An Interview with Lisa Nikolidakis

I had the pleasure of interviewing Lisa Nikolidakis, who has written two pieces that are near and dear to my heart: Silence, Stillness and Songs of Our Lives: Dead Kennedys’ “Chemical Warfare”. I was so nervous to email her for the first time that I postponed it for as long as possible, but after reading her first reply I knew instantly I needed to learn as much as I could from her. She is very funny, very kind, and likes good cheese.

From when you first began writing up until now, how do you see yourself as a writer? Have you changed much?

The first creative pieces I ever wrote were what would now be called flash fiction. I think I was in 5th or 6th grade. The stories were heavy on groan-worthy puns and all had one thing in common: everything in the world was fine, moving along swimmingly, until sudden and surprising death befalls all and boom: the end. Those stories, which I still have, are funny artifacts as they show two things clearly: (1) I had a morbid sense of humor even as a kid, and (2) I knew nothing about structure, but even then, I had a sense that characters have to undergo some change. Of course, it probably shouldn’t be death.

Then, for years and years, I only wrote poetry. In fact, when I applied to MFA/MA programs for fiction, I’d only written one short story. But both my MA and PhD work was entirely focused on prose. I think the early years of studying and writing poetry helped me on a language-level; I still hyper-focus on word choices. But even though I write maybe 2–3 poems a year, I’m no poet.

In my teens and early twenties, I thought that the more obscure my writing was — the harder it was to decipher its meaning — then the more genius-y it was. You don’t get it? That’s because I’m brilliant! Basic bullshit hubris. Through years of studying craft books and reading voraciously, that shifted: clarity is where it’s at.

Finally, you’re asking this question at a really fortuitous point. I am currently — like, right this very second — undergoing another paradigm shift as a writer and how I see myself. Mostly, I think I’m about to move away from the raw sadness of life and onto the joy. When I ask myself what I really want my writing to accomplish, the answer, now, is so clear: I want to make people belly laugh until they cry or accidentally fart (at least with my cnf; I feel good about the space my current fiction is in). And that’s a new chapter. I’ve written funny before, but it hasn’t been my focus.

That’s the long answer.

But in case you need a sound byte, here’s the short one: We’re always changing as writers, and if I were the same writer I’d been when I was, say, 20, I’d kind of suck.

I can’t wait to see where your endeavors on writing about joy take your works. I also really love making people laugh, it’s addicting to say the least.

A few other questions: When you decide to write something, do you just sit down with your writing instrument (i.e paper, computer, etc.) and let the process of writing guide you? Or do you plan something out before you write it?

This is a process question, and that binary is often called “outliners” versus “pantsers” (those that fly by the seat of their proverbial pants — a term I really don’t like, btw). For some work, I sit down with the idea and work at finding my way in. For others, I do tons of research first and take lots of notes and something in that is what gets me started. But almost always, what I have first is the opening line. That’s usually my way in. That said, I do a lot of thinking about where I want pieces to go, and I keep a giant sketchbook just for writing where I map and draw and plan some of what I write. For fiction, that frequently is a working out of the timeline of the story, the ages of characters, who my protagonist is and what she wants, etc… Other parts of the stories and essays are discovered as I write. Sorry if that’s a wishy-washy answer, but I guess what I’m saying is it’s complicated and largely depends on the piece. I definitely think a lot and research before writing and make notes, but it’s nothing like a formal outline. And when I’m really in the zone, there are things that come out in the writing that I just couldn’t plan for.

You talked a lot about your younger self and how you shifted from flash fiction to poetry and then to obscurity. If you could advise your younger self, what would you say? I know for me this is always a hard question, but would you guide her to where you are now more quickly? Or do you think that you needed to have all those different writing experiences to become the writer you are today?

Oh boy. Advice to younger self… I think that going through all of those phases/processes led me to where I am, so in that regard, all of that time was useful. I’d tell young me that anyone who says, “If you don’t write every day, you’re not a real writer” is full of it. That any person or book that tells you there’s only one way is only able to see that one way, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others. There’s so much prescriptive writing advice out there, and while much of it is useful, I think the grain of salt comes in really handy. The myth of one way to do it all — one way to succeed as a writer, one way to write a story, etc — is nonsense. Find what works for you, what gets you excited about the work, and do that. Also, read contemporary things. My education was so canonical that it took me a long time to come to more contemporary authors. I’m glad I read all the Poe, but all that really did was make me use the word “vexed” too much. So I wish I’d read a wider variety of classical and contemporary lit just to have a better sense of that landscape that I wanted to be a part of.

I’d like to ask about some of your favorite things. It can be movies or books; or even how eating your favorite meal makes you feel.

I am obsessed with film and lots of TV, so many books — Karen Russell is holding strong as my current #1 favorite author — hummingbirds, Rube Goldberg machines, webcams that live stream animals (currently watching some bald eagles that just hatched, and the parent birds keep bringing fish back to the nest), dancing, generosity, a ton of music (though I don’t like country much), museums, pandas, the Philadelphia Flyers, Beyonce, the Triple Crown, people who look like their dogs, teaching, theoretical physics, good cheese, psychology, Greece, coffee, the Dancing Plague of 1518, narrating my dogs’ thoughts, travel, my amazing partner, painting and mixed-media projects — the list goes on and on. I think it’s my writerly brain: I go down research holes daily and it can be about anything that grabs me. Today it was this “demon possession” that supposedly happened in Indiana, where I currently live. And I went deep. Read all of the news, police reports, etc… Yesterday it was chickadees. Any time I find something interesting, I want to know everything about it.

What would you say is the hardest part about writing?

The isolation. I find writing to be a lonely sport, and while I do like some alone time, I occasionally wish I’d chosen a more social profession. Or one that lets me play with pandas.

Based on your process answer I am very interested in how you edit your works. Do you edit while you go or do you edit entirely at the end?

I do specific edits/revisions once I have the key beats in place. I rewrote the ending of the short story I was just talking about, and it’s got all the beats in place, so next to my laptop are a series of Post-Its. One has a list of words that I need to control+F for because I know I’ve overused them. It is crucial to learn what your lazy words are as a writer. Some of mine are: just, though, laugh, so/but, and feel. So I will control+F for each of those and clean up the repetitions. That will be one edit, one sitting. Just repetitive words. Then I’ll do an edit for stronger verbs. I go through the piece and find all of the “to be” verbs and others that are kind of boring and see if I can replace those. Sometimes I do an edit just for humor (if the piece calls for it), and I’ll go in and punch up the jokes. I always do a revision for character descriptions, and I try to lay off too many descriptions of, say, eyes.

When I’m doing specific edits/revisions, I don’t let myself do anything else. If I see something else that needs changing, I’ll bold it and stay on task. That way I can come back to it later.

That’s all the stuff I can do on my own, but my beta readers are crucial. I send my story to 2–3 people that I think are good readers of my work. And poor them: they got my story this morning and that beast is 27 pages, which is long for a short story. Like, really long. But I will spend probably an hour discussing it with them and then I’ll make changes to the things that I can’t catch in my own work. That’s usually not sentence-level stuff but more to do with pacing, logic, etc, though sometimes it’s language-level. Especially my partner’s notes. He’s a poet, so he’s really zeroed in on the prose.

That all said, the best revision advice I can give you is this: every time I open a doc, I save it again as a higher number. So my first draft is “With Mercy.” The first time I revise or edit, I re-save it as “With Mercy 2.” And so on. I just make a folder for the story and do that every single time I work on it so that I never lose anything, and I’m not afraid to make real cuts and changes. I lose nothing. The draft I finished this morning is #5. Sometimes I have 15 of them. It all depends. But that is my best advice other than backing up all of your work to at least two places. Every time I finish a draft, I email it to myself.

What do you think makes a good story?

One that sticks with me and has lovely language. For me, all stories in every genre are about what a character wants. The three questions I repeatedly give my fiction students, which I’ve cribbed from screenwriting, are : 1. What does your character want? 2. What’s standing in the way of that? And 3. What is she willing to do to get it? Figuring that out is where I think plot comes from.

Coming up with titles is always very hard for me, how do you come up with titles?

I’m on fire with my titles right now, but traditionally that hasn’t been the case. I almost never have the title first, but I’ve usually got it pretty early in the process. When in doubt, pull out a meaningful phrase from what you’ve written or one that has an image that matters. The title of the story I just finished is “Every House Must Bleed,” which might wind up being the title of the collection. The title came from research. That’s a saying that people used when talking about Carnival season because everyone was supposed to slaughter a pig (for food). But it works on another level because that horrifying thing about the virgin sheets is in that story, too. But yeah: pull out a pretty phrase that gets at the essence of your piece.

I personally don’t really enjoy writing non-fiction. Do you have a specific niche within non-fiction you enjoy writing for?

I’m not sure that I find any writing to be “enjoyable.” It’s like the gym: I don’t want to go, but I feel better when I have. There’s no niche that I’m into more than others, but I can say that I am tired of writing about my father and my abusive childhood. Maybe I’ll return to that subject someday, but for now: I’m more interested in writing about ANYTHING else.

How has teaching effected you? Have you learned anything interesting from your students? Did you ever see yourself teaching when you were younger?

I wanted to be a ballerina lawyer when I was a kid, but it turns out that doesn’t exist. How sad for us all. I never wanted to teach; it wasn’t even on my radar. But when I was doing my Master’s, there was the opportunity to teach, so I tried it — mostly because I was tending bar and going to grad school and really had no idea what I would do for work once I had the degree. Saying yes to that opportunity was the best decision of my life. I ADORE teaching, and though this sounds more hokey and new-agey than I usually am, I believe it’s what I was meant to do. I couldn’t have anticipated how much it would affect my life or in what ways, and it turned out to be the thing that gave me precisely what I was missing but couldn’t put my finger on: purpose. I am never more pumped about the world than when I’m teaching; the free exchange of ideas, the dissecting of published works, the energy the students bring to their own work — GAH. I love it all.