Meet the author: Mindy Friddle

Hello, hi, hey there!

I’m back with another author interview, this time with Mindy Friddle, author of (among other things) the recent release Her Best Self, a story with scandals, secrets, and a surprisingly satisfying ending. Mindy’s debut novel, The Garden Angel, was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers. The South Carolina Arts Commission awarded Mindy a prose fellowship, and she has twice won the state’s Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives on Edisto Island, South Carolina.

What is your favorite part of the writing process, and least favorite part of the writing process?

I love when the writing flows, the outside world falls away, and time seems to stop. There is no analytical thinking going on, just this immersive experience of watching and conveying the characters as they reveal themselves through dialogue and action. A certain inevitability arises, as if I’m eavesdropping and transcribing an actual conversation, and privy to the subtext, conflict, and nuanced emotions. This can happen in an early draft, or after revision, when I can envision the scene in a cinematic way.

My least favorite part of the process is feeling stuck, usually when it’s clear I need to discard an idea or a character. At that point in my writing journal—I keep a journal for each novel—I pose questions about how to proceed and then steep on possible answers for a day or so. I often discover solutions to these vexing quandaries when I’m in the shower or taking a walk, something physical to allow my subconscious to romp playfully in the background. Then I’ll return to my notebook and jot down the ideas. 

Where is someplace you feel most at home?

From the time I was a child, I vacationed with my family on Edisto Island, a small, bucolic island between Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina. In 2019, I fulfilled a dream when my husband and I moved to this transcendent place, filled with migratory birds, the scent of the sea, and gorgeous salt marshes.

Your latest novel Her Best Self has a lot of secrets and bit of a twisty plot. Do you do a lot of outlining before drafting, or do you tend to plot as you go?

I draft first. I usually start by writing about a character who yearns for something. I try to write first drafts of my novels quickly, about two thousand words each session, for two months or so. This is a dreamy, crazy, freewheeling draft of about 70 thousand words, stuffed with audacious ideas. I then write a synopsis of this blowzy draft, a truncated summary of about 500 words. Squeezing those hundreds of pages into one or two forces me to distill the narrative—really wring it out—to discover the heart of the novel, and to clarify the main characters, the setting, and the timeline. Because Her Best Self is a literary thriller, the sequence of events is paramount to building momentum and suspense. My synopsis provided a way to compress the story and reveal crucial scenes I needed to explore. I mapped out these scenes on a poster board, charting chapters, hooks, and the order of events as the revised draft came together. I use the software program Scrivner for revising, too, because I can add notes and move around chapters, keeping things fluid as sections of the narrative coalesce. For me, a major challenge of writing a novel—the yin and the yang—is constructing a solid structure that is simultaneously flexible and open to surprises until the final draft.

Who was your favorite character to write in Her Best Self?

The villainous Lana O’Shield. Lana is the first nefarious, scheming, wickedly clever antagonist I’ve created. It felt wild and oddly intriguing to write from the perspective of a menacing, mendacious, alluring outsider on the take.

Tell us about someone who inspires you creatively. 

I’m in awe of my prolific friend, Julianna Baggott—novelist, essayist, poet, and author of more than two dozen books. We first met years ago at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont when she had a debut novel on the horizon. She’s a writer brimming with enormous creative energy, who is also optimistic, generous, and collaborative. A number of Julianna’s stories are in development at Paramount TV. Her novel Which Brings Me To You (co-written with Steve Almond) was adapted to film; you can stream it on Hulu. She recently founded a production company called Mildred’s Moving Picture Show, which now has over 20 projects in development. Her production company's focus—I love this!— is “writing high-concept short stories, intimately told.”

What kind of books do you gravitate toward in your own reading life?

I read a wide array of novels and story collections across genres. I keep a list of books I’ve read and my impressions of them. Recently, the audacious beauty of Emily Habeck’s Shark Heart: A Love Story moved me. Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead impressed the hell out of me. I’m a fan of Octavia Butler’s sci-fi and speculative fiction, especially Parable of the Sower. The comic novel The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie is delightful. I admire how Grady Hendrix manages to blend humor and horror in The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Vampire Slaying and Tananarive Due’s suspenseful The Reformatory kept me reading all night.

I have a bookcase filled with cherished books I like to re-read, including Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves, William Kennedy’s hauntingly beautiful Iron Weed, Carol Shields’s gorgeous The Stone Diaries, and Tolstoy’s masterful Anna Karenina. I love the dialogue and mash-up of crime and humor in Elmore Leonard’s novels; Maximum Bob is one of my favorites.

Recent nonfiction books I recommend include The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which blew me away and opened my eyes to a new understanding of humanity.

To feed my soul, I pick up Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Every line feels sacred.

What is one of the best pieces of advice you’ve ever gotten?

I was fortunate to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference as a fiction fellow, where I heard an editor on a panel say writers need talent, luck, and pluck. The most important, he said, is pluck—resiliency, discipline, perseverance—the only part of the writing life you can control. Pluck means you show up at your desk, cultivate a creative practice, read voraciously, power through rejection, devote yourself to the craft of writing. And, for me, pluck means finding joy in the journey of creating.

Thank you Mindy!

If you liked this interview, you can dip back into previous issues of Amanda Loves Words to read my chats with other authors, or see my hot takes (or not-so-hot takes) on books I’ve been reading. And subscribe so you never miss an issue. See you next time!