DRIVING QUESTIONS

ARTWRITE: I’d like to start by talking about what fuels the stories that you tell. Dani, can you explain how driving questions apply to your fiction and memoir?

DANI: I think of it as the inquiry - what is the inquiry that shapes the structure of what I write. Some questions remain the same throughout my work, but in some books the question changes, which is why there are more books and not just one.

In my memoir Devotion, I was in this midlife existential crisis with a lot of questions, and those questions became the inquiry. If I was working on something that didn't fall into that thematic place, I tabled it.

In Hourglass, the question was: how do you walk alongside another person for the duration? I read Wendell Berry's essay "Poetry and Marriage" with its phrase "the troubles of duration," and I thought, "I want to explore what it is to form yourself alongside another human being for the duration."

Anytime I've written myself into a corner, it's because I've been grasping rather than waiting. When the question comes - not on my timetable, but it always comes - it's unmistakable.

ARTWRITE: How does the driving question resonate for you, Laura?

LAURA: As a visual person, I take photos that become a sketchbook where I'm collecting images - the way light falls or things intersect in odd ways. Something might haunt me for a long time and I'm not sure why I need to paint it, but I can sense there's a story there. I don't know what it is, but I find it through the process.

ARTWRITE: Is it in the act of painting that you discover it?

LAURA: Yes.

DANI: It's the same for me. I can be 200 pages into something before I know, "Oh, that's the thing." I wish I could have an idea and execute it with confidence. Actually, I don't, because why would I do it if I already knew what it was? It's about discovery and staying with it until it reveals itself.

ARTWRITE: Do you have an outline when you start to write?

DANI: I follow "the line of words." I've never had an outline. The closest I came was with my memoir Slow Motion. I was trying to approach it like fiction and couldn't. A journalist friend asked if I'd outlined it, and I said "Outline? I'm a novelist." She said, "But you know what happened." That was a revelation.

I created something of an outline - "I begin here, it ends a year later, here are the key emotionally driven moments." But underneath was still the question: well, why and how? As my friend Andre Dubus says, "The question is not what happened, it's what the fuck happened."

LAURA: Exactly. There's something in that moment or composition I cannot understand, and through painting it, I'm trying to learn more.

ARTWRITE: How do you know when you've reached that place where you've cracked the code of the thing?

LAURA: It's an editing process - eliminating things, focusing some areas of the painting, softening others. I'm directing the eye and understanding the hierarchies within the composition. There's a certain point where the light resonates and I feel things in tension with each other. It's not defined by an ending - there's never an ending to the painting.

MULTIPLE TRUTHS

ARTWRITE: Laura, can you talk about how you approach perspective in your work?

LAURA: I think about who we are in the space, in terms of perspective. I'm trying to play with that - we can be many different things at different times within that story. I'm exploring perspective where you can be on different sides of the painting with different narratives happening in dialogue with each other.

I'm fascinated by how we're living in a moment of simultaneous realities and simultaneous truths. We can experience the same thing from such different perspectives that produce two valid truths about what happened. I'm trying to manifest that in my work - multiple narratives coexisting in tension with each other.

Some of my paintings now have holes in the middle, bringing the outside in. Others incorporate text, like one that uses three completely unrelated messages from my phone: a text about a spider bite, a news alert about "James Comey being fired," and a personal message saying "I'll be home." These unconnected bits become linked only through my personal experience - how our individual perspective becomes the connecting thread between seemingly unrelated information.

ARTWRITE: Dani, how do you capture multiple points of view in writing?

DANI: It's become one of my favorite things to do in fiction. I think of it as an orchestra of voices. Literature allows us to get close to the interior life of another in a unique way. We can step into the interiority of another life, and I'm interested in how those interiorities bump against each other.

In Signal Fires, there are seven main characters who are deeply connected but have their own separate interiorities. Trying to show both their individual experiences and their connections is exciting.

I had a piano teacher who said the piano was the greatest instrument because you could be soloist and accompanist simultaneously. I've thought about that in terms of writing. My early novels were in first person, but in Black and White, I knew I needed more than one character's perspective. It was about a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and the mother was a photographer. From just the daughter's view, the mother would seem like a monster, but I saw her as a complex character trying to reconcile her artistic ambition with motherhood. The only way to do that justice was to include both perspectives.

LAURA: The challenge is creating this in a way viewers can understand that all of these truths are simultaneously valid to different people.

DANI: I love that approach. It's what makes art and literature so powerful - the ability to hold multiple truths at once.

CHARACTERS

ARTWRITE: Dani, you use the word "characters" in your work, while Laura, you don't. How do you each develop the people in your work?

DANI: It's very different in fiction versus memoir. In memoir, the characters are real people who have their own truths. I think of myself as a character too - not exactly me, but me-adjacent. It's storytelling, not journaling, which is unadulterated me.

In fiction, characters are conjured up. I don't necessarily base them on people I know, though readers often think I do. They come to me with that unmistakable "shimmer" I mentioned.

When starting a novel, I almost always begin with character. For Black and White, I spent a year just knowing there was this mother and daughter with tension between them, but I couldn't get to it. Then driving to the city one day, it suddenly came to me: "The mother's a photographer, she lives on the 12th floor of the Apthorp, her daughter was her subject." That download gave me enough specificity to begin following where they wanted to take me.

With my character Shenkman in Signal Fires, readers would tell me, "I couldn't stand him, he was such a terrible father!" I remember thinking while writing, "Oh Shenkman, don't do that, you can do better." But he was who he was, and I had to follow him rather than puppeteer him.

LAURA: I never start with "I want to paint about X." I respond to things I see in real life - light patterns or compositional intersections. I'm constantly taking photos on my phone of seemingly nothing - just interesting visual intersections.

These photos often include people I know - friends and family. So when I start, there's a real person with a personality, but these aren't portraits. They're starting points for something figurative.

My daughter, when she was about four, asked me, "Mama, how come you paint me so mysterious?" She was saying, "I see me in that image, but it's not me." I explained she was like an actor in a story I was telling - we're collaborating to depart from the original place as I push relationships between colors or focuses.

In a series called "Far Sight,” I tried inverting the hierarchy - making the subject secondary and forcing your eye to the least important element, like a distant light in the background. I was treating people as architectural elements within the composition.

SELF-DOUBT

ARTWRITE: How do you handle the negative voice in your head? Is Sylvia Plath right that self-doubt is the worst enemy to creativity?

DANI: It's an ongoing challenge that never goes away. I find that liberating to understand - there isn't a point where it just disappears. My inner censor keeps morphing and shifting. It might say, "What right do you have? You're not good enough. Someone else has done this better." If it always said the same thing, I'd recognize it and say, "Be quiet." The challenge is hearing all that and working anyway.

A few years ago, looking through successfully completed pieces, I realized I'd started each one thinking, "Here goes nothing." But the next thought was always, "And I'm going to do it anyway." If I don't dive in, I'll never find out what's possible.

LAURA: In your book Still Writing, you mentioned not falling in love with your work while making it. What did you mean?

DANI: It's like "killing your darlings." A professor once told me, "You know how to write a beautiful sentence. You just need to make sure it means something." Once I pulled that dagger from my heart, I never forgot it. I don't want to be mesmerized by poetic language that isn't actually serving the essence.

LAURA: That's crucial. If I fall in love with a certain brushstroke, I end up painting around it repeatedly. I can't make progress because I'm holding that part so precious that it controls the rest of the painting.

I actually look forward to moments when I feel I've lost a painting or ruined it, because then I'm much freer to work on it. When I really love something, I become too paralyzed. Those days when I come home thinking "it's not working" often lead to breakthroughs the next morning when I can approach it fresh.

DANI: I love that. I think of it as diving deeper and deeper into a work, and there's a place right before you find it that actually feels like despair. You have to go through that despair to hit bottom and push up. You can't fake it - you actually have to get there.

LAURA: Especially in today's world, which is so noisy, scary, on fire. My inner censor asks, "Who cares why that's important?"

DANI: When my son was sick as a baby, I couldn't write for years. I thought, "I should go to medical school and invent medications that save babies' lives." There's this feeling of isolation in your studio or writing room, and self-recrimination can spiral. But then there's this absolute need to create.

And when the despair is real, another voice says, "There'll be another day when you think it's great." The same brain looks at the same work and thinks "not bad" one day, then "this sucks" three days later.