Visiting with Stephanie Friedman
by Claire Guyton
My maternal grandmother, Josephine Prolizo, whose kitchen table conversations taught me the magic of story. This was taken on Michigan Avenue the day after my partner and I got married in 2000. My father told her to strike a pose.
What’s your best “This is how I got that idea” anecdote?
My story ideas are strange accretions that build up over time—not exactly good anecdote fodder. Usually I get some germ of a character from something I have read or somebody I have seen (one of the benefits of being a city mouse is that I am constantly surrounded by people that I can observe without having to actually interact with them) and then the character becomes more revealed to me as bits and pieces build up from other sources/encounters/ memories/random imagined details. Once I know the character, I can start writing his or her story.
Tell us about your usual writing process.
I have a fulltime desk job, two young kids, and teach writing in the evenings, among other responsibilities, so there is nothing “usual” about my process, other than that I am usually trying to figure out how and when to squeeze in more writing time. Just last night, my students, who are all working adults as well, and I were smiling and shaking our heads over the common advice that writers should get up in the morning and sit down at the computer for three hours at a stretch, preferably before talking to anyone, so that the language and images bubbling up out of your unconscious from the night before don’t get sullied or dispelled. Nice work if you can get it, but the first language and image that comes to me when I wake up in the morning is likely to be my eight-year-old standing over me, demanding to know why she doesn’t have any clean socks.
Do you remember the first short story you wrote? What was it about?
One of my fun parental duties: playing in an igloo during "Snowmaggedon," this past winter's major Chicago blizzard.
I started out as a poet, and the first stories I wrote were written under duress, because the intro-level creative writing course at Oberlin (where I did my undergraduate work) required you to write both stories and poems. The first short story I wrote because I wanted to and not because somebody was making me was when I got sick of reading these stories in the lesbian anthologies where every time somebody would come out of the closet, she would trip over her first lover on the way. I set the record straight, as it were, with a story about two nerdy, socially awkward, painfully shy lesbians who stumble through the process of dating and finding romance. I can’t say it was a well-written story, but it was my gateway drug to becoming a fiction writer.
Is there a “writing rule” you never break? One you love to break?
“Character first”: I can’t imagine writing fiction any other way, although I know some folks grouse that this emphasis leads to stories where nothing happens (as they put it). Since I have a rather elastic sense of what constitutes “something happening” in fiction, I don’t worry about this myself. As for rules to break, somebody once wrote as a marginal comment on one of my stories that “the semi-colon has no place in contemporary fiction,” so I am always pleased when I can work one in. Colons too. I am not giving up nuances of grammar and syntax for anybody.
