First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Lauren Groff discusses Matrix, out now from Riverhead Books.

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Your main character is Marie. How did you begin to create her? I have read, and you said a little bit in the acknowledgements of Matrix, that you were at Harvard, and you heard a lecture by this woman, Katie Bugyis, and you heard it, and you felt this sort of electricity. And I wanted to ask you what did that feel like in your body? And does that happen very often or that was some special relationship with you in the universe in that moment?

Lauren Groff: That's such a good question. I think it's both. I think it happens with some frequency, like when you know a story is a good one, and that you should pursue it, I think that there is some sort of electrical jolt and how it feels in the body. It's an animal response, right? At first, I was going to say that it was almost a vision, but no, your heart starts beating harder and light becomes tinted gold. And you feel hypersensitive to sensory input in a very real way. I only understand things through my body, right? I think that we are all animals. We are all sort of encased in this flesh and my ideas definitely come to my brain through the body first. And so, when I do sense an idea is a good one, it is a thrill. It's a jolt, it is electric, it is this this wild, sense of possibility sort of cracking open in front of me.

Mitzi Rapkin: I think what can be challenging for writers is that you have this electric golden jolt but how do you keep it when you're writing?

Lauren Groff: That is an immense challenge, isn't it? I mean, that is the challenge. It's a different kind of maintenance of energy. I think the first is pure input of energy and then you have to take a step back, and you have to figure out what does the energy mean. It is exactly trying to make the abstract concrete. In some arts that's much more direct, right, trying to create a painting out of a vision that you have that feels like a more direct transliteration of the abstract. Making music come into the world, composing a score, suddenly, you can actually hear it. And so, the abstract becomes like a more concrete idea. And writing, because our mode of material is words and words are themselves abstract, it possibly is a more circuitous route to the original jolt. I try to get out of my own way and by doing that, I have to trick myself often. I think, sometimes you need to make your brain less intelligent than the story in order to get the story out. And some of the tricks that I use are actually truly tricks and I'm trying to fool myself into getting out of the way. So, I'll get up very, very early and start working when I'm still basically asleep. So, you're kind of overriding that voice in the back of your head that imposes, editing, imposes the intellectual brain on the work. I have to physically exhaust myself every day, or almost every day, in order to get to a point where, again, you know, my brain is not getting in the way. I think a lot of exhaustion really helps with that. So, I'll go for long runs, or I'll swim until I can't see the world straight anymore, so that's another way of doing it. If things are difficult, and I have the time, I'll take a nap and then coming swimming back up to the surface of sleep, often helps reset things and helps you get back out of the censorious brain and into the life of the body. The body knows everything. I think the body is the thing that actually writes. The brain is the thing that actually edits and so I want to try to separate them and to make them as distinct as possible.

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Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel Matrix. Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies' Choice Award, and France's Grand Prix de l'Héroïne, was twice a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.