The Writing Life... with Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante
In this edition, Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante discuss their new collaborative craft book, The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton, 2025).
In this edition of The Writing Life, Ginosko editor
talks with and to discuss their new collaborative craft book, The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton, 2025).Alice and Matthew, each with extensive experience in both fiction and nonfiction, bring together decades of teaching and writing in this innovative exploration of the creative process. In conversation, they share what it means to write from obsession, break “the rules,” and learn from the writers who inspire them most.
About You as an Author
1. What first inspired you to become a writer?
Was there a defining moment, influence, or personal experience that led you down this path?
Alice: I just knew. I began writing poems and short stories when I was five. I was told (by whom I don’t remember–maybe a teacher?) to send them into the Horn Book Magazine, a publication devoted to children’s literature. I know now that the Horn Book does not publish children’s work. Yet every time I sent in a poem or story, I got a very kind and comprehensive critique of it, advice on how to improve, and encouragement to keep writing. When I was eight years old, they sent me a certificate in the form of a cardboard version of an old fashioned horn book with my name, age, and “profession” as writer printed on it. That was it, as far as I was concerned.
Matthew: As a kid, I dreamed of being an actor. Because I was drawn to Queer and political theatre, and because I wanted serious roles that focused on what gay runaways like me were going through in the late 80s during the AIDS crisis, (and because there were none) I wrote my own audition monologues. Not because I wanted to write, but because none of the age-appropriate monologues in the audition books or plays illuminated the life stimulus that inspired me to create. After the third or fourth time I got asked, “Who wrote your monologue?” (although I didn’t get cast in the play), a seed was planted. At the time I couldn’t conceive of someone like me as a published author. I was a dropout, a runaway, a Queer. But the experience of being taken seriously in my very first writing class (a place I basically stumbled into), and then being noticed for writing, that stuck with me, and eventually attached to other defining moments that got me here.
2. How would you describe your writing style and storytelling approach?
Alice: Critics refer to me as “that quirky literary thriller writer.” I guess I’d agree with quirky, but my work is definitely not limited to the thriller genre. I find that black humor and absurdity to be essential ingredients in anything I write. I’m very interested in causality, but not in any simplistic way, i.e., the reason Mary hates spiders is because she was bitten as a child. That’s so tedious. But I’m obsessed by the ways that the oddities and accidents and luck (both good and bad) and, especially, the people who stumble into our paths in life affect our thoughts, emotions, and actions. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to spontaneously and suddenly “know”--from seemingly nowhere–things about a character or a situation while I’m in the middle of writing something. I love tangents in storytelling. I hate logic. That’s the best way I can describe my storytelling style and approach.
Matthew: I’m deeply drawn by the narrative arts because they lend the artist an opportunity to portray the differences between the public performed self and the private inner life. I love interiority. I’m interested in how the past affects the present and the present can revise previous held notions of the past. These obsessions of mine play into my style, which I would describe as highly associative, with lots of interiority.
3. You each write both fiction and nonfiction, and you’ve each written about craft. I suspect each of these have you pulling from different sources, but who are some of your biggest literary influences or favorite authors?How have they shaped your work?
Alice: As a child, I devoured fairy tales. Not the sanitized Disney ones, but the real, dark, and terrifying ones. Then, the classics: Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and then later, E.M. Forster and George Elliot, etc. More recently, Alice Munro (yes, still), Denis Johnson, Lydia Davis, Lucia Berlin, Grace Paley, George Saunders, Barbara Kingsolver. As to how they’ve shaped my work? I have no idea how to answer that question. I suppose all of them–like other great writers–are able to embed extraordinary wisdom and insight into the very particular people, events, and situations they write about. I will be the first to admit I have problems with more abstract or “thinky” writers. I take great joy in writing being thoroughly grounded in the five senses. At the same time, I love the complex, meaningful, and deeply moving emotional subtexts of the concrete worlds that my favorite writers create. I could be very happy only reading works in which no symbols could be detected. Meaning, yes. Symbolism? No.
Matthew: As a young writer, my pillars were Dorothy Allison, Jim Grimsley, and James Baldwin—Allison’s willingness to portray ugly family truths beautifully, Grimsley’s quiet intensity and queer tenderness (and perhaps, creepiness, too) within a working-class context, Baldwin’s vision and sentence-level heat. Two poet-mentors, June Jordan and Janice Mirikitani, got me thinking of audience and specificity. Later I leaned into Mary Gaitskill (I find her work as moving as it is terrifying), Italo Calvino (for his play, his experimentation with form), and Toni Morrison (of course her language, but her use of point of view and her treatment narrative time are mind-blowing and, for me, unclassifiable.). My most admired living author right now, in all her genres, is Yiyun Li. Attempting to say why would just subtract from what she does in her work, so I say just go read her. For brevity, I’m leaving off hundreds, because who inspires you and whose art do you admire is my longest list.
The folks I mention (and many I don’t) shape my teaching, too, as has the process of writing The Lab. It’s different from my fiction and memoir and essays in that it’s collaborative. In a way it’s a return to what I love about the performing arts. I think Alice and I found a third voice for The Lab that borrows elements from each of our two artistic and literary voices.
4. What does your typical writing routine look like?
Do you have any rituals, habits, or environments that help you stay focused and inspired?[md1]
Alice: I probably shouldn’t admit this, but at this time my routine is a little haphazard due to life circumstances. I used to get up early (5am) go for a bike ride at dawn along the sea, shower, drink lots of coffee, and write until noon. Now I do what I can when I can. I do try and write 2,000 words a day. It’s usually shite, but I tell myself that’s okay and keep pushing on. I’m fairly confident that there’s something worthwhile in there, but recently I haven’t yet been looking back to check. This is also very different from my usual routine of editing as I go. Because I don’t plan ahead or follow an outline, it’s always been very important to me that what I have down on the page (screen) is pretty solid before I allow myself to continue. But as we age (and hopefully mature) we need to give ourselves the grace to be flexible. At least that’s what I tell myself.
Matthew: My routines depend on several factors too boring to describe, but to sum it up: I’m dedicated. I tend to avoid first drafts in favor of revising; and I’m as dedicated to teaching and reading as much as I am to writing, so, I sometimes struggle to prioritize my own creative writing. Lately, however, I almost feel like writing and reading are interchangeable. I like the wisdom in the Annie Dillard quote from The Writing Life:
“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”
I’m careful to pair it with this great Murakami quote, because being “careful” is sometimes about reading outside of my already-known interests, style preferences, and, especially, my own solidified world views:
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Like most people’s my life isn’t only about writing, so I’ve learned to trust that things will happen if I remain dedicated to the practice, even if the how and how often shift.
The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton, 2025)
5. How would you describe The Lab in a few sentences?
Alice & Matthew: We say great writing doesn’t begin with form—it begins with obsession. The book borrows the spirit of the scientific method—observation, experiment, replication—so writers can build a repeatable practice.
What can readers expect from the text?
It’s a multi-genre generative craft book built around ten chapters and lots of generative prompts that helps move writers from impulse/obsession, to pages, to revision. Perhaps in ways that are simultaneously surprising (to the writer) and completely unique to their voice and vision.
6. What inspired you to write this book?
Was it sparked by a particular idea, event, or personal experience?
Alice: I loved the notion of encouraging people to do experiments as a way of getting deeper into their material (this was Matthew’s brilliant idea.) Then Jill Bialosky, my Norton editor on previous books, asked for a cross-genre craft book as a follow-on to The Making of a Story. I was very over-committed at the time, but didn’t want to pass on this opportunity, so I asked Matthew if he’d like to be a co-author. Thank God he said yes. He was a dream writing partner.
Matthew: Alice and I have been connected in many ways throughout the years, starting at SFSU where we were colleagues, then she had been a guest speaker in my classroom (and I used The Making of a Story for years, even when she wasn’t there physically to talk about one of her four novels), then at Stanford, then I was a guest teacher in her writing class for expats while I visited her in Europe. All of it was so copacetic and invigorating that when Alice suggested to Jill we co-write, and then she asked me, I of course, jumped at the chance. I was flattered and it scared the shit out of me, which immediately made me say yes.
9. If readers could remember just one thing after finishing your book, what would you want it to be?
What lasting impression do you hope to leave?
Alice: That anything goes. It’s a truism that you should only start breaking the rules of writing once you’ve mastered them, but until then you should color within the lines. Well, first of all, there are no rules, only conventions. Secondly, that’s the perfect way to stifle emerging writers! Yes, definitely learn craft techniques. But really you should focus on just getting down what matters to you. Render your obsessions as particularly, concretely, and precisely as possible. Yes, explore all the ways that great writers have mastered dialogue, plot, characterization, imagery, etc. Understand why their artistic choices worked–for them. Then figure out what will work for you.
Matthew: My greatest teachers (and I count nearly all my creative writing teachers as great, along with several agents and editors) always wanted me to think about and address the logic of their suggestions more than the suggestion itself. (i.e.: maybe I added where they suggested cutting to achieve a less distracting, more dynamic setting; or maybe I took one scene out altogether and developed a second to address a question of character development, when they suggested keeping both and writing a third).
I’d sometimes get nervous that they’d see my “instead-of” revisions as disrespect for the time they spent making them in my manuscripts. Instead, they were thrilled. I won’t lie. It’s thrilling when a student improves their work by following a teacher’s suggestion. The surprise and delight? It’s way (and I mean way) more thrilling when they improve the work by refusing your specific suggestion but addressing what’s underneath the suggestion: something not quite yet developed, something overly familiar, too cut-and-dried. I want The Lab to be like that. We say in the introduction:
“We hope it won’t take you long to discover the subjectivity that informs creative writing books, programs, workshops, and teachers of all kinds. We are not asserting anything as objective fact—but giving you possible jumping-off places to experiment and find the “data” and processes and forms that work for you. And as we will continue to say, take the suggestions we offer, use them however you want, break them open and modify them, and, if you see value in them, pass on your enhanced versions to others—and encourage them to do the same.”
Looking Ahead
10. What’s next for you as a writer?
Are you currently working on another project or exploring new directions?
Alice: I’ve got my fourth novel about half done. Can’t discuss it in detail while I’m working on it. I’m still feeling my way forward. But I’m engaged with the material, and enjoying the process, which is all that matters.
Matthew: I’m working on a memoir that aims to focus on a few things that haven’t yet gelled, but I know go together: what the Covid pandemic resurfaced for me about my childhood and experience as a gay teenage runaway in SF during (what, for me, were) the worst of the early AIDS years; and my mom’s story from farm girl, to religious novice, to her 30-year marriage to my father, before divorce and then finding a lesbian lover (and that’s just the beginning). My mom and I have become quite close friends and she’s completing a writing prompt I gave her. Knowing she kept a list (on the same piece of paper that she started before I was born) that contains each of her 33 addresses, I asked her to write as many searing details as she could remember about each address. I published a craft essay and a segment at Craft Literary Magazine. It’s called Hott Lipps and it introduces the “I” character as well as the mother.
11. What advice would you offer to aspiring writers?
What lessons or encouragement would you share from your own journey?
Alice: Pay attention to what your unconscious tells you. If one image conjures up an odd, completely unrelated one, put it in. If a character suddenly engages in an odd “out-of-character” (I hate that phrase) behavior, don’t delete. Use it. Even if it doesn’t make sense at the moment, have patience. Chances are good it eventually will. Treat not-knowing as the most wonderful gift you’ll receive as an artist.
Matthew: Whatever deeply stirs you, makes you feel complicated contradictory emotions. Work toward what you don’t know about what you think you know. The rest of my advice is, as they say, “in the book.”
12. Where can readers find you online?
(Please share your website, social media handles, newsletter, or any other platforms where you engage with readers.)
Alice: I’m not very active online, but I do have a website: alicelaplante.com. I encourage people to reach out by email, too: alice.laplante@gmail.com.
Matthew: my website, which has links to everything else, is matthewclarkdavison.com. I’m most active on Instagram. You can follow here here: @matthewclarkdavison and The Lab account here: @the_lab_wwnorton.
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