Lynn Steger Strong: On Starting at the End, Writing Mercilessly, Getting Past the Stories Her Characters Tell Themselves, and Her Novel ‘Flight’
What happens when a family loses the person holding them all together? At the beginning of Flight, Lynn Steger Strong’s latest novel, we’re thrust into a holiday gathering overshadowed by the recent death of Helen, the mother of adult children Kate, Martin and Henry. Along with their spouses and kids, the three siblings gather at a creaky old house in upstate New York during Christmas to break bread while grieving. Long-simmering conflicts come to the surface, naturally, but not before Strong grounds us deeply in the struggles of each character to make sense and purpose of their own life – and what the future may hold – while also contending with their grief.
Anyone with a complicated family (and which families aren’t complicated?) can appreciate the nuanced dimensions of the drama in Flight. Strong shifts between characters and gives rich backstory for each without sacrificing pace, in a way that made me want to devour the novel in one sitting and sit all afternoon with each character for a cup of hot cocoa.
Strong and I spoke over email, where she discussed the inspiration for Flight, the way she navigates the time and space her novels demand, and the sustenance she gets from teaching and running.
Katie Hunter: Your most recent novel, Flight, is told from multiple perspectives. It’s also foregrounded by a family’s loss–that of the matriarch, Helen, who seemed to serve as a glue that kept her family together (and in relative harmony).
What aspect of the novel compelled you to start writing it in the first place? Was it the exploration of loss, complex family and sibling dynamics, all of the above, or something else?
Lynn Steger Strong: This book started for me in a way none before has started: at the end. I knew from pretty early the image I wanted to end on (and who knows where these things come from). I knew there’d be a family there and also that a child would have gone missing in the meantime. I knew too that the matriarch had died. What propelled me into trying to write toward that scene was, in part, my suspicions of it. What I was seeing was a moment of shared grace, (and it feels tricky for me even to type that) among a group of very different people, a group of people trying to come together, without who and whatever had guided them in the past toward that grace. I wanted to write them into that moment in a way I could believe in.
With every book, I’m trying to imagine myself into a feeling I’ve maybe never quite had hold of in my own life, and that idea of losing someone, not quite knowing how to move forward, not being particularly confident in one’s ability to love well and uncomplicatedly but doing it regardless, and doing it, even if only briefly, as a collective. That was what I was most interested in at the start.
KH: Loving well and uncomplicatedly - within families or otherwise - seems like a more daunting prospect than ever sometimes, given the state of politics and the compounding trauma of a global pandemic. As you were writing Flight did you feel as if you were somehow in conversation with our particular times? And in general, how do you balance the world outside and the world within your novel when it comes to writing?
LSS: I’m not the first to make the analogy of feeling like part of our job as writers is to walk around with much more porous skin, to be always taking the world in on some gut level, to be careful and exacting, unforgiving, in the openness with which we observe, take notes, imbibe. How that comes back out in the work though isn’t always obvious. I don’t think, for instance, that we all have to write pandemic novels for us to write through or about whatever these past few years have done to all of us. Alternatively, when I’m deep in the novel–and I can’t do this for too long; I have to have long stretches of note-taking or not-writing as the intensity of this stretch can make it difficult to also be a person in the world–it has to function wholly as itself. It has its own logics, its own energies and investments, and the outside world, at that point, can feel like a much too vast and loud impediment. Another way to say this is to say that the novel holds its own specific relationship to time and space that is of the writer’s making. The time and space of the outside world is often (due not least to all that porousness discussed above) often sort of overwhelming and terrifying when I first transition from the book and into it.
KH: What strategies do you use to manage multiple writing projects at once, especially given the intense concentration a novel warrants? What projects are you working on now?
LSS: When I’m really in a project–which I can take a while to get to–I often spend months kind of nosing my way toward the project while also being very easily distracted by other assignments or teaching or just hanging out with my kids. But when I get inside of something, near everything feels pertinent to that project—something my daughter says at dinner, a review I’m working on, something a student notices about a story in class. I’m in a new novel right now, with a very rickety draft that I now have to make sense of: as I was getting to the end of it I worked every morning, every day, for at least two hours before my kids woke up. When I’m in this mode I’m merciless about that time. I get up between 4:30 and 5 regardless of the day or weather, or if we have houseguests or if my kids were up late because they were sick the night before. If I have other work, I ignore it until those two hours are up, until the regular work day starts. But now that I have a draft I’m trying to give it a little space and am working on a handful of smaller projects, both to keep myself from going back to the novel too soon and as a way to force myself to think a little more about what books are and are capable of before I dive back in.
KH: You’ve released two successful novels in the past three years (including Want in 2020). You’re also a professor of writing. How does your teaching influence your writing, and vice versa?
I love teaching and also feel, just like writing, that I could constantly be doing better, that I need to continually re-consider how or if I’m communicating whatever I need to communicate. Re-considering how to build a class in a way that feels dynamic, lively, and immersive; listening to my students, really taking in their points of view, and trying to integrate them further into the conversation, all of this, I think, makes me a better writer. It makes me more expansive in my understanding of what books and people can be; it teaches me to wait a beat inside my work in the same way I do in the classroom, knowing the thing a student, or a character, inserts in that space in which I force myself to not bound forward, is often the most illuminating moment in the class or book.
KH: By the explosive plot points of Flight, I was totally invested in what was going to happen to each and every person in the novel. As a novelist, what is your approach to that balance between plot and character development? And how did you approach it in Flight, especially given the number of characters and POVs?
LSS: Nearly all of writing for me is re-writing, going back inside of the same scene a hundred times and thinking, is this actually the true thing, or is it some lie cast over the true thing to keep the character safe from themselves or other people? What of this is the story the person tells about themselves and what of this gets beyond or underneath that story (and often, how can I show both)?
I don’t think plot and character are mutually exclusive either. As I go back and back and back, I’m trying to double down on each character’s investment in each moment, in the ways even the smallest tensions feel like explosions when they’re happening inside your body in real time. There’s always a moment in the writing when I can’t think about the book if I’m not in it because I need each sentence to move into the next in a way that makes sense to the characters inside of them. I need to feel the sort of burst and push from one thought or impulse into action into interaction into what comes to be the plot.
KH: I appreciate the idea of doubling down on investment in each moment as a way to get to the truth of the story and the core of each character. Do you approach these scene rewrites in a particular way (i.e. chronologically, character by character, etc)? And is there, say, a certain place or time you designate for rewriting versus bigger ideation in your writing schedule?
LSS: I spend months (years) thinking about the characters, the story, the container of the novel, the tensions and the complications. I sort of let them form and knock up against one another in my head. In that time, I write sporadically. I take loads of notes. I write charts on pieces of paper that I almost always lose. I usually get up early during this time but also let myself sleep in sometimes. I go for very long runs and call it writing time. I try to let myself play inside of sentences that may or may not have any bearing on the novel, but just a sort of sharpening of the tools as the ideas keep forming in my head. All of this I think is the “bigger ideation” you talk about.
When I am in the sentences this all shifts. I get much more rigorous in the when and how often of my writing: usually for these stretches it’s every morning 4:30-7 or 5:30-7 depending, seven days a week, until a draft is done. In this time too I can grab at other stretches of time later in the day if they present themselves amidst my other obligations, but it’s really those early mornings that I’m merciless about retaining and it’s in that time that I feel most inside the book. By the time I’m going back through over and over, I’m so fully obsessed with the book that I can dip into it more freely. I can jump in and out of different moments more easily, but I also re-type the manuscript multiple times over the course of rewriting to make sure the sentences are working the way I think they are.
KH: Is there a lesson you'd like to share with us and/or anything you wish you would have known earlier in your writing career, especially with respect to revising or publishing work?
LSS: I run a lot, and, when I was very young, I thought I loved running because I loved to win. I was small and awkward and it felt like winning was a way to feel less scared all the time. I was high ranked in the state, blah blah, thought I’d run in college, had vague ideas of going beyond that. Eventually, like most good-ish high school athletes I had to grapple with the fact that I wasn’t as good as more and more winning would require. I stopped running for a while once I realized this. When I came back to it, I came back to it as sustenance, a space that belongs completely to me and where I feel good and strong but also where I often go months without wearing a watch or even tracking how far I’ve run. This has been incredibly instructive to me as a writer: you have to have long stretches when you’re not clocking it, when it’s the place you go because you love it, because rolling around inside of sentences, making people up, trying to hack your way through all the dead language into something fresh and lively and true feeling feels sustaining, thrilling. I wish I would have known how the act of sitting down to write all by myself would always be the best part, and also, I’m so grateful knowing that now because, just like running (at least as long as my knees hold out) I can return to it regardless of what the outside world thinks of what I make.
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her non-fiction and criticism has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The LATimes, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia University and Bates College.
About the interviewer
Katie Hunter is a writer and educator based in Oakland, California. Her fiction, poetry and cross-genre narratives have been featured in HerStry, Milvia Street, Janus Literary, Lucent Dreaming and other literary publications. She currently teaches high school English and leads creative writing workshops for youth. Find her at katiehunterwriter.com and @kahunteroma.