Photo credit: Michelle Yee
Interview by Erin Steel,
Sarah Selecky is a vegan, a Virgo, and a lover of dark chocolate. But she’s more well-known for her writing and her teaching. The New York Times called her first book, This Cake Is for the Party, “utterly fascinating.” This collection of short stories was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in Canada and the Caribbean, and was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Walrus, The New Quarterly, and The Journey Prize Anthology. Through Sarah Selecky Writing School, she runs online creative writing and mentorship programs, and an annual international writing contest. Her new novel Radiant Shimmering Light will be published by Harper Collins Canada in May 2018.
In the story “Go-Manchura” from This Cake Is for the Party, there’s a sympathetic character named Lilian who is now the protagonist in your novel Radiant Shimmering Light. What drew you to write about Lilian again?
The themes I explored in “Go-Manchura” – friendship, trust, and marketing – became even more interesting to me in recent years. So I wasn’t finished with Lilian. I kept imagining her life and wondering what she was doing after “Go-Manchura”. What would she be doing for money now, in her forties? With her background in multi-level marketing, how was she using her social media accounts? She could try to sell to more people now as her circle of friends would have extended with Facebook. Would she be working on her personal brand like everyone else, and following all the influencers on Instagram?
Also, there was a character in “Go-Manchura” named Eleven who never actually appeared in the story – Lilian just talked about her a lot. I changed the name to Evelyn when I published the book (I did that for my niece, who had just been born). But I always wanted to write more about Eleven. Lilian was so excited about this mysterious woman who said she was going to come to her cottage that weekend. She was almost obsessed with her. Why? I wanted to explore that – who was Eleven, and what did she mean to Lilian?
Radiant Shimmering Light is about light. All forms of light appear – auras, fireflies, iridescent rhinestones. Every page shimmers. Why did you want to write about light?
That wasn’t a conscious decision. All of the light and sparkle surprised me as I wrote it. The stories in my first book were much more consciously crafted and structured than this novel.
For a long time, I tried to think up a good story to write for my second book. I tried so hard to write good characters, to outline a good plot and I kept failing. It was so disappointing. Eventually, after a few years of false starts writing in a heavy way about Eleven and Lilian, I decided I was going to write this book for fun.
I let myself drop any hang-ups about being taken seriously, or seen as “smart”. I told myself that I didn’t have to write a sophisticated book to impress anyone; it didn’t have to be intelligent or literary or prize-worthy; it didn’t even have to make sense. I just wanted to write something that I would love to read.
That freed me up. I let go of a lot of inhibitions that had been holding me back. I let my subconscious take the lead in my scenes, and I let myself enjoy the sensory aspects of writing without thinking. I didn’t edit anything as I wrote through the first draft. I just let myself enjoy the process of writing.
So while I didn’t decide that I wanted to write about light, I did consciously decide that I wanted to write something that felt light. My subconscious mind may have taken that word another way. Maybe that’s why the book has so much shimmer and glow.
Although this novel feels light, it’s a complex study of female friendships, female entrepreneurship, and female ambition. Why was it important to you to centre your novel in the female experience?
I wanted to write something I wanted to read, and my own life is centred in the female experience, so it’s natural to write about it. I love writing, reading, and thinking about the layered, complex relationships women have with each other. What I think is more interesting is that I had to let go of my own fear of not being taken seriously as a writer if I wrote about women. That’s the weird part. That’s what gives me a scaly feeling—that cold, hollow moment you understand that you’ve internalized a story from somewhere else, and it doesn’t serve you creatively at all, that it’s not even your own story. Why did I tell myself that writing about women would be light and fun, and not literary? When I saw that this was a belief I had, I was like – what? Where did that come from?
I tricked myself into writing this novel by giving myself permission to write something “easy.” Ha! It wasn’t easy at all. But I did love writing it, because it was exactly what I wanted to write. I wrote it for myself, and for the women I know.
This novel is inventive and modern. You’ve incorporated several social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter into the prose. Lilian says, “I love my digital community.” Why did you focus on digital communities and Lilian’s online experience? And how did that affect your process for writing this novel?
We live online now. We stare into the face of a screen more than we look into other human faces. We do everything through our phone – everything. I wanted to create the visceral experience of what it means to live online. The constant connection/disconnection, and what that feels like in the human body. That’s what this story is about—connection. And Lilian, who is more socially anxious than most of us, is especially vulnerable to the problems that arise with seamless and constant digital living. I couldn’t show the wholeness of the problem by writing a token text here and there. The experience had to be immersive, the way Lilian lives it. Writing this story in any other way would have felt false.
This was sometimes very difficult. I experienced imaginary online interruption and overwhelm every day, because of the story I was writing. Then, coming back to online living in my real life could feel pretty bad. Exhausting. There were days I wanted to throw my phone in the lake. When I felt really fritzed and terrible, I told myself to use that feeling – put it into the writing. Give those feelings to Lilian. There’s a scene where Lilian looks at her phone and her body flinches, as if it’s giving her an electric shock, just looking at it. That’s real—I’ve felt that flinch.
I found ways to heal that inflammation, though. I wrote without wifi, and I wrote everything by hand—I use a Lamy Safari fountain pen with a nice fat nib. When I transcribed the first draft into my computer, I used the Freedom app. I turned off all the notifications on my phone, and left it on silent most days. I sealed off my Twitter account entirely. I installed the Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator and limited my Facebook checking to once or twice a month. I took regular sabbaticals from work to write without going online, and several times a year, I put up an out of office autoresponder on my email, just to get some white space.
Of course, for my livelihood – I run an online writing school – I have to be online some of the year. I love the writers in my own online community so much, I can’t quit the internet (and I’ve considered quitting many times, during the writing of this book). My mission is to use my online writing school to get writers out of their heads, into their bodies again. I know it’s a paradox—an online writing school that gets you offline? But I think it might be working.
What was the biggest challenge you encountered while writing this novel? How did you overcome it?
The question of time. When I started the book, I wanted to write a contemporary story set just slightly in the future. I wanted to look at the health and wellness industry, social media branding, and the female lifestyle empowerment brands I knew about in real life, and turn up the volume on everything a bit, to see what would happen. I played a lot of what if. What if someone started selling ground up quartz crystals in face cream? What if someone could make a living from Instagram product placements? What if they put meditation pods in shopping malls? What if someone meditated over chocolate and then sold it as a healing food? What if a company sold water bottles printed with positive words that would shape the water molecules? I played what if with plot elements, too. What if a self-help guru paid to make his own Netflix documentary? What if a woman wrote a public letter calling someone out about harassment, and people actually believed her?
The challenge for me started around late 2014 and early 2015, when some of the things I had imagined as over-the-top started to happen in real life. I found myself trying to create more and more ideas for imaginary things, but I couldn’t keep up with the real world.
I put this book in present tense because the characters are so concerned with presence. I wanted the time to be present. But by the end of my second draft I realized that I could never keep up with the present. “Now” doesn’t last long enough to exist in print anymore. This wasn’t a contemporary novel—this was historical fiction. I went back and rewrote the third draft so it fit into 2016, the last year that I could consider writing this story with any insight. Since 2017, real life feels downright surreal.
What advice would you give to writers who are in the early stages of writing a novel?
Writing a novel is going to feel messy. Don’t overthink it. Don’t expect it to make sense as you go. You won’t know what it’s really about until after you have written it. Remember that you love writing, and this can and should be fun for you. Allow yourself to write what you would love to read, not what you think you should write.
Write your first draft as fast as you can. Have a bit of an outline, with a few story milestones in the beginning, middle and end, and consult your outline now and then as you write, but hold it loosely. Write your book from beginning to end – write scenes in the order your reader will be reading them.
Resist the urge to edit as you go. The things that I had to fix and correct in my second draft were vexing, but they were manageable problems. Characters appeared and disappeared, events didn’t occur in linear time, and I mixed up place descriptions. Nothing major. But I know that if I’d stopped to make those fixes, they would have felt more important than they were. I would have become hung up on those details, and that would have gotten in the way of my writing to discover what the story wanted to tell me about itself. You can fix the small stuff once the first draft is done but if you don’t have an ending, you won’t know why you’re stopping to fix whatever it is you’re fixing. Let it be a mess at first. Trust your subconscious mind; you can fix the inconsistencies later.
In your writing school, you teach about influence. Who has influenced your writing? And how?
For this book, I went back to the writing I loved when I was young. Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat books opened a portal for me as a young writer, and that energy is still at the heart of what I love about writing. Her stories are urban fairy tales, lit with Californian colour, music and food. I can see how Weetzie-inspired I let myself be with this book—all of that rainbow and sparkle, the colour, the meals, the dogs, the visions. I opened myself to magic, too—Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Eden Robinson. I reread Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being to see how she brought magic into the real world. Reading George Saunders always reminded me that I could do whatever I wanted to do—that there are no rules. Some other books that I read for influence and permission while writing this novel: The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn; Spinster by Kate Bolick; Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte, and the Elena Ferrante My Brilliant Friend series, of course.
How has teaching writing changed your own writing?
It keeps me honest and gentle with my own work. It’s easier for me to tell other people how to make their creative life better, and to see all the ways their work shines, but it can be harder for me to do these things for myself. I have to do what I advise my writers to do, or I’d be a hypocrite. I have to treat myself with as much compassion as I treat my students, or the lessons fail. When I see my students take risks, like writing without knowing if they’re making any sense, or tapping into a voice that makes them feel free and a little bit crazy, or finishing a project even though the inner critic in their head is trying to tell them it’s not worth finishing – it’s humbling and inspiring. It galvanizes me to do the same thing in my writing. Teaching writers and witnessing their breakthroughs has shown me that self-doubt doesn’t go away; you just have to write through it. And when you are brave enough to write through it, that’s when you find the raw, living truth of a story. I learned this through teaching; writers teach this to each other by doing it.
Erin Steel is currently enrolled in UBC’s MFA in Creative Writing (Optional Residency Program). She lives in Calgary, Alberta.