Karen Russell’s novel, The Antidote, is available now from Knopf, so we asked her a few questions about writing, reading, procrastination, and more.
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What time of day do you write (and why)?
These days I write when my kids are in school. Morning is definitely better than the 12:00-2:00 pm stretch. Shadowless noon feels like the hardest time to write fiction. Lately I’ve been falling asleep in my kids’ room around 8:00. Then I emerge like a Yeti from a cave and stumble groggily to my own bed.
But when I was younger, I felt like I did my best writing at night, and when I can rally, I still love writing at night. I think it has something to do with the freedom that comes after a defeated expectation.
Often I’ll spend a stretch of daylight hammering away at something that isn’t working at all. It feels more like typing than writing. And then after sundown, when I expect nothing of myself, when I’ve outlasted all my ambitions and frustrations and given up for the day—sometimes a window opens. Then I can travel somewhere that feels more spacious, more anonymous, more free.
But it’s mysterious to me, why and how this happens. I’ve come to feel that I need to show up and clock into my official work site every day, even if it’s just to exhaust some part of my waking mind. Somehow the typing prepares the way for the real writing, if that makes any sense.
Every so often, some line or scene will leap onto the page seemingly out of the blue, from parts unknown to my anxious, vigilant center. This can happen anytime, but I find it easier to relax into this state at night, when writing can feel almost like receiving a waking dream.
I’m old and I tire out easily now, but when I can manage an all-nighter, it’s always thrilling. By two a.m., my internal supervisors have all clocked out, and everyone in my house is asleep. It’s easier to listen at night.
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What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?
Good: Read poetry. Write poetry. Even if, as in my case, it’s really bad poetry.
One of my short stories, “St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves,” began as a truly terrible poem with many howls and aggressive end-rhymes. “Lupine,” “supine,” “moonshine.” It was not good! But there are lines and images in the published story that I salvaged from the poem, and its questions first revealed themselves to me as verse.
Reading poetry, and trying to write it, taught me to slow down and weigh the power of each word. It gave me a visceral appreciation for how sound can lead to sense, how suspense operates on the level of the line. Poetry also taught me that writing is music scored for the breath, a music saturated with meaning. And that this meaning makes itself syllable by syllable, star by star in a constellation that can only reveal itself at the speed a reader’s eyes move over paper.
Related to this good advice, which I received from my freshman seminar professor, I’m also grateful to Fanny Howe’s life-changing essay “Bewilderment,” a guide for writing and for living, in which she writes:
Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability. It cracks open the dialectic and sees myriads all at once….[B]ewilderment circumambulates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality.
Bad: When I was a younger writer, most of my early attempts at short fiction featured children and animals. A well-meaning professor at my undergraduate university, who was not one of my instructors, read an early story of mine and told me that I should try writing “fully adult characters.”
I’m sure he didn’t intend for me to internalize a literary hierarchy of being, but I did become self-conscious about what gave me pleasure as a writer and a reader. I tried to write what I imagined to be more serious, literary stories, with “fully adult characters,” as he’d suggested, and failed utterly at this. I was nineteen, and it was much easier for me to imaginatively inhabit a mangrove forest or a wolf-girl than a woman in midlife.
It was also where my undermind, as Stephen King calls it, kept leading me—to the inner and outer landscapes of childhood and adolescence, to the swamps and the seas (and also the strip malls, the theme parks, the Miami Seaquarium fronting the real ocean) where I’d been a child. When I tried to strain my voice to impress my professor, instead of singing in my natural register, everything I produced felt flat and false.
In graduate school, a different professor read a story I’d written about disordered dreamers at a sleepaway camp. The first draft had two point of view characters: a young, bewildered camper, and an adult counselor. My professor’s feedback was something like, “Wow, this adult you’re writing feels like an Ann Taylor mannequin, but the kids are so alive. This is really the kids’ story. Let yourself write what you most want to write.”
Which may be another way of saying, what demands that you write it, what haunts you relentlessly, what sparks your genuine curiosity or troubles you at 4 a.m., what returns to your mind like blood welling to a cut, what you can’t seem to stop yourself from writing.
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What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?
Ok, I’m going to answer this honestly. When I write, I chew a lot of ice. That’s what’s usually on my desk, in all weathers: a giant mug of hot coffee, a pack of gum, and a cup of ice cubes.
I don’t remember anymore how this started, but it’s a real compulsion. My husband bought me one of those hotel ice buckets as a courtship gift, and I was very touched.
I get lectured alot about how bad it is for my teeth. Hopefully my dentist will read this, and understand that my career hangs in the balance.
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Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?
The Simpsons. Our family loved this show. We all still quote from it. A lot of my early cultural literacy came from this cartoon. The Planet of the Apes, the Cold War, Jackson Pollock, Citizen Kane, this is just off the top of my head, some things I first learned about while watching The Simpsons.
One of my best friends first bonded with me over our shared love of the Treehouse of Horror series, and to this day we talk about different episodes the way other people talk about the NBA.
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How do you organize your bookshelves?
It looks like an earthquake organized our bookshelves. Books are stacked horizontally on top of the vertical books, books are canted at strange angles. It’s a real estate crisis. We have a basket on the floor for overflow books. I’m always amazed when people have alphabetized libraries. I aspire to be like them.
But you know, I confess, I also really like the pleasure of browsing our shelves and rediscovering books. It reminds me of the way I felt as a kid at motels and hotels, combing through those libraries curated by chance and neglect, whatever the prior guests had left behind. Where the same shelf might contain the Bible, a Jumble Puzzle, Codependent No More, The Prince of Tides.
This is sounding more and more like a rationalization, I realize, I swear we’re going to organize our shelves one day.
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What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be writing?
My “search history” is a diary of procrastination.
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The Antidote by Karen Russell is available via Knopf.
