No one writes fashion fiction novels better than someone
within the fashion industry, whether it’s Anna Wintour’s former disgruntled
assistant Lauren Weisberger’s The devil wears Prada or English born fashion
writer and New York “It girl” Plum Sykes’ Bergdorf’s blondes, these books will
entice any book lover. Lately I have been on a diet of Lynn Messian’s books of
witty tales of fashion and friends, Lindsay Lohan was right fashion has never
been this fun.
Like most stories nowadays, it all started on social media
and it lead to this interview, this interview has been the most fun and I am
sad that I no longer have reasons to email Lynn but I will be internally grateful
for this great read.
Who is Lynn Messina?
Lynn Messina is an endlessly optimistic pessimist.
What’s the question
you’d most like to be asked by never have?
Is it true that the Baroness Orczy, the author of The
Scarlet Pimpernel, broke your heart? And if so, how’d did she do it?
How old were you when
you first decided you wanted to become an authort?
The defining moment: reading a book about a fifteen-year-old
girl who invents a video game and convinces her parents to let her build her
own house in the backyard with the money she earned. I was fifteen myself and
the thought, This plot is so absurd, even I can do better. So I immediately sat
down to prove it. I wrote the story by hand on loose leaf paper. I never typed
it up so I don’t know how long it actually was but in retrospect, I think it
was probably just a short story.
Describe your writing
process; is there any specific ritual that you follow?
I start with an idea, usually just a first sentence. I never
know where the story is going and I sort of just hope that it all works out. I
find ideas engender other ideas, so I can’t get to the second floor without
first building the ladder to climb up. Fashionistas, for example, started with
a conversation I overheard during my first day at InStyle magazine. I wrote it
down verbatim and that was all I had. So I forced myself to fill out the rest
of the page and then I kept writing until a story appeared. With Fashionistas,
I finished the first chapter and then took another experience from InStyle that
had struck me as strange and started the chapter from there, again having no
idea what would happen next. But once you introduce, say, a smell, you have to
introduce a person who smells it and a person who causes it and reactions to
it.
If I write long enough, sooner or later, a story will appear. Every time, I
worry that it won’t happen, that nothing will appear, and yet every time it
works. Which isn’t to say I’m not worried it will stop working at any moment. Inevitably, as I write successive chapters new ideas pop up
that affect the beginning of the story, but I don’t stop and fix the beginning.
I just keep going and fix them on the next round because I think editing is
fatal. Once you start, you really can’t stop and you could spend the rest of
your life tinkering with the same three chapters.
I usually work by word counts. When I’m starting a book and
have no idea what’s going to happen, I make myself write five hundred words per
day. If it takes me eight hours to write five hundred words, then I’ve put in a
good day at the office. But if it takes me only an hour, then I get to lie on
the couch and read a book or watch TV with a totally clear conscience. When the
book hits its stride, I raise the word count to 1,000 and then 2,000. At some
point, the story becomes clear and the end comes into sight and I don’t need
word count anymore to spur me on. The narrative’s momentum carries me through
and I resent anything that makes me stop writing for the day.
Who are your
favourite authors and how have they influenced your writing? Name a book you
wish you had written?
I still love early Douglas Coupland: Generation X and
Microserfs had a profound affect on me—the style, writing in short bursts, the
clarity, the straightforward ideas delivered neatly, the optimism, the belief
that community is the answer. I think Tom Stoppard is amazing. Arcadia is
perfect, absolutely perfect, and makes me feel thoroughly inadequate every time
I read it or see it, which I love. I want art to make me feel inadequate. Kate
Atkins has a book called Emotionally Weird, which taught me it’s OK to be
whimsical. I love absurd humor and elegant descriptions. Two books I wish I
were able to write are The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles and Where’d You Go,
Bernadette by Maria Semple.
Have you ever had a
case of writers block and how did you overcome it?
I’ve only had writers’ block at the beginning of a book,
when I start writing and writing and the story never takes off. I never figure
out what’s going to happen next. But when I say “writing and writing” I mean,
like, five hundred to a thousand words. I give up pretty easily and walk away.
Sometimes I do something entirely different, like write an essay or pick up
more freelance copy editing work. When I get stuck in a book—i.e., can’t quite
figure out the next plot point but still know where the book is going
ultimately—I will either write down all my thoughts in a free-form way,
following each idea to its conclusion to see if it will work over the long
term, or take a walk.
Is there anything you
find particularly challenging in your writing?
Finding the right words to describe something that’s crystal
clear in my head. On those walks, I sometimes compose whole paragraphs and in
my head the wording is perfect and it all makes sense but when I try to write
it down exactly as I remember it, it doesn’t make sense. I’m always amazed by
how difficult it is to articulate even the simplest idea.
Artists are the
self-critical people, how do you not give up on writing a book when self-doubt
kicks in?
A misguided faith in my own talent. I don’t doubt myself as
a writer; I doubt myself as a product. Writing a book is easy compared with
trying to get someone—either a publisher or a consumer—to buy it. And when that
self-doubt kicks in I smother with endlessly optimistic pessimism.
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“Fashionistas… has genuine style-plus all the wit and wisdom
erroneously attributed to The Devil wears Prada… Messina has written a book
that captures the idiocy and humour f the fashion world.”- Times Out New York
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I was wondering if
any of the characters or places in the book are based on real people or places
Lol no naming names of course?
A few characters in Fashionistas were inspired by some
people I’d worked with at InStyle. As I mentioned previously, the first
sentence of the book was a verbatim remark made by one of the editors. But
those people are just a jumping-off point. Real-life people, for all their
quirks, aren’t outrageous enough to propel my stories forward.
Fashionista is a hip
and funny parody of trendy magazines, what are your thoughts on Fashion
bloggers who are now being seen in the same light as editors.
I’m in awe of their ability to influence a market. I think
fashion bloggers concentrate the power of a magazine like InStyle in the hands
of one person or a few people and they have more of a direct line to their
followers and influencees (for lack of a better word). What I like about
fashion bloggers is they seem less focused on celebrity than mainstream
magazines. It’s more about the clothes and the designers. What really resonated
with me while working at InStyle was its product validation through
celebrities, we’d cover anything as long as there was a celebrity attached.
That’s what amused me and inspired me to write the book.
What have you learn
about the fashion industry?
That it's capricious and scary and so much depends on luck
and timing. The designer in Fashionistas who Vig interviews before he blows up
was based on an up-and-coming designer I'd read about in a magazine profile. I
honestly can't remember the name of the designer now, but I remember wondering
a few years later what had happened to him and when I looked him up, I found
that he'd had the misfortune to release a line of clothing with Islam accents
in the weeks immediately following 9/11. I wish I could remember the name so I
could see how he's doing now. In that way, it's a lot like publishing. So much
is out of your control.
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“Delightfully witty” -New York Daily News “Well-written, funny and sharp” -Pittsburg
Post-Gazette
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Bleak is a smart,
funny take on the Charles Dickens classic BLEAK HOUSE but one can help to
notice how it heavily borrows from your personal life. Another significant
influence is Lindsay Lohan who appears in the form of teenage sensation Moxie
Bernard
Bleak—which replaces the endless, hopeless court case at the
heart of Bleak House with an endless, hopeless movie option—was an attempt to
get something positive out of an option that went on for years. I know that's a
ridiculous thing to say because I got money, exposure, book sales and a party
with Paris Hilton out of it, so there were plenty of positives. But there's
something insidious about having a huge opportunity remain just out of your
reach year after year. And when it's something like a potentially big financial
payoff, you put off making some decisions in hopes of having more options down
the road. Bleak was my attempt to redeem that turmoil and uncertainty
creatively. Also: There was so much good material in it. So many things that
had happened were simply too ridiculous not to write about, and I relished the
opportunity to take those things and make them more ridiculous still. The funny
thing is, when I wrote the book in 2007, I thought I'd experienced everything a
movie option had to offer, but in the eight years since I've learned that it
can always get weirder and sadder.
Moxie Bernard was influenced by Lindsay Lohan, who was
briefly attached to star in Fashionistas, but she was also an opportunity to be
completely outrageous. Some of the antics ascribed to her I'd come up with for
other characters but couldn't use because they were too over-the-top. I could
get away with it with Moxie because she's a tangential character who exists
mostly as an idea in the lead character's mind. So I didn't feel the same
responsibility to make her wholly believable.
After fashionista
didn’t take off as a movie you began writing a contemporary adaptation of Bleak
House, what did advice do you have for anyone that has held on to a dream just a
little too long?
To not kick yourself for believing too long. Hope is an
almost impossible thing to kill.
We still have our
fingers crossed for Fashionista being adapted into a movie and it being Linsay
Lohan’s comeback. Your fans love fantasy movie casting the characters in your
novels, do you imagine which actors would play the characters in your Bleak,
Savvy girl and Mim warner lost her cool?
Nope. I’ve never imagined any actor playing any of my
characters, not even Lindsay Lohan when that seemed like a real possibility. My
mind simply doesn’t work like that. The characters are clear in my head, and
only the movie itself could supplant them. Or maybe not. I don’t know what
would actually happen. Maybe the movie would be too different from the images in
my head to make a difference.
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“Get an inside scoop of the scandalous world of fashion
magazines” -Elle
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What advice would you
give to anyone starting out in their career in fashion?
Master the basics. Acquire the skills. Stick with it despite
crushing disappointment—which is what I would tell anyone entering any creative
endeavor.
The wisdom it imparts
on the way the working world works is perfect for newbies; what do you hope the
reader grasp from it and what would you promise anyone who hasn’t read it?
It’s very easy to have your head turned by fun and glamorous
things, but at the end of the day, you still have to produce something. I get
distracted easily. When something exciting is going on—say, the months after
the Lindsay Lohan announcement or a book is selling particularly well—I have a
ridiculously hard time sitting down and focusing. I’m too jittery and excited.
But I always remember a Balzac novel I read in college about a young man who
came to Paris to be a writer but instead drank, flirted and partied and never
wrote anything. I think of the character who was supposed to be in his garret
writing but never was and then I think of Balzac, who was in his garret writing
and now I was reading him, a 150 years later. There’s glamour in the garret, too.
What is the book
based on and what type research went on?
I wrote Savvy Girl because I wasn’t done examining the
magazine culture I work in. I’d lost my gig at InStyle because of Fashionistas
(my boss wasn’t quite as amused or aghast by the celebrity culture as I was)
and I’d moved onto another magazine that was all about female empowerment.
Though, of course, no glossy women’s magazine can be all about female
empowerment. Little things inevitably have to undercut the mission. But I
wanted to set a story at that kind of publication, and I also wanted to tap
into the glamour that I as a high school student in the suburbs of New York
City imagined about life in the city. I wanted Chrissy to go to lots of
parties, like a debutante going to lots of balls. Oh, and I just remembered
that the original idea for it came from a friend named Christina who started
work on the exact same day as another woman named Christina. At once, the other
Christina established herself as a superstar and my friend felt like she was
the bad Christina. That’s where the original idea came from. The story was
originally called The Good Christina. The idea for the savvy girl writing
contest hit me halfway through the book and I went back and rewrote it to
support the new vision. As for research, I didn’t do a lot. This was a case of
writing what I know. But when I write historical novels, I Google constantly.
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“Fast-paced and funny, it’s a cute an breezy book that’s sensitive
when it needs to be- particularly as it relates to the ephemera of “what’s hip”
to the passing of youth” -New York Post
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Which scenes in your
book did you have the most fun writing?
The scenes I have the most fun writing are the ones that get
entirely out of hand, when things become successively more ridiculous. So in
Fashionistas, the scene where they brainstorm celebrity and fashion stories
based on Jesus to go with the cover story on a Jesus art installation, or in
Tallulahland, when the two neighbors start a bidding war over the property
Tallulah’s mom had left her.
Is there an
underlying message that you want you wish to relay about human nature through
your characters?
I think it comes down to hope. For me, everything always
comes down to hope—how to embrace it, how to live with it, how to crush it, how
to rebound after it crushes you. It’s human nature to have hope, despite all
evidence to the contrary.
Did you pattern the
characters after anyone you know or is they totally fictional?
I do pattern characters after people, lots of people, but
it’s always just a starting point. The character wouldn’t work if it was just a
reflection of someone I knew or read about. They’d never become real to me
because I would always be trying to figure out how would that person react,
rather than my character. And that’s the excellent thing about characters,
rather than real people—they can react any way you want them to or need them
to. And if something they do doesn’t fit them, you can change their action. And
if something they do doesn’t fit the story, you can change the story.
Which character in
your books mention above is your favourite and how much of yourself is
reflected in that character?
In Fashionistas, Vig has a best friend called Maya, and that
character is my favourite, because Maya is me—pushed to the margins of my own
story. But she’s also does things that I’ve thought about but would never do.
For example, I had pinkeye in the office once and my eye was horrifically puffy
and swollen and nobody said a thing. Nobody noticed and I had the idea of doing
increasingly outrageous things to myself to see if anyone would notice. But of
course I never would. Also, one reviewer called Maya a bottomless well of need.
I sort of love that description of myself—ironically and yet unironically.
More of Lynn Messian's books http://www.amazon.com/Lynn-Messina
Follow Lynn Messina on Twitter @lynnmessina
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