#196: Missouri Williams — Writing Strange and Ambitious Fiction, Doubt as a Generative Force, and Why Idleness Is Essential to Creativity

Award-winning novelist Missouri Williams on writing strange and ambitious fiction, treating doubt as a generative force, and why idleness is essential to creative work.

You'll learn

• How a destabilising illness and a new language can reshape a writer’s whole relationship to words.

• Why style isn’t something you construct so much as a way of seeing you’re partly stuck with.

• The case for drafting without thinking about the end result and keeping the stakes low.

• What an image you can’t stop returning to can reveal about the book you need to write.

• When idleness and empty, unproductive time become the most essential part of the work.

• How doubt can function as a generative engine rather than a block.

• A method for layering instability into a narrator who sounds completely in control.

• What a chorus can do on the page that a single narrator can’t.

• Why being placed outside your depth, where everything has to be relearned, can sharpen a writer.

• The difference between doubting your work and doubting your right to do it at all.

Resources & Links

• 📑 Interview Transcript (docs.google.com/document/d/17pYpE_t4KEgmMvygfH…)

• Missouri’s Instagram (instagram.com/missouriwilliams/?hl=en)

• Sisters of Mercy (the-sisters-of-mercy.com)’s song, “Flood II” (open.spotify.com/track/3YHZiQu4sbngGWCgoOes8J)

• The Vivisectors (us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619299/thevivise…)

• King Lear with Sheep (modernfarmer.com/2014/07/king-lear-sheep)

• The Doloriad (us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605087/thedoloriad)

• Missouri’s Agent John Ash (caa.com/entertainmenttalent/books/agent/john-ash)

• Samuel Beckett (faber.co.uk/author/samuel-beckett/?srsltid=Afm…)

• Ágota Kristóf (penguin.co.uk/authors/177964/agota-kristof)

• 2023 Winner of Republic of Consciousness Foundation (republicofconsciousness.com/2023-prize)

• “Form Is Back” (thedriftmag.com/form-is-back)

• Meditations (penguin.co.uk/books/35295/meditations-and-othe…) by René Descartes

• Dead Ink (deadinkbooks.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoq9doHQXExeF5Lm…) publisher

• The Faerie Queene (gutenberg.org/files/15272/15272-h/15272-h.htm) by Edmund Spenser

• The Republic (gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm) by Plato

About Missouri Williams

Missouri Williams (instagram.com/missouriwilliams/?hl=en) is the author of The Doloriad, which won the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and named a best book of 2022 by Vulture. Her work has also appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Believer, Granta, and The Drift. Her newest book is The Vivisectors (us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619299/thevivise…).

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