Conversations with Leaders: Claire Gibson on Writing
Her writing journey, nonfiction vs fiction, and faith in fiction
Claire Gibson is a writer based in Nashville, Tennessee. Born and raised at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, she grew up captivated by cadets and the beautiful Hudson River Valley, and long dreamed of writing a story that honored her childhood home and the women that inspired her there. Her compelling stories of women’s experiences have been featured in The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Tennessean, Entrepreneur Magazine, and many other publications. Beyond the Point is her debut novel.
Can you share your writing journey? Was this something you developed early in life, something you picked up later, etc.? What inspired you?
When I was about 9 years old, I read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and immediately fell in love with reading. From that point forward, I was just one of those kids that always had a book going. I love reading great novels, and to this day, always spend an hour or so reading each day (often at night before bed). There’s just nothing better, for my writing life, than to continue to be a voracious reader. It’s kind of like a musician that needs to tune their instrument. If you read all the time, you begin to tune your own voice, picking up on things like structure, variation, and pace. Novels and short stories do that for me. My greatest inspiration, to date, is a writer named Min Jin Lee. She wrote the novel Pachinko over the course of many decades, and the story is one of my favorites of all time.
Around the time I was 12, I began writing little stories to pass around the school cafeteria. My college public relations office hired me to keep a blog for prospective students, and also paid me to create other content for the university. These things I did because they were fun — I did not consider writing a career path, until I was out of school, and began to realize that it had always been my dream to do for others what Roald Dahl had done for me: create a world that I could fall into, characters that touched my soul. So, I began freelance writing in 2013, pitching stories to newspapers and magazines, and then after that, the idea for my first novel struck, and I got to work on my first piece of fiction.
You've done quite a bit of feature writing for places like the Washington Post, Marie Claire, Garden and Gun, etc. But you also write fiction, including your book, Beyond the Point. Is it hard to go back and forth from nonfiction to fiction?
For me, writing fiction is much harder, emotionally, than churning out a piece of journalism or a 1,000-word personal essay. If I could spend the rest of my life writing only personal essays, believe me, I would! But at the end of the day, I only have so much life experience to pull from. The allure of creating an entire universe — a cast of characters, a story plot, a feel — is what keeps me going back to the difficult work of fiction. It’s like being a sprinter versus a marathon distance runner. Right now, I’m enjoying trying to excel at the marathon distance. But in truth, the two really work in tandem to keep me motivated. I write a weekly newsletter called The Forest is Mostly Dark, and the practice of starting and finishing an assignment each week helps me maintain the discipline and momentum of forward progress.
I loved Beyond the Point. It really gave insight into the culture at West Point. Was this always going to be your first novel, given your experience growing up there?
Thank you so much, Daniel! I never tire of hearing from people who have read the story and enjoyed the experience. As a writer, that’s everything. I do feel this was always going to be my first novel. When I started writing as a journalist, I toyed with the idea of writing a novel about my experience as an Army Brat. But truly, the West Point setting had seeped into my veins, and it would have been difficult to really write about anything other than that place that I love, and the people I met there. In 2013, I interviewed several dozen women graduates of the U.S. Military Academy — some of whom I’d known when I was a child — and their stories helped inspire the novel.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to One Little Word to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.