Writing Your Own Process: Desiree Prieto Groft
Alumni share their experiences and insight on polishing the craft and finding their own voice.
How has your writing changed throughout the years? What has surprised you the most?
I entered the M.F.A. program with an M.A. in English Literature and a bit of a journalism background, having written for mainstream print and online publications. But much of that writing—blogs and service journalism—was considered “low culture” compared to the “high culture” of academia, especially as journalism became increasingly clickbait-driven with digitization.
So, my writing wasn’t always the strongest, and my journey inevitably evolved into this mix of both excitement and shame. I often asked myself things like, Am I a real writer? Will my work ever be taken seriously? Will someone crucial to my future literary career find my silly NBC Chicago blog, “Design Your Underwear in Your Underwear?” But then also, Yay! My silly blog got syndicated in the Bay Area! I’m a syndicated writer now! (But maybe not a real syndicated writer?) Please don’t ever Google me in 2008 or any of these blogs one day.
Having the privilege of being in academia—especially in an M.F.A. program—was an incredible gift. I got to study some of the greatest writing across time and cultures. But academia could also be stifling, because if you’re a working writer or artist, your own art often lives in “low culture.” The term carries a negative connotation, historically referring to class hierarchy—being of the working class rather than the aristocracy. But low culture is also popular culture. It’s what resonates with a wider audience.
It took me years to answer that question—Am I a real writer?—with a firm but kind response: Yes, you are. Real writers have to work for a living, for things like money and exposure. But real writers can be like Cinderella—they can do the grunt work, polish floors and crack some eggs—and still chip away at their art a little every day to create something more beautiful and meaningful.
I think that I became more comfortable answering that question because I studied and practiced incorporating literary techniques from “high culture” authors—the masters of craft—which helped me refine my novel. In particular, I focused on structure. In journalism, you “who, what, when, where, why, and how” your way through a story upfront. Creative writing works differently. There’s a similar but more flexible framework. Is the story chronological? In media res? Told through flashbacks or an epistolary form? The answers can depend on whether the genre is creative nonfiction or fiction.
Some of the concepts I think about—regardless of genre—come from writers like Gay Talese, Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, and John McPhee: there should be a fixed point in time for the story to revolve around; write chronologically first and then tuck theme in later; both fiction and nonfiction should be as reliable as the most rigorous reportage, while reaching for a larger truth beyond verifiable facts;
Beyond structure, I think about things like how to squeeze the juice out of a metaphor on time like Eudora Welty, or how to incorporate humor as delightfully as Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, or Dorothy Parker.
What do you enjoy about writing the most or the least?
I love seeing all the hard work and countless drafts finally come to fruition—especially when the story resonates with other working women in my community and beyond. I’ve had women buy a copy of my novel for themselves and then more for their friends, daughters, and mothers. An old friend in Chicago told me that she and her teenage daughter read the book together every night and were sad when it ended.
Girl, Unemployed was born out of my frustration with the divide between high culture and low culture when I had to ask myself: When do I just get to write something fun and irreverent for real, working women who didn’t have family money or spouses to support them?
Women who were paid—if they were paid at all—less in the workforce, even when they didn’t take time off for marriage or babies. Women who were laid off during the Great Recession. Women who’ve had to collect unemployment checks. Women with grit, who made it out alive—who pushed through bitterness and resentment and discovered that building meaningful relationships, community, and tackling hardships with humor (and each other) got them through it.
I enjoyed finally leaning into that and letting myself do exactly that.
The thing I enjoy least about the writing process is energy—or rather, the lack of it. Ideally, I want to write every day. Sometimes I tell myself, Okay, just 1,000 words today. But with a toddler, a full-time job, and bills to pay, that can be tough. I also try to be real with myself and turn negative self-talk on its head by saying, Okay, nobody expects you to win the Pulitzer Prize today. Maybe tomorrow. You also don’t need to be Chekhov. Just make the writing exist on the page today, and you can always go back and make it pretty later when the draft is done.
Who have you been reading lately? How have they influenced or inspired you?
My professor and New School thesis advisor, Susan Cheever, influenced my nonfiction thesis Women, Money, Jobs, which later became fun fiction, Girl, Unemployed.
I read a couple of Cheever’s books while I was in the program, but I didn’t realize until years later that her first novel, published in 1979, was titled Looking for Work, similar to mine. How cool is that? Her novel was out of print, but I tracked down an old hardcover copy and sped-read it—it smelled like the musky libraries of times past.
Just last month, I read in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that Susan Cheever was publishing a new book about her Pulitzer Prize–winning father, John Cheever, titled When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever. So, I revisited my copy of The Short Stories of John Cheever and reread a few of his stories. Now that Susan’s new book is out, I’ve just started reading that, too.
I’ve always been fascinated by authors like John Cheever, whose work influenced the books, television, and films our culture grew up consuming throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—works like Mad Men, Seinfeld, and, more recently, Your Friends and Neighbors starring Jon Hamm on Apple TV.
I learned the art of writing clean, crisp prose from Susan. She was a stickler for grammar and sentence structure, so I tried to cut my run-ons. Still, I take creative risks with syntax because so much of my dialogue is colloquial—and the opening sentence of my novel is practically Faulknerian in length. I do my best to eliminate anything too verbose, redundant, superfluous, unnecessary, ad nauseam—or just plain boring or long-winded—unless I’m proving a point.
Perhaps most importantly, in the opening pages of her new book, Susan points out that in the 1950s, her father “moved to the suburbs, a place that everyone literary scorned but that turned out to be his great subject and his home ground. Westchester was his St. Petersburg, his Paris, his Yoknapatawpha County.”
Many of us writers go broke chasing these mirages—these Parises, these elusive, ephemeral ideas of what it means to be a writer—traveling the world and possibly accruing student loan debt studying literature and writing during a recession.
But we should remember that our job as writers is to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, wherever that may be. That’s what John and Susan Cheever taught me and other writers. And that’s what my novel is about: real working women struggling in the least glamorous of places and circumstances yet still finding the courage to chase success.
How did completing an MFA help you find your style or purpose in writing?
Completing my M.F.A. helped me learn and gain a deeper respect for the immense behind-the-scenes work that goes into building a narrative. A narrative includes plot, conflict, setting, and characterization. It also includes rising action, climax, and—hopefully—a satisfying denouement. But a narrative can also involve intense research.
Not everything was online when I was working on my M.F.A. thesis, which again, would later become Girl, Unemployed. I spent quite a bit of time at The New School’s Fogelman Library and NYU’s Bobst Library. I also visited the Historical Landmarks Commission in Greenwich Village and the New York Public Library near Bryant Park. Heading down to the NYPL basement to find old records of historical buildings was tremendous. I learned so much about the women’s hotels that became the central setting of my novel. I found incredible gems—especially from the now-defunct New York Tribune—with headlines about the strengths of imperialism and the first birth control pill. Very wild!
I also had the rare opportunity to live in one of the last historical hotels for women in New York City, which became the primary setting for my novel. I lived alongside one of the longest residents to date, a woman who had once worked aboard the Queen Mary in her heyday. She had lived there since 1968 and passed away while I was a resident.
Another woman in the hotel had a wild night with Mick Jagger in her heyday.
This next part is difficult to say, but another woman at a neighboring historical hotel for women jumped from her window and died. These heavy, real-life stories found their way into my novel because they were sobering wake-up calls: when you’re struggling, you often want to isolate yourself—but that’s when we need each other the most. We were all struggling alongside each other, yet not together. What if we had been struggling together?
The behind-the-scenes research I did allowed me to bring those stories to life so that their hard-earned lessons could truly resonate.
What piece of advice would you give to current students who are in the process of crafting their first novels/collections?
I think it’s important that we spend years standing on the shoulders of giants during this process—learning everything we can about writing and publishing, especially from institutions as storied as The New School. It’s also important to build a community and go to writing conferences, festivals, and workshops.
But it’s also okay to take a break if we feel we’ve had enough and can’t keep spending money and energy on conferences, querying, contests, and that exhausting hamster wheel of the traditional industrial publishing complex.
I also wish someone had given me grace and told me it’s okay if you don’t get one of these famous two or three-book deals in the high six or seven figures that are becoming the Big Foot of the publishing industry. You still have a voice, and there’s still an audience for your art.
We used to be humbler and more altruistic about our art, saying, “if it touches one person or saves one life, it’s done its job.” But in a digital era where influencers reign— and it sometimes feels like you’re nobody unless Knopf says you’re somebody— it’s important to return to humility and gratitude for smaller, but just as important, platforms to share our art with people who truly need it.
So, go find some supportive beta readers and editors to help you make your book shine. And then go publish it. And then go shout it from the rooftops. And then go ask your favorite bookstores to carry your book. Be honest. Be transparent. Be proud. Tell them that you’re an indie author. Just go out, play, and let go of all the shame.
Desiree Prieto Groft’s work has appeared in Newsweek, Huffington Post, Rome Today, and more. She also had a print column and blog at the San Antonio Current and contributed to the Emmy award-winning NBC Chicago Street Team. She teaches literature and writing at Arizona State University’s New College. You can read her bestselling novel Girl, Unemployed at Amazon and Barnes and Noble now.