Interview with Author Reneé Bibby

We are always in the mood for a story that feels unbarred (or "boundless," a term we love to use). Boundlessness can come from huge risks of form or content, or it can arrive via less obvious means: a subtly different type of voice, an unexpected setting, dialogue that surprises or moves us. Reneé Bibby's story "The Lake Holds No Light" taps into a lot of those elements. Catch up with the author in our short interview below!

Do you consider yourself an organized or chaotic writer? 

In the late '80s, when I was an aspiring teenage writer, my Apple IIe fritzed out and I lost all of my stories. Even then, I handwrote first drafts in a spiral notebook but typing up my stories is a big part of my rewrite process, so with that epic digital fluke, I lost the iterative “genius” of my heart-felt angsty writing. I despaired. There was no way back then to Google a solution. 

From that day on, I swore to never lose a single spark of creativity, no matter how ephemeral or pointless it may be. (I also became a compulsive command + S hitter so that stories will be sure to save, a habit so engrained I occasionally feel the compulsion to do it when I’m writing on paper.) 

I use a specific notebook to write stories, a second notebook to make notes on those stories, including ideas for rewrites or feedback, and a third notebook to keep track of more evergreen writing content, like lists of good character names, rejection counts, notes on themes, etc. I have a productivity app I’ve relegated to writing only, where I track ideas and notes on the go, as well as all of the research I do for a given story. I keep all of my analog material color tabbed and clearly labeled, and my digital content tagged and clearly labeled. I use an Airtable spreadsheet to keep track of all my pieces, cross referenced with a second spreadsheet where I track all the publications I’d like to be published in (yes, there is a Weird Lit entry!). 

Given all this, you’d probably guess that I’d be a plotter—knowing all the beats I want to hit in a story. But, it’s the opposite. I am absolutely a pantser with stories, freewheeling inside a narrative, excited to see where it might go. The clear guardrails around the process of writing means that I feel very free to explore without getting lost. 

What's your editing process? Do you have a first or beta reader, or a workshop group? 

I write everything by hand, first. It’s usually a mess of ink spills, crossing outs, marginalia, arrows swooshing across the page to show where a paragraph or phrase should move. I find that process organic and exhilarating. I don’t censure myself in the handwriting stage. As a young writer, I taught myself some cursive shortcuts so that I could get my ideas out faster, so this draft is always, truly, a Sloppy Copy.

Within days, sometimes hours, I have to translate that mess to the orderly digital landscape of Word. (If I wait too long, I’ll struggle to interpret my own handwriting and notes.) This is essentially the first edit. If that first draft is a wild-haired witch pulling sentences from the ether, this second draft is the Secretary version of me. She sorts through the madness for what makes sense. I make editorial choices as I type, moving scenes around, discarding content (goodbye, my darlings), or sometimes drafting new material. I will noodle on sentences and mark in the text where should be noodled on in future drafts. I almost always make notes in my companion notebook about what to deepen and explore in future drafts. 

The second draft is what I send to my numero uno reader, Lilian Vercauteren. (She and I also write stories together.) She does not write the same type of stuff as me, but she gets what I’m trying to do. Normally at that point it’s big picture feedback: what’s missing, what’s confusing, what’s gilding the lily. 

I then do several substantive rewrites solo. I do a lot of thinking about the story, rewriting, and pushing myself to understand what the story is about. 

A few drafts after that first input, I bring the piece to my writing group. That group, born out of my time as a student at the Writers Studio, is six of us who meet once a month to exchange feedback. We have been meeting for ten years. We all write very different material and often that’s my first taste of how a story will play with a broader audience. They’re generous in their support for my speculative fiction and horror even though they don’t write it themselves—you guys, I have made them read so much dark material. 

As my second readers, they prophesy either more work, or polishing. Sometimes, I learn from them that the story has some cracks in it. I’ll have to either spackle those, or … redo the whole foundation. I have absolutely torn a story all the way down to the studs to get it to work right. Just as often, there’s consensus that a story is working well, at which point they’ll do line edits (I’m a notoriously bad speller) or encouraging me to make small shifts in language that will punch up the impact. 

I repeat that cycle—to Lilian, rewrite, to writing group, rewrite, to Lilian, to writing group, and on and on—until the time when the story is finally doing what I want it to do.

This whole process can take up to a year. I had one story that I’ve been working on for ten years. I almost always have six or seven stories cooking, all at different points in this system (which, btw, is why I have a spreadsheet to keep track of everything). 

 Advice on creating that you’ve learned by trial and error?

My advice is this: you have to show your writing to people. 

In all the years I’ve been writing and teaching about writing, I’ve only ever met one writer who was good at being her own reader. Nearly every other person who wishes to put their creative content into the world has to first put their stuff into the world. No amount of planning, editing, self-censure or even ego will allow you to launch a successful first draft. Starting out, I thought was possible, partly because that’s how it’s portrayed in media—writer sits down, types a draft, sends it away to be immediately published. I had to have the perfect idea, execute it precisely, and maybe do some light edits, and then literary magazines would pay me to publish it. Naivety of what type of money you can make as a short story writer aside, there is some much more labor in writing than I ever knew and even more importantly—so much more feedback. You cannot stand on shore, look at the sea, conceive of a boat, build it, drop it into the water, and sail away.

If you want something to take off, you have to get in the ocean. You have to take your little, glued-together cork boat and put it in the water. In that way, you have to be scientific, keeping track of what works, what didn’t. There are so many ways to build a boat, even more ways to build a story. The only way you’ll get better at building is understand the component parts of story, understand how to mix and match them into something that will finally, some wonderful day, float.

If you were a cryptid, what would your name be and what strange habits would people whisper about?

I would be the Storyteller. As a woman in her Spinster Auntie era, I would be a long-haired, dowager-humped creature that haunts the hallows of the city to hiss psychological support at people who are in the grips of despair. The croaked threatening tone would in direct contrast to the positive content of the comments. In real life, when I am watching people spiral because they’re creating a worst-case scenario out of a situation, I often encourage them to “not write that story,” about the situation. I’d just keep that up in cryptid version. 

I’d appear in the glass of the subway, around the corner from the office breakroom, or in the bathroom stall next to them, and interrupt their intrusive thoughts with perspectives like, “or maybe they do love you but they were having a hard day,” but said with such menace that people are disconcerted. Unsettled. They will be so puzzled by what I said, they’ll chew on it for days. They’ll recount it to friends. And in retelling it, they’ll digest it. They’ll feel better. 

The denizens of the city will be terrified, but also hopeful I’ll appear. That when they need me the most, I’ll be there. 

What's your favorite obscure novel or short story (a work you never hear anyone else talking about)?

In the landscape of apocalyptic narratives, by far the best and most bizarre is The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay. The apocalypse kicks off because a virus causes people to understand animal communication, and we explore all the beautiful and tragic ramifications of that with Jean, a drunken, unlikeable main character, and Sue, a dingo. 

It’s not an “easy” story. Not only because Jean is not a typical character feel-good character, but because part of the premise is about how animal language would “sound” to us. It’s not a magical shift to a state where the animals converse in clear, Edwardian English. Their meaning and grammar—their motivations—remain obscure to us. The reader, like the people in the book, have to work to understand. I puzzled over whole passages, (to be fair, I am a reader and writer who likes some work in a story), and slowly grew to understand the dingo, Sue, and the stakes for both of them on their shared journey. When I say I wept at the end of this book? I had to get a tissue box. 

I have never met another person who has read it, but I wish to, someday. Given its opaque strangeness, I can’t recommend this book to most, but readers of Weird Lit might be just the right group! 

Pigs or chickens?

Pigs, 100%.  

Reneé Bibby (she/her) is a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. She teaches at The Writers Studio and reads for Brink. Her work has appeared in Fractured Lit, Luna Station Quarterly, and Taco Bell Quarterly. Reneé coordinates a yearly Rejection Competition for writers—all writers, all levels welcome! More at reneebibby.com.