Author Stephanie Danler’s advice to an aspiring writer is like an explosion of clarity.
“All of us have a million beginnings that are incredible, but you don’t know if [they’re] brilliant or shit until you write past it and can hold it all in your mind,” said Danler, author of “Sweetbitter” and a New School alum, told The New School Free Press. “That’s the first step to making it happen, you have to write it.”
It seems so simple — tell the stories that you feel you must. Danler’s own work follows this advice, yet is more so an act of resilience and perseverance.
“Sweetbitter,” Danler’s first published book, is a sensual coming of age story about a 22-year-old girl who moves to New York City in search of herself. Tess, the main character, becomes swept up by the intricacies that exist in the underground world of the upscale restaurant business when she takes a job as a back waiter at a restaurant modeled after The Union Square Cafe.
Danler wrote the first version of the book after she learned of her acceptance to The New School’s MFA Writing Program. It was around 20 pages and contained the same first line that would ultimately be published, a scene about shucking oysters, and the same conclusion.
After her first submission, graduate professor Helen Schulman explained that what she had was not a novel. She needed characters and she needed a plot. What she did have, however, was an idea, and a voice, which Danler described as, a “slightly lyrical very rhythmic prose style.”
Danler pushed on and wrote the entirety of the book during her time in the graduate program at The New School, and she said the workshopping there gave her an edge in allowing her to think about her own work and decide what is negotiable to cut or change and what simply is not.
“Personally, I could not have done it without a MFA program,” she said. “If you have an idea and you’re willing to work harder than everyone else, then you should go to graduate school to give yourself the time and the space.”
The idea for the book came from Danler’s own experience working in the restaurant industry beginning at age fifteen. After watching young men and women take on jobs in the service sector as placeholders where they could make money while in search of their actual careers, she was fascinated by the slow adaptation to the underground labor-intensive lifestyle, and their surprising decision to remain in what many consider to be “survival jobs.”
“Sweetbitter” pays homage to writers that inspired Danler, such as Renata Atler, William Gass, M.F.K Fisher, but particularly those who chose to tell a female coming of age story, which she finds, “baffly underrepresented.”
Danler revealed that “Sweetbitter” will have life in a “different medium,” though she is not prepared to discuss the details yet.
For now, she is leading the nomadic life of a best-selling author. She told me she’s off to Chicago and Tampa for the remainder of her book tour, and then to Peru to work on a piece for the website Travel + Leisure, which she freelances for.
Her final advice to New Schoolers?
“Finish what you start.”