Melissa Broder, author and creator of the Twitter account @sosadtoday writes on themes like body image, the internet and dating (both irl and online). As she releases her third novel Death Valley — a darkly amusing grief-based survival story — we caught up with Melissa and asked her to talk us through her creative practice. Giving her take on the typical advice given to young novelists, she shares just how far they apply to her everyday work, before offering up some rogue advice on finding both community and inspiration.
Write everyday
“It might not be a lot, it might be a little bit, but I write everyday. I sometimes have a couple of projects going at the same time, so I’ll work on at least one of them.”
Write what you know
“I write in terms of internal landscape. I’m always writing what I know, or you could actually say I’m writing what I don’t know because I often write out of a question or dilemma that I’m experiencing.”
Make a plan
“I often do an outline, but it’s sort of more like the ship of Theseus, where I start out with an outline, and then by the end of writing every single piece of it, the outline has changed. But it’s still the same ship. Or at least, a ship.”
Research
“This one depends on what I’m writing. For Death Valley, I did a lot of research about edible plants and the hierarchy of needs, and how long a person can go without water, things like that.”
Carry a notebook and pen (kind of)
“I carry my phone, and that serves as my notebook.”
Read widely, and allow yourself to be influenced
“I’m not a big fan of instructional writing books, but there is one book like that that I found really fascinating. It’s called Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the very First Sentence by Lisa Cron. I’ve read it twice, actually. It’s pretty corny, a little ‘live, laugh, love’, but I personally found it really helpful. I tend to be very internal and this book talks about plot, but from an internal sort of perspective, and a brain perspective. It asks things like, why suspense? Why do we, as readers, love suspense? And how can that be achieved, even if we know what is happening or what is about to happen?
“In terms of writing influences, one writer who I feel is such a creeper, who sneaks in a lot, is Thomas Bernhard. I wouldn’t say that my style overall is a Thomas Bernhard style, but whenever I end up reading him he somehow gets in. There’s a scene in Death Valley when the protagonist is tracing her steps back and forth, and it’s a little bit Berhardy. The sentences get longer and longer, like his do, and some of his voice gets in there.
“Book by book, however, I have had different influences. For my poetry, I would say that Dorothea Lasky has had a huge influence on me. For The Pisces, I read Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter and Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s The Professor and the Siren. For my second novel Milk Fed, I was slightly more intentional and I read a lot of Isaac Bashevis and the early books of Philip Roth, who is one of my favourite writers — I read his Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus. There was more of an intentional infusion with Milk Fed.
“For Death Valley, I read a lot about deserts, like the environmentalist Edward Abbey’s work, especially Desert Solitaire, and the creeper Bernhard.”
Adapt the way that you write
“For The Pisces and Milk Fed, I dictated my first drafts and then I was sculpting, sculpting, sculpting them, like they were clay. But for Death Valley, I was paying homage to my own father, who had been in an accident and was in the ICU and died after six months. I really wanted it to be a diamond all the way through, I just wanted to be beautiful as I was working on it. So I really went sentence by sentence and edited it like a poem from the very beginning.”
Find inspiration in the weird, and learn the language of internet beef
“I used to love Twitter. My ‘friends’ on there would be people with an avatar of a pig or a fried egg, who were funny and provided me with a show every day, or a ‘choose your own adventure’ experience — like, I had no idea what they were going to say that day,
“I feel like Twitter went downhill even before Elon bought it, however. About five years ago advertisements came in quite heavily, and so did a sort of soapbox element, so it stopped feeling like a creative experiment. That’s when I felt like the glory days were over. It’s no longer an experimental cluster of villages, as it felt like before. But I did meet two of my best friends on there, the photographer Petra Collins and writer Kristen Iskandrian.
“The internet is still present in my writing, and I still sometimes tweet — my account @sosadtoday isn’t dead, but it is on life support. When I write on the internet, there’s always a serotonin dopamine contingent in the way that it’s designed. I’m not talking about an article being published on the internet, but the more direct raw-dogging of the internet. It’s kind of like a slot machine — when I pull the lever [by tweeting], are there going to be three cherries or will I get punched in the face? When I write about the internet, there isn’t that instant reinforcement or punch in the face. But it is fun. It’s a fun thing to make fun of.
“I’m way more likely to go on Reddit these days, it’s a place where I’ve been spending a lot of time. I usually come there in fear, it’s usually to look up a symptom or to look up people’s experiences on antidepressants. People usually don’t go on there when things are going well, so often people say their experiences are absolute hell. I don’t know if Reddit is good for my health, especially when it’s about health. But I find if I take a step back from that, it’s such a fun thing to make fun of internet beefs and their language. It’s so serious!”