Ep. 2. Reclaiming Genre Fiction with Stephanie Edd
In this episode, I was in conversation with Stephanie Edd, writer, artist, kitchen witch, and author of the anti-noir, The Clear Case.
We talked about:
💀 The perils and pleasures of loving genre fiction
⚡️ Writing without financial or institutional support
📖 Balancing writing with other demands
Stephanie's ceremonies for writing are:
🖋 Taking field notes on everything
🍓 Eating delicious snacks
Stephanie Edd is a writer, content producer, and artist in a variety of mediums including paint, ink, and kitchen witchery. She unites her love of art, film, and prose to craft fictions that are sensual, visual, and analytical in historical, noir detective, urban fantasy, and speculative genres. Her historical short story about post-mortem photography, Behind the Dark Slide, was published in the 39th issue of The Berkeley Fiction Review. She graduated from UC Berkeley with an English degree and continues to haunt the San Francisco Bay Area.
I recently had the pleasure of editing Stephanie Edd’s novel, The Clear Case, a sharp, colourful, novel that trades in subversion to gently critique the noir tradition. It’s also a dreamy read with lush period details, and elegant plotting. If you love crime fiction, but despair of outdated tropes, this clever anti-noir is for you.
The Clear Case published in ebook and paperback November 1st 2023. Follow her on TikTok @stephanieedd for noir and booktok content. Subscribe to her newsletter at stephanieedd.com and follow her on twitter and instagram @stephaniejedd.
Transcript:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Laura Joyce:
It's really great to talk to you today, and I'm so pleased that you've agreed to share some background your novel, The Clear Case, and to talk about your writing journey, your writing practice, and balancing creative demands and other demands in your life, and why you really wanted to write this book in particular and what got you to the finish line in writing it and sharing it with readers.
I wonder if you could share first something about your personal writing journey.
Stephanie Edd:
Yeah, I would say my writing journey began pre-literacy.
I was raised in a very creative household and taught that its okay to fail for the sake of the journey of creativity and it’s very fun and rewarding even if things don't necessarily work out and I was exposed to just a lot of creative expression and outlets. And it got me thinking about story very, very young. And I used to make my mother actually. Transcribe my stories, I would dictate to her because I was too young to write.
I was not literate yet, so I would tell her all these just meandering child stories. But I would make her write them down.
That was something that just sort of consistently reappeared in my life and that. At all throughout childhood wrote little stories and eventually kind of got immersed in fan fiction when I was in junior high school, which I think is a really great tool, especially for very young writers because you're taking existing established characters and existing in established secondary worlds and making them do which you want. And it's kind of like writing with training wheels.
That's something that really moved me in to the process of constructing and learning all of the rules of writing and formatting and structure. People would reply to my fan fictions and give me writing advice and that felt very real and validating.
And then through high school I had a lot of mental illness to deal with and writing became a really great way to release a lot of energy and as a coping skill and in a way of sort of removing myself from chaotic environments into an environment that I had total control of, like as a fiction writer, you, you get to immerse yourself in this secondary world and have total control over what happens even if the circumstances of the writing, surprise you. So, that was something that carried me through those youthful years.
When I got to college, I wanted to be a playwright. I got very interested in theatre and that really influenced my writing. But then when I graduated, I got attracted again to novels. Like I got kind of pulled back into that side of writing that I had been most interested in, especially because it can be difficult to get a script out the door and get that off the ground but a book you write it, it's there, and it exists, so that was sort of the trajectory of me getting to the point of being a novelist.
Laura Joyce:
I think fan fiction is like a really, overlooked community for training to be a writer. I love that idea of it writing with training wheels.
Fan fiction can be such a supportive community for writers. It allows you to work the elements to play with or the clay to form into something, but you don't have to make it from scratch yourself and I think there's something really powerful about that.
But also, what an amazing image of you as a preliterate child dictating these stories and turning them into something concrete. So, knowing, even at that stage, that these stories are for other people and they're more than just imaginative play for you that there is an audience for them.
I think that that is so colourful, and that image will really stay with me that idea of you as this kind of creative child who has bloomed into this adult writer.
So many writers I've spoken to in this series have mentioned mental health difficulties and the way that writing fiction specifically, has been a way through for that and I think that's something that will resonate with a lot of people too.
I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your current writing project, the novel The Clear Case, which I have read. I was one of the editors on this book and I found it a really wonderful, memorable contemporary Noir, but also an anti-Noir; it's doing something subversive but it's also adding to that tradition of the Noir. I really enjoyed it and I'd love to hear a little bit more about how it came to be.
Stephanie Edd:
I'm attached to this book. It does mean a lot to me. It's actually my first novel that I first wrote from soup to nuts completely. I started it a couple of years after I graduated college. I had been having trouble actually getting back into the process of really writing consistently and finishing stories. I had completely lost my ability to write briefly. My skills and brevity were gone. And was really struggling to write any kind of short fiction, it wouldn't be until years later that I could do that again.
Writing in college was so different and, and I loved it. I loved college and I love writing essays, but it took me a while to get back into the groove of writing fiction.
I remember I came home one day to do chores and I just spontaneously put The Maltese Falcon on the television just as the background. I'd always really loved old movies, and Film Noir in particular, since I was pretty young. For some reason, it just clicked, and all of a sudden, my San Francisco Detective Mel Gance existed. It was like all of a sudden, he just sort of appeared to me. The possibility of this story became an opportunity, and it was something that occurred to me – I could write this kind of pulp, Noir, hard-boiled mystery.
I love mysteries, and that was as almost a light bulb, finger snap moment of being like, yes, this is my genre. This is something that that suddenly fit with everything that I'm interested in in terms of aesthetics, dialogue, banter, and pacing. Everything sort of fit.
And also it was an opportunity to write politically and to address something that I had struggled with my whole life with Film Noir – the burden of the Hollywood Hayes code, which instituted a lot of very strict rules so the bad guys lose in the end and you know, the girls can't be too bad and queer people can't exist and it was just sort of frustration where you watch these movies where you love them and then you're kind of like, well, if only.
If only this hadn’t been this way or if only so-and-so hadn't lost in the end. And I realized that I could rectify a lot of that. So, while I also loved literary Noir which is so hard-boiled, and which provides all of these hard-boiled plots to the Film Noir genre, it also can be really brutal and, offensive
I just recently watched Murder my Sweet which is the Dick Powell adaptation of Farewell my Lovely and Philip Marlowe's first cinematic appearance, incidentally. And I don't know if any of your listeners have read Farewell My Lovely, but it's so racist. Philip Marlowe is just saying the N-word constantly.
Hard- boiled fiction is also really afflicted with this twisted, and very American, casual bigotry. And it makes me so mad because there are so many great lines and so much extensive writing that Chandler did, and these movies just have so much beautiful writing in them but just have these big problems. I realized that, as I talked about, writing gives us so much power and so much control in the secondary world that I could administer this antidote to Film Noir in particular and write this mystery and just have so much fun with it and really immerse in San Francisco.
I live in the Bay Area because I went to Cal and so I worked, and I have worked in San Francisco for many years. I love the city to this day and wanted to really bring that in and have that be a part of it.
So, the novel combines so many different things that I'm interested in and characters that I've come to really love.
Laura Joyce:
As someone reading your book, I've had a similar experience to you and that I love crime fiction, I love thrillers, I love Noirs. And they have a very chequered history. I think that during the early twentieth century, and the interwar period, the books that were being written then are absolutely full of bigotry not just from the characters but at the level of the fundamental story architecture really. And I think that does intersect with the Hayes code, but it also has to do with wider cultural norms of the period.
To have a work that goes back and addresses those things was an incredible pleasure to read. As you say, to have characters who would have been either invisible or had very restricted roles in Noirs of that period, and to give them starring roles is a real transformation. There are just some amazing characters. And I know you have plans for the series. I know that we'll see more from these characters.
But just in terms of that work that you're describing of not just reclaiming, but almost reinvigorating, that genre. So that it's not just an anti-Noir, but it's also doing something very recuperative and revelatory with that genre. It just is, it was an incredible pleasure for me to read and I, it sounds like it was a pleasure to write.
One thing that really stuck out as you were speaking is that idea of what a first novel can be, which is a place to bring together all these interests you have, all these things that are boiling up in you for your whole life – your obsessions, your desires, the things you want to process and understand. So, often they end up in this really heavy mix in that first novel and then it's a case of shaping that into something that's more, possible to be communicated to an audience or a reader and that is often where the really hard work comes in.
It sounds like you've had that decade to find that space around it. I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about that, about either the kind of shaping process or the publication process because you're about to publish and I wonder if you might talk us through that a little bit as well.
Stephanie Edd:
Initially, when I wrote the I wrote a first edition of this book, that was almost a writing exercise. I was struggling with brevity and so I wanted to try to write a short, sweet, tight pulp novel you can take in your pocket and it's a quick potboiler type of experience. I wanted to take that on as that kind of a challenge and I was really pleased with how that went and then I was done with it. So, I was done with that version and then I wrote the sequel. The TK hitch in the same fashion. And that was a few years later.
And right after that happened, I started thinking that my writing process changed a lot as I wrote that second book. And then I wrote a different book. An urban fantasy, kind of literary thing. So that was this other book that had just gotten finished, and I was feeling really good and really enjoying this writing practice that I had put together.
And I thought, it would be cool to take The Clear Case to the next level and make it into something more substantive and more in line with the contemporary books that I want to write.
So, it became twice as long, a little bit more than twice as long. And so much of it changed. Tons of actual plot elements changed; new characters got added. And I really just blew it up and expanded it into a full, robust novel versus this novella pulpy potboiler So that that journey was really interesting, and that's why it took so long.
I think some people were like, wow, you worked on this for a decade, what the heck? And it's like, yeah, it went through this evolution because it was part of my life and part of something bigger.
And so, I think sometimes we get the sense of writers having a text and that's the one thing they work on and it's just this straight line and it's very chronological and it's very orderly and you sit down at 4 o'clock and write for 27 minutes and there is this very clean perfect structure where you finish the book in a year, and I did that the first time.
But the second time I went back, and I treated it in terms of the preparation. It was like I was starting from scratch, and I actually built a map of all these locations that appear in the book that I wanted to appear in the book when I worked on this outline, and I went to San Francisco, and I just went and visited all these locations with my DSLR and took pictures and relaxed and just spent the whole day visiting the locations for the Gance and Grace mysteries and for The Clear Case.So, that whole journey was really exciting and different.
On the publishing side. I decided that pursuing traditional publishing for this particular book was not going to be realistic because I had experimented with this this pulp version of this novel, and you know everybody was self-publishing in 2013 and I think a lot of authors today might chuckle to think about that time. It was very fledgling - creatures climbing out of the sea for the very first time. No one knew what they were doing – it was a disaster.
Today there are so many resources and it's so much better now and that we have platforms where we can find professionals to work with and can find editors like you. It is so amazing to be able to get a real editor to look at your text and get into it. It’s very comforting. It's not just about you know, following these rules or doing what you need to do. In order to get the text underway, but it's so valuable having objective eyes on it and getting to get that feedback and tap into the resources that are so available today. Because people that are or have been working in traditional publishing are now more available to indie authors and so I think that's really wonderful, and I've just been really enjoying how this process is so different now.
I'm very fortunate to have more of a platform and to and to have a little bit more money to invest in terms of editorial because, you know, publishing a book is expensive either way. So, being able to do that in an efficient way now is wonderful and this this process has been much less gruelling, much less brutal. And much less lonely.
Laura Joyce:
I think the difference in a decade is quite stark. So, it does feel now like it's not just putting a book out there and seeing what happens. There is an entire industry for indie publishing that didn't really exist in that period, and I think that it just means that so many exciting books are out there for readers, and I think so many readers, myself included, don't check when buying something, whether it's been indie published or traditionally published, I think that distinction is so much less than it was. And readers just want great books to read!
I think you're absolutely right that it's completely different now to how it was then, but it's still a job. It's almost like a small business really because you need the platform, you need the investment in it.
What I love about it is there is this sense of community that you're describing. It's a community of writers, it's a community of readers more than anything who are just looking for really good books and there are more available now than ever. I find that from the reading side for sure.
To go back to your point about some people asking how can it take you a decade to write a first book? I almost find it stranger when it doesn't take someone a decade to write that first book.
Because most people I work with and, as someone who's written books myself, that first book, like we were just saying, it has everything in it and it's about processing your life at the same time as it's about writing that first book.
And good luck to anyone who can sit down at 4 pm and write for 27 minutes; I am an admirer of anyone who can do that. But it's just not really feasible for most of us, because life is complicated. And because writing is not just sitting down typing words; it's everything that goes along with it.
So, thinking about you going and taking that research trip and spending time and kind of luxuriating in those locations so you could bring them back to the book. That is time that's so well spent because when I read that book, I have never been there, and I could see it. I could see it so clearly. So, it's that kind of sense of what is writing? It's not just the typing. It's every single thing that goes into it and that's why the first one I'm not saying it should take a decade, but I think it makes sense that it does take a decade. And your new readers are going to benefit from the richness of that time spent.
I think you've kind of answered. A little bit the other question that I had which was about how you balance creative demands and other demands. You've given a sense of how you built writing into every aspect of your life. But I wonder if there's anything else that you'd like to say about
being a writer who's also working, who also has other responsibilities; it's not as easy as someone that might just have endless free time.
Stephanie Edd:
Absolutely. I guess there are a couple of things. One is that I think it's really important to fit writing into your life as opposed to trying to build your life around writing. I've talked to people who've gotten an MFA. I didn't but I really admire it and I'm super jealous. It sounds so much fun! But I've talked to people who just graduated and they're having a little trouble in their new lifestyle on when and how to write. Because they they're so used to it being the focus. But now, because it's very difficult to sustain yourself just on a writing career, all of a sudden, you have this day job or you’re a freelancer and you have to feed yourself and you have family obligations or community obligations or health problems or just things to negotiate in your life.
And as a result, those things even if they are not your priority personally, they're still your priority practically in our material reality. So, you have to find a way to fit writing into that. And I guess one of the ways that that has happened for me is that I tend to look at everything in my life as in service of writing.
So, I'm kind of one of those writers who Writing is kind of my whole life in a way like writing is the substance of my soul. If I'm not doing it, I'm probably not doing okay. It's like you see a cat that's not grooming themselves, you’ve got to worry about that cat. Stephanie's not writing. We got to worry about Stephanie a little bit.
I think about writing as being. As my life being sort of in service of that. My job is the money that funds this, and this is the way that I take care of myself. The ways that I immerse and luxuriate, to use your word, in my writing is all about facilitating that. Just doing whatever I can to fit it in and make it just sort of an inherent part of my life like a handbag I take everywhere.
I am just a huge fan of notebooks in a practical sense. I know people love to collect notebooks, but I actually use the same exact like sketchbook every single time. I don't get different ones. I make field notes and I just have very particular tools that I stick with that helps bring a certain level of continuity and order to a very chaotic process because I'm a very chaotic person.
I may be on the train at ten in the morning and get this idea and pull up my field notes and just start scrolling and taking notes or I may bring my full-size notebook to a museum and then sit down and work and I have this way of incorporating chaos into the process and just making every opportunity count and facilitating a sort of existence that enables me to put down what needs to be put down when I think of it and that way the work is never lost.
I'm very big on that of just. Put it down, get it down on paper, get it down on a screen. You can't edit a blank page, like you just have to. Just start putting it in there and fitting it into your life that way sort of facilitates it. So, while I can seem very orderly, there is a lot of chaos to it, and I find that fortifying and fulfilling.
Laura Joyce:
I really like that. I think many writers, myself included, are huge notebook fans, but I think that I really like the distinction you make there between people that sort of collect them, maybe as a something that can be a little bit performative almost: the performance of writer and then the kind of practical use that you're describing.
You’re so right that you can't edit a blank page. Research notes, field notes, going and being inspired by creative art that others have made. These are all ways to keep the writing alive even when you don't have an idea that you're working on specifically. It's about filling yourself up with these kinds of creative, rewarding experiences, and taking notes, and I think there's no other way of doing it.
The simplest thing is actually the best thing. And it is accessible. I mean, all you need really is a notebook. A pen and an hour or two that you can spend, and you can do these things. I really agree with you that there's a disconnect between that life when there is a huge focus like on an MFA and then a jarring movement out of that versus a life where it's always been woven in and embedded in and you know, there isn't time, but you still make time anyway because like you say, you wouldn't be you.
I think that imperative is what can drive so many people to create that art even when there isn't really space.
I love the idea that everything could be the subject of field notes if you pay attention.
Stephanie Edd:
I don't think the process has to be elegant. s It doesn't have to be sexy or beautiful. You don’t need a walnut desk in a in a rich warm gaslit study. You know there's times where I'm like okay my notebook is full it's time to transcribe it into the computer. I have like snacks laid out by my laptop and it's a lot like studying in college. It's not something that seems super romantic all the time. Sometimes it's just sort of schoolwork, and sometimes it has those homework vibes where it's not super stylish or romantic, but it is very functional, and I find that I find that also really rewarding.
I really like working hard.
Laura Joyce:
There are some things about homework that is very nostalgic and very fun to think about, not all aspects of homework and all the aspects of school hold good memories for everyone but I think most people that grow up to be writers probably have fun memories of some aspects of that because research writing, reading, thinking, responding, those are the things that keep us happy and keep us alive really so I love the idea of the homework, the studying, the snacks and just been super comfortable and it's the ideas that are important, not the trappings and it can be so easy to get tied into the trappings and to forget that the ideas are where it's at. So, I love that idea of study hall vibes.
It's been an incredible conversation. It's so valuable. For people who are listening who are thinking about writing their first book or trying to finish a first book or, who are asking themselves is it possible? Can it be done?
It’s so powerful to hear from people who have done it, people like you who've worked so hard for so long and are now at this point of reaching readers in a really exciting way. I think it's very inspiring and I really appreciate you sharing this. Thank you.
Stephanie Edd:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it and I really admire your work and was so grateful that you agreed to edit my book and it was such a rewarding process. I'm really proud of where the where we got the text. So, thank you. This has been lovely.
Laura Joyce:
Me too. It's really wonderful book and I cannot wait for other people to read it too.