Kate Folk

How did you become a writer?

I think I’ve always been a writer. I’ve always loved stories and felt that the boundaries between reality and imagination are permeable. When I was a kid I wrote a sixty-page “novel” about a cheetah named Damara who escapes from the zoo. It was pretty overwrought. In college and after, I was unsure about pursuing writing as a career, which seemed ridiculous—who was I to think I could do that? I was always looking for someone to give me permission to write, so when I’d get negative or mixed feedback on something I’d written, I would be devastated, and want to give up. I got an MFA from the University of San Francisco, and after graduating, I spent years writing short stories and submitting them to journals. The process of submitting, getting lots of rejections and occasional acceptances, helped to solidify my identity as a writer. I had to get to the point where the main goal wasn’t publishing or other external validation, but the work of writing itself, the daily habit of it, the writer’s life. Though of course validation is always nice, too.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

The first books I loved were the Babysitters Club series. I was addicted to those books when I first learned to read. I had read all 130-something of them by the end of first grade. Then I got into reading R.L. Stine’s Fear Street Books, and Lois Duncan’s supernatural thrillers. I read Don Delillo’s White Noise for a class in high school, which blew my mind at the time, and probably set me on my current trajectory. Later, the work of Alice Munro, Mary Gaitskill, James Baldwin, Kafka and Nabokov have all been major influences, as well as contemporary writers of weird and speculative fiction, like Amelia Gray, Kelly Link, and George Saunders. TV and movies have also made a big impact. I spent my childhood watching a lot of TV—too much, probably. The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and The X-Files were the shows that most shaped my worldview and artistic sensibility.

When and where do you write?

It depends on what else I have going on at the time—teaching jobs, other gigs and commitments—but on a day I have free to write, I’ll start with my morning routine of exercise, meditation, and journaling. I journal 1,000 words each day. Then I’ll shower and eat breakfast and start writing. It’s a little ridiculous how elaborate my morning routine has become, but it all lays the groundwork for writing fiction. The front rooms of my apartment face a noisy street, so I do a lot of writing in bed, because my bedroom is tucked in back, quiet and dim. I also time myself when I write, with a timer app on my laptop. I do a loose version of the Pomodoro Technique, especially at the start of a writing session. It can feel daunting to begin, but if I tell myself I’m just writing for 30 minutes at a time, it feels approachable. I’ll write 30 minutes, take a break for a few minutes, write another 30. Once I’m inside the story, I don’t think about the time anymore, but it can take some coaxing to get into that state.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a novel about obsession. That’s all I can say at the moment.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I would call it more an inner resistance to getting started, like my writerly muscles have gotten cold and cramped up. It can be easy to talk myself out of writing. Over the years I’ve gotten better at doing it anyway, even if it’s just for thirty minutes. The routine I described above helps me get over the resistance, because I’m following a well-worn path, a groove in my mind. I used to listen to a few Philip Glass albums on repeat when I wrote, which was another way of training myself, like a dog.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

My MFA professor, Lewis Buzbee, used to tell us, “don’t confuse impatience with ambition” when it came to publishing, which I think is wise, and not something I’ve always heeded, to my own detriment. I recently read George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and I love how he describes revision as a process of making tiny adjustments, based on intuition—rather than thinking at the level of plot, to think on the level of the sentence, and let the work guide me, sentence by sentence, into becoming what it should be, like slowly adjusting a ship’s course. There is so much wisdom in that book, but that part sticks out to me now, as I’m revising a novel.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try a bunch of different things—subject matter, style, structure—until you figure out what you are most compelled to write. Many writers, including me, have struggled until they found the stories they were most suited to tell, and most interested in committing to, day after day. Keep trying until you tap into something that feels alive on the page.

Kate Folk is the author of Out There, a story collection (Random House '22). She has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, One Story, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Concern, and Zyzzyva. Recently, she was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.