“When there is something I don’t understand about the world, or other people, or even myself, it is only through writing about it that I can get any clarity on it.” —Stacey Swann
On Wednesday, November 19, Stacey Swann will teach “Show and Tell: The Power of Exposition and Interiority.” In this class, students will learn how exposition and interiority can heighten the impact of scenes and allow deeper access to voice, ultimately bringing out their characters’ complex and subjective selves. This class is a part of the Novel Writing Class Package.
Stacey Swann’s debut novel Olympus, Texas (Doubleday) was a Good Morning America Book Club selection, an Indie Next Pick, and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Swann holds an M.F.A. from Texas State University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, Texas Highways, Epoch, and other journals. She splits her time between Austin and Lampasas, Texas.
Here’s what Stacey had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
Stacey Swann: As a kid, I loved to immerse myself in book series. There was something about getting extended time in a completely different world from my own that I loved. My sister and I shared a box set of the Little House on the Prairie books. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were probably my favorite, though—the talking animals as well as the exciting tales of adventure. (The Christianity part flew right over my head.) I also devoured The Black Stallion series and established my early love of mysteries with Encyclopedia Brown. After that, I moved on to helping myself to my parents’ library books. I loved Stephen King and was blown away by his voice and imagination.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
SS: For a long time, I grappled with writing resistance. I wanted to write and didn’t feel fully myself if I wasn’t regularly writing. However, I also had the hardest time sitting down to write and facing the page. It wasn’t until I really dug into what was going on in my subconscious—some early beliefs I held about myself, my talent, and what it meant to be useful in the world—that the resistance loosened up. It taught me to pay attention to my process and my emotions around my work. If things aren’t going well, it isn’t because I am not meant to be a writer. It’s because there is something in my subconscious damming things up. The only way to get back to flow is to uncover the source of the block.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
SS: Besides the clarity that I get from writing, which I talk about in the next answer, I think the most rewarding part of being a writer is the community it has given me. There are just so many opportunities to make connections with other writers, and our shared love of books and writing makes friendships come more easily, somehow. This first started when I took creative writing extension classes at UT in my mid-twenties and continued on when I went to grad school for my M.F.A. Since then, my community has grown and grown thanks to the Writers’ League of Texas, fellowships and conferences, and the thriving literary scene in Austin.
Who do you write for?
SS: I wish I had a more magnanimous answer to this, but I write almost solely for myself. I do find it really gratifying when readers of my work tell me that it was meaningful to them in some way. But at the end of the day, my reason for writing is much like Joan Didion’s reason: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” When there is something I don’t understand about the world, or other people, or even myself, it is only through writing about it that I can get any clarity on it.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
SS: I want to remind people that the best way for books to compete with film and TV isn’t to copy them by always “showing” via scene and dialogue, but to lean into the things that film and TV don’t do well: exposition and interiority. (Just think about how clunky a movie voiceover typically is.) In fiction often my favorite parts are getting those deep dives into interiority or getting an unexpected swerve into exposition that changes my understanding of the fictional world. It’s not that we want to avoid writing scenes, but we have this amazing superpower we can weave into those scenes. We shouldn’t be afraid to use it.
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Thanks, Stacey!
Click here to learn more about Stacey’s upcoming class.
