Matter of Craft with Hala Alyan
In this edition of Matter of Craft, Hala Alyan, author of Salt House and The Arsonists’ City, chats with us about storyboarding, her 30 minute a day writing practice, how her writing process changed with her second book and how poetry serves her prose.
Kailey Brennan: Since The Arsonists’ City is your second novel, I was curious how the process of writing this one was different than your first?
Hala Alyan: Totally. Yeah. I love that question. It’s actually wildly different. I forget who said this but I read somewhere that the best way to learn how to write a novel is to write a novel and it's so true. I know sometimes when people are published, they aren’t publishing the first book they’ve worked on. In my case, Salt Houses was, so it was really my introduction to novel writing and long prose writing, from the ground up. I did it in the most inelegant, complicated, torturous way possible. I wrote per my curiosities - I do a 30 minute a day practice - so every day I would wake up and be like, what do I feel like writing today? And I would just bop back and forth with the timeline and the city and different perspectives. By the end I had hundreds of Microsoft word documents that were just different scenes and I had to go back, collect them all, stitch them together, and try to make a coherent whole narrative out of all of these bits and pieces. And I cursed myself a million times doing that. So I said I will never do this again. So I may have overcorrected a little with The Arsonists’ City. From the beginning, I took very much of a screenplay approach and storyboarded the hell out of the story first. I got a ton of different colored note cards and a big corkboard and sat down and just mapped out. There are five different family members who I would say get similar airtime. So each one had a different notecard, the different cities had different parts of the corkboard, and I just really had a strong sense, before I put pen to paper of the plot. At least kind of as a whole and how everyone interacted with each other and where each person was and what their narrative arc was. And of course in day-to-day writing your characters misbehave and they do unexpected things that you have to change. There's still spontaneity and surprise, but it really helps me to get a handle on the plot from the very beginning.
KB: Yeah. That actually was my next question for you. Since we have different perspectives and timelines and flashbacks. So you do outline first and know where you are going.
HA: So the way that I work in general, and maybe this is what most writers do, is I'll have like an image in my head of something that I want to happen. I'll have what I think are pivotal moments in the narrative.
Then I will try to find a way to visually represent them. So they're sort of like crumbs, and then I'm trying to create the trail that follows those crumbs. So like, how do I get from this moment between the couple in Beirut to this moment where their son, however, many years later is trying to do this- how am I getting from this to this to this narratively? So it usually starts with images that have come to me while daydreaming or literally dreaming or just talking to people or brainstorming or whatever. Then I try to fill it in later on.
KB: That makes sense. How long did it take you to write this book where it’s pretty lengthy. And it seems like there might have been some research involved so I was curious how long this process was?
HA: You would think it took longer than Salt Houses or at least the same time but it actually took a lot shorter, and I think it was because I did the plotting first. I invested a solid few months in just storyboarding and getting that down before I started writing, which I had never done anything like that before. So Salt Houses came out in 2017 and then it took me a few months before I started storyboarding so I would say about two years start to finish, final draft handed in. Maybe even like a year and 10 months or something. But again, I had an approach that once I had the plot, the writing - knock on wood because it's not like this is how all projects are - the writing really flowed easily with this one, which was really delightful and wonderful. I also had the luck and the privilege of having a couple of really great residencies in the midst of it. I went to Paris for a full month where I had nothing to do but write there. I took a trip and it had some time to myself to write. I had the luxury of more extended periods of time to write.
KB: You mentioned that you write for 30 minutes a day. What does your typical writing day look like? Take us through a day in the life.
HA: I'm a dual career person, so I would say a day in the life usually teaching a class and then seeing a few patients, clients, or I'll do a few therapy sessions, take a break and then do a few more. So that's kind of what I'm doing in terms of a day job. Then at some point during the day, I have the ritual of 30 minutes a day, but I don't have any other ritual beyond that. It's not like I need to do it in the morning or I need to do it at lunch or at nighttime. Just as long as, at some point in the day I do 30 minutes of writing. I feel good about it. I have this little hourglass that's 30 minutes so I'll literally turn the hourglass around and put my phone away and then just dive in for half an hour. It's been a pretty consistent practice. I'm really pleased that I've been able to keep it up. If I were to be on a residency, which is far less frequently, I'll usually start the day off by reading, then do 30 minutes, then read, then do another hour or two, then take a break, then do another hour. I'll try to bulk up what I'm actually doing, for more than a half an hour.
KB: I’m sure it depends on what you are writing but are you a fast writer? Or do you really take your time in those 30 minutes?
HA: I think because of the 30 minute model, which is how I started writing the first novel so it's all I know in terms of writing longer form prose, I'm pretty quick. I'm very attached to really terrible first drafts. I'm not afraid of all the horrible first draft. They are horrible, let me tell you. (Laughs)
If anyone saw a first draft of mine, it would be unpublishable because I have a code that I write it. Like I do like a capital “x” for when I need to come back and fill in a word. I'll underline a word that I think, close but not exactly what I want. I'll write little notes to myself. I'll be like, Hala, make this scene better, Hala, punch up this dialogue. it's all these symbols and numbers, so it is really indecipherable. But my priority in the first draft is to get everything down on the page and then you can pretty it up later. It doesn't matter. I don't need it to be. I think you save time one way or another. At somewhere, the time has to be spent. I have a lot of friends that are really methodical, thoughtful writers and they take their time constructing sentences. And I think what ends up happening is they have fewer things to edit later on. So they save time in that way. They're kind of doing the editing as they're writing. And then there's my model, which is like vomit it on the page and then edit it later.
KB: I'm in the middle of my first draft right now, so I'm feeling that.
HA: Which direction are you more in?
KB: I’m like get it down, edit later, like you.
HA: That’s awesome you are halfway through.
KB: I have a writing partner who just finished and I’m a few thousand words behind, so we are hoping to start revisions together.
HA: Oh, I love that. having a writing partner sounds so wonderful. What a great system of accountability.
KB: Definitely! So I'm curious about where you have so many character perspectives in the novel, was there one character you enjoyed writing more than others, or were there any that were a particular challenge for you?
HA: I like that a lot. I think Naj the youngest daughter who's in Beirut was particularly fun. I lived there a decade ago. The summer that the family is there is in 2019, so I know a different Beirut than the one that I was writing. I have gone back to Lebanon I would say every year, once or twice, so I still kind of have a finger on the pulse of the scene there. [Writing Naj] really allowed me to kind of dive into these really fun parts of that city and all the different subcultures, artistically and to think about what it would be like to be, on the cusp of 30, and a really successful musician, living, in my opinion, in one of the most amazing cities in the world. She's also just so stubborn and so annoying in a lot of ways that that was fun to write.
I also really liked Mazna. Mazna’s journey was for me, one that I never was bored writing. I was always really invested in her and her emotional journey or lack thereof. You see her in all these really different situations where either circumstantially terrible things are happening or she's kind of making terrible things happen. That sort of character I think can be really interesting to write.
KB: In addition to fiction, I know you also write poetry. So I was curious, how do you think those two genres influence each other in your work?
HA: So for Salt Houses, I remember this thing I kept saying in interviews, which I really meant was like the way that I was able to get through writing a long reform piece, which was unlike anything I'd done before, was that it felt like I was writing like a million little poems. I was just writing thousands of little poems and just focusing sentence by sentence, scene by scene, and paragraph by paragraph. That made it feel less inundating. And I think there is some truth to that still. I think I approach larger projects - and the storyboarding kind of helped with this one- as like really, they're just an amalgamation of a ton of tiny moments and those tiny moments, that ability to kind of get really granular or look at the specificity of things feels very much borrowed from poetry. So I think in that sense, poetry has really served me. I think prose writing has served me with poetry in that it's allowed me to really expand the poem. So I think before I started doing more fiction work, I was very rigid about what a poem looked like. I think working more in cross-genre ways has brought me out of my shell in terms of being more experimental with format.
KB: Are you working on any more poetry or are you working on another novel? What do you see in the future?
HA: When the pandemic hit, I was working on a third novel that I literally stopped working on the week of lockdown and have not picked back up again. I just printed it out at staples and it's massive. And again, indecipherable to anyone and I need to l reread it to catch up with where I was, because I want to get back into it. So there is a third novel, but I put it aside during the pandemic to work on nonfiction. I can't fully explain why. I think there was something about quarantining and lockdown that made imagination and fiction a little harder to access for me, whereas the urgency of the experience and the immediacy of the experience helped me unlock things in a nonfiction kind of personal essay memoirish way, a lot easier. So I have a nonfiction book that I'm working on. It's a cultural memoir on the concept of erasure and the ways that it manifests in eating disorders and attachment disorders and alcoholism and just the different ways that we get erased and erase ourselves. I'm hoping to return to the novel very soon. My bridge to that has been that I've worked on a couple of short stories in the last few months. So that's been me dipping my toe back into fiction. It's wild. If you don't do something for a few months, you really lose that muscle a little bit, or at least you start to get scared that you're gonna lose that muscle. The other thing is that I don't really monitor my poetry. The poetry comes when it comes. I usually do two or three months out of the year. I'll find a poet that I love and be like, do you want to do poetry swap? And we'll swap poems every day for a month. Then sometimes there are months where I don't write a single word of poetry and it's fine. I kind of trust that relationship more and I can pick it up when I'm inspired. Whereas fiction and nonfiction, I need to be more disciplined.
KB: That nonfiction book you are writing sounds fascinating. I can't wait for that.
HA: Thank you.
KB: My last question for you is what was the last book you read that you can recommend?
HA: I just read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and I super duper recommend it.
HALA ALYAN is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
