Craft Advice with Stephanie Land
Craft Advice with Stephanie Land
On getting the best ideas in the shower and in therapy, writing sex scenes, writing about people you love, writing about people who've been shitty to you, vivid settings, and reading work out loud.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Her potent writing style is widely compelling. Maid, her first memoir, has sold half a million copies worldwide, been translated into thirty languages, garnered a place in the New York Times 100 Notable Books, included on Barack Obama’s “Summer Reading List” of 2019, and made into a wildly popular Netflix mini-series.
Her most recent memoir, Class, debuted last year as Good Morning America’s Book of the Month and was named as one of the best books of 2023 by Amazon. Her essays have been featured in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Atlantic.
In other words, Stephanie knows a thing or two about writing. So it was a delight to ask her how she did it! I learned a lot. I think you will, as well.
If you missed part one of our interview, you can read it here.
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Where do you write?
Anywhere possible. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve told myself that I need some kind of writing device in the shower because that’s where the ideas come. Usually, a therapy session will give me some kind of idea for my Substack. So much so that I’ve had to force myself to not do that, because I don’t want every Substack to be like, "Well, I just had a therapy appointment, and…"
So you have a therapy session, and you’re like, "Oh, that gave me a great idea." Then how do you turn that into a Substack or chapter or scene?
A lot of the time I’ll wait for an opening sentence to come to me. Then I’ll write. I can easily write a thousand words or more an hour. My best friend hates me for it. Sometimes, from the time I exit my therapist’s office to when I get home, I can rush to my laptop and write something super fast, and it’s good. I don’t know how I do that. If I knew, I’d make a lot of money.
But with this book I’m working on, I have to keep emailing my editor and saying, "I’m thinking about it." It’s all working itself out because so much of it is framing. You’re looking for the arc, what to include and what to leave out. What the tone is.
It’s difficult for me right now because I’m going to write this whole book about how much anxiety I have, and I’m not feeling like I’m too much of an anxious person anymore. It makes me wonder if I was actually anxious. I’m trying not to question too much of what I promised I would write about.
When I was working full-time as a freelancer and had an infant and an eight-year-old, I would carry around a little notebook. Whenever an idea came to me, I would write it down. If the first sentence came to me, I’d write down the first sentence and the opening paragraph. I usually had like thirty pieces that I was working on at once, from pitch to invoice.
Wow!
They were all on a whiteboard, listed in their different processes: "to pitch," "accepted," "to write," and "invoice." And then, “invoice” again.
The kids would be asleep around nine or so. Coraline would be asleep on my lap. I would sit on my living room floor with my laptop balancing on a stool, make myself a huge cup of coffee and write everything I had taken notes on that day until two or three in the morning.
That’s incredible. It sounds like a lot of the way you’re structuring your pieces is intuitive. You’re not necessarily carefully plotting it out.
Yes, partly. I describe it as "chewing on it before spitting it out." It’s more like going over it in my head.
Are you sometimes chewing on things for a while?
Yes. With this book, already it’s been six months. I hate book proposals with the strength of a thousand suns, but they are useful. You’re putting a lot of thought into what is actually going to go into the book, and that’s usable information. I really like that process of planning and organizing.
But I don’t do outlines or anything. With Class, I was blocked for two years because I didn’t know if I should include how Coraline was conceived. It took me a long time to figure that out. Writing about me having sex with people was really difficult, too.
In Class you do have quite a few sex scenes. They’re great! I wondered if you had any tips for writing sex scenes.
I was reading Melissa Febos's book Body Work on a plane to New York. One of the things I was doing in New York was meeting with my editor to talk about the book. A third of Body Work is about sex scenes and writing about sex. I almost skipped it because I thought, “I don’t need this.” But then I thought, "What if I did?"
After reading it, I started to consider things differently. What if I approached the experience of becoming pregnant with a feeling of empowerment? My editor was the one who came up with the term “Hot Single Mom Summer.” We talked about embracing the idea that, yes, I was out there, having fun, I was hot surrounded by rock climbers, I was having sex, and it was great most of the time.
It was right after Roe fell apart, so there was this idea that single moms should be angelic. My editor, who is also a single mom, liked the idea of challenging that notion because if poor people aren’t supposed to have nice things, sex is the nicest thing, or it’s supposed to be. For single moms, sex is completely off-limits. That was me putting a finger in the side of the reader because I don’t know how many people have slut-shamed me.
For writing a sex scene, I had a rule: I would not directly write about a penis. I would not use the word "penis" or "dick," or anything like that. I would write as if there was no actual penis in the room. And then not use the word "thrust."
Your memoirs involve writing about a lot of people, some of whom have been horrible to you. Do you feel comfortable writing the truth of how they treated you, or do you feel like you have to be protective of them in some weird way?
The legalities of it—as long as it’s true, that’s all that matters. There’s that quote by Anne Lamott on this: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
I don’t feel any need to keep toxic people in my life. If they did something that affected me, I don’t feel the need to tiptoe around their behavior.
That’s amazing. I still feel the need to tiptoe around their behavior. I wish I didn’t.
With Maid, I was really terrified about the scene where my dad beat up my stepmom. I was worried about how it was going to affect her. But I also don’t know if she ever read it. I haven’t talked to my family, so I have no idea if any of them have read it.
But there was that part of it where I thought, "I am probably going to let people know that something happened to someone that they don’t necessarily want people to know about." Those decisions are hard.
But it also happened to me. It really affected me, and it affected my relationship with that person. When I’m going through the mental process of piecing together a story arc, those are decisions I have to make: can I leave this out and still maintain the story? Because this was the reason why this happened and then this happened.
I was just talking to my therapist about how I feel like I need to explain everything. Writing about other people can feel like trying to explain, "These are the reasons why I did this."
That makes a lot of sense. Are there challenges to writing about the people that you love?
Absolutely. As Story has gotten older and Coraline too, I’m featuring them less and less in my writing and on social media. After the series blew up, I had hundreds of thousands of people suddenly know about me, going all the way back through my Instagram to the very first photo and commenting on it and liking it. That’s weird.
I’ve been more protective of my privacy and my kids’ privacy. This book I’m writing now has three people in it that I’m going to have to write about, and they’re not going to like it. But, you know, you shouldn’t have been shitty.
That’s so helpful to hear, Stephanie. There’s someone in my life who’s been horrible to me. I feel like I’m at the point where I could write about them but what I write might be difficult for people I love to read.
I understand. With Story, I didn’t want to affect her relationship with her dad. So instead of writing directly about his actions or revealing the super shitty stuff he did, I focused more on writing my reactions to his words that he said to me. Probably to the extent that people did question if I was experiencing domestic violence.
One person told me, "You never want to gossip—you never want to feel like you’re revealing private information. And that includes yourself. You don’t want to gossip about yourself either.”
I try to maintain that, not writing anything too embarrassing. With my kids, too, I don’t want to write something they would be embarrassed about—like potty training or something like that. Even when writing about abusive people, I try to hold back on things that would be too revealing.
Of course, if it’s on a police report or published somewhere, then, yes, you can do whatever you want with that. One of the essays I wrote is about my second marriage. He strangled me, and he very much doesn’t want me to write about that. But I already wrote about it for The Guardian. There were also multiple newspaper articles and police reports about him, so he can’t really say that I’m lying. With him, I’m like, “Fuck him. I don’t care.” But there are varying degrees of that feeling.
Do you show people what you’ve written in advance?
Absolutely not. With Class, I did show a complete first draft to Reed, who was in the book. I wanted to capture Missoula in a moment in time, and how it felt to go from campus to walking around downtown to being a service industry worker surrounded by college students. Reed was the same—he worked at a sandwich shop. So I ran it past him because I wanted his reaction, to make sure I was writing about Missoula in a loving way.
As soon as I had galleys, I gave copies to Deborah Magpie Earling, Robert Stubblefield, and Katie Kane. They’re still huge supporters of mine. I’m doing Montana Writers Live in a couple of weeks. They were very important to me and I wanted them to feel like they were represented in a good way. But that’s the first time I’ve ever done that.
It must be weird that you’re writing about these people and then you give them these pages to read about themselves.
Oh, totally. I could go to the grocery store and run into anybody. There are people in town who are very upset with me that I wrote about the university in that way. Some people think I was punching down. But I was writing about the gatekeeping that goes on in academia. That was important to me—the power professors have.
Your settings are so vivid. When you write about a city, or each home, and even your cars, I felt like I was there. I felt like I was in Ruby, I was in Pearl. How does the setting come to you? Do you first see it, smell it, hear it?
I learned that I have a very visual brain. There was that tweet a long time ago about how there’s a population of people who cannot picture an apple in their head. But mine is so vivid. The apartment we lived in in Missoula—the oldest house in Missoula—I don’t even have to close my eyes. I can just sit in a chair at the kitchen table and know what it sounds like, what the air feels like when it kicks on, where the dust is visible in the sun. It’s like putting myself in those rooms and looking around. It’s so vivid and real that by the time I’m writing it, I’m just describing what I see in my head.
I had to teach myself how to write in scene. That wasn’t taught in college. I figured out the best way to do it was to picture myself sitting in a movie theater and watching it on the screen. I would write it out as I saw it play out on screen visually. That helped, sometimes. My friend Debbie Weingarten also suggested using touchstone points, where you have an object that opens up a backstory.
It sounds like you see it all first—then sounds and smells and all that come onboard.
Yes, like sitting in Pearl. I loved that car. I lived in that car, so I know it better than the car I drive now.
Have you named the car you drive now?
No, I called her Kitty because she purred, but it’s not the same. With Pearl and Ruby, we talked about them like they were people we were taking with us instead of just something we were using to get from one place to another. They were an extension of us. I needed them so much that I had to care for them like they were family members.
A lot of the readers of Beyond are writers, so I wondered if there’s a prompt or writing tip that has been really helpful for you.
I had a professor—who’s now a Republican, which is uncomfortable—who said something really useful: the not-writing is just as important as the writing. When I started freelancing and got to the point where I could afford daycare, it became apparent that so much of my job was not actually writing. It was emailing, administrative work, thinking, reading the entire internet and figuring out what everyone else was talking about and how I would spin it in a different way. I spent maybe twenty percent of my time actually writing.
Also just putting the work down and not thinking about it is very valuable. Getting some space—if anything, give yourself some distance from it.
When I was done with copyedits for Maid, I had read the book probably ten times. I thought I had written the biggest pile of trash in history. I thought everyone was going to hate it and I’d be laughed out of town. Then I read it again for the audiobook and had so many moments where I thought, “Wow, this is actually pretty good.”
It’s good to read things out loud, too. For voice, cadence, and how things sound.
Do you read all your work out loud?
Yes. I read even my Substacks out loud. I’ve read both of my books out loud more than once. For the audiobook, of course, but also when I was doing copyedits. Class I actually read twice because I was so nervous and insecure about it.
It does help. Thanks, Stephanie!
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If you enjoyed this Craft Advice with Stephanie Land, you might also enjoy this one with Brandon Taylor:
Love these crafts advice! As I have just completed a first draft of a book on my daughter’s father who didn’t behave in the best way I can particularly relate to what Stephanie says. I too was / am concerned about how my daughters would view their father, but I hope I have managed to find nuance and complexity. And, I think my daughters know more than they let on. And I wholeheartedly agree with the point about single mothers having sex! Yes, absolutely let’s challenge this image of single mothers being angelic! :)
What a great conversation! I love Stephanie’s desk too!