We recently connected with Carol LaHines and have shared our conversation below.

Carol, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Like many writers, I began as an avid reader. I began reading at age 4 and devoured almost a book a day for much of my childhood. I think reading is the one sure way to internalize the craft of writing–it happens intuitively. I am a product of 11 years of Catholic school, and I definitely credit my teachers for instilling principles of grammar, sentence structure, etc. as well as for encouraging me. In college, I did not study writing per se, but I studied literature, with a heavy emphasis on classics like Dante and Shakespeare. I also studied music, which I realized, in retrospective, also had a profound influence on my craft, as I came to appreciate that I was incorporating musical structures and forms (leitmotif, recursion, theme & variation) into my work. In my twenties, I studied with Phil Schultz, a Pulitzer-prize winning poet who founded the Writers Studio in Manhattan. His devotion to the study of voice, specifically, had a profound impact; my later studies with Rick Moody had a profound impact, as well, as he understood immediately (before I did) what I was attempting to do, and his writing advice was always targeted and modulated. So the path was rather circuitous and haphazard, which I don’t think is unusual for creatives, writers especially. I think it is important to understand what type of writer you are; what work you gravitate toward; what your process is; and to appreciate the distinction between writing versus editing.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Writing is not a marked career path in the manner of say, law or medicine. I began writing seriously in my twenties. I studied craft at the Writers Studio for 5+ years and with Rick Moody for 8+ years. I spent a copious amount of time assimilating the elements of craft. I wrote short stories exclusively at the beginning; as I progressed, I started writing longer works and generating work much more quickly. I’ve published dozens of short stories in literary journals like Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, redivider, etc.; I’m the author of two novels, Someday Everything Will All Makes Sense and The Vixen Amber Halloway, both in a tragicomic/dark comedic vein; I’ve been nominated for various prizes, including the Pushcart Prize.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I’ve been a lawyer; I’ve been a musician; but for me, nothing is more rewarding than being a writer. Writers create entire worlds; they transcribe human consciousness onto the page; by some inexplicable alchemy and process of transmutation, they bring life to the page, conveying the human condition. The impulse to tell stories is intrinsic to human beings; from the earliest times, we’ve had myths, narratives that shape how we see the world. Every day, I begin anew; there is nothing routine about it. Each story, each book, has its own demands, its own structure and internal logic that it is ours to discover; magic routinely happens, in ways we can never fully anticipate.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Because my path to writing has not been a traditional one, I feel I’ve been less susceptible to certain kinds of canned writing wisdom–generic advice/bromides like show don’t tell. This type of advice tends to suppress the more radical, inventive writers and induce a kind of unfortunate stylistic uniformity. I’ve learned to be less reliant on workshops, where a certain kind of groupthink can take over without a skilled moderator. Writers have to learn when to heed advice and when to ignore it, and who, specifically to listen to. It can be difficult. Part of this involves understanding who we are as writers and which models we identify with. I’m never going to be Raymond Carver or a minimalist, and my work is always going to tend toward a more ironic sensibility. You have to accept this and adjust yourself accordingly.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.carollahines.com
• Instagram: @carollahines
• Facebook: Carol LaHines
• Linkedin: Carol LaHines
• Twitter: @CLahines
• Other: https://linktr.ee/clahines

Image Credits

Robin Martin