Hello Beautiful People,
Lacy Crawford is a graduate of Princeton and the University of Chicago. She was the senior editor at Narrative Magazine, and the director of the Burberry Foundation, and, for fifteen years she as an independent college admissions counselor to the children of powerful clients in New York City, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and London. Lacy is the featured author in our School Time Author Q&A Series, as her book, Early Decision, (based on her experiences as an independent college admissions counselor) has recently hit shelves!
MM: First things first, did you ever imagine that you’d write a novel while working as an admissions counselor?
LC: Yes. That’s one of the reasons I never worked as an admissions counselor full-time; I was busy writing, and trying to earn a living while doing so. But I never thought I’d write a novel about working as an admissions counselor.
MM: What advice would you give to aspiring writers who wish to make writing their profession?
LC: That’s a very specific question, of course—not just advice for aspiring writers, but for those who wish to make writing their profession. I know of very few writers who only write, whose income from the writing is enough to pay for their lives. Many of them teach, or are on the lecture circuit, and / or have partners with steadier incomes. If you want to make writing your sole profession, I’d say you need to figure out how to turn out bestsellers, and / or live on not a whole lot—not useful advice, and not accommodating of the challenge of luck and the shifting of the publishing industry. The real advice for people who wish to consider themselves writers, and spend a great deal of each day working on writing, is to find a way to earn a living that permits you to read and write every day, to feel steady and grounded so you can get the writing done. If this is teaching, great. If it’s selling insurance, also great. Whatever it is that permits you to develop your writing will give you the best shot at selling that work and, in time, cutting back on the other things.
Also, read. Read real books and real articles and real poems, the best ones you can get your hands on, all the time. You are not reinventing the wheel. But you are reinventing yourself. So read the good stuff.
MM: Just for fun, if you were stranded on a desert island, what movies would you want to have with you?
LC: Home movies of my children, of course, if the stranding were real. Otherwise, for entertainment: Bull Durham, Chinatown, On the Waterfront… Do series count as film? Could I have a season of The Wire, or Mad Men? Or Sherlock?
MM: If you had to choose five musicians to listen to for the rest of your life, who would they be?
LC: The King’s College Choir (Cambridge), the Beatles, Lyle Lovett, Glenn Gould playing Bach, the Rolling Stones.
MM: Just for fun, what books are permanently on your bookshelf?
LC: Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, Alice McDermott’s Someone, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, John Lahr’s collected profiles, Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life, the two-volume edition of the OED, poetry by James Richardson, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, Adrienne Rich… It’s a big shelf, and it accumulates layers, slowly, like sedimentary rock.
MM: Do you write at a particular time of day and/or at a particular place?
LC: Now I am raising my children, who are 3 and 1, so I write whenever I can, often in the middle of the night, curled up with my back in the corner of a sofa. I take notes at the kitchen counter while my children play. I wrote much of Early Decision while my firstborn napped in his carseat—we parked in underground garages so my phone had no signal, and he’d stay asleep. I now have three mornings a week when I can work, assuming I have nothing else pressing in that time. I aspire to a regular schedule when they are both in school.
MM: Can you describe your writing process for our readers?
LC: I read all the time, the best books I can find, new and old. Ideas come. At some point, one idea will assume, to paraphrase I think Claire Messud, a certain urgency, and I will begin to take lots of notes as its shape emerges. I think about it constantly, and feel impatient to begin. Finally I find time to sit and draft. I write with great pleasure for about an hour, and then I look it over and realize that my sentences bear no resemblance to the idea in my head, and I am devastated and full of anguish and give up on the entire enterprise and resolve to go back to graduate school. Then I remember the words of a mentor—“No one asked you to write”—and settle back down to the work of getting on the page the story I have imagined. Back to the non-precious task of it, the boards and bolts, hanging words together so a reader will see what I see. I revise constantly as I go, and I can’t go forward until I feel I’ve got something solid in the paragraph before.
MM: What’s the biggest thing you hope readers will take away from Early Decision: Based on a True Frenzy?
LC: I believe that there is solace (and fun) to be found in perspective, and that’s what I hoped to provide. That regardless of Harvard’s admit rate, parents can honor their children’s voices without undermining their futures. That sweating the college process at all is an enormous privilege, and to raise a resilient and successful child requires having some awareness of that.
MM: What’s next for Lacy Crawford? (In terms of new and upcoming projects.)
LC: I have been taking notes toward another novel, which is not about college, for about a year. Though lately I’m happily sidetracked by an essay idea.
MM: In today’s economy, arts programs are being cut. What reasons would you give to a politician for preserving the arts?
LC: There was just that study published about how reading literary fiction encourages empathy. That we have to quantify this is alarming and frustrating, but the contemporary emphasis on data does seem to be making science of the spectacularly obvious. I believe that human beings must live in community with one another, and the only way to do this effectively is via the development of empathy. Beyond earliest childhood, the arts are the best means we have for teaching and practicing this human skill. It’s not only about compassion, about being kind. It’s about imagining other ways of being, which is about being in better contact with other people, and with ourselves. Finally, for some people, particularly young people, the arts are a set of languages that represent the only way to stay in conversation with others. Young people are saved by theater, poetry, fiction, and visual arts all the time, every day. They find a way to know their feelings and express them. To reduce opportunities for this sort of discovery is to endanger the development of a generation and will cost lives. I believe that in the most concrete sense.
MM: Who is/was your greatest teacher?
LC: Experience.
Thank you, Lacy!
Live, Love, Learn,
Megan &