a matter of learning to truth both yourself as the writer and your reader.
Q: You’re an alumni of North Central College, would you say there are skills and lessons you picked up during the time you spent there as a student that have helped you in your writing career now?
Oh my gosh, yes. There were so many pivotal moments for me. I took a class with Richard Guzman in Harlem Renaissance Literature that still resonates with me today. I felt like James Baldwin was speaking for me in so much of his writing. And I was a sophomore when I wrote the first thing that I remember having real power. My mother died when I was eight, almost nine, and in some ways I’d been writing about her and about that for years; but one night, I began an essay with this sentence: “So you want to know what it’s like when your mother dies…” And I just went on from there. I talked about not knowing the difference between shampoo and conditioner for years, about having to buy my first bra with my father, about not having any idea about dating or boys, about not knowing how to dress like a girl or act like a girl or wear makeup or get rid of the rage and anger I felt like I carried around with me every moment of every day. I cried while I was writing it, like actual real tears just falling onto the page. I felt like I was finally gathering up all those years and all that pain and doing something with it. It was one of the most powerful moments of my life, and it was spurred by a creative writing class at NCC taught by a professor who’s no longer there named John Jacob. I finished writing it at about ten o’clock at night, and I got in my car and raced to my best friend’s house — she’s also an NCC alum, Cindy Landorf (now Wyllie) — and I read it to her sitting outside on the sidewalk in front of her house. When I was done, she just looked at me and said, “Wow.”
But it was a massive “wow.” It was a “wow” that contained the whole world.
Q: What advice would you give to students that are looking to write their own novels now or in the future?
My advice is this: live a life in which you are the only one who can write the stories you’re writing.
And take a year off between undergrad and grad school. Go and see the world however you can, and write every day. Write like you brush your teeth, like you eat. Just fit it in. If you only have ten minutes one day, then you only have ten minutes. Whatever. There are a million reasons life will give you not to do it. But don’t be in a hurry. Just write.
Q: What is one of the best experiences you have had in your career thus far?
Being able to look Rick Spencer in the eye and thank him for the second chance he, and NCC, gave me.
Also, of course, publishing in the New Yorker. There’s no higher echelon for a writer…
Rachel Snyder will be at Madden Theater January 28th at 7 p.m. for an Anderson’s Bookstore event. Come enjoy her talk on her new book and more inspiring words of wisdom. You can purchase her book, What We’ve Lost Is Nothing, at Anderson’s Bookstore and bring it along for her book signing.
