LIKE EVERY OTHER WRITER, author Matt Mendez knows the saying to “write what you know,” though he is far more invested in writing about what you don’t know. Listen in and read along as we discuss that, and so much more.
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Marion: Today my guest is writer Matt Mendez. He’s the author of Barely Missing Everything, his debut novel and the short story collection, Twitching Heart. Barely Missing Everything has been called “a searing portrait of two Mexican American families,” by Publishers Weekly, and “accessible and artful” in a starred review from Kirkus. It was named the 2019 Best YA book by Kirkus, Seventeen Magazine, NBC Latino, and Texas Monthly, and was a Georgia Peach Book Award for teen readers nominee. Awarded Second place in the International Latino Book Awards, a Junior Library Guild selection and a Land of Enchantment Black Bear Book award winner. His new book is The Broke Hearts, just out from Atheneum. Welcome Matt.
Matt: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Marion: Well, it’s a joy to have you here. Your first published work is a collection of short stories titled Twitching Heart, written from the working class barrios of El Paso, a place that doesn’t get much coverage in American literature. And every writer and writing teacher knows the adage “write what you know.” So if you come from a place that’s not covered in literature, talk to me about how you acquired the vision to write from there.
Matt: Quite frankly, that’s where I’m from and going to school and learning to write, you hear that adage, “write what you know,” all the time. And I think when you think about your family and your life and when you’re learning to write, you quickly discover as you’re writing, you don’t really know what you think you know. You know what I mean? Which is such a fun thing to discover and a humbling thing to discover as you’re writing. As you start to maneuver through stories and you start to learn your craft, you realize you don’t know a lot about writing. And when you write literary fiction, when you write contemporary fiction, you also learn to discover that about life itself.
Marion: Yes.
Matt: Because that’s what contemporary fiction is. It’s about an exploration about family. It’s an exploration about relationships, and tough relationships and about tough life lessons and the things you think you are writing about and you’re writing towards, you realize “I don’t know exactly what it means to be married or to raise children or about coming of age,” which is what I ended up writing more with YA in my current work.
You realize I don’t really know exactly what it is, what it means to grow up or to be at these moments. And that’s kind of a delight and a surprise, which is really what you want as a writer, is to be surprised when you’re writing because you know that’s what you reader’s going to get when you’re writing. And for me it was kind of like these two tracks that I was on when I was learning to write and trying to figure out the craft and then taking that advice of writing what you know and realizing like, “Oh, I also don’t know these things about life and I don’t know what these characters are actually going through.” Even though when I started I really thought that I did and then soon discovered that I didn’t. And to me that’s just exciting.
Marion: So, it’s more like writing from what you don’t know.
Matt: Absolutely.
Marion: Yeah. I kind of like that. Somebody said that to me recently in an interview and I thought, “Oh, that is so much better, so much better.” Because I think we all talk the same way in these sort of sentence fragments. We say things like, “Oh, that restaurant last night was so great. It was so great. You’ve got to go there.” And you’ve learned nothing from what I just described.
But when we sit down and write, we dive in. And I think what I’m trying to get at in the first question is just that the idea that this is not a place that a lot of people have covered. And you answered it so beautifully, “but it’s where I’m from.” And you write from there, even if it’s not a place that you’ve located on the shelves prior to this in the bookstore or in the library. And going into YA or Young Adult, it fascinates me that these two novels are both Young Adult and told through the lens of Latinx culture. And I can’t say it better than the great writer Sandra Cisneros says when she writes about you, “Matt Mendez writes on target about people who are barely surviving in an America all too familiar to those who live on the borderlands.” And she goes on to say that you make room for them on the pages of American literature. So let’s talk about making room for people. How do you define who you are making room for in your work?
Matt: Honestly, what I’m making room for is readers. So as a writer, I think it’s our job to tell stories and to make room for readers who don’t have stories in books. So as a young person, I didn’t find myself in stories and I really didn’t grow up in a world of books. I didn’t even really think about books. My parents weren’t readers. I didn’t have aunts and uncles who were readers. My grandparents weren’t these big families of readers where we didn’t consume stories in that way. We would watch movies, so there were stories around us, but mostly our stories were told by family members.
We would sit around and we would talk and we would joke and we would laugh and we would make each other cry. There was song and music and we would tell these stories in these really vivid ways and that’s kind of how we would connect with each other. So we had story, but what we didn’t have was the written word and we didn’t have literature. It was just this thing that was missing that we didn’t know was missing.
And it wasn’t until I was an adult and in college that I discovered books and discovered Sandra who was probably my most influential writer. I discovered her. And it was in these classes where I was studying writing. One of my main characters in Barely Missing Everything, wants to be a filmmaker. And I had the same aspirations when I was younger and I was taking screenwriting classes and I was taking creative writing classes as a way to teach myself how to write screenplays, which is a very circuitous route to kind of learn how to do that. Where I had a creative writing teacher who kind of pointed me in the direction of literature and kind of gave me books and kind of shepherded me through that where I discovered all these really great writers and I discovered books and novels and short stories.
And now when I write, I found room for myself. I found place in stories and place in literature and making room for my younger self is why I’ve kind of chosen to write YA and why I feel compelled to tell these coming-of-age stories because it’s important for the world that I grew up in. To kind of bring it back to your first question, is to make room for my younger self about my home and El Paso and what coming of age is in the desert Southwest and El Paso and in the frontera. And to kind of have these experiences be read by younger versions of myself and these young Latino Latina kids growing up so they can have the experience that I didn’t have.
Marion: Yeah, that’s lovely. Making room for your younger self is a beautiful phrase. And my audience is writers and I think that’s going to invite a whole lot of people to type today as they listen to this. And I thank you for that. I think that the idea of the education fascinates me. I find that reading screenplays and writing screenplays, which is something I spent an early part of my career doing, was a great way to learn how to write dialogue. So can you talk just a little bit about the influences that you’ve kind of picked up? If you think of the things we get early but that we still have on us, is that one of them? Is the screenplay something that informed the work that you’re doing now?
Matt: Absolutely. I’m always been kind of fascinated by the rhythm of really fast conversations. So I watched a lot of movies growing up and I have really funny friends and really funny family members. So I was always kind of drawn to conversation and the way people speak. And in the nineties I think a lot of the movies that came out that were really talky. Like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez movies, they always have this really kind of witty back and forth banter. So I’ve read a lot of those screenplays and just a lot of them are really dialogue heavy and the back and forth banter just really snappy.
So, I think in a lot of my work I have what I think is pretty good repartee and really back and forth dialogue where a lot of it’s conversational but it’s also very stylized where you remove the ums and the pauses and you keep kind of a frenetic energy that moves back and forth in this very writerly way.
I think when we sit down to write, dialogue can become clunky and expositional. And not to be super technical, but if you want your dialogue on a page to move, those are the kind of things you want to stay away from so you’re not writing crime procedural and you want to kind of capture the energy that you have when you’re talking with people and were really funny. And I think your dialogue should be funny and move the story forward without explaining. And to me, movies do that really, really well. Really good movies do, where they’re funny and engaging and entertaining and not explaining. And I think movies do that really, really well and I’ve always wanted to incorporate that into the dialogue that I do when I’m writing stories.
Marion: I think it’s a great lesson for people. And the other great lesson that I think people can pick up reading your books, reading your short story collection, reading these two YA novels is how you characterize people. Your characters are beautifully wrought. So let’s talk about characterization. Late in the opening scene of The Broke Hearts, your fine new book, you described Danny, a main character this way by writing, “Things Danny cared about had a way of vanishing on him. It made caring a gamble.” These are two great sentences that sit right on the nose of the reader like a lens defining Danny and propelling us into caring about what is at stake for him. So let’s talk about characterization, as I said. I’d love your take on what considerations go into expressing to the reader who each individual is in a story.
Matt: That takes a lot of drafting. Even two small little lines that requires you just to think. Those small two little lines used to be three or four pages of describing and telling what Danny cared about as a character and as a person. I think when you’re able to condense a character into a couple of lines of what’s really, really important, I always get excited as a writer when I’m able to do that, when I’m able to finally lock that down. And I know when I read something like that, when another writer does it, I’m always like, “Oh, how do they do that? That’s such a magic trick.”
But thank you so much for pointing that out and for the compliment. And always when I read other writers, when I’m reading an Angie Cruz novel or a Manuel Munoz collection of short stories, I’m always really, really amazed at how they’re able with the economy of space to do that, because I always feel like it takes me paragraphs to get there. And in early drafts, it’s always paragraphs to get there. And then understanding your character and their choices and the age of your character, you’re eventually able to get there.
And Danny, he’s young, he’s coming of age and things are always changing. So that’s just kind of the mindset of a young character. And things always seem to be vanishing when you’re young, and when you’re changing, and when you’re graduating from high school and the life you just had is no longer the life you were leading. So of course a young person would feel like things are changing and that something new is always going to be a gamble.
And to me that just kind of puts you, if you understand where your character’s footing is at and what their fears are and characters, that’s kind of where they’re at. They’re afraid, they’re tentative. And it’s kind of understanding where their footing is will allow you to write to what they’re afraid of and what risks they’re going to take or not take, and the danger. It will help you understand your character and characterize them a little easier, although it’ll take you mountains and mountains of drafts to get there.
Marion: “Where their footing is” is a great navigational tool. And the kindness and generosity you’ve just shown by admitting that those two sentences began as pages and or many paragraphs is true too. It’s so much like cooking. If you braise something, put it in the oven for a really long time and you get that amazing taste that comes from only cooking down. You have to cook down a bottle of red wine and a quart of chicken broth to get this half a cup of this totally sticky, wonderful, completely ambrosia like delicious thing. That’s what it is. And I think a lot of writers, younger writers, newer writers don’t believe it. They are going to say, “Wow, those two sentences, I could never do that.” But what you just said is you can, but you’re going to start with two pages and then it’s going to be about getting your footing, about your need to define Danny.
And “these things have a way of vanishing on him and it made caring a gamble,” I can feel the distillation in that, but I love the idea that it starts big to get to the small. You’re absolutely right. But getting the footing, that’s that’s lovely, that’s very generous. You also do this great thing in this book, what I call devices, but people have a million words for these things. So you utilize the traditional narrative of course, but you throw in screenplay that one character JD is writing throughout the book and flash fiction and the combo works beautifully.
But I know from my own adventures in writing and working with writers, which I do all day, that just as quickly as a great structured device pops into your head, we totally talk ourselves out of it. We go, “Oh no, I’ve never seen anybody do that. I can’t do that.” Or we say, “I’ve never seen anybody do that. Can I do that?” Or whatever. But you went ahead and did it, and it made it onto the page and your publisher published it. It’s great. It works. It furthers the story, it drives home the characterization. It does everything you I think intended it to do.
But talk to me a little bit about when those structured things pop into your head. Do you just shoulder forward or do you have the confidence or are you like me and say, “Oh, I don’t know if I can do that.”
Matt: It was kind of a risky gamble. I felt like very much Danny where I was taking a gamble writing this novel because I wrote it in 2020. So everything was kind of up in the air. Everything seemed like a gamble in 2020 when I really sat down and kind of plotted out what I was going to do with this novel. And normally I have a certain amount of friends that I can trust to read and kind of look things over it. And the first person to read this novel was my editor and I didn’t give it to anyone else to read.
And as I sat down and started to work and was really in the middle of the novel, these different kind of literary devices and things I was working with just kind of took shape. And the story itself felt really organic with how the structure of the story started to work. A character would make a choice and a device would kind of pop up. And the needs of the characters seemed to drive the devices and the choices I was making. So, it didn’t feel like I was contriving a story in order to make a meta fiction or to try to create a world that I wanted these characters to inhabit.
The character seemed to kind of pull me into this kind of direction and this world I was making. So this book is a standalone novel, but it’s a companion piece to Barely Missing Everything. The world of the past story kind of infuses this book, so it seems like it’s a continuation of a universe of story. They butt up against each other and influence each other. So it just seemed to evolve into what The Broke Hearts cards is now and it’s a continuation of Barely Missing Everything.
So, to me it just feels like a really organic kind of evolution. So the book feels really natural to me in a way that I just trusted myself that if it didn’t work, my editor would tell me it didn’t work. And she was really supportive and really embraced the structure right away. So I felt confident in revision that the structure itself was sound and luckily it works. And I love screenplays and I love writing and flash fiction and just the economy of space and how lyrical you can be and how well you can just free yourself to just dabble with writing something that’s beautiful and kind of profound and be lyrical. And to me, I just had this space to do that in a way that my editor just really gave me the freedom to try to play with things as a writer that maybe you don’t always get in a traditional novel.
Marion: Yeah. And that’s wonderful. I wanted to mention that we met some of these characters previously in your debut novel, Barely Missing Everything that we now get to continue on with in The Broke Hearts. So let’s talk about staying with characters. When and how did you determine that you weren’t done with them? Or were you always planning a follow-up? Or is this a series? A lot of people want to write contiguous story or continuing story, but again they think, “Oh no, I guess I better try to get it all in one book.” Talk to me about moving on with the same people, some of the same people.
Matt: So I had always wanted to write this as a standalone novel and I wanted to kind of take Danny who was a minor third non-point-of- view character from Barely Missing Everything, and kind of write a stand-alone novel from him, just a single point-of-view novel. And I wanted to write a pretty basic, straightforward novel from him. He was going to be a first generation kid who was going to go to college and I was very interested in that kind of singular story. His dad was a retired army sergeant and I was really interested in that dynamic in that story.
And then as I started writing, JD who was one of the main characters from the first story, just popped up in the story and he became just this dominant character that just would not go away. He was just super pesky. He was such a big part of the previous novel, the previous story, that he just kept intruding on the story to the point where it was like, “Well, I guess he’s a main character now.” So then I had two point-of-view characters and then the Sarge, who’s a main character in The Broke Hearts, but his story is told through these beautiful flash fiction pieces. So then he became a point-of-view character. And then the screenplay became part of the story.
And then all these different elements just started mixing together and it just became this companion piece that The Broke Heart’s is now. And they’re dealing with the aftermath of Barely Missing Everything in this way that I didn’t quite anticipate when I started. So I just kind of trusted myself and my instinct that, “Hey, this isn’t what I wanted to do when I started.” But as I kept going, I was like, “Well just trust yourself that hey, these elements keep presenting themselves. This is kind of where your subconscious is leading you. Just keep going and don’t try to force this preconceived idea that I had and just kind of trust what you’re doing.”
I think that comes with experience as a writer. I think younger me would’ve tried to force the story, which is what I used to do was like, “No, this is where I started, this is where I want to end.” And I would kind of shoehorn an ending. And this one just kind of organically kind of moved forward. And I think I’ve been doing this long enough that I kind of trust the process and how I can write myself through these kind of tight corners I put myself into.
Marion: I love the word trust and I think it’s a complicated process. You write from, as we discussed as we opened this conversation, from a place that hasn’t gotten a lot of literature. You take on how difficult it is to make it in life when your life is what we sometimes refer to as Brown, the Brown lives, the people from the Southwest, the people that are not as reported in literature and are being reported in literature more often. But how when these lives are don’t matter. I mean, that’s one of the remarkable things that you got me to think about as I read Barely Missing Everything, your debut novel. And as you just said, you wrote your new book, The Broke Hearts in 2020, but it’s not possible not to talk about 2023 now.
We’re just a few days after Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem was unshelved and made unavailable to children of a certain age in Florida where amid lists of banned books, we have a lawsuit brought by Penguin Random House fighting the banning. And my audience is writers, many of whom want to write what they know as we get back to what we were talking about initially. But what they know, domestic violence, institutional racism, fear of others, code switching, women’s rights, I could go on and on. What they know might get them taken off the shelves. So talk to me about that trust thing, that trust that this is the story, this is what I’m going to write, and what? No matter what?
Matt: Yes, no matter what.
Marion: Yeah.
Matt: So for me as a writer, me and the page, I’m always going to write what I want to write. And then to me advocacy is separate. Pushing for civil rights, pushing to stop book bans, to push against this encroaching fascist censorship is separate. I work with teachers, with libraries, with politicians, with advocacy groups in my role as an author, as a citizen. To me that’s advocacy work. And I pursue that separately as an author, which to me, being an author and being a writer are different things. So to me that’s what I use my advocacy for and my weight as an author, as a citizen, to go and visit schools, visit libraries, and make sure I’m doing those things as a public person to keep pressure on city councils and school boards to fight these book bans and to support libraries and teachers.
But as a writer, I want to make sure that I’m not self-censoring, that I’m not trying to write something out of fear, or write something that I’m hoping will never be banned, or that I’m going to censor myself, or write something in that hopes that it won’t be banned or that it won’t be offensive, or that I’m going to limit myself out of fear. Because that’s really what these things are about.
Marion: Yes.
Matt: It’s about taking books off the shelves, but it’s also about stopping me before I even get started.
Marion: Yes, it is.
Matt: So that’s what I think writers have to be worry from, is like to be vocal and to advocate and to fight this thing as an advocate and as an author. But as a writer when it’s you by yourself, is to not let them stop you before you even get started.
Marion: Beautifully put and so important, and covers that responsibility I think we have now to advocate, but to do it with the greatest of professionalism in the work we do with libraries, the work we do with publishers, but to write what we believe, write what we know, literally without fear or favor. And thank you, I appreciate that so much. I think it’s going to give a lot of people a lot of courage and I think we need a lot of courage right now.
Matt: Absolutely.
Marion: Yeah. So the coming-of-age novel has so much appeal, and so much so that I’ve read multiple times that young adult literature is mostly read by adults, that the biggest audience is still adults. So let’s talk about the actual appeal of it. Much of YA, at least in my pretty extensive experience reading it, is this coming-of- age concept, but it’s also usually written in the I voice. And in the two YA novels of yours, you use the third person. So it’s coming-of-age, but it’s with that overview, that flyover, that up here, omniscient look. So can we talk about that and the advantages of writing from the third person when you’re writing in coming-of-age. Is that a cocktail that you just really love?
I mean, what was your thinking there? And there are advantages and disadvantages of writing first person, third person in this coming-of-age concept.
Matt: Oh, for sure. For me, the third person close omniscient narration just always feels the most natural for me. So I think I just kind of gravitate towards that. And also I think that’s just always been a natural oral storyteller’s point of view. Whenever I hear somebody telling me a story, it always seems to be in that point of view. When they tell cautionary tales and they tell fairy tales, it’s always from that distance and in that narrative voice. So I’ve just always enjoyed stories told from that point of view. So for me it’s kind of my default and how I love to receive, read, hear stories. It’s from that distance that kind of moves back and forth from really, really close to the character and then able to pull back and kind of give you this overview and this distance where you get to see a character move and think and act.
I’ve always just kind of loved that, and as a writer I just feel, for me, I have this ability to close the distance on a character really quick and then pull back and give the reader all sorts of deep secrets and then pull back and show like, “Oh, this is what the character also doesn’t see,” and give them this really spectral view of what’s happening in the story and in the world around them that I just don’t feel as a writer, I’ve been able to gain access with first person. Although I do write a lot in second person too, which I think is just a fun way to write a story and put them in this almost “choose your own adventure” style writing where I put them right inside the character and have them be the you character, which I do in a little bit in the flash fiction pieces in The Broke Hearts, which I loved doing.
Marion: It shows.
Matt: Yeah, I love doing that. But you can only do it for a little bit. At least me, I always find that to become kind of exhausting after a while, so I always do it in short spurts.
Marion: Yes, it reads like rocket fuel and I bet it feels like rocket fuel. You would just do it for so long, but it works beautifully. So it’s propulsive in this new book.
So as we wrap this up, I was thinking as you were talking about an interview I did recently with Lamya H, who she’s Muslim, she’s queer, she’s wearing a hijab and she’s living in the United States. She’s writing about her experience., And one of the things she said to me was that she feels that being on the outside and she is by her own definition very much on the outside, and I think we would agree that we’ve put her on the outside, not on the inside of American culture, yet.
She said that it has some real advantages to writing and it would be a lovely world if no one was writing from the outside, the borderlands, being excluded. What are the writer’s tools you have on you from writing from who you are and where you are on the borderlands of America and culture?
Matt: I mean, there’s so many different ways to kind of answer that question. Being outside of dominant white American culture, from being in the Southwest, which isn’t the dominant literary landscape and culture. And then just even as a writer and predominant writers, like writerly culture, I’m not an academic. I didn’t come from a world of books. I’ve been in the military. I’ve been a mechanic for most of my life, which I think gives me a much different background than many of my writer colleagues.
And I think that that has informed my writing probably more than anything else as far as technically how I write and how I view writing as a mechanic. It’s made me super non-precious about writing and how I view writing as craft. That’s really informed how I write as far as being able to look at a manuscript, see something that doesn’t work, and then toil and work on it to make it kind of as good as I can without feeling whatever I’m doing is just this super really precious thing. I’m like, “Oh, that doesn’t work,” and I’ll easily redo an entire draft and not really think too hard about all the labor I’ve put into it and feel overly sad about trashing a first draft, which I have a lot of friends that have a lot of issues with it.
Marion: I love this answer and I’m going to have to follow up with it. The idea of the mechanic in you, the idea of the skilled mechanic utilizing those eyes, those hands, literally on a piece of writing is as practical and direct a concept as I’ve ever had put to me. So did you understand that when you started to first write, what was the first time you said to yourself, “Oh, this is my mechanic self doing this editing?” Was it conscious or did you laugh three quarters of the way through your first story collection going, “I think there’s a little bit of mechanic skills going on here because I’m not sentimental about this word, these words. They don’t work, they got to go.” It’s like a bad carburetor. Boop, gone, out. So talk to me about this, please.
Matt: It was kind of in workshop, I realized that. I was in undergrad, we were doing workshop and everybody turns in their stories. You get back your notes and you start doing your revisions. And I turned in my story, I got notes from everybody and everybody’s making the little comments and I was like, “Oh, that makes sense, that makes sense, this makes sense.” And I went and I did a revision and I turned a completely different revision into my writing professor and the story was dramatically changed.
And I sat down with the professor and he is like, “Oh, this is much different. You made a lot of improvements.” And me and her were
talking back and forth and she said, “Oh, usually when you get a second draft from somebody, there’s very minimal changes.” She’s like, “You made a lot of wholesale changes.” And I was like, “Well, yeah, of course I did. I had this note from you, this note from some of the students in the class and a lot of them made sense. So I changed them.” And she talked to me about how usually it takes a long time for a writer to get there. And I was like, “I didn’t understand why. You said this didn’t work, this didn’t work. And I looked at it and of course they weren’t working, so I took them out.” I didn’t understand what the confusion was.
And then she says, she was like, “Well.” We started talking about my background and she was like, “Oh, well, it kind of makes sense.”
She pointed out to me, “Oh, well you’re a mechanic. This kind of makes sense. It wasn’t working, the part wasn’t working. You just removed it and put a new one in and that was working.” I was like, “Oh, that makes sense.” So she was the one who actually pointed it out to me versus me coming to the epiphany on my own. She’s the one that kind of pointed, she’s like, “Oh, well this kind of makes sense if you’re a maintainer, that you’re just fixing broken things. It didn’t work, so obviously you would just do something different.” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of obvious.”
Marion: Best editing advice I have ever gotten in an interview. Thank you, Matt. That was lovely and I am going to keep that and think about that and hold that to my heart. It is a great piece of advice.
Matt: Oh, you’re welcome.
Marion: Think like a mechanic.
Matt: Yeah.
Marion: All right, well, good luck with the book. It’s a joy to read and I’m just so delighted to be able to talk with you. Thank you so much.
Matt: The pleasure was mine. Thank you.
Marion: The writer is Matt Mendez. The book is The Broke Hearts, just out from Atheneum. See more on him at matt mendez dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of the Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
