On Novellas, Day Jobs, & Friendship Stories:

In early 2022, the writer Abigail Stewart put out a query on Twitter: who wants to join a chill vibes writing discord with me where we just sit around and write and drink tea? I was on my second internet writing group that was slowly dying—charitably, due to peoples’ jobs and travel picking back up after the debut of vaccines—so I thought, why not? Even though I don’t drink a ton of tea, I do enjoy chill vibes.

Over a year later, the group is vibrant, growing, and still very chill, and the team there have become friends. They’ve supported me through finishing and querying a short story collection and starting a long-simmering creative nonfiction project that I’ve been calling my deeply embarrassing internet memoir.

“How’s that going?” my now-friend Abby asked me when we sat down to talk about the third book she’s published since founding the discord, a novella about three women’s stories over fifty years in one suburban Dallas home called Foundations (Whiskey Tit Books, 2023).

“Oh, it’s going,” I sighed. “I just made a goal to finish a draft by the end of 2023, but I keep looking at the outline of all the chapters and getting very intimidated by it. Ten chapters? Why does it have so many chapters?”

“That’s a lot of chapters,” Abby said, laughing. Is it too many? I wondered. I guess I’ll find out after writing all ten of them. Abby, for her part, just wrote a book with only three chapters and just finished writing another short book during National Novel Writing Month. Are short books the way to go? 

I set out to interview Abby about her new book, but we ended up discussing different processes for writing with full-time jobs, the novella as a form, and our unsung favorite theme in fiction–friendship.

Caelyn Cobb: Foundations is the second novella you’ve published. What appeals to you about the novella as a form?

Abigail Stewart: Everything. Love them. There’s something about the economy of language, of being able to say what you have to in a shorter space. Some of my favorite books are novellas and I just find them fascinating. And I have always wanted to write short books, and it’s really hard to do because people are like, this isn’t a book. I’m really lucky that my publisher is really open lengthwise and enjoys them, you know?  It’s nice to create something that you can sit down and read in one sitting.

CC: Yeah–I work in publishing, and I would say that capitalism is totally the reason we don’t have more novellas because it’s so hard to price a book that’s short. So I really respect publishers that will go out there and do that kind of stuff because it’s riskier. You want to make sure you price it where someone will feel they’re getting their money’s worth, but also make sure you are not losing money on the book. It’s hard to find a sweet spot.

But anyway: do you find that you gravitate toward this form because you both write and have a full-time job? I have a full-time job and I’m always struggling to have the brain space and the time to write. I don’t think I want to try to become a full-time writer because capitalism is terrible, and I feel like that just would make my writing way less fun to depend on it like that, but I also think it pushes me toward writing shorter things.

AS: I write novellas and I write novelettes and I write short fiction. So I’m definitely working in smaller pieces than like, writing an 800-page Game of Thrones series-type book.

CC: Oh, those are a thousand pages!

AS: I don’t. I just, like, I can’t. I can’t. I mean, shout out to those books. Like, I enjoy a long book, but I do not write them. I work in marketing, so I have a nine-to-five. I do work from home now, which I didn’t before. So that’s kind of changed things a little bit, where I’m able to get up pretty early in the morning and get some writing done before I have to clock in at 9:00. So I’m very blessed to have that now, whereas before I was writing on my lunch breaks. For my first novella, I wrote on lunch breaks and then kind of finished when we went home for the pandemic. So I am able to write in the mornings now and I really like writing in the mornings when it’s quiet and I’m the only one kind of up. I hate mornings, though. Like, I’m such not a morning person. It’s…I hate them.

CC: Oh my God, yes. The worst. I can’t.  I’m so impressed you can get up early to write because I don’t think I could do that. I write at, like, one in the morning.

AS:  I am literally so cranky. Like, you could not talk to me. I literally wake up, put my electric blanket on, get my thing of water and then struggle bus to my desk–which is actually the dining room table; I don’t actually have a desk. And yeah, I just write before my brain is really awake. I just sit down and, whatever I’m thinking that day, I just write. And yeah, that’s my process. I’m a terrible outliner. I have an ideas box. It’s just a Word document where I put every idea that I have about the book, and then as I go, I kind of pull from it. But I do not outline. I feel like if I wrote nonfiction, it would be a lot harder that way. Because I’m just kind of being like, “Okay, where does my brain want to go?”

CC: Now that’s interesting. I’m kind of in between. Like, I will do an outline, but it’s just brackets, and then I go and fill them in. If it goes weird – the fiction, anyway–if it goes more weird, I’m like, “Oh cool, whatever.” I’ll move things around, maybe.  My nonfiction writing process right now is just a nightmare because I create outlines that I actually write in to trick myself that I’m not really writing. But sometimes I’ll write ‘insert [this] here,’ and I’m like, okay, that was not helpful to my future self!

So, this new book, Foundations, which you didn’t outline, takes place in a single house over three time periods. Where did you get this idea?

AS: I wanted to kind of tell the story of a house. That was my first thought–that I wanted to have this story of, like, what imbues a house with its essence? I’ve always felt that when you’re in a house, it has this particular feeling, remnants from people who have lived before. The walls have an essence, a kind of understanding beyond you. I thought that that was a really interesting concept. And I’ve lived in Texas, and I wanted to base something in Texas and explore the female journey across time in that specific place. So it’s a novel of character and place I think more than anything.

CC: One thing I did think was really interesting is the relationship between the characters and the objects in the house. It sort of reflects their emotional state. In the first section, you have the woman who’s in this 1950s house and it’s like, I mean–I wanted to move in. It’s like this mid-century dream.

AS: Yeah, it’s my dream house. I’ve created my dream house.

CC: It’s clear that it is very carefully curated because her life is about appearances and she doesn’t have kids, so it’s kind of like filling up the house with these beautiful objects. Then you have the second character, who is depressed, and she has nothing. Just her vodka and a couch that she sets on fire. And then you have the last girl who’s trying to be one thing and trying to create this house to look a certain way for a TV show, even though she’s nothing like that in real life. There’s a moment when she realizes people can see her off the clock–there are hidden cameras in the house, which is this very surrealist moment in the story where she starts to think about the artificialness of her life. I think it’s kind of an epiphany for her. So, I guess I’m just English-majoring you on your own book. But I’m just wondering if that was intentional or if that’s just me putting things together because I like to do that.

AS: No, I mean I appreciate you English-majoring my book. Thank you. My dream in life is for someone to English-major my book.  I think what I was trying to achieve is to imagine the characters very fully with their stuff. What kind of flotsam is in your world? What would you see next to this character? In the second story, Jessica deals a lot with the lawn chair and going outside and trying to put the lawn chair together, and it’s like this moment where she’s like, if I can just put this lawn chair together, it’s gonna fix everything, but she can’t do it, and it just doesn’t work out. It’s just kind of a mess, like her. That’s, I guess, at the core. What does the house reflect? What do the objects reflect?

CC: Could you tell me more about the legends of the house and how they develop over time? Because I thought it was very funny how the legends are wrong. When Jessica, in the second section, moves in, her neighbor says that they had seances here all the time, the wife disappeared, and the house is haunted. We saw her story, though, and I think there’s like one seance, and Bunny didn’t just disappear–she chose to leave. She ditched her husband and is maybe gonna have a nice lesbian love affair in Mexico. Then, the third character–Amanda? She hears about how the house almost burned down, and we’re like, well, it didn’t really burn down. Jessica just set a fire there. So I’m interested in that–where did that come from for you?

AS: I think that, when I approached the story, I was trying to tell the story, like I said, of these three women throughout a very specific place and a very specific time. How do these things evolve? Not just the stories we tell about ourselves but the stories we tell about those around us and particularly women. You’re always going to be the crazy ex, or you’re gonna be the dissociating movie star or the bad mom or whatever trope or stereotype society forces upon us. Take Bunny, for instance. She doesn’t have kids. So she has this kind of stigma about her in the 1950s that people obviously feed into, and they want to create this even worse narrative about her than what actually is true. As you’re going about your life, what stories are going to be told about you? And what stories are you comfortable telling about yourself? With Amanda, in the third part, she is constantly trying to manifest, and you know it’s not going to work. With Bunny, and with Jessica, especially–they were both trying to escape. But at the same time, they’re themselves and open to being criticized, and in the end, they are brave enough to move forward with what they actually want. With Amanda, we don’t really get to hear her legend because it kind of ends there. So–

CC: Well, I will English major you again and I will say that she’s on a reality TV show and they are creating a legend about the house in a way. If this house had a Wikipedia page, it would be like, this house was featured on blah blah reality show and so on. So I think there’s a legend there too.

AS: Yeah, there’s definitely an opportunity for legend.

CC: Okay, I also want to ask you about the role of friendship versus romance here, and I won’t English major it to you. It was really interesting how friendships were given the greatest weight of all the relationships that the characters have in your book. Tell me more about that.

AS: I think friendships are the deepest connections that we make with people. We don’t give a lot of space for friendship relationships in America. I’m not sure why that is. But I do feel like when you go through a friendship breakup or something like that, you’re not really supposed to mourn it or grieve. You’re just supposed to be like, ‘Okay, whatever, we’ll go make some more.’ And it’s very hard to make friends, actually! So the friends that I have, I value very highly, and so I think in the story I wanted to create that for my characters because it’s something that’s just important in my own life. I was interested in doing it in this book because I hadn’t really, in anything else I’ve written before, had friendships at the core of it. And so, I was like, what if your friendship is the most important relationship in your life?

CC: I love the contrast with the domesticity of the house. Because the house is the site of the raising of children, of marriage. Yet, for all of them, the most important thing they experienced in the house was realizing how important it is to have friends. And, you know, I love writing about friendships. I think that’s probably one of the core themes of my own work. I have a novelette chapbook coming out this spring with ELJ Editions’ Afternoon Shorts series, and it’s basically a love letter to my high school friends, who I’m still in touch with to this day. It’s an interesting, rich kind of thing to focus your work on–the weirdness of friendships and the intricacies and the dramas and ups and downs. I like a good friendship getting-back-together story like your character Jessica has, kind of more than a romantic getting-back-together story. And a friendship breakup story too. I love good friendship breakup stories.

AS: Yeah! Love those. And congratulations on your novelette! That’s so exciting.

CC: Well, congratulations on your book. This is your third book. You’re a three-time author! That is also exciting. What are you working on next?

AS: I feel like we all have our Internet stories, and that’s my next novel. Novella, I should say. It’s definitely my Internet story. It’s dealing with the esports community…I’m actually a really big fan of competitive gaming, like on Twitch. It deals with that kind of community and the parasocial aspects of that. I don’t feel like anyone’s really written fiction about it yet. It’s a little weird and more experimental than anything I’ve written and plays with different text structures too. It has Twitter posts and things like that in it.

CC: I think you have to write like that if you’re writing about internet communities.

AS: I think Patricia Lockwood did a really great job with her book [No One Is Talking About This], and that’s what we’re all aspiring to at this point. So my book is basically a tangential story around this one guy who is in the esports community that kind of disappears from the Internet, and everyone’s like, what happened to him? What’s the ripple effect of that of one person just being like, I’m not streaming anymore, bye?

CC: Are you talking to an agent, or is it too short?

AS: All right. I’m just gonna be real. It’s too short. I love writing short books! It’s kind of annoying. But I can’t wait to see it out in the world. I feel good about it.

This interview has been edited for length.