Lauren Oyler will be reading at The Difficult to Name Reading Series on Saturday, June 27 at Brit Pack.
You're a writer/editor for VICE, getting their VICE Broadly section up and running. I don't know how you find the energy to write anything. Sometimes I think to write an essay or something, but I can sort of see both sides of an issue or like, I think it would be better to just think about it rather than write about it. I guess that's my question: How do you convert something that you want to THINK about into something that you want to WRITE about?
I don't want to sound like the wrong kind of asshole, a weenie with a "passion," but I truly feel most myself while I'm writing, and I hate not being able to write about everything I think about. I'm sorry! This is at odds with my pathological laziness and avoidance of work, as well as with the fact that I find writing to be, most of the time, horrible. I wish I could escape it! (I wish I could escape myself! etc.) I probably keep doing it because of a fateful/bad combination of 1) an attention-seeking nature; 2) extroversion; 3) being good at it (which then creates a feedback loop with the attention-seeking nature; blah blah Likes-and-Retweets culture blah blah); 4) believing that journalism is good for society, maybe, sometimes; 5) believing that writing does legitimately help you figure out what you THINK about things, instead of just leaving ideas in this weird fog of unease and notion; and 6) masochism. This last one people claim as a cutesy self-deprecating joke so often that it must sound like I too am humble-bragging, but seriously: While I am definitely bragging, I also find writing very, very, very hard. It's somewhat easier to actually write shit when you have a job that requires you to do so, though.
Your fiction has been published in a lot of cool places. What's your process been like working with fiction editors as opposed to non-fiction editors?
Thank you! The process has been pretty much the same? Nonfiction editors often have a more specific purpose than, like, "publish a good story!" so that is a lot more collaborative, or at least back-and-forth. Also, there aren't usually blind submissions with nonfiction, and I think that probably affects process. Like all millennials, I would like to publish more fiction, but here we are.
What can people expect from your reading?