LINDSEY: Hi, can you hear me okay? 

ANOUK: Yes! Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me.

We're just going to start with like the broad questions, and then we're going to go a little deeper into your piece.

So the first question I just wanted to ask you was, what are you writing currently, or if like you aren't writing right now, what do you plan to write? 

LINDSEY: Right now, I'm working on a screenplay. I've been working on this screenplay for like a year, and I'm so ready to not work on that screenplay ever again. So I think I'm maybe a month out from having like the final draft of that done, and then I would really love to jump into rewriting a book that I wrote last year.

I only have the first draft of that done, so that's probably what needs some serious work. It's incoherent at this point, but those are my two babies right now. It's very hard to focus on one project at a time.

I know some more disciplined writers do that. I don't know how they do that. 

ANOUK: Right, what's this screenplay about? I would love to know more about it.

LINDSEY: Sure! So it's about death as a 30-year-old woman. This 30-year-old woman wanders around in the Pacific Northwest, and she collects the souls that are ready to move on to the next phase. And she's very lonely because you can't have friends when you're Death.

She has come to fear the living, because living is really difficult and painful. And in death, you don't have to grieve anything because you never have anything to lose. So, kind of playing around with this idea of her befriending somebody and then having to switch places with them. She becomes alive, and then the living person becomes Death. 

ANOUK: Oh my gosh, wait, that's so cool!

LINDSEY: It's probably not a great sign that that premise is so difficult to explain. It's been hard to write.

ANOUK: Okay, if that's ever turned into like a movie or a show, I will watch it. Incredible. So, like that kind of transitions us into the next question. You talked about death in your screenplay, and I know that death is a theme in your story as well.

What themes or thoughts kind of spur you into writing? For every writer, there's something that haunts them. And I was just wondering what you have. What haunts you when you're creating? That's a really fun question.

LINDSEY: I'm really fascinated by grief. I write about grief a lot. I think grief is so totaling to people that they start behaving in a kind of funny way.

Do you know what I mean? There are so many times like people laughing at funerals, but then six months down the line, just breaking down behind the wheel of their car while they're taking out the trash. It doesn't make any sense. Grief is the opposite of logic.

I think we expect ourselves to— okay, I'm wearing all black. It's the day after. I expect to feel sad right now. And then sometimes you don't.

Sometimes it sneaks up on you. Sometimes it hits you at like nine o'clock in the morning, way harder than it hits you at midnight. And I'm really fascinated by that.

I'm fascinated by how people grapple with grief. It's one of the few things that we all have in common. We all lose people that mean a lot to us, and we all react differently. It's like a thumbprint. It's so unique to the person feeling it. So I write a lot about grief.

LINDSEY: I write about people out of their element. I remember one time my sister was studying abroad in Germany, and we flew over to visit her for a few days. And my dad, who has worked in construction his whole life, doesn't speak another language.

Just walking around in Germany with his giant belt buckle: “Why isn't there English on these signs? I'm so confused. How am I supposed to order anything at this restaurant?” And my sister's like, you're in Germany.

Of course, it's in German. But it was like taking John Wayne to Munich. It doesn't fit in there.

So those things really spark my imagination and make me want to sit down and write. 

ANOUK: I guess your screenplay is the pinnacle of that because your protagonist is the one who brings grief. I love to hear it.

LINDSEY: Yeah, like the only person in the world who's never felt grief before. So she's just an alien. What a weirdo.

ANOUK: Now going a little deeper into your piece. How has a part of you changed while writing like a very deeply personal, I assume, creative nonfiction piece like the one you submitted? The change doesn't have to be large.

LINDSEY: Well, this was actually the first short story that I wrote ever, like since I was a kid. I think we all wrote short stories as kids. 

So this was the first time that I wrote a short story and then submitted it anywhere. I wrote it a couple of years ago now. And I think the most tangible difference is that it has opened up the format to me.

I do specialize in screen and television writing. And there's this joke amongst screenwriters that  the novel writers are the real writers. That prose is really where it's at. If you wrote a book, we tip our fedoras to that. 

[This story] kind of opened up the form, the format. And I was like, oh, maybe I could write prose if I just keep chipping away at it and practice it every day, like I do with my other writing.

I can get good, and I can tell stories in this way. And that was very exciting to me because so many stories can't be translated into movies. Most stories can't be turned into movies actually.

Now, suddenly, I have this amazing access to prose, and I feel like I can write about anything. And I've been writing a lot ever since I wrote this piece. So it's special to me in that way.

That was like my first foray into literary magazines, too. So that's also been amazing. 

I feel a little jealous of writers who are like, “this piece helped me get through an awful storm in my life, it was my guiding light.” I don't feel that way. This story, specifically, is very old news to me. It was kind of living in the dusty corners of my brain.

You go through the emotions of the people that you're writing for. But I can't say that it healed anything in me. There is something exciting about sharing such an intimate detail of your childhood with strangers.

It’s thrilling because people might not like it. I'm sure there are people who've read the story and they're like, who cares about your goat? Like, whatever. And that's exciting to me.

I would love to hear from people who hated this story. 

ANOUK: So the risk, the gamble, thrills you. 

LINDSEY: Yeah, I like the risk.

ANOUK: Your background is in screenwriting, and you just said that some stories can be turned into movies and some stories cannot be turned into movies. 

So what parts of the story would change if it got turned into a screenplay? 

LINDSEY: Yeah. So if we have to change it into a screenplay, it would be hard. The United States is still the hub for movie-making. The industry is in a real dry spell right now, but a lot of filmmakers from all over the world still come to the United States to make movies, to enter Hollywood, to write for television, things like that.

So if you want to appeal to American producers, American studio executives, American audiences, the story has to be very linear. The character is this way at the beginning, midway through, some things happen, and she starts to change. And by the end, she is a different person.

It's a very ABC, three-act structure. If you're making a movie in France, it doesn't have to be like that. If you're making a movie in South Korea, it doesn't have to be like that.

But I'm an American and I write American movies. I don't speak French or Korean. So I'm pretty limited in the form in that way.

Prose allows you to live in the internal workings of a person much more than a film does. In film, you get a look, maybe, if you have a good actor. In prose, you can...I've read some of the most beautiful chapters where nobody is speaking and no one is doing anything.

They're just remembering something, or they're like pondering the about curtains. And it's just absolutely gorgeous. And you couldn't make a movie about that.

That can be one second in an otherwise 90-minute movie. And there has to be a car chase in it somewhere. 

ANOUK: Oh, of course.

LINDSEY: The music, and it has to have everything.

ANOUK: And that reminds me of Fight Club, because I read the book recently. And then I watched the movie, and I was like, “This is not what I read.”

LINDSEY: Adaptations, like book adaptations, are so difficult to do for that exact reason. 

I love it when I see the author of the book write the screenplay. I think that translation is incredible. Gillian Flynn did it for Gone Girl.

Great movie, great book. I credit her with 95 percent for making that franchise what it is. Same thing with The Godfather. That started off as a huge chunk of a book, and now it's lauded as one of the greatest movies ever made. So it can definitely be done. But a lot of structural changes have to take place.

And it does have to be more linear and more action-packed.

ANOUK: So prose gives you more freedom and no pressure from an industry. 

LINDSEY: Right. You can really do whatever you want. I think as long as it's interesting to read, people will read it.

ANOUK: The next question I have for you is what made you write about your childhood specifically with this piece? What was your thought process?

LINDSEY: This was one of those rare anomalies where I think I was cooking.

I get a lot of good ideas when I'm cooking. And I had this idea. I want to write a little short story about when my goat died. And I kind of want it to feel like this.

I had no idea how I was going to structure it, or how long it was going to be. But I was like, I just have like this vague inkling, maybe I'll just sit down and do it. And I sat down at like nine o'clock that night and wrote at my computer.

The story was done in like 40 minutes. Then I went through and combed through, edited, changed some, you know, pushed some commas around. But generally, the final form was the way that it is.

That never happens. You're a writer, too. You know how much editing goes into something, how much rereading, and maybe give it to a friend. But every once in a while, you sit down, you get these anomaly pieces that just happen. It's like they just fall from the sky onto your computer.

And you're like, “Why don't I do this all the time? Why is this screenplay taking me a year and this short story?” Writing this story, I just wanted it to be honest to my experience as a kid at the time. I find it very easy to tell stories from a child's perspective, because they are so unadulterated by the lenses of practicality or logic. It's just pure emotion.

And the things that [kids] notice are entirely new to them. There's nothing more exciting than being around a kid when they're noticing something for the first time. So it's very easy to tap into the idea of a child who's just, “We're on the road, and my dad's truck is big and blue, and we have this goat, and he's awesome because he can climb a tree.”

ANOUK: It's just raw emotion. Maybe that's why it was easier to write. 

LINDSEY: I think so, yeah.

ANOUK: Thank you so much. And going on from your cooking epiphany, what are some things that you do or some tricks that you have when you're kind of blank and you're just at a dead end? Yeah.

LINDSEY: The best thing I do is move. Like if I'm at my computer and I'm just hunched over and I've been here for two hours and nothing is happening, I'm like, I'm hitting a wall. I need to get up and go for a walk.

I need to go for a drive. Let me run some errands. I need some physical activity to get my body moving. And the more boring those tasks are, the better. I try not to listen to music or have a podcast going all the time. I used to be addicted to just having noise.

ANOUK: Yeah, that's me. 

LINDSEY: But really, if I'm bored, just staring at the washing machine, waiting for my clothes to be done, it frees up my brain and it just lets it breathe.

And once I sift through all the really boring thoughts of, “I need to file my taxes, I need to renew my passport, I should call Connor and try to figure out when we're going to do this thing.” Then it gets to creative space, and it solves problems that I never would have solved if I'd stayed hunched over my computer. So anytime my friends are like, “I'm really struggling to write this thing,” I'm like, “Let's go for a walk. Let's get out in the sun for five minutes.” It will help you jostle things loose a little bit. 

And then if a story is still giving you trouble and you are just like hacking away at it every day and it's just not coming out, there's probably a problem at the very beginning. It's probably the first sentence.

ANOUK: It's either it's you or it's the story. 

LINDSEY: Yeah. So if it's not one, it's the other for sure. 

ANOUK: Okay, thank you so much. And just one last question.

If you can choose, what is one thing you want the reader to take away from “VERY BIG HORSE,” and why? 

LINDSEY: I think sentimentality is underrated. I feel pretty sentimental towards everything. All of those memories in that story. I feel sentimental for the time that my family and I were living on the road, living on powdered donuts. I feel sentimental towards all of the animals we were caring for on the ranch.

I feel sentimental for my parents as they were in their 40s. I miss that. I love who they are now, but I also miss who they were. And I think, when I was a teenager, and I was in college, there was this big cultural push to be strong and to be independent, to just “fuck it” and move on. 

And I think it's totally okay to feel sentimental towards rocks and goats and grass.

I think it actually makes your life so much more colorful. And I really, if I miss anything from my childhood, it's that pure feeling of love for tiny, tiny things. That's hard to reclaim as an adult.