Elizabeth Staple is the author of the new novel The Snap. She is also an attorney, and she has worked in sports public relations. She lives in Connecticut.
Q: What inspired you to write The Snap, and how did you create your character Poppy?
A: The Snap is largely based on my background and experiences working in sports public relations, which was my first career. It was something that I genuinely loved but also have complicated feelings about, and this book was an attempt to work through how those realities can coexist.
The earlier timeline when Poppy joins the team as an intern is a version of me as I was—pretty naive, really eager to belong and earn a place for herself, and willing to do almost anything to make that happen.
In the later timeline, Poppy is much more established, both in her career and as a person. On a micro level, she could never be pushed around the way that her younger self was, but overall, she’s been compromised through years and years of integrity papercuts.
I wanted to show how the first person becomes the second, and to create a discussion about power. Is it more valuable to have clean hands but no agency to create change, or to have sullied yourself in a really significant way but be in a position to make things better for the ones who come after?
Q: The writer Holly Gramazio called the book an “engrossing feminist sports whodunnit that made me care about the baffling logistics of American football...” What do you think of that description?
A: Holly’s description and overall support of this book is incredibly generous!
I think her mind is the most exciting kind of creative, where there’s an ostensibly ordinary and very straight-laced set-up that then takes a hard right turn, but with no blink toward the fact that it’s no longer within the ordinary world—almost a Will Forte of fiction.
I take Holly’s description as a high compliment, because to me it says that the story is Not Boring, and as a writer, what more could you ask of your readers?
Q: As you mentioned, you’ve worked in media relations in the sports world, but did you need to do any additional research to write the novel?
A: My greatest strength in writing this novel was also my greatest weakness—I haven’t worked in sports media relations in more than 10 years, and while that gave me the professional freedom to write this book without worrying about job security or professional blowback, a lot can change in that time, especially with the advent of team social media presences.
I reached out to a lot of friends and former colleagues who still work in those spaces to get a sense of how the weekly schedule has changed or adjusted, what’s the same, and what of my experience would be really outdated at this point.
Surprisingly, almost everything was still the same, from both a scheduling and temperamental standpoint. That has been really underlined by younger women in the field who’ve read the book and then reached out to say how much it resonated with them. It’s incredibly gratifying, on one hand, but on the other, of course I wish it all felt less familiar by now.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I almost never know how a book will end when I start writing.
I’m really jealous of authors who work from a neat outline and then write from page one through to the end, but I tend to have tentpoles instead—scenes that stand out in my mind, major plot points, even lines of dialogue that I hear very clearly and know I want to include. I write all of those first, and then work forward and backward, incorporating new ideas as I go.
It’s definitely not the most efficient way to work, but as I write I surprise myself by twisting this way or that way, and I genuinely don’t think I would be able to start from a blank page and visualize all of that without actually walking on the path, if that makes sense.
For this story, the original ending was even less resolved than it is now. I wanted something that felt very true to life and left the reader with the full frustration of the fact that these things happen, all the time, and most often go unpunished.
Without spoiling the ending, my agent and editor convinced me that for the sake of the narrative, it would be worthwhile to give readers a little bit more of an answer, even if a lot is still left up to interpretation and imagination.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now I’m working on a novel that plays around with perspective. I don’t want to say too much, but my main goal when writing books is always to start a good conversation.
With The Snap, it was to really challenge readers to consider what they would do in Poppy’s situation—not as their best selves, not as readers sitting on the sidelines, but as actual people whose careers were truly dependent on the tough choices they were being faced with.
In this next book, I’m hoping to start a conversation about how everything we experience is shaded and colored by everything we’ve experienced before, so that you and I can take almost identical walks through the park but come out the other side having processed what we saw and heard in completely different ways.
It’s slow going, but I’m excited when I think about what the finished product can be.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has read this book. There’s nothing that I love more than browsing in a bookstore, and the experience of walking into one and seeing my own book on a shelf will never, ever get old.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment