Tell Me Your Ways…with Holly Gramazio

Author of the amazing, un-put-downable debut novel The Husbands.

When I reached out to Holly about answering some questions on her writing process she graciously agreed saying, “I have a VERY scattered revision process so should be fun!”

Her answers do not disappoint. As someone whose revision process is a bit chaotic this interview was extremely encouraging to me.

Photo by Diana Patient

I loved The Husbands so much that my husband got a play by play while I was reading. I couldn’t help but wonder how extensively you plotted it? Are you a plotter or a pantser? Why do you find this the best way for you to write? 

Well, I’ve only written the one novel so far so I’m not sure if I’ll always write them the same way! But for The Husbands the plotting was definitely something that went alongside the writing process, rather than ahead of it.

What does your drafting process look like? Do you write scenes in order?

Oh, I didn’t write in order at all.  I wrote a bunch of scenes and sections and jokes and husbands. Sometimes I’d take three or four separate goes at the same scene. Or I’d sit and think “what else could go wrong” or “what might be a funny thing to happen” and write that, and then hop to another entirely unrelated scene the next day. 

And then the actual plotting and structuring process came after that, once I had a huge unwieldy disordered document - a bit like the various draft scenes were a huge pile of clay to shape and rearrange and cut down. Figuring out the order of course, and lots of filling in the gaps, smoothing things out, making different scenes more or less dramatic based on the needs of where it ended up sitting in the book, that kind of thing. 

Please walk us through a little of what your revision process looks like?

I’m quite lucky in that I mostly enjoy reading my own writing! So I reread a lot as I write, and make a lot of sentence and paragraph level revisions as I go.

And then for bigger revisions, I make a big list on a bunch of sheets of paper or cardboard of stuff I want to change - which might be tiny details like changing a minor character’s name, or big things like making a scene hit harder. Or stuff that kind-of cuts through the whole book, like checking for consistency in how someone speaks. And I just go through that list - not in order, particularly, but picking the tasks that call to me - and I do ‘em and then cross ‘em out, and then pick the next one. For The Husbands I had a few different versions of this kind-of bug list, some that I made on my own and some based on agent or editor feedback.

Having that list on paper is really important to me! So even though my editors had commented a lot on the word document version of the book, I’d still copy any changes I wanted to make as a result of those comments over to the paper list..

How do you know when your story is done?

I am incredibly deadline driven, so basically it’s done when it’s too late for me to change anything else and I’ve promised to send it to someone else. Otherwise I’d just keep twiddling for ever.

How many beta readers do you typically have for a project? Does anyone read all the versions? 

For this one: a bunch of people read the first ten thousand words - a couple of friends, and the other students in a little novel-writing class I enrolled in, run by the writer Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. Those rounds of feedback were super useful for figuring out what was working and what wasn’t, plus it was really great motivation to start pulling the rest of the book into shape.

And then when I was close to having a start-to-end draft, I began reading a chapter a night aloud to my actual husband. And that was amazing - he is absolutely no good at lying or concealing his emotions in any way, so I could tell right away if he was bored or didn’t think a joke worked. Plus reading it aloud helped me notice a bunch of sentences that weren’t quite sitting right, of course. !

But I don’t think anyone else had read it all the way through when I sent it to my agent - which I now know is NOT the way you’re meant to do it, but I didn’t really know that at the time. All my other readers came later. First a few friends who read the whole thing after my agent had suggested that it probably needed a better ending, and who helped me figure out how to work on that and the other changes she’d suggested. And then once we’d sold the book and I knew it would actually get published, I felt better about getting more people to read and give me specific opinions on things like, you know, “would a thirty-year-old say this” (I’m about ten years older than Lauren!), “does this scene set in Denver make sense to someone who has ever been to Denver”, all that.

DEFINITELY nobody read all the versions. Pretty sure I didn’t even read them all start-to-finish myself. Honestly,  I couldn’t even tell you how many drafts there were - so much of my editing process was so scattered and incremental, so there aren’t distinct “here’s version 1, here’s version 7, here’s version 103” moments. 

What are you currently working on now?

Well, I’m trying to write another novel, but it’s pretty early days, so I don’t think I should say too much about it - I’m worried that if I talk about it too much I might use up all my enthusiasm and not actually get it written.

Do you have a favorite book on the craft of writing? 

Oh I love craft books. Honestly, I don’t often consciously use any advice from them - although you’ve got to assume it’s nestling into the brain somewhere, right? - but they help me feel excited about writing. I particularly loved George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and About Writing, John McPhee's Draft No. 4, Lydia Davis' Essays One.

Anything else you’d like to share? 

Okay, I don’t know how common this is, but: I end up using three or four different programs whenever I write anything long. Even just a long blog post or an essay. I’ll start out in google docs or notepad or even just writing something an email draft. Then maybe I’ll put everything into Scrivener. Then eventually Word, or a CMS if it’s for something online. It’s like I use up my ability to see the project in one program and have to switch to something else to carry on, copying-and-pasting across from one to another every few months.  

Where can we find you? (I'll link your socials)

I have a little newsletter at https://buttondown.email/holly - a mix of book news, writing stuff, game thoughts, things I’ve read and enjoyed, the ongoing adventures of trying to keep slugs out of my tiny garden, etc etc. I’m @holly_gramazio on Instagram, and hollygramazio.bsky.social on bluesky athough I’m only there occasionally.