Rebellion 1776 tells the story of Elsbeth Culpepper, a 13-year-old girl working in a Loyalist judge’s house when Patriot cannon fire marks the start of the Siege of Boston. When Elsbeth’s only living relative, her father (her mother and siblings died in an earlier smallpox epidemic), goes missing and the judge is banished from Massachusetts with other Loyalists, Elsbeth has to figure out how to survive on her own. To avoid the orphanage, Elsbeth finds work as a maid for a wealthy family, though things take a turn for the worse when smallpox finds its way into Boston and debate rages about the risks and benefits of inoculation. 

After the conversation with Dlouhy, Anderson spent much of the five intervening years intensely researching the lives of people living in Boston in 1776, a great deal of which made it into the novel. “When I was trying to figure out what furniture would be in the house that’s a central setting in the book, I went to the probates, meaning the inventories made of a dead person’s estate of wealthy Bostonians so that I could see the kind of furniture they [had],” Anderson told WD. “But I was also interested in trying to find out about the lives of ordinary people. I spent months learning about the Almshouse in Boston. How did the town take care of people when the breadwinner of the family was dead or very ill and the children had to be fed? What kind of choices did families have or didn’t have when it came to the care of their kids during this sort of crisis?”  

Anderson doesn’t just write picture books or deeply researched middle-grade historical fiction. She’s well-known for her contemporary YA novels, including National Book Award finalist Speak, ALA Best Book for Young Adults and New York Times bestseller Twisted, and Amazon’s Best Young Adult Book of 2019, the nine-time star-reviewed memoir in verse, Shout. 

Regardless of which sub-genre she’s writing (“I just write what’s consuming me,” Anderson says with a laugh), her stories depict children and teens trying to make the most of their lives often during extraordinary or challenging times. Because living during uncertain times is a recurring theme in her books, we pick up our conversation talking about writing about an epidemic while living during a pandemic. 

You’ve written about an epidemic before (Fever 1793), but in this case, you had, like the rest of us, the unfortunate experience of living through a pandemic. How did that impact your writing compared to writing that earlier book? 

Where I was living at that point, in early 2020, was just on the border of Philadelphia, and we were pretty close to a hospital. I will never lose the memory of the—because it’s a very densely populated area—ambulance sirens that were 24 hours a day. It was just constant. Desperately sick people being taken to the hospital that was very soon overwhelmed. That’s such a strong sense memory in me.  

But also, at the same time, those of us in children’s literature were trying to figure out what role can we play in our community to support American families or families around the world in this hard time? A number of families had reached out to me to tell me that, as a family, they were reading Fever 1793, and I wound up doing a read-aloud for a couple of chapters of the book and putting it somewhere online. I had some emails from parents who really appreciated having a book that, because it’s set in history, it’s touching on the same themes of fears and concerns and this disease coming out of nowhere.  

But my books end in hope, and it gave families a much-needed tool. There’s a bunch of other books I’m sure they were using too, not just mine, but the families were using literature as a way to help their kids process what they were going through, what we were going through as a country at that point. That really stuck with me as I started to narrow my research a little bit with the idea that I’m going to write a middle-grade novel about this and what kind of information is going to be, first of all, fun and interesting for my readers, but also give them a few things that they can take away from the story.  

What kind of research did you do for this book, and generally speaking, where does research fit into your writing process? Is it before you draft or as you hit upon a question? 

No, the research usually takes a couple of years before I even start writing the book, and that’s why people sometimes give me a hard time, because I don’t write books very quickly. But some people don’t take the research thing as seriously as I do. I just feel so strongly, especially when you’re talking about the founding of America, we have seen a lot of information be manipulated. It’s very important for those of us who work with kids to try to find an appropriate, a sensitive way—because we’re talking about children here—but also an accurate depiction of what was going on in those years of the American Revolution. So, for me, research is first and foremost what I have to do. 

My job as a fiction writer is to deeply ground myself in the facts of the situation. Using, for example, government documents from the Boston town meetings. They had to discuss not only the stuff going on with the war, but [also] the smallpox epidemic that raged across America. For all the years of that war, smallpox epidemics were popping up all over the country, which caused real problems for the military as well. So, town records, newspapers, journals, letters, probates. … 

There was just so much. Caitlyn had to push hard to get me to actually turn the book in because I could have worked on it for another 20 years. 

You do quite a bit of research for your contemporary novels too. Does the research or your process differ based on whether you’re writing historical fiction or contemporary fiction? 

So far, it’s been dramatically different, which is why I think I’ve enjoyed going back and forth between the two subgenres, because I get bored kind of easily. When I’m writing for today’s teenagers, I don’t have to worry about the details of the time and place. I can make certain assumptions about what my readers already know about the world, and my readers for my YAs are older too, so that is also different.  

My historical fiction starts in setting, in terms of time period and place, and I have to understand what really happened. Then I have to figure out a plot that will somehow mesh well with that. I begin slowly as I—it feels like if you can imagine a statue rising from the middle of the ocean—as I’m doing this research and trying to hold all these threads in my head about what happened, what I think I want to write about a character begins to emerge. Then I have to figure out the external life of that character in terms of how that person interacts with the plot, as well as all the internal life. What is it about this character that makes them the right person to tell the story about?  

My YA fiction always starts with character. Always starts with character. It starts because there’s something I’ve found in our culture or the world where teenagers are being really disrespected, or something about teen life that is poo-pooed by the adults in the world. That really makes me angry, and I write really well from anger. So, I start thinking about the kind of character that whatever, fill in the blank, for any one of my YAs. Then I have to structure a plot. 

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One of the things I loved about Elsbeth was her inner monologue and reading what she wanted to say compared to what she actually said and how she reigned it in. How did you develop her as a character and her voice? 

One of the challenges of writing a different time period for children of today is language and voice. I try really hard not to put in anachronistic language—language from the wrong time period. Shout out there to the online dictionaries that help me make those choices! But I also have to remember that in some cases, these books are read by 9- and 10-year-olds. I can’t get bogged down in the way we think people might have spoken because of the language we read in letters that were written by one rich person to another rich person. So, I do take some liberties with voice and not necessarily with—I don’t have my teenage character chewing bubble gum and saying words that we use today. 

But she does have a pretty fresh attitude, you know? She’s like every 13-year-old I’ve ever met in my whole life. I don’t think 13-year-olds change that much from century to century. I wanted to get inside of her because I kept thinking, we’ve been through this pandemic, we’ve been through some real political divides, and here I was writing about a character who was living not only during the smallpox epidemic, but also during a time of real political divides trying to figure out, how am I going to eat today? One of the incredible strengths I see in children and teenagers of all generations is that the world is affecting them, but they’re also trying to grow up in this world. So, they still are being fresh and frustrated and sometimes naïvely hopeful.  

How do you know when a story idea has legs, when it’s going to turn into something that you can continue with?  

That’s a great question because, thinking back, I started writing in the early ’90s and it probably took 15 years, almost 20 years maybe, for me to understand that some things are just a good idea, and some things could become a book. There was a time when I was starting a lot of books, and then I just dropped them, because I had that initial flame, but without fuel, it doesn’t go anywhere. And again, everyone’s process is different—but maybe that’s why I think about a book for a long time before I start writing it. When we’re talking about the world of historical fiction, I’m doing a lot of that early research, and I’m thinking particularly about Rebellion 1776, I couldn’t wait to get out of bed in the morning to learn more about this time and place: Boston, ’75 through ’77. I couldn’t wait. I skipped so many lunches because I was so deeply into wanting to learn about this experience.  

Then, when I started writing, I missed a lot of lunches the last five years, because I was just dialed into this character. There’s this intensity of the connection with characters and the story that for me, lets me know this is the book I’m supposed to be working on. If it feels like I’m painting by numbers, then I should probably look for a new project. 

I saw on your website that you have done a lot of school visits. Do you still do them? 

No, mostly because of book banning. 

That was going to be my next question: How have the school visits changed in the face of book bans and censorship? 

What worries me the most is, just before the pandemic hit, in children’s literature, we had finally begun to open the doors to all kinds of stories. We were finally—the people who held power were recognizing that there’s a lot of different stories about and for children, especially in America where we have people coming from so many different backgrounds and different cultures. It’s a ginormous country, so a story for a kid in one part of the country is different for another. Lots of different faiths, lots of different understandings of gender identity and sexuality, and the way families are structured. Kids’ publishing was just beginning to embrace all that with amazing results. Authors like Angie Thomas and Nic Stone and Jason Reynolds, and just incredible, talented people. 

Then we had the one-two punch of lockdown and book banning. What I worry, really deeply worry about, is that the people who are the generation younger than me, a lot of them are these new authors that we’ve recently seen published in children’s publishing, they don’t have the ability to do school visits the way that my generation did. It’s very hard to make a living as an author and in children’s publishing. Anybody who made a living as an author—who didn’t write a fantasy novel and made a fortune—usually a part of their income stream was visiting schools, which is a win-win for everybody. The staff in the building and the students get to listen to an author talk about writing and learn about writing and keep kids really jazzed about books. And it also provided a more or less reliable income for the author. There were years when my kids were young, I could budget the family budget on the school visit income, and then if royalties came in, well that was just bonus.  

So, what happens to our pool of writers and illustrators and children’s literature, if they don’t have that option of school visits supplementing their book income? What happens is they have to go back to their day job,s and that means we’re not going to get the books. Maybe they’ll write a book every five years, every 10 years, but they’re not going to be able to do a book every year or every other year the way they could have if they’d been able to do school visits.  

And then you have the book bans themselves that are removing so many books. I’m just one of thousands of books that have been removed from great swaths of the country. … 

There was a point when I was traveling 150–170 days a year—now that includes travel time to get to back and forth—and last year I had two school visits. 

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When you were doing the school visits, I can only imagine the impact of talking to those young readers, what that did for you as a person, but also for your writing. What was that like? 

I loved doing school visits. I mean, the school visits I would do for—for a long time I was writing picture books too—elementary and middle schools are very different than what I was doing at the high school level. When I would go to a high school, I would always have the administrators sign off on what books I could talk about because those are issues that in some school districts people were not comfortable with. But with the younger kids, middle school and younger, oh my gosh, just that amazing energy and joy and those kids!  

I was there to talk about the writing process obviously, and research. Usually, if I was talking about my historicals, I’d be talking to kids between fourth and eighth grades. And if you think about it, somebody writing historical fiction for kids, basically I get to be a fifth grader every single day. A fifth grader with an assignment: Study this thing and then write about it. And the kind of frustrations that kids have in terms of that sort of assignment from school, it’s exactly what writers deal with. You procrastinate. You don’t want to revise. You just want everybody to tell you it’s awesome. And you still have to do the hard work. Then when you finish it and you wake up the next morning, you have to do it again. I think we have a lot of things in common.  

It was really moving sometimes to hear from my readers of historical fiction, how my books affected them. I had one young girl, I was at a school visit in New Jersey, I think around 2003. She was a sixth grader, and she had read Fever 1793. She told me the reason she liked that book is that the main character goes through really hard things, and she liked the emotions. Her father had been in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Thankfully he survived, but it was a very traumatic experience for their family that was still echoing two years later. She said that was the first character whose inner life was something that that girl identified with because she had also been through hard times.  

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What additional advice do you have for readers of WD? 

Very early on, I can remember—and this has all changed so much, so it’ll sound like I’m talking about a different planet—but back then you would send, for children’s literature, you would either send the entire picture book manuscript or opening chapters in a novel through the mail because we didn’t have email yet. Usually, they would come flying back with a standard rejection letter. But every once in a while, I would get a personalized rejection letter—got those for several books—and I felt like somebody had turned up with a cheerleading squad to cheer me on. Even though it was a rejection, it was a quality rejection. I kept them taped on my wall. One of the hardest lessons that took me a long time to learn was to not take those kinds of rejections personally, and to recognize that sometimes it was that I had sent the wrong story to the wrong editor. Because you have to learn about the business as well as learning about the craft. But also learning that because somebody rejected my work, sometimes it meant that it really sucked. Sometimes it meant that it wasn’t ready.  

The most important lesson of all was, I had no control over if my work got accepted. I had complete control over the quality of work that I sent in. It’s sometimes very tempting to spend all your time studying the editors or worrying about your platform or those sort of things—it’s a game I think we play with ourselves as authors when writing feels hard.  

Here’s what I want all writers to do: I want all writers to find a photograph of themselves when they were 4 or 5 years old, and I want them to put that photograph close to where they write, either a physical space or a space on their desktop. Every time they start to hear the negative self-talk in their head, I suck, I’m wasting my time, all those terrible things we tell ourselves when we get down, I want you to look at that little kid. Would you say those words to a child that age? No. No human with a heart would say that.  

To be your best writer self means being gentle with yourself sometimes, especially when you’re creating something. Creation is best done with an open heart and a gentle spirit. Sometimes you’re going to write crap, but that’s OK because then you can fix it and make it better. That’s what you would tell a 5-year-old: “I’m so proud of you for finishing that draft. That was a really hard thing. Have a cookie and then tomorrow we can start revising it and make it better.” 

I started to talk about people who spend a lot of time on their platforms. I think that kind of work, for many, is a sign that there’s something they’re not feeling cool about in their manuscript. You should want to be with your manuscript all the time. That’s where your energy needs to be, is the quality of your work. Be gentle with yourself.

The post The WD Interview: Laurie Halse Anderson appeared first on Writer's Digest.

They say you should never meet your heroes. But speaking with Stephen Graham Jones is a lot like speaking with your local theater nerd about the history of Broadway, except with a lot more goosebumps and nightmares. 

Known for his horror writing, Jones has won or been nominated for over 20 awards, including the Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award, British Fantasy Awards, and Locus Awards. He has published more than 30 books and hundreds of short stories, in genres ranging from horror to science fiction to absurdist. You can find his work in well-known publications like Clarkesworld and Nightmare Magazine. On top of his writing career, Graham Jones is also the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English and a Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado Boulder. But while some writers might let those accolades feed their egos, Jones is just like the rest of us—plagued with pre-publication anxiety. 

“I’m still in that stage where it could be a total flop and a failure and nobody’s going like it, you know?” he said, laughing, as we sat down to discuss his upcoming release, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. “Like, you and three other people have read it, so I’m scared. But you’re supposed to be scared, I think, too.” 

I assure you; he has nothing to be scared about. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a historical horror novel about a professor, Etsy, who, in the midst of a career crisis in 2012, is transcribing her great-great grandfather’s diary. Through entries from 1912, we learn that Arthur Beaucarne, a pastor, heard several confessionals by a Blackfeet man named Good Stab. These transcribed confessionals leave blood in their wake.  

We began our conversation by discussing the technicality behind this latest release. 

I would consider The Buffalo Hunter Hunter to be a story within a story within a story, but all three of those stories are told through first-person narration. Was it difficult to keep all of those voices distinct? 

I did have to keep all three of those voices, those narrators, distinct. I mean, they distinguish themselves a little bit just because they’re in different contexts and they have different histories, but that’s not quite enough, for me to do it, anyway. What I ended up having to do was give each of them different rules to follow that they didn’t know they were following. 

The outside narration, the frame—Etsy—she has access to anything she wants. She’s got semicolons. She could have footnotes if she wanted. It wouldn’t matter. She’s got everything. Arthur Beaucarne, he has those big old long dashes, and he’ll use however as a coordinating conjunction. And then when you get to the center of the nested narratives to Good Stab, he doesn’t have any dashes at all. And no semicolons, either. … I have somewhere a list of rules [that] each character will always default to using this when possible, and that when possible.  

And I wish I could say that that happened organically the first time through, but really, it just kind of expressed itself through their own voices. And then I had to codify it and go back through a few times and comb all the things that didn’t fit out of each character’s voice and sections. I made that little list of rules specifically for my editors and copy editors so they could help keep me on track. 

In 2011, you wrote an article for our blog in which you said, “If you keep having to dip into the story’s past to explain the present, then there’s a good chance your real story’s in the past, and you’re using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.” Did tackling the storylines in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter complicate that for you? 

I did say that in 2011. I’ve been saying it since, like, 2000. I still subscribe to that completely. I think a lot of stories and novels and novellas and stuff I read, the past is simply there as a slippery ramp you fall down to get to 1942 or whatever. And I think, Why don’t we just go to 1942 and tell the story from there? But yes, this story is probably showcasing my infatuation with Philip K. Dick and how he always nests his narratives inside like Russian nesting dolls, you know? The trick is there are causal implications between each layer of those nests. And I really, really love that kind of narrative. I don’t know if I call it a framework, but I just love that delivery method. 

So, yeah, I wanted to try it this time. I’ve done it once before in a novel called Ledfeather that came out in ’07 or ’08. It goes back and forth between 1884 and a century later. And that was me testing myself, how would I handle delivering the past? And turns out epistolary was the trick I used in that novel. … 

But this did complicate it. And I think the way that I handled it—in my head anyway, maybe on the page—is I made Etsy be that outside frame of the past. 1912 was, of course, the past … and then Good Stab’s story from 1833 up to 1884 is even the deeper past. I did end up saying that this story happens in the past. I don’t think it actually happens in Good Stab’s past. I think it happens in 1912 … But I did want to have stairsteps to get there. I felt like I would’ve been losing some context had I just dropped us into Beaucarne’s Sunday sermon.  

This is not the first time you’ve played with multiple points of view. Even though Mongrels has a first-person narrator, some parts of the book are told from a third-person perspective. At what point in your writing or drafting process do you decide to include these layered points of view? 

With Mongrels specifically, I wasn’t even writing the novel. I had two weeks off, so I thought I would write a bunch of stories right fast, and then I decided, What if I name the characters the same and put them in the same world, and it can be a novel? But what I found out with Mongrels was if the first-person chapters touched each other, then the reader instantly was triggered to ask, “How did we get from here to here?” I realized I had to pad it with these little third-person interstitials …  

As for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter … I had just taught a vampire graduate course. I just had vampires all in my head. And a couple weeks before the course was over, I started writing The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I just couldn’t help it, ’cause I had so many fangs in my dreams and everything. So, I sat down to start it, and I thought, Well, here we go. We’re dropping back into some past. Then Etsy just kind of raised her hand and said, “Wait, wait, I gotta go first.” It wasn’t anything strategic, and I didn’t plan it out. It’s just that I couldn’t figure out how to get back 100 years or so without some sort of person to hold [the reader’s] hand back to there. Then the person who was best at holding their hand I thought might be a professor. And then I had to ask myself, “What kind of crisis is that professor in?” She’s in a tenure crisis, a career crisis.  

To me, that’s just how novels develop. It’s all like mechanical problems that you provide a solution for, but then those solutions bloom out and become the story.  

With your Indian Lake Trilogy, you were exploring the expectations around the slasher subgenre and then how easily those expectations can be subverted. What were you exploring with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter? 

You know, I told myself I would never write a vampire novel until I could do it the same way I did the werewolves in Mongrels, which is to say, until I could put a creature on the page with a biology and a culture that felt real to me. I had tried to write werewolf novels twice before Mongrels, and both of them failed because I was just looking at pretty werewolves. [Laughs] Basically, I didn’t have a story. So, I knew not to just look at pretty vampires with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but also, I had to do a lot of swapping out of characteristics and traits to make the vampire something I could believe in.  

In a lot of vampire stories, the vampire will just up and fly across the town. And I’m like, “What in the world, is that Vampire Superman? I don’t understand this. How are they not beholden to gravity? How are they propelling themselves?” … There are a lot of things with the vampire that I think are story expediencies that have kind of accreted onto the vampire through so many [adaptations] of telling over the centuries … and then they become part of the code for vampires, and they don’t get interrogated quite enough, I don’t think.  

With The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, I wanted to interrogate all those. And what I want is for the vampire to keep on going. I don’t want it to fizzle out. I don’t want sparkly vampires to kill the vampire. [Laughs] For me to help the vampire thrive, I feel like it’s incumbent that I kind of burn off the fat, if that makes sense. So it can be a leaner … organism … I asked myself, “If somebody was infected with something that made them have to subsist on human blood, how would that function? And what are the ramifications?”  

You have tackled everything from short stories to novellas to full novels to graphic novels. When you sit down to write a story, do you have the length and format already in mind? Or do you figure that out once you’ve begun the project? 

You know, for a story, I generally have the length down. Like, an editor will call me and say, “I need something from you. I’m paying $.10/a word, up to 7,000 words. After that, you don’t get any money.” And I’m like, “Well, a 7,000-word story, then.” [Laughs] I can usually hit that, more or less.  

Flash fiction always stays flash fiction. Flash fiction never opens up to a story for me—so far, anyways. Only once have I had a novella open up to a novel, and that was Only Good Indians. Well, now I’m lying. I tried to write The Only Good Indians three times; the third time, I finally did it, but the first two also became novels—The Babysitter Lives and Killer on the Road. So, I screw up sometimes. I just misjudge the scope, you know? 

People always ask why I write and read so much horror when the real world is horrifying enough. Have people asked similar things about your work?  

Yeah, they do. I think that the response to the world being a dumpster fire is either to look deeper into the flames or to find a cute kitten to look at. Those are the two responses. [Laughs] Both are legitimate! Neither is better than the other. … But I think what gazing at the flames of the fire can do is when we engage horror media, whatever kind, we’re seeing characters struggling through a dark, violent, terrible, scary tunnel, the same way we are. The difference is those characters on screen, on the page … they get to the end. And that gives us here in the real world, in our own dark tunnels, hope that there is going to be an end to this horror story.  

I mean, there is a sense in which horror media is a funhouse mirror that distorts our current anxieties and fears and issues and all that stuff. … But really, I think the reason so many of us are watching, reading, engaging with horror lately is that it has an end. Stories have ends, whether they’re good or bad, and we want an end to this horror story we’re in. 

There seems to be this perpetuating idea that publishing is having a horror renaissance. Do you feel that that’s accurate? 

I do think that since probably Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom … the world has finally woken up and realized that we’re in dialogue with what’s happening. I think until then, people always thought, like, there’s a carnival, but we’re this far-out tent just doing blood gags for each other, putting on masks for each other and laughing and dancing around. But I think Get Out and Victor’s book both signaled to the world that, “Hey, we’re talking about things that matter.” And ever since then, horror has had a different velocity or momentum or something. It just feels more vital, I think. It’s got its finger on some sort of pulse for the moment. 

I do sometimes hesitate to say that horror is having a renaissance, or it’s a current fad, but the only reason for that is self-protection. It’s because fads go away, renaissances [blow] over, you know? I’d much rather horror just continue to be part of the conversation. However, my concern is that horror, we’ve gotten so much of our identity from the solidarity of being outsiders with each other. And so now that we’re in the big tent, now that we’re not outsiders, I wonder how that’s going to change the fabric of horror. 

It’ll be interesting to see. It’s one of those waiting games. 

Yeah. I totally agree. I’m excited, too. Because if horror had stayed the same, then it would die. Things can’t stay the same. They’ve got to keep adapting.  

I know quite a few people who would be upset if I invited them over to watch a monster movie and then put on John Carpenter’s Halloween. So, I want to ask you: Do you consider slashers to be monsters? 

I do. I’m teaching a monster lecture course in the spring here to, like, 250 sophomores. One of the monsters we process through is going to be the Jason Voorhees of the world, the Michael Myers of the world. My definition of monster is that which we have to use unconventional weapons to dispense with, like silver bullets or daylight and or headshots with the slasher, the unconventional weapon that gets used against it. [The slasher’s] silver bullet, its Achilles’ heel is the final girl, you know? … I think Jason Voorhees is as much a monster as Godzilla is. 

In your opinion, what makes a good monster? 

They have some sort of Achilles’ heel. That there’s something we can use our clever monkey brains to figure out and weaponize against them such that we can put them down. Because realistically, how can we ever stop Jason Voorhees or a werewolf? We’ve got to melt down our grandmother’s silver to shoot that werewolf. That kind of stuff. I love that. I think monsters need to be bulletproof, basically. That’s kind of part of the unconventional weapons.  

And monsters can’t be negotiated with. That’s really important as well. If you can ever come to a treaty table under a white tent and say to the monster, “You’ve been doing this a while, and this is really causing us some grief. Let’s see, if we give you this and this, can you stop doing that?” That’s not going to be a fun story. [Laughs] 

This issue of WD is all about pushing boundaries. Who are some authors you admire for how they push boundaries in their work? 

Oh, man. I like the way Jeff VanderMeer is always pushing the boundaries of both delivery and reality. Nicholson Baker, I like the weird stuff he does. … Paul Tremblay is pushing boundaries with form in a lot of his books. He’s always doing stuff in the margins, or he’ll pit two or three narratives against each other in his story, such that you kind of lose the thread of truth or trust.  

I love to read writers who are tinkering like that, because like with music, garage bands are what keep music vital. It’s not The Rolling Stones, you know, it’s not the monster bands. It’s the ones who are coming up with new sounds in the privacy of their garage. And we need people doing that. 

How do you think you push boundaries? 

I like to experiment—you know, actually maybe experiment’s the wrong verb. Brian Evenson, when people try to label him an experimental writer, he’s like, “I’m not experimenting, I’m innovating.” Because he’s not just pouring random test tubes into other test tubes and waiting to see what happens. He needs to get from here to there, and he comes up with a new way to get from here to there. And innovation is wonderful. I think random experimentation doesn’t always feel authentic or doesn’t come from an authentic place.  

But myself, if I am contributing anything in that regard, it’s that I only write novels that I think are bad ideas. Like, any novel I ever have that I think, Oh, I can do that, then I don’t write that novel. That is just super boring to me. I can’t imagine writing a novel that I think is going to work. I only want to write novels that are broken at the level of conception, that feel like bad ideas, because then I have to become a better writer and get extremely lucky to make it work. And when I get extremely lucky, and I somehow become a better writer, I feel like I went somewhere. I did something. … I like to write myself into a corner over and over, such that I have to become a better writer to get out. 

We would be remiss not to discuss that you are a distinguished professor. Do you feel that your approach to writing has changed at all since you began teaching writing? 

I signed on as a visiting assistant professor in 1999. My first novel came out in 2000. So, it’s really hard for me to disentangle those two. I feel like my professor career and my career as a novelist were birthed at the same moment.  

But I do think that being a professor helps me a whole lot with being a writer, because every day, like here in an hour and a half, I’m going to teach a workshop, and I’ll be telling the students things, techniques, precepts. What I’m trying to do is instill in them a sense of narrative ethics, basically. I want them to care about story in a new way, in a good way, in a responsible way. I hear myself telling them those things, and then, later on in the afternoon, I’ll be writing, and I’m like, “Oh man, I told them this. I’ve got to be better. I’ve got to adhere to that myself. I’ve got to set a good model.” I can’t just say it. I’ve got to live it.  

And so, saying these things to all these generations of students that I’ve been doing for 25 years now, it’s kept me on the straight and narrow. I mean, I’ve written stories about working the window at a drive-through urinal. I’ve written about giant time-traveling caterpillars. But to me, that’s all the straight and narrow in that I’m adhering really strictly to a sense of narrative ethics to something that I think actually matters.  

You know, content never matters, but how you care about the story and care about the story’s impact on the world, I think that that matters a lot. 

What words of advice do you have for our readers? 

I would say everyone has their chosen genre they like to write in—I’m a horror writer. I think of all the genres as different five-acre fields spread along a creek. They all have fences around them, sometimes really tall fences. But I think it’s really important to, when nobody’s looking, step across the fence into romance or into space opera or into paleoanthropology or into botany. There are endless fields to step in, endless bookshelves, and I walk around those wonderful fields. And then when the sun goes down, I come back to my own fence, I step over it, I get back into horror, and I stand there. What’s happened when I’ve been swishing through those other fields is that burrs have stuck to my pants legs. And then they fall off in the horror field, and their seeds, they grow up into strange plants. That’s how we keep a genre vital: We transpose different DNA into it, strange alien DNA. And I think that’s the most important [thing]. That’s a way to keep your genre active instead of just using your genre. 

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Pat Barker is a writer’s writer. Though she’s accumulated numerous accolades over her decades-long career, including a Booker Prize and a Guardian Fiction Prize, and was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her services to literature, she still concerns herself with things like what it means to write effective dialogue and looking past the bad first draft to see if a story has legs. “The thing about writing is it’s not difficult,” Barker says, now in her early 80s. “The rules of good writing are incredibly simple. It’s just that it takes you 50 years to learn.” 

This sense of humor about her writing life filled our conversation ranging from her opinion on whether a writer’s unfinished work should be published posthumously (“I do actually have a horror of leaving an orphan book where you can imagine your publisher and your executor and your agent say, ‘Oh, well, it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? But on the other hand, perhaps we can just about rescue it and push it out.’ I don’t want all that. I want any book that’s published under my name to have been finished”) to what she told herself about winning the Booker prize to be able to keep working (“It’s such a stroke of luck. But that’s all it is. … Julian Barnes said it was ‘posh bingo,’ and I said, when I won it, it was three lemons in a row. And that’s the way to look at it. If you start seriously thinking that you have written the best novel of the year, then you are in trouble. You haven’t. You’ve written the novel that five random people agreed on, on a particular afternoon. That’s what you’ve written.”) 

Joking aside, Barker is best known for her novels set during times of war. Her Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road—which won the Booker in 1995) follows the poet Siegfried Sassoon, psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers, and soldier Billy Prior as they deal with the horrific effects of trench warfare in World War I. Likewise, the Life Class Trilogy (Life Class, Toby’s Room, Noonday) begins with art students Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant, and Kit Neville in 1914 and traces the intertwining of their lives from the earliest days of World War I through the destruction of London during the Blitz of World War II. 

Currently, Barker is in the midst of her Women of Troy series, beginning with The Silence of the Girls. The 2018 novel, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, retells the story of The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan queen who was awarded to Achilles during the Trojan War. Briseis’s story continues in The Women of Troy, as the Greeks’ departure from Troy is delayed due to unfavorable winds, courtesy of the gods they’ve offended during the destruction of the city. The newest book in the series, The Voyage Home, shifts the narrative from Briseis to that of Ritsa, a healer who has been given to Agamemnon’s war prize, the virgin Cassandra, as her slave, as they travel from Troy to Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s wife awaits. 

When asked what appeals to Barker about writing a trilogy or series, she says, “The great thing about writing a trilogy is that you can’t get away with just repeating. You have to have central characters, but you can’t just have them thinking and doing and saying exactly what they did in the previous book, so you are obliged to dig deeper into that person.” Which is exactly what she’s done with the stories of Briseis and now, Ritsa. 

And while Barker is dedicated to completing Briseis’s story in The Women of Troy series, she says she won’t be embarking on a new trilogy or series: “… of course, I am now too old to write another trilogy. So somehow or other, I’ve got to come to my senses and write a single book or books.” 

We began our conversation with what interested Barker about revisiting ancient mythology.

Before I got The Voyage Home, I went back and read your Life Class Trilogy, and there was a line in there about the silence of the girls as Achilles and Agamemnon fought over them. That book was published in 2007, at least in the United States.

You know, I’d forgotten that I wrote that. So, when people ask me when The Silence of the Girls was published, “When did your interest in The Iliad and the women in The Iliad start?” I thought it was comparatively recent. Whereas in fact, it went back quite a way. I’ve forgotten I wrote that about, Elinor Brooke sitting in the Cafe Royal noticing how silent the women have become, and how objectionably loud the men have become.

So, if you didn’t remember you had that interest before, what did spark the idea for this trilogy?

We’ll perhaps call it a series, yes, there will be something next. Certainly, because the character [Briseis] is not finished. 

What did spark it? Well, I suspect an even earlier introduction to The Iliad, because I read it out of general interest. Like lots of young women, my predominant experience was, well, the grandeur of the language, and how almost inconceivably ancient these stories are, some of the earliest stories that we, as human beings ever told each other that took final form, or not final form actually, in The Iliad. But there were these girls, and the girls were saying nothing, and I think quite a lot of men, not all men by any means, would read that, and they wouldn’t hear the silence. But I think almost any woman would hear that silence. So obviously the thing to do if you’re a woman writer is to try to break that silence, to try to express what the women are feeling and not able to say.

Did you know the scope of what these three books would cover before you started writing the first one?

No, and I don’t think I really knew, even at the end of The Silence of the Girls, because I do tend to get very down on myself at the end of the book. When I sent off The Silence of the Girls to my British publisher, Penguin Random House—it’s the same publisher on both sides of the Atlantic now—I thought it was absolute rubbish. I said that in an event at which my editor was present, and he couldn’t believe it. But it was absolutely true, because the book that you actually hand over is never the book that was in your mind when you started to write it. Every book falls short, I think, of what the writer intended. That one fell dramatically short because I was seeing it against the backdrop of The Iliad, which is one of the greatest books ever written.

At what point did you decide to continue the story with the next two books?

It’s always this nagging when a story is finished. And unfortunately, for my sins, I seem to finish a book at the point where it’s the end of a movement, but it’s not the end of the piece. There is something left on set, just like the Regeneration Trilogy, when at the end of Regeneration, Siegfried Sassoon is going back to war, but he’s still not convinced that the war is anything other than a dreadful mistake. Yet he has to go back and face the horrors of that again. No way is that the end of the story. You need to follow this person. You need to bring your central character to a moment of more than momentary peace. And that is the end of the story. I’ve now written three trilogies, and I don’t seem to be very good at ending it at the end of one book.

I wanted to talk about completing the story of a character because with The Voyage Home, you did shift narrators. With the first two, Briseis was the narrator, but in this third book, it’s Ritsa. What challenges did you face writing from this different character? Or did it open things up for you?

I think it opened things up for me, and it also restored me to the earliest voices in my work, which were very much the voices of working-class women in the northeast of England. Very poor women, women who were up against it. And Ritsa, although she’s living in a very different society, her relationship to the other characters in the story is very much that she is the bottom layer. She is the ground feeder if you like. She’s a slave. Before she was enslaved, she was a healer. She was a woman with independence. She was a woman with a professional reputation, a home of her own. So, although she hasn’t fallen from the great heights of Briseis, who was a queen in her previous life and then a slave, she, nevertheless, has suffered a very dramatic loss of status. She has become Cassandra’s slave, at her beck and call 24 hours a day. She doesn’t like it very much. She doesn’t like Cassandra very much. 

Nevertheless, her voice is a very pragmatic voice, a voice which is focused on survival rather than on ideology, if you like. She wants to be alive at the end of the story, and she’s in a better place at the end of the story than she was at the beginning. So, I think from the point of view of the reader who is identifying with Ritsa, this is an awkward trajectory. 

I do think this very simple thing is quite important, that you don’t want to take your reader into a pit and leave them there. Apart from anything else, I think it’s quite immoral to do that. I think you should always offer hope. And it’s honest, because if you are actually despairing, you wouldn’t be writing. The act of writing is itself an affirmation of hope that things can be better.

That’s so interesting considering that you write so much about war.

I do write about a lot of traumatic events. But I also write a lot of recovery stories. And I would say that the survival rate in my books is higher than the survival rate in life. In that sense, I’m a very optimistic writer.

Going back to the narrators, I can guess why you chose to have the few chapters in The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy that are from Achilles’ and Pyrrhus’ perspectives in the third person, since they’re the men and this is about the silence of the girls and giving them a voice. But I was curious about, in this new book, why you chose to give Cassandra’s and Clytemnestra’s perspectives in third person.

Yes, and Ritsa’s in first. But in a way, it’s brutally simple: Ritsa’s alive at the end. You can’t get trapped inside the viewpoint of a woman who is not going to make it all the way through. I mean, I think some books do this, or they flip into the afterlife or something like that. But mainly if the word I is being used, you expect that I not to be in a coffin at the end of the book, because otherwise they’re describing their own death and can’t describe what happens after it. … 

It’s a way of saying, although these characters are very evenly balanced in the call for the reader’s sympathy, nevertheless, the first-person narrator is generally the person the book is about. In my books, the first-person narrator tends to be an honest narrator. They are telling you what they know. They might be misleading you, but if they are misleading you, it’s only because they don’t know the truth themselves. I don’t play games with the reader in that sense.

In another interview, you talked broadly about why retellings of mythology are experiencing a surge these days. But I’m curious, for you personally, what appeals to you about reimagining myths?

It’s that imaginative power of knowing that you are dealing with the story which has been around for at least two and a half thousand years. Because the stories that formed The Iliad, for example, had been around probably a thousand years before it was actually captured in the form that we now know it, and there’s a danger in thinking that capture, The Iliad, is the final form. But of course, it isn’t. The myth can’t be frozen in that way. The myth goes on, so that Shakespeare in 1602 writing about Troilus and Cressida is also telling one of the stories in the myths that made The Iliad, and so on into modern-day retellings. It’s endlessly rich because it delves into some of the deepest emotions and convictions of human life. I think it’s very humbling to be part of a chain of writers telling a particular story. You are a custodian of the story. In the end, it is not about you, and that’s what I like about it.

Have you found any benefits in writing about wars or events that are so far in the past, compared to trying to write about something that is in the relatively recent past?

There’s a great benefit in the sense that if you’re writing about the contemporary scene, the reader already knows what they think about the contemporary scene. The point about writing about myth or writing about the relatively distant past is that the reader doesn’t have the knee-jerk reaction, Oh I know what I think about that. So, you come in under their radar, and you move past the automatic prejudices and get them to look at the basic situation again, and to feel different things about it. For me, that’s the main reason. 

The other thing of course, is this: Even the very distant past, you are still dealing with homo sapiens. The human brain has not evolved during that time. So, as [A. E.] Housman said, the person who’s looking at the storm on Wenlock Hill in Roman times is essentially the same man who’s looking at it now. The trees have changed, but the human brain has not changed. It’s a way of getting down to a deeper level of human complexity.

What comes first for you when you’re starting a new project? The idea for the story or a character’s voice?

I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it “the breath on the mirror.” If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly. 

I wish I could tell people how to hasten that process, but I don’t know how to. It can take ages to get to the point where you are hearing the characters talking, or it can happen almost immediately. I think the only real tip I’ve got is if you’re writing in third person and the characters are not coming to life, switch to first person. Even if you don’t intend to stick with it, at least write something in first person and do the sensory things. …

When you let the characters talk to each other, as you’re figuring out this story—

I can’t stop them. [Laughs] If it’s working, they won’t shut up!

Are you actively writing this down or typing it? Or are you allowing it to happen in your head until you do get that spark of the story?

I allow it to happen in my head, and I’m grateful that it’s happening. Now and then, if I think somebody says something vaguely significant, I will write it down in a notebook and wait for the moment in the story where they’ll reach the point of saying this. But, the first-person narration—and part of the last three books now have been first-person narration—is, in fact, dialogue. It’s a monologue. The person is talking to the reader. So, first person and reliance on dialogue do go very much together. 

I think dialogue is absolutely key to everything, and it’s very difficult because you can read books on characterization, narrative, conflict, and all that. But dialogue is so dependent on the individual ear. You probably could get more from a scriptwriter or somebody teaching theater writing than you could get from somebody teaching a novel on dialogue. 

I actually have quite a bee in my bonnet about dialogue when I think about it, because I think a lot of the things that are said are nonsense. Like “every person has to sound completely different from every other person,” and it’s not the way things are. I mean, if you’ve got five blokes going into the bar of a golf club for their hard-earned pint at the end of the day, you can make them sound completely different because you can say that one is Scottish, one is Welsh, one is Irish, one is a visiting American, and they will sound different. But it misses the point because what they are doing is to make the same sounds about the same subject. What they are saying is, “We belong here.” There’s no actual content in the speech at all. It’s the weather. It’s who was par or whatever—I know nothing about golf on the course—and things like that. It’s just saying: “We belong here, and we don’t threaten you. We are prepared to be friends.” 

It’s exactly the same when the kittiwake lands on the ledge and watches a thousand other kittiwakes. It says, “Kittiwake.” If it says anything else, it’s in trouble. It’s the kittiwake theory of dialogue. It’s the voice of a community, not the individual voices. Just like, for example, as you get in James Baldwin sometimes, where you get people in the religious community and they’re saying things like, “Praise the Lord.” They are saying, “We belong to this community. We share these beliefs.” They’re not saying anything that reveals them as an individual. And obviously, you need dialogue that reveals the individual, but you also need the voice of the community out of which the individual voice emerges. But, you know, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about dialogue. [Laughs]

Do you have a writing routine: time of day that you write or a target word count?

It varies at the moment. I write in the mornings. It’s 1,000-plus words a day, which I’m just starting a new project. All I need it to do at the moment is grow. And I need to stifle the voice in my head saying, This is rubbish. It’s not worth doing. The only way to do that is to plow on day by day because you can’t make any sensible judgments about a project until you’ve got a first draft. I used to have a little thing on the top of my screen: “It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be finished.” And you worry about it being good when it’s there. Until that point, it doesn’t matter really. It just has to be there.

So, you’re not one of those writers who has to revise the previous day’s work before you move on to today’s work?

No, I leave sometimes in the middle of a sentence, deliberately, or in the middle of a word so I can finish the end of the word and the end of the sentence with no thought at all. Then just move on. 

It’s all about conning yourself at the early stages. You’ve got to con yourself into finishing. Because everybody, at some stage, everybody who isn’t a complete—I won’t use four-letter words—thinks their work is rubbish some of time. I would distrust any writer who never thought their work was rubbish. So, it’s a matter of shutting that voice up long enough for you to be able to see what you’ve got.

I talk to writers all the time, but I still find it so reassuring to hear writers of your stature feel the need to con yourself, to make yourself believe that your work can be something good, even if it’s not right now.

You’re only as good as your last paragraph, and if you’re writing a very rough first draft, your last paragraph is always rubbish. If you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a problem of belief, and somehow, you’ve got to find a way to believe, even though your last paragraph was rubbish. Winning prizes and stuff like that, which you might think would help, it doesn’t help in the least.

Is there any advice that you have for the readers of WD that we haven’t talked about?

Keep going, but don’t focus too much on the externals of recognition and publishing. You have to enjoy the journey. 

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The post The WD Interview: Pat Barker appeared first on Writer's Digest.

For Sutanto, who was educated in creative writing at the University of Oxford and now lives in Jakarta with her husband and children, writing in different categories, genres, and tones is all about keeping things interesting for herself. “It’s kind of like eating savory foods and then after that, you’re ready for something sweet,” she said. “Each one has been a really nice palette cleanser.” Earlier this year, her third and final book in the light-hearted Aunties series, The Good, the Bad, and the Aunties, was released, so it was time for another book on the dark side.

You Will Never Be Me is the story of two former friends who have both seen varying levels of success as social media influencers, specifically as momfluencers. When they first met, Meredith Lee helped Aspen Palmer learn the ropes, but after Aspen’s influencer status shot past Mer’s, Mer felt left behind. So, she engages in some “Stalking Lite” and maybe a little sabotage too, until Aspen’s seemingly perfect life starts falling apart—for the world to see. But when Mer suddenly disappears, leaving a young son behind, Aspen sees an opportunity to solve the mystery and fix her life in the process.

When I asked Sutanto what sparked the idea for the story, she asked that I not print the answer: “This is such a spoiler! The thing that gave me the idea was actually [redacted]. I don’t know if you watched it, but season one had this time twist, and it just blew my mind when I first watched it. I was like, I need to write something like this.” But as for the reason behind the characters being influencers, that’s in part because of the content Sutanto sees online. “I’m a mom, and so the algorithm is always pushing mommy-like content to me. And I read this article about this husband who was like, ‘I’m leaving my wife because of aesthetics. … I can’t even get my daughter a toy that I want to get her because of aesthetics.’ I felt so bad for him, and then I was obsessed with the idea: mom influencers.”

If you’ve read any of Sutanto’s other novels, this focus makes perfect sense. Regardless of whether they’re humorous or psychological thrillers, one underlying theme in them all is perception, specifically how women and teen girls are perceived by their peers, their family, and by wider society. That’s where we picked up our conversation.

Momfluencers take that idea of perception to the next level. Why is that theme important for you to write about?

Growing up, I was raised in a cult culture where I was basically raised to be a trophy wife, and the standards for being a trophy wife, they were so strict. Down to the hairstyle has to be long-haired. You had to keep your weight under a certain number, and you have to be educated, but not too educated. One of my cousins went and got a PhD and my parents were like, “Oh my goodness, how is she ever going to find a husband now?” Because she is going to be more educated than most of the men. It took a lot of work for me to unlearn all of that. The perception of girls and women, it’s such a big factor in my life right now. So, I guess it always leaks out into my writing, whether I mean for it to or not. I rarely ever set out to write a message book, but it comes out naturally.

When I read You Will Never Be Me, I couldn’t put it down. It’s such an entertaining ride to see what horrible things the characters will do next. It’s a masterclass in manipulation and continually pushing your characters past their limits. How do you create these kinds of characters? Do you have a process for developing them?

I usually create the plot first because I outline my books before I start writing. But I never know what the character is going to be like until I actually start writing. Then their voice kind of comes out onto the page. Like with Vera Wong, I had no idea what she was going to be like. All I knew was she was going to be nosy. But I didn’t know the tone of the book until I started writing the first chapter. And it was the same with You Will Never Be Me. I know what they’re going to do, so I have this vague idea of people that need to be able to do certain things. But I never know their personalities until I start writing.

One of the other things this book does really well is talk about the idea of authenticity and what that means in terms of people in the public sphere, like influencers, which to some extent is something that writers who want to be published are going to have to contend with. How do you stay true to yourself as a creator in what you share with your fans, and what advice do you have for other writers?

This is a really tough one. I wanted to become a published author for a very long time. It took over 10 years, I would say, for me to even get my first publishing deal. During that time, I kept thinking, Oh, when I become a published author, my life will begin. I’m going to be so happy. It’s like that goal weight thing, you know? I spent my teen years thinking, If I hit my goal weight, that’s when life will start for me. And it kind of carried over into publishing.

After I got my publishing deal, and then I got more deals, the Dial A for Aunties thing happened, and it was so big. Then I was posting a lot on social media in an effort to help promote the book and posting a lot about my life. I was making it look really happy because a lot of it was happy. But I kind of realized, I’m just as anxious and depressed as I was before I got the publishing deals. I realized I’m being so inauthentic. Especially on my Instagram page, I was only ever sharing the highlights of my life.

It was around that time that I started doing therapy and I told my therapist, “I’m being so inauthentic, and I hate it. I’m contributing to this unhealthy obsession on social media about only putting your best selves out there.” So, it was something I had to work through with her to find a happy medium of what to post on my Instagram. I explained to her, “I can’t be a hot mess online because I still want people, if they find my page, to be like, ‘Oh, she seems fun. I’m going to pick up one of her books.’”

After months and months of working with her, I feel like we came to a happy medium. I do this Write With Me series on my Instagram where I post a reel every day when I’m writing. I’m very honest with how some days I’m going through a hard time. … when I look at my Instagram page now, I’m so happy with what’s on it. It’s 70 percent positive and then 30 percent crappy days.

There were so many twists in You Will Never Be Me, and they all felt so true to the characters and to the story. Do you know most of the story and the twists when you start drafting? Or are you ever surprised by where the story takes you?

When I first started writing, my first ever book was totally pantsed. I didn’t know how to outline and so I think the first three books I wrote, I pantsed them. I remember my husband being like, “I was just reading an interview with this author, and he says that he outlines his books before he writes them.” And I was immediately like, “How dare you. I’m an artiste. Every author has their own process. Don’t tell me to outline.” And then I realized, this isn’t working because I was getting stuck all the time. Even after I finished the draft, it would be a hot mess. I would have to rewrite a lot of it. So, when I first started outlining, I only outlined about half of the book, and then I got stuck. I would start writing and then, things would surprise me. There was a lot more flexibility.

You Will Never Be Me, I think it’s my 18^th book, so by now, my outlines are meticulous. I like to say I’m a Chinese mother: My outlines listen to me because my characters are scared of me. They know not to surprise me. My outlines, they have no chill, you know? They’re chapter by chapter. They tend to be 12 pages long, and they’re quite detailed. Each chapter would have maybe one to two paragraphs detailing what’s going to happen. When I was writing You Will Never Be Me, I knew all the twists. I knew the biggest twist, and I wrote the outline around that big twist.

You’ve published 11 novels in four years. How do you keep up with that pace, both in terms of coming up with the ideas and writing them, but also doing things like this where you’re promoting them?

Because it took me so long to get my first ever publishing deal—during those 10 years I was writing and then I would get really sad when the books ended up getting rejected by everybody—I learned the healthiest thing for me to do was, once I finished a book, once it was ready to query or go on submission, the best thing for me to do was to immediately move on to a new project. To fall in love with a new project so I could let go of the last book. So, I got into that habit where as soon as I finish a draft and I edit it, I send it off to my agent.

Now I actually do take a break, but I emotionally detach myself from it. Then I’m actively thinking of my next project. I’m actively asking myself, What do I want to work on next? So that’s number one, the mental health part of the answer.

And then the logistics part. I’ve trained myself to write super-fast because it’s the only way I can outrun this really mean little voice in my head. I don’t know if you have this voice. I call it my “editor,” and as I write, this inner editor is saying things like, “Oh wow, that sentence is awful. That’s so awkward. Does that even make sense? The character is so boring. This plot makes no sense.” And on and on. I found out that the only thing that helps me avoid this voice is to set a 15-minute timer. During those 15 minutes I don’t go to the bathroom. I don’t take a sip of my coffee. All I can do is write. I don’t allow myself to delete anything that I’ve written during those 15 minutes. I’m just speed writing.

Over the years I’ve trained myself to write 500 words during those 15 minutes. Every day I do four 15-minute rounds, and then I hit 2,000 words and stop. I don’t do anything with that manuscript for the rest of the day. I would focus on the admin stuff or the interviews, the promotion work. It gives me a break, and I’ve written 2,000 words.

I do this until I get to 40,000 words, and then for the next 40,000 words, I check myself into the most beautiful hotel in Jakarta because it’s so cheap [laughs]. Our hotels here are a third of the price of hotels in the States. I take full advantage of it. I go to the most beautiful five-star hotel here. I stay for three nights, and then for those three days that I’m at the hotel, I write the next 40,000 words of the book. I basically finish it in a long weekend.

I love the idea of this mini writing retreat for yourself! How did you come to that idea, and why did you land on 40,000 words as being the point at which you wanted to have that dedicated writing time?

I chose 40,000 words because that’s right in that horrible, saggy middle of the book where the concept is no longer fun, and you can’t see the finish line. Everything feels stale and horrible. You don’t know where the plot is going. Well, I know because of my chapter outline [laughs]! It’s still a horrible middle.

The first time I did it was because of Vera Wong. I had pitched the idea to my publisher, and they got really excited about it. They were like, “We’re going to push back Aunties 3, we want to publish Vera next.” And I was like, “I haven’t even written Vera.” And they were like, “That’s OK. We have faith in you.” So, I wanted to get it done as quickly as I could, because I didn’t want there to be too much of a delay in my publication schedule.

At 40,000 words, I’m in this horrible middle, and the plan was to go to a hotel for three nights and write 20,000 words. I feel like once I get to 60,000, usually I can see the end, and that would give me the last push. I’ll just write 20,000 words, then I’ll come home, and I’ll go back to my 2,000 words a day. But when I went to the hotel it ended up being so amazing. I didn’t have to think about groceries or all of the daily life, mundane chores, no distractions. I ended up finishing the book.

After that, I felt rejuvenated. For three days, all I did was sleep and eat amazing food and write. It was feeding my creative soul. People were telling me, “You’re going to be so burnt out by then.” But I wasn’t. I left feeling feel like a person again. Not just some tired mom, which is what I feel like most of the time. Ever since then, that’s been how I write all of my books.

I want to go back to something you said about those 15-minute intervals to outrun that inner editor you have. How do you change your mindset so you can do that?

It is so hard. When I sit down in front of my computer, I actually say out loud—even now, I say it out loud—“I am going to write trash now.” And somehow just saying those words, it gives me the permission I need to not have standards. Then as I write, if I start feeling like this is so bad, I actually mutter under my breath, “I’m writing trash. It’s OK. I’m letting myself write trash. It’s OK. Just keep writing trash.” I keep reminding myself, you can edit trash, but you can’t edit a blank page, and editing is so much easier than writing because writing is like coming up with something out of nothing. That’s how I changed my mindset—saying those words out loud, repeating them.

You write and publish in so many categories and genres. Did you know you wanted to do that going into your writing career? And if so, how did that impact your search for a literary agent?

I kind of knew, but I kind of didn’t. When I first started writing I was writing only YA. My first book deal was for The Obsession, which is YA suspense. And then my then-agent told me, “Middle-grade is picking up, publishers are buying it. Do you want to try writing that?” So, I wrote my middle-grade fantasy. When writing middle-
grade, you need a lot of humor because kids love to laugh. It was the act of writing that, that made me think I wanted to try my hand at writing a comedic book.

That was when I got the idea for Dial A for Aunties. At the time I thought it was going to be YA because I’ve only been writing YA. Then as I was plotting it, I was like, Wait, this feels really wrong. A bunch of aunties lugging around a dead teenage boy? That just felt really bad. [Laughs] It needs to be for adults.

I remember feeling so nervous: Can I write an adult book? And it was so ironic because by then I was 30 and it hit me. I was like, Oh my god, I’m 30. Of course I can write about a character who is 26. I was querying my middle-grade at the time, so when I started getting offers for it, I would talk to each agent and I would ask them, “How do you feel about me writing adult as well?” And a couple of them were honest. They were like, “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. You should stay within kid lit.”

Then I spoke to my current agent, and she was all for it. She asked about the Dial A idea. I told her and she was like, “It sounds amazing. Send it my way as soon as you have it.” So, I went with her. She knew that I wanted to write in multiple spaces, but I don’t think she knew at the time how wildly different they were going to be. It’s been a really fun ride. I’m really glad she’s such a good sport.

You mentioned adding humor to your writing when you were writing the middle-grade book, and I did want to talk about that because all three of the Aunties books and Vera Wong, they’re just so funny. What is your approach to writing comedic content?

I think it was always there in the first draft just because of the genre of the books. I knew that they were going to be comedic books, so they kind of had to be there.

I’ve written in so many different genres by now, I can say with certainty that humor and romance are the most difficult things for me to get right. Because I feel like, especially with humor, if you don’t get it right, it just comes off so cringey. Then the whole thing falls apart. I was taken aback by how difficult it was to pin that down.

Dial A for Aunties, that was easy because it was based on my family. A lot of the things were things that happened with my family. I remember when I was little, we were in the States and my dad wasn’t feeling well. He went to see a doctor and he told the doctor, “My body doesn’t feel delicious.” The doctor was like, “Excuse me?”

Those kinds of instances, they stick with me. So, it’s very easy to draw from real life and just put that in the books. I feel like that comes through—the authenticity—that people can tell that it actually is an authentic thing, rather than an author trying to be funny.

What final words of advice do you have for readers of WD?

Usually, my biggest piece of advice is lower your standards, but we touched on that already. My next best piece of advice is to find as many writer friends as you can because these are the people who will completely, 100 percent understand how difficult it is to break into publishing. I think the only non-writer person I can moan about this to is my husband, and none of my non-writing friends and family get it. My parents, they’re in real estate so they just didn’t understand why it was so hard to get an agent. They’re like, “Well, if we want to sell a house, we just get an agent. Why so hard to get a literary agent? What is wrong with you that no literary agent wants to work with you?” And I’m like, “Well, no, it’s different.” I feel like the only people who truly get it are your fellow writers, and I would’ve given up so long ago if not for my writer friends. Reach out and find your community.

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From The Perfect Daughter by D. J. Palmer to the TV show “The Crowded Room,” popular media continues to use DID for its tantalizing plot twists and the unique opportunity it presents to explore the expansive possibilities of identity.

One of Alyssa Cole’s primary goals was to not add to the harmful narratives surrounding DID, a mental illness that impacts an estimated 1 percent of the population according to the National Institutes of Health. And in this interview, Cole discusses her efforts to represent the disorder responsibly.

Cole is a New York Times bestselling author who first made a name for herself in contemporary romance. Her debut thriller, When No One Is Watching, won the 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Paperback Original and the Strand Critics Award for Best Debut.

WD spoke to Cole about One of Us Knows, which was published by William Morrow in April.

Since the main character has DID, you wrote several characters at once who are both autonomous and deeply connected. What was the most challenging aspect of this?

The most difficult thing for me was really trying to be cognizant of DID as a real diagnosis. There are people who have it. From the beginning, even though it became so deeply important to the story, I didn’t want the story to be about it. I wanted it more to be about a group of people who happened to be a DID system figuring out how they interact and learn to trust each other. I didn’t want it to be a sensational aspect. So often in stories with DID—and this is why I chose Ken as the main protagonist apart from liking prickly heroines—every time you see a movie or read a book or a story about the identity that is not written by someone who has it, it’s always: “Surprise! You have DID!” And then: “Surprise! There’s a secret bad guy who is doing something bad just because they’re a sociopath.”

So, I wanted to subvert that and say, here we have this system. They know they’re a system. They’ve already gone through the “surprise we exist part”—what happens after that navigating and what happens when the main person who is causing trouble is also the one that has to get them out of trouble. Making sure that I was accurate within reason and respectful, but also showing all the messy sides of people who are dealing with mental health issues, outside external factors, a pandemic, a recession, and everything else going on.

What was your research into DID like to portray it in a normative way?

I read lots of memoirs, but first, I tried to come up with a basic story because I didn’t want to read someone’s story and then be like, Oh, let me make a story based on this thing. So, I wanted to have the basic structure of what I wanted to happen and then read more information from first-person sources and see if it was within reason. The basic plot did change as I was researching because some things were, not necessarily bad, but I don’t know if it was my place to write something like that. Then other things were like, Oh, OK, so something like this can happen, and I can then add that to the story without it being something fantastical.

So, I read a lot of memoirs; I read first-person accounts on Reddit and other online sources. I read with the grain of salt because I didn’t know who those people were. There are a significant number of people who [are diagnosed with] DID—I feel like 1 percent of the population is a significant amount—and there are a significant number of people who have it and don’t know it, and then there are people who think they have it. For example, reading Reddit isn’t the same as talking to a psychiatrist or something, but at the same time, people know their brains and what’s going on. I have a lot of things that I would not assume someone could talk about better than me just because they have a degree. And even if the person doesn’t actually have DID, they’re using the same brain as the person who has DID to imagine the situation and what they’re going through. …

But I did have a system I consulted with to make sure I wasn’t putting anything that would be harmful to DID systems in pop culture since there are already so many harmful stories out there. They would read through and generally it was like, “Oh yeah, this is how it can happen, or this happened in our system.”

Some of the more fantastical things I won’t reveal because I don’t want to give spoilers were based on something from my childhood, but I didn’t know if it was crossing a line presenting the idea as something supernatural. I did discuss with the person how best to present this idea of how the ghost plays into the story and the idea of interacting with ghosts and what happens with that when you then have neurological differences and mental health issues and playing around with how real is what’s going on.

Do you have any best practices to share about writing characters who have identity components that you don’t share?

For me, I’m always thinking about how people work and also how not to hurt people. There’s one aspect of how would I feel if someone was writing someone similar to me? What are the things I would not want them to talk about? What is a framing that would be uncomfortable for me? I try to think of it to the best of my ability as someone who is not in someone else’s brain, what could be hurtful to someone?

I also then try to think about what are similarities that I would have with this character? Even if it’s not the same thing, what overlapping experiences do I have that I can draw from to better inform their experience?

So when you’re growing up and there are not a lot of books that have people who are like you, and then you pick up a book and there’s a character who is supposed to be you, my main goal if someone like that picks up one of my books and sees a character like that, I want them to put down the book feeling happy. Even if they have some quibbles with certain things, they feel well-represented and glad that they read the book.

I’m certain some people will not like it and some people will like it, but my main goal is to try, to the best of my ability at the very least, to not be harmful to someone, and at the best, to try to explore their humanity the same way I would want my own explored and not as a trend or a trope or here’s some diversity spice sprinkled onto it. My characters are fictional, but I want them to feel as fully formed and human to someone who has a similar background as I would want to feel reading about someone like myself.

Can you talk about writing characters who are actively deceiving or lying to each other? How do you keep them true to themselves while deciding what hints to give the readers about their true character and their reliability?

For some reason, I really enjoy writing this, and in reality, I hate lying, and I’m super strict about it. I feel like there’s some relation somewhere in my brain between examining all the different ways that people can lie to each other and themselves and also a neurodivergent sense of being able to tell when people are lying and having to figure out: Is this malicious? Do they know they’re lying? Are they lying or are they just hiding something, because that’s not lying?

On some level, I’m subconsciously parsing what is true at all times. Then I really enjoy the dynamic between people [who] are not necessarily maliciously lying. The things I find more interesting are the ways that we lie to ourselves, that we lie to other people to protect ourselves or to protect other people. The ways that people learn to trust one another and [are] learning to trust themselves. I think the lying is also a way to work toward characters discovering how to trust.

I don’t like stories where the lying leads to the character being completely invalidated in their ability to believe in themselves. People lie just to get through the day, even if it’s not malicious.

Talk about trust, then. The main characters are figuring out who to trust in the outer world while learning how to trust themselves.

When I first started writing it, I was thinking of the DID system as a ragtag band of misfits in one body and how they would have to learn to work together, as well as how that dynamic plays out in similar stories or group dynamics, except, in this one, they’re all stuck together. Because they are in one body, I thought it would be a great way to examine both the idea of self and the idea of community and the way that trust is so necessary for the equilibrium with yourself and within a community. With Ken, what does it mean when someone does not trust themselves so much that they can’t see who they are? Even if they’re not necessarily a good person, I wanted it also to be like, is the bad guy always really a bad guy?

There’s conflict happening in the characters’ inner world and outer world at the same time. How do you manage pacing and timing between the two?

Yeah, that was hard. I generally write stories—whether it’s a romance or thriller or sci-fi—whatever mystery is happening, it’s generally burning slowly and then explodes at the end. And with locked-room mysteries, often they’ll get to it right in the beginning and then spend the entire rest of the book exploring it. But because there are two mysteries here—two locked-room mysteries—it was going to have to be different. At the beginning, we’re getting more of the inner world mystery from one point of view and the outer world mystery is more slow burning. Then we get more explosive towards the end.

There is a variant story where both would’ve been happening at the same time, but I felt like it would’ve been too much because there were so many points of view and different things going on.

Also, when I was first thinking of the book, the inner world story was going to be the secondary story, but I was like, the emotional and human connection between the characters was more important to me than the external actions going on. They were still relevant and important to the story, but secondary to what the characters needed to achieve internally.

For writers who like to weave different storylines into the same book, there’s a tension of which one should take the lead. Sometimes this can change the genre of the story. Do you have that conflict, or do you usually know from the beginning which storyline is going to be the most prominent and which genre it will fall into?

I generally know from the beginning. Sometimes I try to add elements that don’t pan out, but then they aren’t necessary to the story. For example, I have a book called A Duke by Default, and it’s a contemporary royalty romance set in Scotland. There’s a secret love child of the Duke, and there is a slight background story of someone trying to buy the real estate in the neighborhood and the neighborhood people are like, “Oh no, what are we going to do?” Part of the reason this guy who hates the monarchy and doesn’t want anything to do with it decides to take on this role is because he can then protect this community. I wanted that gentrification subplot to be bigger, but it was not the story for it. And that gentrification subplot then went on to be applied in a more relevant story where it could be the centerpiece in When No One Is Watching.

For me, I have the story and the characters, and sometimes they have to change the situation, but usually that doesn’t change the genre of the story. It’s more so, this situation is more fitting for something else, so we’re going to have to get rid of that for now or downplay it for now, and then maybe I’ll be able to come back to it later or maybe it just wasn’t meant to be in this one.

Conflict between romantic interests is often used to portray unconscious attraction or attraction that the characters are fighting against. How do you keep this conflict from getting stale or annoying as the book progresses?

Some things that people see as the inciting incident, I see as the resolution because the interesting stuff happens before, and it builds up to all of that instead of immediate violence and dissent. I see conflict as the resolution because I’m a person who, if there’s a conflict in front of me, will address it immediately. So sometimes particular conflict-driven stories don’t work for me because I’m not going through all of that. If there’s a lack of emotional aspects, and it’s external conflict, it’s like, this could be ended in several direct ways. …

The way that I approach conflict is I try to think of the emotional perspective and background of each character and then what is abrasive when they rub against the emotional background and personality and everything else of the characters that they’re around. This can, of course, be a bigger thing if it’s a life-and-death situation. For example, I don’t particularly enjoy “enemies to lovers” stories unless it’s fantasy or historical, but I love “misunderstanding to lovers,” obviously.

In one of my romances, A Prince on Paper, the hero and the heroine have a fake relationship. He is a redheaded step-prince, and she is the cousin of a newly married princess, and throughout the book, he hides behind his playboy façade. And she’s playing a royalty romance otome game [a story-based video game] and romancing him in the game. Throughout the book, she’s getting these phone notifications and, as it goes on, he starts to get more and more jealous because he thinks that she’s talking to another guy. Then at the end, when everything comes to a head, he realizes that she’s playing a game with a fake version of himself. Even though, on the surface, it’s a silly conflict for him, it’s deeply emotional because he is like, “This is the one person who sees me for who I am.” Then he has to wonder, Does she really see me?

There’s another way to tell that story where he gets mad, and he explodes because he’s jealous and thinks she’s cheating. Then when he finds out it’s a game, that conflict is over because that’s the superficial conflict of “I like you and I don’t want you to be with anyone else.” But for this particular couple, I thought it would be more interesting if the idea of she’s cheating on him with a game version of himself, which is the façade that he presents to everyone else, and him having to question if she likes that version of him better. So, I always try to think of the possible straightforward conflict between these two people or between these systems or between this person and this system, and then what is below that conflict that would make it personal for these particular characters. What is the specific thing that would harm them more so than the general conflict of possible cheating or possible misunderstanding?

You often use texts, chat forums, and other written correspondence in your books. Can you talk about that?

So many of us spend a lot of our time texting because our friends are all over the place or we’re busy and not seeing them every day. I just want to see it incorporated more into stories because I feel like it’s realistic. There’s a difference in the way people write and the way people talk to each other, even if the general feeling is the same. It’s just a different way to show interaction and provide a deeper understanding of the characters. What are they writing to themselves in a journal that they’re not telling other people? How do they text as opposed to how do they talk to someone?

Either showing a deeper understanding of a particular character when no one is watching or, to some extent in this book, a deeper understanding of a situation and the ways that the written word, whether it’s a letter or a text or an email, can shift the course of the story or shift your understanding of what’s going on. It can also just be there to provide a deeper understanding of the world.

You watch a lot of anime. Has it taught you anything about portraying emotion or a character’s character?

The biggest thing that it’s done for me is influence how I saw conflict, climax, and resolution in stories. I’ve been watching anime and reading manga since I was very, very young, but I didn’t know the name for the structure that you’ll find in a lot of anime and manga. Recently I found out it’s called kishōtenketsu, and it’s a story without conflict.

It’s a four-act structure, and the third act is usually called the twist. That’s where you learn something that makes you completely reframe everything that you thought you knew, and then you go onto the resolution. The twist doesn’t have to be something explosive. It can be a minor thing that changes how you view everything. Even though I don’t think my writing exactly uses this [structure], it’s been strongly influenced by it and the idea of how little details can change everything.

Do you have any final advice for other writers?

I have taken creative writing classes, and I’ve taught them, as well. But the most important thing is to see those things as a tool that is helping to shape your writing skills and style and not as something your writing style has to conform to.

Often, there’s this idea that you have to take writing classes and learn all of these rules, and I don’t think that’s true. The biggest thing is to read a lot so you can innately understand story structure. This even comes from watching movies and TV and thinking about why it was great and what points did it hit and what aspects of it resonated with you, and then how would you incorporate not the exact thing from the show, but the feeling and the craft into your own work.

You can be writing something and then you can be like, “Oh no, this doesn’t feel right.” You don’t know if it’s because you are missing a certain plot point or a certain story beat if you haven’t studied those things. Education is good, and taking classes is good, but in my opinion, reading is the most important thing. And reading to understand how the book makes you feel at certain points, not just to consume it.

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The post The WD Interview: Alyssa Cole appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Orange’s highly anticipated second novel, Wandering Stars, is out now, and will firmly establish Orange as one of the most talented writers of our time. It begins with Jude Star, a member of the Southern Cheyenne Tribe, remembering his survival of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 and his subsequent imprisonment at Richard Henry Platt’s prison-castle in Florida, an early precursor to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Gradually it shifts to Star’s son Charles, who is forced to attend the Carlisle school, and follows four additional generations until it meets up with Orvil Red Feather’s story, shortly after the closing events of There There.

Wandering Stars—which could just as easily be read as a standalone novel—therefore serves as both a prequel and sequel to There There, and features the same deceptively simple, lyrical writing style, with Orange’s trademark repetition of words and phrases (e.g. “Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry” or “He has forgotten that he has forgotten things on purpose”). Orange says this style is “kind of an unconscious thing. I hope it’s not some kind of writerly tic that becomes annoying. … I do like the way you can deepen words through repetition and deepen meaning if you’re using the same words in the same sentence. Something that deepens but can also be playful. I guess I’m trying to defend it and also recuse myself from it at once.”

While he’s writing though, Orange, who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and teaches creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, tries to “disappear the voices in the room,” as it were, and instead tries to “focus on sentences and pacing and readability.” Trying to quiet those voices is harder now because he says you “can’t not know that there’s an audience once your book becomes a New York Times bestseller.”

But a large readership wasn’t the audience Orange was initially writing for: “Gertrude Stein has a quote, I don’t know if I’m saying it exactly right, but somebody asks her, ‘What’s your secret to writing?’ And she says, ‘Small audiences.’ With There There, my first reader was my wife. It eventually extended to the small MFA program I was in, where most workshops were four to six people.” With an audience increased by magnitudes, we began our conversation talking about expectations.

Writing the second book is always different than the first because there are expectations involved. How was it different for you?

It was completely different and two years of that being a pandemic was not helpful either, even though everyone had the quote unquote “all the time in the world.” I think the whole sophomore effort thing—the living up to the success, all the new voices in your head when you’re at the page—I think I definitely felt like learning how to do it all over again. I’ve heard that’s already the case with a lot of writers—for each book, you kind of have to learn how to do it again. So, it was definitely challenging, and I had to learn new tools.

With There There, I thought of the premise in a single moment, and I always had as sort of a guiding structural guiding light: Everyone ends up at the powwow. And that’s a very convenient thing when you’re stuck—how does this relate to them getting to the powwow? With this book, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was going to happen in it and this historical piece was not something that I had planned when I first thought of it. So that also was sort of a monkey wrench. That didn’t come until a year after I started writing it. I was at a museum in Sweden, and I saw this newspaper clipping. I was being given a private tour, and they sort of were awkwardly saying, “We have your people’s stuff. Do you want to see it?” Like, they felt bad that they didn’t know what to do with it yet, because a lot of museums are trying to reckon with the problematic history of museums.

So, this newspaper clipping had Southern Cheyennes in Florida in 1875, and I didn’t know about this piece of history. It turned out to be the origin story of the boarding schools. My tribe was at the origin of the creation of the boarding schools at this prison castle in Florida. So, it went from being a fascination because it had to do with my tribe’s history, to being an integral part of the book, and even informed this generational structure that it now has in its complete form.

It’s so surprising that you didn’t know it was going to have that historical piece until that far along in your drafting process. I was trying to think of another book that serves as both a prequel and a sequel but could also be a standalone novel at the same time. I couldn’t think of one. It was very surprising to me, and I love that you were able to make it do all of those things.

It was certainly hard, really. My editor helped me to shape it, and there were books that I was reading along the way that helped me think of it better. Actually, Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance was something that helped convince me, in addition to my editor helping to convince me, to do this linear form where you have this generational piece. That was a really helpful book to read along the way to understand the way a narrative can build an energy by doing a linear thing. Because I often like to do nonlinear, and I was eventually convinced that it worked like this.

Then, the prequel/sequel/standalone piece was also a challenge because there were a lot of drafts where I was repeating myself from There There, or it was too contingent on having the reader have read There There. And I did want it to be its own book.

It does have that large cast of characters just like There There does, and they are all connected in various ways. How did you decide who to include and what perspectives to include?

It started with this character Jude Star. That’s the way the book starts, and it really happened organically from that single family-line source. He ended up having a son. I knew his son was going to end up at Carlisle, and he [Jude] was going to conceive of this idea that he was a part of what made this school that his son ended up getting sent to. I mean, he doesn’t know this in the book, but I proceeded in a really linear way from there. I had his son knowing his friend Victor Bear Shield’s daughter, and then their child being born. So as far as the historical piece goes, it really followed a linear time line. The characters from There There, as it happens in the second half of the book, was a lot more of figuring out who didn’t belong, and how to keep the story with this one family; [it] is a tighter storyline because originally, I had a lot of the characters returning from There There.

Since some of those characters in the present-day part of the story had established voices from the first novel, but there were some new ones in there too, were there any that were more challenging for you to write than others or others that were easier?

During the pandemic, I read all of Toni Morrison, and I had read some of her books before, but I hadn’t read all of her. And there’s something she does with third-person omniscient that is unique to her voice. I had not been interested in third-person omniscient at all. I hadn’t really written anything in that form, and I think I tried to do that in the second half of the book. I don’t think I succeeded. I think the voices end up intruding a lot more than I intended, which I think is fine. I’m happy with where the voices ended up, but that did shape the way that I was thinking of how to convey the characters, so they all have a little bit more of a distance than the third-person close that I was doing more of in There There.

All of these characters, we talked about them being related by way of the generations but even the ones that aren’t part of the family, they’re all interconnected, and they form sort of this web where what one person does sort of tugs and pulls on that web affecting all of the other characters around them. This was true of There There too. What’s your method for keeping track of all these characters and their time lines and actions?

It feels like total chaos. [Laughs] I don’t know that I can give you a method. I can tell you that structuring for me happens on long runs, and in my head is when I have the most clarity about order and how things fit together. I learned that while writing There There. I was just talking to a group of students, and somebody was asking me about structure and keeping track of characters. I had the experience of trying to map it out visually and realized while writing There There that I’m not a visual person at all. When I saw it all visually, when I mapped it all out in Photoshop, it made me feel more confused and like there was more chaos happening. So long runs became the key. It’s something that I already do as part of my writing process, but it also became this key to thinking about structure and how things could make sense together.

Going back to the idea of generations, so much of this book is about the idea of what we inherit, even if we don’t know it’s something inherited, or if we do, we don’t necessarily know where it comes from. The physical example that sticks out to me is the bullet left in Jude Star after the Sand Creek Massacre, and then the bullet piece that’s left in Orvil after he survives the Oakland Powwow shooting. It’s that idea that the past has never really passed, but it’s living inside of us. What did you hope to accomplish, or what was your approach to writing and connecting the past to the present?

I think we’re in a really interesting moment as a country where we’re realizing a lot of things in the past have not been dealt with. So, on one level, I think especially for Native stories, the way the past affects Native people and our relationship to this country and this country’s relationship to itself, has to do with there being things not dealt with to this day that make the past remain present in a really felt way. There’s been a lack of reckoning with the history of our country, the origin of our country, as it relates to Native people.

So that piece, along with on a personal level the way Native people feel history, I think, is different than [how] other people feel it. Part of that has to do with the institutionalized way we talk about American history and the absence of Native people from that teaching and from the conversation. It makes the past felt more than if we did. … For Americans to think of the country or how we did or did not get through the ugliness of genocide and the removal of people and all the different things that have been done, we don’t have any version of that. Instead, we actually just skip over—you hear about the Indians and the pilgrims, and then in institutions, as it’s still taught to this day, you don’t really hear anything. That absence is really felt as much as a bullet that stays in you.

There are a couple of interesting thoughts early in the novel about the idea of books and writing and what stories do or don’t do. One said, “I didn’t think stories were made to comfort. I believed what my father told me. Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.” How much of your own opinions or ideas about the power of writing and storytelling did you give to your characters?

I think they probably believe it more than I do. I remember when that line occurred to me. This character is talking about a story that his dad told him, about his dad sort of disappearing. On some level, I definitely believe that storytelling and when you get involved with the story—with a good book, with a good movie—at the end of it, you are taken away. You had the experience of disappearing into it, and when you came back, you were different and you were changed. I do believe that fundamentally. But I think that was something that came in a single moment of writing from a character’s perspective, rather than that’s what my belief was, and I wanted to give it to one of my characters. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. What made you want to be a writer?

I realized at some point that there were things that I could access through writing, and through fiction specifically, that were in me that I couldn’t access without writing. I think writing is another form of thinking, and storytelling is not only a way to remember, but a way to create something new that is a part of us. But, through the creation process and the telling of the story, I think it’s part of what keeps me wanting to write—that I don’t know what’s going to come. I don’t know what story’s going to come unless I make space to write and see what comes. That surprise element, the idea that I don’t know what’s there, is what first got me excited about it and also keeps me going. That the writing process has this mystery to it and this aspect of discovery and just bringing together a lot of different elements—memory and emotion—it makes me feel more whole to be involved with the project, to be thinking through something through characters.

It fills not only a restlessness I always felt that I didn’t know what to do with, but also a hole where I need meaning to be, that I think was left by my intensely evangelical Christian upbringing. My dad, he was a Native American Church peyote roadman, and they were both very intensely religious and talked about God a lot. When I first started writing I was really looking for something like a religion to fill a space and fiction ended up being that. I don’t want to sound too crazy to say that. But, I really went at fiction in a way that felt like I was trying to fill that kind of hole. …

What I love about fiction is that it doesn’t pretend to have answers. It poses more questions, and it renders a world where those questions can exist and where the reader can think about them and feel them, but it’s not dogma.

What have you learned about your own writing from teaching others how to do it?

There’s this emphasis that writing teachers give, that I was given, that I find myself giving, about emphasizing “scene” that I don’t always think is right. And sometimes, I’ll default to it because I think that’s what good writing is, and that’s what the reader wants—probably mostly because that’s what the reader wants. We know—I don’t know who the “we” is here—that readers enjoy the illustration of something versus being told some information. There’s a general truth we can all agree on, that scene-based writing is the way that we teach what good writing is.

But I think it can be over-taught. I think the way that I write is from the inside out. So, I’ll know characters’ internal thoughts and tics well before I put them in the world. And a lot of this stuff, as it comes out, is not necessarily something I would ever want to show somebody except certain people I trust and trade pages with.

I’ve learned to know when a scene should be there to anchor the reader and the character to a real world, and when to trust what internality can do, what thinking can do for the reader and, for the character development too. Trying to balance that is something you have to stay conscious of because the default mode is to just put a character into the real world and watch them do stuff and give them a desire, even if it’s a glass of water. I think part of what fiction needs to do is what only fiction can do. We have TV shows and movies that are filled with scenes that are honestly more brilliant than what most writing can do. If we’re only writing scenes, we have TV shows and movies. The interior is what fiction can get at, and I think we need to use fiction to do that as much as we can.

What advice do you have for the readers of Writer’s Digest?

Find a way to make your writing process a discipline in the way that musicians practice their instrument. I think writing has this mystique of like—there’s this binary of inspiration, of being visited by the muse or you have writer’s block, and I think this really detracts from a discipline. So, finding ways to write more, whatever that looks like. It depends on the person. Some people can set a goal of 2,000 words a day, and I probably did that for a year. Or, even just copying beautiful sentences that you admire and feeling how it is to write them isn’t anything new. Other writers have said this but transforming your writing practice into a discipline in the same way that, when you see somebody perform their instrument that they’ve put in the time. Writing requires that.

I don’t think it’s asking of you to be brilliant every time you sit down to write; I think it only asks you to sit down. Occasionally it will ask everything of you if you’re doing it right, and if you’re devoted. That’s sometimes where it’s the hardest, but I think most of the time you just have to be there. So that requires—and this is old writing advice—butt in the seat. But I think part of it is rethinking the way you think about writing. Not as like, Do I have a good idea? Am I interesting? Am I inspired or am I experiencing writer’s block? Instead, How do I put in the time? Trying to reframe it for yourself, because I think we’ve been told that writing is this one thing and it’s been taken outside of the realm of discipline. So, finding ways to convince yourself to be writing as much as you can, as much as time will allow, rather than waiting for the idea or waiting for the inspiration.

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Meet the Master of Disaster—from foreshadowing pandemics to dreaming up demon apples, author Chuck Wendig juggles multiple genres like a seasoned carny. Step right up for some tasty urban fantasy … a side-show of horror … a sci-fi circus … or a middle-grade book with plenty of thrills and chills. He’s got all amusements covered. With New York Times and USA Today bestsellers to his name, Wendig shines across numerous readerships. How does he balance all his acts? In a candid conversation, he shares insights on writing productivity, finding your voice, and embracing process over product. We discuss how the real world always impacts fiction, especially the scary things. It turns out, facing fears can be frightfully productive. Already a writer’s writer, Wendig also explains why craft books aren’t necessarily bullshit. Let’s get to it.

We met at my first-ever writing conference in Fort Collins about seven years ago. You told the participants a story about your dad cutting off his finger. I have yet to forget this.

[laughter] True story.

You had the audience completely mesmerized. Not because of the creep factor—that would have been gimmicky—it was how you laid out the story. You did it carefully and slowly … you had us all there till the very end. How do you do this as a storyteller? Does it happen organically? Can we learn this?

Part of the irony is my dad was, himself, a fairly good storyteller. I don’t think it’s genetic or something you can’t pick up. Storytelling is like writing in general, you learn by doing it and often doing it badly. I used to run role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, so it’s kind of the same thing—you’re telling a collaborative story for people. You can see on their faces when you’re losing them or exciting them, or it’s time to drive the knife in, or flip it around so they don’t see what’s coming. You develop a rapport and rhythm. You get it by practice, practice, practice.

A lot of great storytelling in writing depends on voice. And to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of sci-fi or dystopian or horror genres. But I read your books because of the Wendig-esqueness of them all. Your voice establishes trust with readers in a very honest and inviting here-I-am-come-along-for-the-ride-we’ll-have-some-fun type of way. Did you always have this or has it developed over time?

It’s something I’ve always had but not something I always knew how to use. When you’re a baby writer you don’t know you have a voice. You’re always trying to find the voice of what the market will buy or other writers. We do things by imitation, which is a form of flattery obviously. Hey this sounds like the writers I like and they’ve sold books, maybe it’s a good thing. But I do think we chase our voice only to circle back around and realize we’ve had it all along. It’s who we are as people. And a combination of all our weirdness and our fears and the crazy things we like and love. It all gloms together into how we experience the world and then how we translate the experience onto the page.

You’ve had six books out in the past three years: Dust & Grim; You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton!; The Book of Accidents, Wayward, Gentle Writing Advice, and Black River Orchard arriving this fall. How do you stay so productive?

Some of it’s down to routine. I used to work freelance and if you don’t make the deadlines, you don’t get paid. And if you don’t get paid, it turns out there’s these things called MORTGAGE COMPANIES and they get mad when you don’t give them their money. That’s the sort of cold, calculated answer. But.… I really, really, like writing. I’m not one of those writers who says I don’t like writing, I only like having my book on my shelf. I just enjoy the process. I like it and editing more than I like having the book out. I mean it’s obviously awesome about an audience who reads it. The fact I get to do it is reason enough. But the pandemic was a challenge in that regard. It threatened my routine and expectation to commit words to paper.

A lot of writers were suffering—either you welcomed the opportunity to be at home and do something different or couldn’t conjure up a creative thing to save your life.

Yeah, that was me. I had nothing in the tank.

The energy for doing the work just fizzled?

It really had never happened until the pandemic. And it’s ironic because before the pandemic, I wrote a book about a pandemic. And then during the pandemic, I was supposed to write the sequel about what happens after a pandemic. It was emotionally jarring to go back to this thing. I went back to the page and I had nothing. It was a hard time—it wasn’t an energy issue so much as staring into a void.

In terms of that, you have a lot of contemporary issues …

Is that an accusation or …

No, [laughter] but we all have very long lists by now. What I mean is you include contemporary issues in your work—divisive politics, the environment, societal concerns, even A.I.—all significant concerns in our world right now. How important is this to you as a writer and your audience? Is this something you feel is a responsibility?

Not at all. It’s these fears. Things I’m worried about. Wanderers for me … I could’ve written about 10 books based on the anxieties I harvested with that. I took all my anxieties together to form this massive epic robot of a book. I call it my Anxiety Voltron. For me it’s not about any perceived responsibly, or feeling like I have to talk about these things, but it’s what’s on my mind. They worry me and entice in a weird sort of way. I can’t help but want to write about the things that fascinate me.

You’ve written about everything from sci-fi, fantasy, horror, dystopian, to paranormal. Why do you like to mix it up so much?

That’s a good question. I think ’cuz I’m greedy. I think I’m really greedy. I will always want the tasting menu or the buffet. I don’t need one whole meal—I want to taste a lot of different things. Also in my generation, we grew up reading multiple genres. It wasn’t like I’m a science fiction reader. I started off reading Douglas Adams and Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke and then Stephen King. Then I moved on to epic fantasy … Robin Hobb. Then crime fiction … I loved it all. So greedily, I’m like, Why can’t I have all of it? In fiction, we tend to silo writers. Especially if they get successful very early. Which is one of the weird fortunes I possess—I started slow and built a career which lets me play around a bit and establish a circuit board in multiple areas. It’s not like I’m hard-coded into one direction. For me, it’s a joy of getting to play in all those spaces. It’s too much fun not to do.

You’ve said the horror genre is a safe place to fight monsters. I love that idea—can you elaborate more?

Horror is a great place to contextualize all the things we’re actually afraid of. Sometimes you put them in the form of monsters, supernatural, or otherwise. It’s a place to conjure your anxieties and fears and deal with them in a way that’s removed from reality. It’s almost like a simulation and I can mess around with it. It’s a safe place to do that while still allowing you to grapple with the realities of things and treat the subject matter as seriously as you’d like.

That’s a great perspective for a writer, but what about a reader? Is it the same thing?

Yes. The same thing. When I was a kid—when we were told at any moment we could be obliterated by missiles in the middle of the night?

And hiding underneath my math teacher’s desk was going to save me from a nuclear bomb?

Exactly. I was notably not happy. Good night, you may be dead in the morning by nuclear fire. The first horror novel I read was Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, which is about people surviving an epic-horror-nightmare-nuclear-winter-hellscape, and it made me feel a lot better after I read it. People get in their heads they shouldn’t read things that scare them (different from trauma obviously), but you miss an opportunity to confront the fear in a safe place. For me it’s showing the subject matter I’m afraid of, but doing it in a way that tells me I’m not crazy. Because when I read someone else saying “This is scary stuff,” I’m like, Oh yeah, I also think it’s scary. So right there you feel seen. But also, they’re telling a story and the sheer existence of a story—characters surviving and talking and occasionally joking, moving from point A to point B—feels grimly optimistic. Even if the characters lose in the end, you feel, well, they had a shot. It’s comforting in a number of ways.

What scares you?

What doesn’t scare me? Just opening the news tab on any website will give me a doomscrolling infinity loop of anxiety. Wanderers is a pretty good encapsulation of it all. The politics, the social issues happening in the country, cruelty at local school boards. Artificial intelligence is freaking me out right now. Fungal diseases. I got a long list … we don’t have enough time.

Does writing help?

Yes, it absolutely does. And reading. Medieval sorcerers of old would summon demons into a summoning circle in order to control and extract favor from them. I’m definitely summoning demons with my books. I make them fight like Demon Fight Club.

Earlier you mentioned you like the process of the writing. What part is your favorite?

It’s actually finding the weirder, slower moments. The plot stuff is good, but it always feels a little more on track. I know the story needs to move from A to B and there’s things I can do to mix it up. But it’s always in the quieter, stranger moments when the story does things you don’t expect. When it has a moment to breathe on its own … and the book gets to make its own decisions. Obviously, I know books aren’t literal, but there are times when it feels like literal magic.

Can you give an example from one of your books?

In the Miriam Black series, I learned very explicitly if I was writing a super, super, supplemental character (like a third-tier, z-grade nobody—a cab driver, or someone at a hotel), if I find there’s something interesting there or a relationship or dialog, I will turn them into a character who stays until the end of the book. Basically, I didn’t plan for you to be here but I really like you so I’d like you to stay.

You have this uncanny knack to write authentic characters, no matter their age, race, or gender. For example, in Wayward, characters Pete Corley, Ed Creel, Shana, and Benji—they couldn’t be any different. With such a diverse cast, what work do you do to get it right?

I try to treat them seriously—where they’re coming from and what their problems are. I bridge myself to them but knowing at the end of the day, there’s no way to write a character that isn’t in some way me. I would love to be able to conjure a literal new person.

How do you inform your characters? Do you have to be careful about well, only this person is going to be funny and only this person is going to drink whisky? How do you split the atom of you among all these people, or is it a calculus you don’t have to perform?

I generally try to turn the screw so there is enough away from me. Build the artifice. But my experiences in the world certainly inform. It’s difficult not to. But still, I’m not someone who works with rats at the CDC … it’s an opportunity for me to research and talk to people. I think the notion ‘we must write what we know’ is a dubious one. It has value at a simplistic level, but after unpacking it, there’s a lot of nuance that goes into a piece of writing. For me, it’s building characters out so they’re serious and I’m taking them seriously only as much like me as they need to be.

You said you were fortunate to build your career slowly. Was it helpful with setting future expectations?

For people who get six or seven-figure advances, they have to sell a lot of books. As a new author it’s very difficult unless you’re getting the full weight and scope of the publisher behind you and happen to hit a certain zeitgeist. An underperforming book can kneecap your career right out of the gate. But then, even success essentially brands you as the cow who has to stay on that farm because you wrote a hard, sci-fi epic. And if it succeeded really well, what if the next thing you want to write doesn’t? Good luck, but it’s what you do now and that’s what they’re going to want for the next 10 years of your life, if not forever. So, expectations are set and you’ve been branded.

You have several popular craft books: The Kick-Ass Writer, Damn Fine Story, and the recent Gentle Writing Advice. Yet, you’re the first to say any craft writing advice is bullshit. So, why write craft books at all? Why bother?

I like to read craft books myself and I find value in them. Whether you’re talking Stephen King, Lawrence Block, Anne Lamott … these are books that even if I don’t agree with every piece of, that’s fine. It’s weird that people who don’t agree decide it’s bad advice. It’s just advice that isn’t for you. When I started my blog TerribleMinds over 20 years ago, it was me yelling at me about writing. It was a way to vent and talk about the challenges I was facing. Putting my thoughts into a form I understood. You don’t always understand what you’re thinking until you get it out. Like magnetic poetry, you need to barf out those words and put them in order. But, when I saw people were reading, it was terrifying. It was like turning on the lights in a dark room where you’ve been talking for an hour and you realize you aren’t alone.

And you’re naked.

[laughter] Yes—but the advice was ultimately for me and by me. I don’t know what works for anyone else. There is no guaranteed way. Writing isn’t math where you plug in the numbers and get a result … it’s squirrely. It’s not how you do it. But this is how I do it today and it might not be the same tomorrow. Ultimately, it’s to have people think about what they’re doing. Anything to help people write and read more intentionally. That’s the whole point of the craft books. Give them a perspective, not the perspective.

What advice would you give to new writers or those struggling to break in?

The advice is stupidly simple … you just have to keep going. Trying to become a published writer is like putting a bucket on your head and trying to headbutt a wall. Either the wall is going to fall or you are. You have to love what you do because there is no promise of reward beyond the doing. So, if you find love in the doing, it’s probably why you do the thing in the first place.

In You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton!, you talk about “Do the Thing.” It basically sums up all writers’ struggles to move forward. Why do we need this constant motivation? What is it about us as human beings and creatives that we need this? Do we have a finite well?

It’s because IT’S REALLY HARD. Writing and telling stories, painting pictures, making songs. I think the myth is that somehow art is easy … it just comes to you … the muse moves you. But it doesn’t. It’s like moving narrative earth, it can be hard and challenging because there’s no instant result. As a writer, you get questions like: Is your book a bestseller? Being made into a movie? Is it like Stephen King? Huge questions. And if the answer is no, you feel like you’re failing.

I get it. So, writers need to laugh and get lots of hugs?

There’s definitely a lot of feeling lost in the woods. And we can use a flashlight. And a hug when we get out.

We talked earlier about fears and I want to end with it too. You have a great line in The Kick Ass Writer I’m going to paraphrase, “Fear will kill you dead … you have nothing to be afraid of that a little preparation and pragmatism cannot kill … fear is nonsense.” On that note, can’t fear be helpful when it comes to writing and publishing?

This is the heart of what Gentle Writing Advice is about. It challenges some of these things like why you can’t have self-doubt … kick self-doubt in the butt and move on. But self-doubt is incredibly valuable. If you didn’t ever doubt yourself, you’d be a psychopath. Sometimes doubt is what helps me as writer say, This isn’t working right. A little bit of fear is good, too. Fear in general—well, there’s a good reason we have it. Hey, you should be scared of that van with the clown driving in it. DON’T GET IN THAT VAN. Only when fear stops you from writing, stops you from doing what you want, is it toxic. It can be paralyzing.

Like self-sabotaging? I’ll never be a bestseller, so I won’t write at all?

Yup. It’s easier not to try. And that’s scary.

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Michael Cunningham writes for an audience, but it’s not the audience you’d expect. The typical piece of writing advice is to “write the book you’d want to read,” but an experience Cunningham had while working at the Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach between getting his BA and his MFA made him consider what would make his older co-worker Helen pick up a book. A single mom of three trouble-prone children working multiple jobs, Helen was “a huge reader” according to Cunningham. “At the end of every long, hard day, she would get into bed and read for an hour. That’s what she was moving toward …” After recommending she read Crime and Punishment, “as only a pretentious 22-year-old could,” her assessment of the novel (“it was pretty good”) had an impact on Cunningham: “I kind of loved it that no one had told Helen what she was supposed to like better than what she was supposed to like less. … it would be something to write a book that would feel like something to Helen, that would be alive enough and interesting enough and compelling enough to be the book on her nightstand with her pills and her glasses and her Kleenex. That really changed things for me.”

Cunningham still writes for specific people, a select group close to him “who stand in for all people.” He says, “I’m fortunate in having friends who are exactly who I have in mind as readers. And yet they’re nobody’s fool, but neither are they always expecting the worst. They’re generous readers, but also discriminating readers.” The first reader of this small group is Cunningham’s husband of 37 years, Ken Corbett. “He is a fantastic reader, a fantastic editor, and is able to be entirely frank with me, because he takes me that seriously. I know he’s not backing away from anything in order to spare my feelings. I like having my feelings spared, but this is too important.” Writing books that he believes certain people in his life would want to read “translates as much as anything into striving for a certain vividness.”

And Cunningham’s novels live up to this goal. Whether he’s tackling the AIDS epidemic in his early work, as he did in A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood; exploring the lives of three women connected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway in The Hours, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999; or detailing a marriage on the brink of collapse (By Nightfall), his writing brings to life all of the hope, wonder, and heartbreak of the human condition through the relatable, yet intense experiences of his characters.

Now, with Day, his newest novel, he does the same. On April 5, 2019, Dan and Isabel’s marriage is on rocky ground, their children Nathan and Violet grapple with the challenges of childhood, and Isabel’s brother Robbie, who lives with them, needs to get over his most recent boyfriend while looking for his own place to live. A year later, on April 5, 2020, readers see the family in the earliest days of the COVID-19 lockdown with Robbie stranded in Iceland. Finally, on April 5, 2021, when the effects of the previous year have brought their lives to a breaking point, readers see the fractures that a global crisis can cause, in the way only Cunningham can craft. We began our conversation with his inspiration for the novel.

What was the inspiration for Day and when did you start working on it?

I was about a third of the way through another novel entirely, a big, long, multi-generational, I won’t call it a saga, but you know what I mean. There came the pandemic, and I felt like there was no real way to work the pandemic into the book I had started. It felt both important and nearly impossible to write somehow about the pandemic. Nearly impossible in that, how do you write a novel, write anything that takes the pandemic into account, without being a book about the pandemic? How do you keep it from overwhelming the novel in more or less the way it overwhelmed the world? I was really stumped for a while, but I just couldn’t go on with the novel I’d started. I couldn’t think of where to go from there.

I don’t always know where any novel comes from. It seems to sort of burble up somehow, and plenty of never-to-be-written novels burble up, are examined, and then sort of burbled back down. So, I always wait and live with the idea for a while. The idea being: What if we were to see a group of people through the pandemic from before to after, which is a little unusual for me. I don’t usually start with a relatively abstract notion like that. It’s more like: two best friends in high school, one’s gay, one’s straight, an answer grows out of that. Or in the case of The Hours, it was originally going to be a gay version of Mrs. Dalloway, which burbled out and was a really bad idea, but then it evolved into something else.

So anyway, it’s a long answer to a simple question. This novel was unusual for me in that it started with an ambition on my part to write the novel that neither belittled the pandemic nor was overwhelmed by it. And then one thing leads to another.

That’s interesting because I was rereading your earlier work, and I was thinking about how you included the AIDS epidemic as it was happening, and this novel does that with COVID. I wonder, just generally speaking, what are the challenges with writing about events that are current and still unfolding?

Fate is much too fancy a word for any person to apply to themselves, but I have, as a writer, so far survived, not one, but two pandemics. And it’s not over yet! So, knock wood, right? But I think all writers who are roughly my contemporaries, which is almost all living writers—or certainly people past a certain age—those of us who were in not one, but two of them … I don’t know if that makes us writers of the plague generation, but it is somewhat unusual historically speaking to find most of your writing career dominated by two catastrophic events in the form of communicable diseases. Go ahead, see what you can do with those two!

My first, A Home at the End of the World, was difficult in that I was writing it as the AIDS epidemic was raging around me. I was working in the mornings, then volunteering with GMHC and then with ACT UP in the afternoons. This is not so much about art as it is about the atmosphere in which you’re trying to produce something that resembles art.

The nature of the AIDS epidemic kept changing. I started A Home at the End of the World when there were no tests for HIV, and I finished it before there was effective medication—“Oh, there are tests for it. Oh, this is how we get it.”—and I had to keep revising that book as I went along to just keep up with the events as they unfolded.

With this one, well, let’s just say we all hope that the worst of the pandemic is behind us. If that proves to be untrue, it’s still a little bottle rocket from the years 2019 to 2021.

So many of your books have specific timeframes … Do you plot them out and know this timeframe in advance? Or are you more of a write, explore, and work it out in revision writer?

Very much the latter. I start with an idea or a scene or, well—I can’t imagine anyone simply writing a sentence and then writing another sentence without any sense of what kind of book you’re writing, or where it’s headed. But I keep that a little bit vague in my own mind because I know amazing writers who plot it all out in advance and stick to the plot. I, however, find, like a lot of my sister and brother writers, that if I know where a novel is headed, the characters tend to become employees of the story, whose job it is to convey it to its destination. Every book turns out to be something other than what I had expected it to be when I started writing. Again, Day is a little unusual for me in that the structure came early, and I saw no reason to break up the structure, though within that format there were endless possibilities.

It’s a great question, and I’m glad you brought up “time” because I teach. I was just in class yesterday, and I talk to my students two days a week about narrative and how it works and what it’s for. We were just talking about how certainly fiction, as opposed to poetry, is anchored to time. It would be hard to name a novel—there’s always some novel that defies whatever category you try to put novels into—but I think it is pretty safe to say that 99 out of 100 novels are subvertly about the passage of time and what happens over time. A poem doesn’t have to do that. You could pick just about any book on the bookshelf behind me or any book on the bookshelf behind you and give it to somebody and say, “I hope you like this—it’s about the passage of time.” That’s sort of fundamental. It doesn’t mean chronology. It doesn’t mean sequence, but it can only be read sentence by sentence.

So yeah, I probably do know fairly early on about the time span I’m looking at, and really ever since Mrs. Dalloway, I seem to have been focusing on naturally, follow your instincts, smaller increments of time. Even Specimen Days, the book after The Hours, is three distinct time periods, albeit set in different places, in different genres.

One of the things about surviving to a certain age and having written a certain number of books is, at a certain point, you begin to see patterns that were invisible to you as you were writing because you were just writing the best book you could. And you don’t think of yourself—I don’t think of myself—as any kind of writer in particular, but when you look back … you have inclinations, you have a fingerprint, there are ways your mind works that are not something you’re really aware of until you begin to see a smallish pile of books and see that they all have something in common.

Yes, so many of your stories are explorations of family and creating the family that you need and the different ways that love shows up in those families. There’s a great quote in Day where Isabel and her co-worker Derrick are looking at some photographs, and he says, “This is a story about extending the boundaries of family.” I thought that encapsulates your novels. What fascinates you about that topic of family and how it shows up?

I think families are inherently interesting, but so are a lot of human and other phenomena. My particular interest and attraction to the unconventional family, probably, was driven into me by surviving the AIDS epidemic during which untold numbers of people, of course, died. Among those numbers, there were a lot of people—gay men—who called their parents and said, “I have two things to tell you: I’m gay, and I have AIDS.” Often, their parents rallied. More often than you would think, they hung up the phone, and we formed kamikaze families.

The person who was mortally ill, we were already friends, but suddenly there was a whole other kind of crunch on. We did for each other the kinds of things that many of us had grown up being told only your family will do. When the shit hits the fan, there’s only one porch light that’s on, there’s only one body of people who are going to sit by the bedside and make the funeral arrangements. And guess what? That role can be equally filled by a disco bunny, a motorcycle dyke, and a drag queen. As I saw that happening over and over again, then the disco bunny would get sick, and the drag queen, and that had a real effect.

I felt that I don’t want to romanticize the unorthodox or queer family, and I hope I haven’t in any of my books. It’s been really important to me to not hold out a family comprised of a disco bunny, a drag queen, and a motorcycle dyke—it’s not like your troubles are over if your biological family is out of the picture. But I wanted to, and this seemed more urgent 30 years … I wanted to acknowledge those families. I didn’t want them to be pushed to the side or underestimated. And then it’s how many novels later? It still stays with me.

There are some beautiful descriptions in Day. There’s a scene where Violet is waiting for the little white dog to come to the park, then toward the end of the book, a character describes a feeling of queasiness that’s not love, but may or may not not be love. The way those are written is so specific and real that they evoke something unique to those characters, yet we can all identify with them. I wonder about how you craft these sentences. I would love to think that over time it would get easier to write that way, but I also imagine there’s a lot of time and revision that goes into it.

Over time, it gets a little easier if only in that over time you have a little more confidence than you did. Over time, you come to feel like the appellation writer is one that actually does apply to you because early on you just feel like a huckster, which can last through the first couple of novels. So yeah, a little less of a sense that I am skating out onto very thin ice, and it’s helpful to feel like almost literally you have the right to do this.

It’s something I talk to my students about. At our first meeting—I teach a literature class and an advanced writing class—and I asked them a number of questions. The one that really freaks them out is What do you think you’re good at as a writer? They’re perfectly willing to talk about all their shortcomings. I say, “OK, you’re going to need this: Let’s talk about what you’re good at.” And it’s really interesting to see them struggle that way.

Which is a long way of saying that I guess you could say I’m no less frustrated by any given days’ work, but I’m less fearful than I used to be. …

When I was at the [Iowa] Writers’ Workshop many years ago I had one great teacher, a writer named Hilma Wolitzer, mother of Meg Wolitzer, also a fantastic writer. Hilma took me aside about midway through the semester and said, just to me, not to the other students, “Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to, when you’re finished with a draft of the story, go through it and grade every line either A, or—let’s say there’s no Cs—the really great ones get As, the perfectly OK ones get Bs. Then I want you to go back and rewrite all the A sentences because those are the ones about your precocity. Those are the ones in which you are doing triple flips in the run-up to the Olympics, and they’re not in service to the story.”

So, any novel of mine, certainly any paragraph, most paragraphs, has shed a skin of overwriting that you don’t see, that no one sees but me.

That’s entirely counter to what I would’ve expected. I would assume that you would want to improve the B sentences, but what you’re saying makes so much sense.

Right, and this was, again, specifically advice for me and with my penchant, even that young, to write overly elaborate, overly lyrical. Why just one simile when you could have three? And I’m still looking at those A sentences. …

So, when you have that conversation with your students and you ask them to identify what they’re good at as a writer, presumably they want to know your answer to that question.

Oh, I do answer. I don’t ask them to discuss painful topics that I’m somehow spared from. I think this is something like, I write a really good sentence, and I feel like I see very clearly. I offer them that. I usually do not tell them, at least not early on, the A sentence versus B sentence thing, because they’re students, and it’s hard to convince them that I’m not speaking to everyone … We may trot that one out later. I try to steer them away from using the word weakness. Like, what are your challenges or whatever, which is kind of bullshit, but I also don’t want them to say weakness. …

Going back to Day for a minute, I reread The Snow Queen, and it struck me that Tyler is very attuned to the political happenings of the time, the elections of 2004 and 2008. I think in Day it would’ve been easy, and maybe obvious, to include the politics of 2020 and what became the politics of COVID-19. But there was none of that. Was this an intentional choice?

For one thing, I think the pandemic was enough, because of course the pandemic followed close on the heels of the 2016 elections, and I guess this is where you kind of cut your conscience to suit your situation. I’ve generally felt that a lot of American fiction, even the stuff I really admire, it takes place in a slightly weirdly apolitical world, as if it didn’t really matter who was running the country, who was running the corporations. It’s hard to imagine a South American writer or an African writer writing about people as if they were unaffected by class and politics and consumerism or whatever.

But for Day, I felt like not only was the pandemic more than enough to take on, but on the one hand, I don’t want the novels I write and novels I read, to just ignore culture and politics. On the other hand, you want a novel to be both specific to its time and to make sense beyond its time, and I feel like, the politics when I was writing Day—which is true right now—I have no idea what it’s going to be like in a year or two years. And I thought, These people have trouble enough with what they’re doing.

What advice do you have for readers of Writer’s Digest?

Don’t panic.

To be more specific, in my experience, what undoes writers more than any other factor is they give up too soon. Going both to undergraduate and then the MFA program, I knew, in both places, really gifted writers who simply came to their senses and stopped and did something else. It’s sort of by attrition, like “I’m sick of being a bartender, I’m going to get a real job, and I’ll write it on the weekends. I’ll have children and I can write when they’re taking naps.” Believe me, I’m not saying don’t have children or don’t do an interesting job. But what I do know, there’s so many of us early on, it’s a question of knocking at the door and knocking at the door and knocking at the door and just, “Fuck, will you stop knocking? All right!”

I had a story in The New Yorker, a chapter from A Home at the End of the World, and it got a lot of attention, but that was after almost 10 years of sending stories to The New Yorker and other places. … So, don’t panic.

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When I catch up with Jean Kwok, she’s just returned from the American Library Association conference in Chicago to her home in the Netherlands. “Librarians are the best, aren’t they?” she says. “They’re a very important part of my life because I was so poor. The library was an incredible refuge for me. I would not be a writer today without the library.” But that isn’t the only reason why Kwok was at the ALA conference. “Nowadays with banned books, they’re really under siege. I think this is the time when we need to step up and show our support for our librarians and our schools.”

Banned books are something Kwok knows a thing or two about. Her debut novel, Girl in Translation, which she describes as “my most autobiographical novel based on my working in a factory as a kid and living in an unheated rat-infested apartment in Brooklyn,” was recently a subject of the rampant and overreaching book-banning efforts currently on the rise in the U.S. So, when a parent asked Kwok to write a short defense of the book that could be read at the school board meeting, Kwok agreed. “As I was writing it, I got more and more riled up,” she told WD. “… And I thought, I have to go there. I can’t let that stand. So, I flew from the Netherlands to Pennsylvania and defended it in person.”

Making the trip wasn’t without its risks though. “I really didn’t know how much aggression I would be facing, and I also could have hurt my career,” Kwok says. And while her attendance didn’t prevent her book from being banned, it was the principle of the matter: “It’s about saying what’s right and what’s wrong, and also speaking up for other authors who might not be able to, might not be safe doing so.”

Speaking about her life, as she did during her speech defending her work, is nothing new for Kwok and if there’s one word to describe her work, it’s personal. Her novels have been published in at least 20 countries and taught in classes around the world, many of which she visits to share her story. Like the main character in her sophomore novel, Mambo in Chinatown, Kwok was also a professional ballroom dancer for years. Her third novel, the Read With Jenna book club pick Searching for Sylvie Lee, was inspired by the disappearance of Kwok’s brother. So when Kwok said her newest novel, The Leftover Woman, was her most personal book since her debut, I had questions.

What sparked the idea for the story of Jasmine and Rebecca and Fiona in The Leftover Woman?

The Leftover Woman was really born from my own struggle as a woman in a traditional Chinese immigrant family. In a Chinese immigrant family, what happens is there’s a hierarchy based on age and gender. As the youngest of seven children, after a whole bunch of boys and as a girl, I was at rock bottom of that hierarchy. We lived in poverty, and I was working as a child in a clothing factory …

I grew up in a family where when my brothers spoke—they were just my brothers, but they were older and they are male—when they spoke, even if what they spoke was ridiculous, I wasn’t allowed to contradict them ever. When my father had something to say, I wasn’t even allowed to look him in the eyes, let alone voice a kind of opposing opinion. Women are just supposed to be vessels, silent carriers of male children. So, for me, it was a struggle to grow up. I basically had the opposite of tiger parents. It wasn’t considered necessary in my family for a girl to go to college. I mean, I don’t think girls were really considered necessary at all. So, in my life it was really the two choices: the factory or finding a man I could marry. And I decided to go to Harvard instead.

I thought it was interesting that Jasmine’s chapters were written in first-person point of view, and then Rebecca’s are written in third person. Did you always know that you were going to have those perspectives? How did you know what was the right point of view for both of those women?

It’s at the heart of the structure of the book because I think one of the things I do in the novel that is interesting is that I use a genre plot twist to replicate the white gaze, and that’s tied into those uses of point of view that you just mentioned.

I always wanted first person for Jasmine because I wanted us to be able to see Jasmine from the inside, from her own interior language of speaking and thinking in Chinese. Even though it’s not explicitly stated, her chapters are actually all in Chinese; they’re in her mind in Chinese. Rebecca is really about a Western point of view that is seeing this world from outside the Chinese language barrier.

… There was a point when I was writing the book when both were first person. So, when both points of view were actually in first person, I felt I loved Rebecca and I loved Rebecca’s voice, [but] I never felt like my first person for Rebecca was right. And it might be because I am not white. She’s a white wealthy executive editor. I wanted to be close to Rebecca, but I wanted a slight bit of distance, and it really felt right to put her in third person, in close third, where we could really follow her and be interior. But it isn’t quite as close as that first person of Jasmine’s.

I feel like that’s another connection between Searching for Sylvie Lee and this book. I heard you talk about being able to see the interiority of those characters who have full and complete and complex thoughts in another language and then seeing them from another person’s perspective.

That is absolutely what I was intending to do as a theme that runs through all of my novels—starting with Girl in Translation to The Leftover Woman—I’m deeply concerned with interior and exterior. What is a person like on the inside, and what do they look like on the outside? I think that in a lot of ways, The Leftover Woman is really about looking at women. How do we look at women? What do we see when we look at women, and is that accurate? Does that reflect what’s interior? Especially when you have an Asian woman, for example, or a woman from a different culture who speaks a different language, how are outsides the same or different from our insides?

Exactly. I read that you wrote and then rewrote your first novel more than once. The Leftover Woman is your fourth novel that’s been published. How has your drafting process changed since that first book with this new one?

I definitely changed how I approach a book from Girl in Translation. When I wrote Girl in Translation, I was really learning how to write a novel. I finished that book once, and it was like 400 pages, and I had to throw away 350 of those pages. I kept the first 50 pages, and I rewrote it again with a completely different story and completely different arc from what I had done previously. That was, needless to say, an extremely painful experience—I’m not somebody who can crank out pages very easily. It takes me a long time to write those pages, and then to need to throw them away because it was structurally flawed and the overarching skeleton was just not working, made me change my process.

From then on, there’s been kind of a gradual process where I do plan my books more as I go on. That said, it’s not at all like I can outline them and just pound them out. I wish I could. But I am very aware of the outline of my book. I feel like writing a novel is like building a ship, and you have to have the architecture, you have to make it correct. It has to work; it has to be watertight. When we go back and we revise, we all love to fiddle with commas and ands and punctuation, but that’s like the paint, you know? I mean, as much as I love language, I feel like if the fundamental structure of that ship is not built correctly, it’s going to sink. …

That said, in writing The Leftover Woman, at some point in the story, every single character was in jail, in bed with each other, or dead. I have killed everybody off in some draft, because when you are a writer, what you do is, of course, you set up an impossible situation. Here, I have an impossible dilemma. The tagline is “two mothers, two worlds, one impossible choice.” It’s about an adoptive mother who desperately loves her child, it’s about a birth mother who desperately loves her child and wants to get her back. And in the end, the child goes with one of them. I had to figure out which one. How do I do this in a way that reflects a kind of balanced perspective? I had, of course, interviewed people from all different parts of the story. … In the end, it’s not that you have to please everyone, but that you resolve this dilemma in a way that feels right to you personally as an author. And I just twisted myself into a pretzel trying to do that …

That is the most difficult part of wrapping up a book. The ending has a lot to do with how people will feel afterward. I wanted an ending that was both realistic and felt right, and felt earned, and that’s also uplifting. That kind of gives value to both women and their desires and dreams. To make it a story about learning and changing despite our flaws and talking about the things we have in common, and valuing, honoring the things that these two women have in common, instead of all the issues that can drive them apart.

This book has some complicated timeline stuff going on. How do you keep yourself organized as you’re drafting and working through those timelines?

I have meticulous notes. When I was a debut author, I winged it. I was just like, Woo, I’m gonna feel my way to the end. Then you feel your way to the end, and your editor’s like, “So, was that six months? What season was that?” And you’re like, The whole thing doesn’t work! She’s wearing a T-shirt, but it’s got to be the winter because of the amount of time that needs to have passed. What I have learned is that the clearer I am to myself during the writing process, the more creative I can be. Your first instinct is that you think, I want full creativity, so I’m not going to nail anything down. But the truth is, the more you nail it down to the real world, the more possibilities you open up to your brain, the more specific you can be.

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Thinking about all four of your books, they each have some element of, I don’t know if grittiness is the right word … But this one seems to really take that to the next level. Is this a start of a new tone in your work?

Well, I don’t know. I think as writers we’re always developing, right? I always think the role of the writer is to create and not to judge. And I think it’s very easy to say, “I’m this kind of writer,” or “I’m not as talented as X, Y, Z. This famous writer, by the time she was 25, had already published all these great books. And I’m not like that.” Whenever I hear someone say that, I always think, That’s not your job. … you are gifted with the desire and this kind of burning urge to write, and that’s your job. It’s the job of the rest of the world to judge you and to categorize you and to say you can do this or that. Because I think that sometimes when we judge ourselves, we wind up limiting ourselves and our potential.

But that said, I do think I’ve become more and more structured as I write, and I think I understand story much better than I used to. It’s something I really work on. I read Writer’s Digest, I read craft books incessantly. I study, I read other people’s books, and I outline them. I really try to understand how exactly they put this book together so that when I read this reveal, it was really exciting. I think I’m developing as a writer by making more intricate plots. So I don’t know if I would say that I’m going in a new direction, but I’m definitely moving forward as a writer in a way that I enjoy.

One of the other things that I like in all four of your books is how they celebrate art and creativity. Has creativity always been something that you were drawn to? How did you get your creative start?

That’s such an interesting question because I was not brought up in a household that valued creativity, although there was a lot of art in my household. Despite our poverty, my father painted in his free time, and my brother played the violin for us in that incredibly rundown apartment where we had nothing else. He would stand and play the violin after working for hours at the factory. So, art was a kind of salvation, but I didn’t understand that you could make a living at it. I didn’t ever hope to make a living creating art. I just hoped to make a living. That was my only dream, to be able to actually survive and have a job that paid the rent, that was my goal in life.

I was at Harvard, and I was a physics major because, you know, that’s a “real” job, right? I was up all night writing this problem set, and I was making notes on a piece of paper, and I wrote a poem. My hand wrote this little poem, just a couple of lines, and I felt like I had laid an egg. I was just like, What is that? What have I done? Oh my god. What’s so strange is that from that moment on, it was the only thing I wanted to do.

That’s why when I say to people who want to write, it’s like that desire to write alone makes you a writer. I had so many years in which I wrote nothing. But I agonized. I might have written nothing, but I did a lot of agonizing about not writing [laughs]. And I think the agony lets you into the writers’ club because I realized one day, investment bankers don’t stay up late at night thinking, Oh god, I didn’t write a word today. I feel so bad about myself. You know? I realized that agonizing meant I was a writer. I was not yet in a state where I could express what was inside. I wasn’t able to actually do the writing yet. But, I was a writer because I was so deeply consumed with it, and from that moment on, that was all I ever wanted.

I do believe that art is what separates us. Art makes us human. Art is the deepest part of our souls. It’s the entryway into our deeper selves. You have a surface self that’s doing your email and paying the bills and saying hi to your neighbor and doing the groceries, and that’s a very important self. But we have this huge part, like an iceberg that’s underneath the surface. Art is a way of accessing that part.

Girl in Translation has been used for first year reads, common read programs, and book clubs, and Searching for Sylvie Lee was a Read With Jenna pick. What kind of responses have you gotten from readers in those discussions, and have you learned anything about your writing from those conversations?

Having spoken at places around the world, some places don’t have a large budget, but some places are very posh and very exclusive. Everywhere I go, people say to me, “This life of poverty was also my story,” or it was [their] mother’s, or was somebody else’s. There is so much that’s hidden underneath the surface that you think, Oh my gosh, I’m in this place and everyone here is affluent and comfortable. It’s never true because somebody will come and whisper in my ear about their secrets. There are so many double lives we don’t see that are happening across the world.

What I have learned from it is that, like for many people, when I started writing, the writing was really for myself. It was a means of communicating my anger, despair, happiness, joy, elation. It was a means of trying to become in contact with a deeper part of myself and it was a real adjustment to make it public. …

I would say that maybe the thing I’ve learned from being a published writer and going around and giving talks, is that opening is actually very valuable and meaningful because people tell you that your work touched them in a way, gave them hope in a dark moment, made them look at things differently, made them feel heard and understood. And that’s one of the things I say with this whole book-banning thing—I was a kid who found myself reflected in characters in books, who felt a deeper connection to books than to people in my real life for many years, and that was something extremely important to me.

When it comes to having those kinds of conversations with people, how do you go into that in a way to protect yourself and set boundaries about what you are willing and not willing to talk about?

I think that begins with what you write. That’s why I write fiction and I don’t write memoir, because fiction is already a process of transformation. I also write fiction because I believe that fiction can tell the truth in a way that sometimes an accurate reflection of the facts can’t. When we write a scene in fiction, we are trying to tell the truth of that moment. What did it really feel like? And sometimes that might mean we have to change what actually happened or what was actually said to make it truer than it would be if you just had a recording of whatever inspired that scene in real life. So, I feel that fiction already gives you one layer of transformation.

It’s something every author has to decide for themselves. How much of yourself are you willing to put into your book? And how much of it are you willing to expose when you talk about it?

Do you have any last advice for the readers of Writer’s Digest that you want to share?

… When you are revising your work, it’s a long path to go from conception to a finished project. A lot of times, there’s a lot of feedback along the way, or you are not sure how to change it, how to improve it, how to do X, Y, and Z. Once you get a little more professional, people are saying things like, “Well, this really has to fit more into the thriller format.” Sometimes, what they’re telling you actually is right, and you have to be as flexible as you can in hearing the feedback you’re getting.

But the thing I always say to writers is that you never should forget the flame that made you want to write this. It is better to have a strangely proportioned beast that burns and is alive and stalks across the page than a perfectly proportioned corpse on the page. That is what you run into the danger of. It’s possible from too much feedback, too much confusion, that you wind up taking out whatever is at the heart of your work. So, you always have to remember that and keep that flame alive.

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When I reach novelist and poet Luis Alberto Urrea, he and his wife and research partner Cindy are fresh off another Zoom call with his book marketing team in New York, working out the plan for his newest novel, Good Night, Irene. As Cindy helps him position the camera, a painting of his mother in uniform on the wall behind him, he tells me it was “kind of scary” but also that “the pregame excitement is really moving to me because I think a lot of my books have had to be explained a lot. It’s given them challenges, me with my border stuff, and here we are—it wasn’t a devious plot on my part to do a World War II book about an American woman …”

For Urrea, who is best known for his writing about the people living near and crossing the U.S./Mexico border, including the 2005 Pulitzer finalist The Devil’s Highway, his novel Good Night, Irene ventures, in one way, into new territory. It follows two American women, Irene and Dorothy, as they enlist in the Donut Dolly Clubmobile program of the Red Cross during the later years of World War II and are sent to the front lines in Europe to provide food—namely donuts—and a reminder of home to American soldiers. Yet the story also remains firmly in Urrea’s wheelhouse of writing about his family history—Irene is based on his mother who was a “Donut Dolly.”

Family is the throughline for much of our conversation. When I ask about how he drafts his novels generally, Urrea connects it to his family. The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America are based on his great aunt Teresita Urrea, the Saint of Cabora. “After 25 years of research, I had the timeline of her life. It was a skeleton upon which I could extrapolate details in my own style.” Likewise, the 2018 bestseller, House of Broken Angels “was about the last weekend of my big brother’s life and so again, that gives you a kind of outline in a way historically that you can then lie around.”

Given that writing about these personal events, like his brother’s final days or the undiagnosed PTSD his mother faced as a result of her service, means having to talk about them extensively in public, I’m curious about how Urrea takes care of his own mental health. His answer was surprisingly uplifting: “Not to be too precious, but it does get to you sometimes. But if you could go with us on the road, you’d see how astonishing it is for me. People that I would’ve never been able to talk to come and they’ll share something with you or they’ll just want a hug or they’ll cry or they’ll pull you aside and whisper something about their lives to you. It’s so great.”

But it isn’t just readers that Urrea gets to know in unexpected ways through his writing. When I ask him to tell me more about the research that went into Good Night, Irene, he shares how he learned to see his own mother through a different lens.

You spent decades researching one part of your family. Now, with Good Night, Irene, you’ve got a story inspired by this whole other part of your family. How has the research and the writing differed with this new novel?

It’s not research in a way because it’s my mom, and I grew up with this story. I grew up with the ramifications of the story but not really understanding it. I think the great crime we commit is thinking, Oh, it’s just Mom. … I didn’t really understand what she had gone through or what she had survived and who she really was. I’ve said this a couple of times to people because I’m talking to interviewers often or addressing groups, but it hit me suddenly that my mom was the only American in my whole family. She was in exile from New York and from everyone she knew, and I didn’t even realize how lonely that must have been for her. She was suffering the ramifications and echoes of her very hard experiences in combat.

You met Cindy earlier here. She’s a reporter and it’s helped me a lot doing some of the research in the books, because she’s a queen of research. We were talking one time and I started telling her more about my mom because she never met her. As soon as I started talking about these Clubmobile women, she was like, “Wait, what did you say?” “You know, Donut Dollies.” And she said, “What is that?” So, when I found myself telling Cindy, I started realizing, This is a really astonishing story actually. And we started trying to research it. It was really difficult because they were forgotten. …

The other part of it was finding her truck partner, her wartime best friend, the last of the Donut Dollies. That really opened the story for me.

I read in your letter in the advanced reader copy of Good Night, Irene about going to Europe and tracing their footsteps, but also that the records of these women had burned in a fire in the ’70s, and I thought that was incredible. How do we let this huge piece of our history just disappear?

It’s hard to comprehend. I think the Red Cross lost a lot of stuff. It was a warehouse. The women who went were super patriotic. They weren’t going to gain anything from it. They had reasons, obviously. I tried to hint at some of them in the book—some were escaping something—but most of them just wanted to go serve, wanted to go do something for their country. Certainly Jill, the woman who was the inspiration for Dorothy, she said she wasn’t going to stay in the back. She wasn’t going to be in the rear. She wanted to be up at the front. The only thing she could see that would take her to there—she wasn’t any kind of nurse, [but] she could drive a truck. And off they went.

We learned going through the papers that Jill left and my mother left, part of their training was to forget. Part of their training was to not actually know where they were headed so that if they were captured—and they were given provisional officers ranking in case the Germans caught them to try to avoid atrocity—but they were trained not to know where they were going, and they often didn’t know.

In the first 80 pages, the characters go from their homes to D.C. to New York City to Liverpool to London to Cambridge, and many more locations to come. What kind of challenges did that present for you and for your editors in terms of plotting or even just remembering where they were at a given time?

It was quite the challenge actually, and I obviously got things wrong. In fact, when we took the trip to Germany, we rented a badass BMW and off we went down the Autobahn. I had all my notes about the trip, and [thought], Wow, this is great. We went to Buchenwald, and we did all this stuff, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I was going the opposite direction of the way they went. My editor is a stickler on detail, and he’d say, “Wait a minute. That’s not possible because this is however many hundred kilometers away from where you’re talking about.” I had to curb my enthusiasm and try to get precise. This actually happened in the real world. We’re not in Narnia. …

As far as the challenge for me, it was intense. But I had a lot of help. Everywhere we went, people flipped out because they didn’t know the story. For example, the National World War II Museum in New Orleans—incredibly helpful. The young docent we got in touch with took us in, and they didn’t have much, but they did have the actual uniforms. … If you see the black and white pictures, they look like they’re brown or gray, but they’re not. … It’s a beautiful blue. Eisenhower, that style monster, had haberdasheries in England make them, every one of their formal uniforms was a bespoke pattern. But they were all this beautiful blue. Who would’ve known?

I would not guess that at all, especially given some of the circumstances they find themselves in, having a bespoke uniform would seem a little frivolous.

But that’s for the formalities. In work they wore dungarees and white blouses, and they had aprons and so forth. Jill, the Dorothy character, she was, “To hell with this!” She wore coveralls with a wrap around her head. She wasn’t kidding around with that garbage. In their supplies, they were given silk stockings, and Jill gave hers away: “Who wants some stockings? I don’t want ’em!”

I hoped those details about Dorothy were true because I just loved her character.

Me too. I have to say, I’m in love with Dorothy. It was an extrapolation on the woman. My mom talked about her. … She always talked about “Darling Jill.” We knew that by the time I was starting to work on this, they [the Donut Dollies] were probably all dead. We thought that Jill had passed away. We were doing research from the “Urrea Research Center” here in the library, and Cindy found a video on YouTube. It’s called “Miss Jill Goes to War” [YouTu.be/eAwCMIiVdyA]. It was a local news report, but astonishingly from Champaign-Urbana, 90 minutes away from our house. And here’s Miss Jill, tough old woman, talking about the war. We flipped out. There was, in my mom’s stuff, a thing Jill had written, and there was an address tag on it. We thought, Oh my God, she may be alive.

We wrote her a letter, and she called us immediately when it got there. She was 94 years old, and she always called me Louis. None of that Luis business—Louis. I got on the phone with her: “Miss Jill, I can’t believe we got in touch with you and found you.” She said, “I’m 94 years old, Louis, you must get down here to see me. Don’t try to wait till I turn 95, if you get what I’m saying.” So, we drove down there, and we knocked on her door. When she opened the door and let us in—a portrait of my mom on the wall. It was fated.

We spent years with her. She died at 102. We hung out with her a lot. We interviewed her for hours and she shared her photo album. We had the photo albums of hers and my mom’s and both of their writings and her stories. It was so great. It was so moving to me. She still had the actual map that she had draped over the wheel as she drove the truck with her little writings all over it. She had drawings my mom had done. …

She really was this amazing vivid, vivacious soul who took the war in stride. Unlike my mom, she was not undone by it. She introduced me to my mother when she was 27, if you know what I mean, because she saw her in action. She saw that my mother was the source of joy for them all.

There’s some great banter in Good Night, Irene, and it reminded me of a Katharine Hepburn film—very sharp and funny and smart. How did you channel the conversational style of that time period that the Donut Dollies would have had?

I think it’s lost to us now, but American English was so different back then, and it was snappy. All you have to do is look at those old movies. Bogart was the slowest talker, but everybody spoke fast, and they had a certain inflection in what they said—it was just the American voice. Miss Jill still had it—not so much in general, because she was 84, 85, 86, so she was getting slow and frail.

This is partially where it came from—my mother, when she was on a higher note, being giddy and happy, and Miss Jill, because she liked to go out. She was a member of the country club, and she also very much enjoyed being on a date. We would go to the country club, and then she would put her arm through mine. I would walk her up the stairs, and we were clearly on dates.

The waitresses all knew her, and they’d sit her down and say, “Miss Jill, you look like you need a little glass of joy juice,” which would be a Manhattan. She would demure and she’d say, “Oh, I don’t think so, maybe make it a double.” So, she had this timing. They would bring her joy juice and she would sit there frail and old, and she would take a sip or two. Then you’d see her get naughty. Her eyebrow would go up and she’d start looking around and she’d start zinging people at the table. Total transformation. And I thought, It’s like a time machine. … I just fell in love with it. It felt organic to me. I could almost hear them talking.

So, I won’t try to claim any literary genius thing, but it was just listening and seeing remnants of that style and being a fan of those old films.

I’ve laughed a lot in your books. They’re about some heavy topics like war, death, what happens at the U.S./Mexico border, but they’re all infused with such wonderful moments of humor. What’s your approach to that?

I don’t know what it is. It may just be some kind of weird failing on my part. I want to be moody. I want to be Jim Morrison or something and I think I end up being Steve Allen or one of those ’50s comics.

I don’t want to convey a lack of joy. I think life has so much joy and so many people are suffering so often. I teach at the University of Illinois, which is not necessarily the literary joy capital, but in my workshops, one of my main points is the joy. I mean, you’re getting to play with words and you’re getting to possibly change the very existence of someone you don’t know.

One of my writing rules that I tell the students—and they look at me a little oddly—but I tell them, “Laughter is a virus that infects us with humanity.” Once you can break through whatever your worries or barriers are with a good laugh or at least a feeling of community with somebody who’s “other” to you, then it’s hard to hate them. It’s hard to look down on them. And certainly, because so much of my work was representing border people and the undocumented, when you start to realize that we too, all of us, love our children. All of us feel hunger the same way. All of us want a better job, we can share laughter together. I’m proud that my readership is kind of mixed.

What has working with students taught you about your own writing?

It’s taught me about what the sheer joy of what we do is. If you get together with writers, you hear a lot of complaining and people have a lot of bourbon. [Laughs] But it’s such an astonishing thing. And especially for me, I didn’t think I was going to go anywhere, do anything. I spoke Spanish before I spoke English, and to be teaching all these writers at all these American universities feels like a little bit of vindication to me for the barrio. But I just think it’s a super blessing all the time.

Also, I had to do some gnarly back-breaking work for years and now I teach. I roll into a class, and I pontificate for an hour and a half, and we all say, “See ya.” Those people I work with are working all night, every night—like I have all my life—on their work. All of a sudden, you realize that the good stuff that’s happening now allows me to make connections for them and get their books published. Which is happening right now with one of my great grad students. You can’t beat that. I know that I’m just reenacting what Ursula [Le Guin] did for me. I’ll never be the legend Ursula is, but those things are good.

That’s the kind of feel-good story I love to hear in the writing community. Someone giving you that opportunity and now you’re doing that for your students too.

I feel as though it’s our job to remember where we came from and how it felt. If we get any place on the stairway, I believe we need to turn around and tell the next one that we know, “Come on, get up. I’m going to help you get up to where I’m at.” Because we have to look out for each other.

Let’s face it, there are people who want to be famous. There are people who want to be rich. And I always warn them, neither of those is likely to happen. It could happen, but this is a hard way to do it. You should learn to play guitar and go burn your amps on stage. It can be difficult, but we can’t stop ourselves. When you know someone who cannot not do it, that’s some sacred thing. That’s some incredible indwelling of the spirit and it’s nice to reach out to them.

You write nonfiction and novels that are historical, novels that are contemporary, poetry, and short stories. Do you have a preference among those different styles? How do you decide what you’re going to write next?

I have a really glib answer for that, and forgive me, but it’s kind of true. If I had my way, I’d be writing haiku day and night, little Richard Brautigan-style blurts about nothing. I’m starting to see that as my calling in life—just these little marvelous moments we don’t see that we should see. If you showed me a little spider on a dewy web, I could just sit there and write about that.

People ask me that question and I tell them, if I get this idea of a morning, of a sunflower still wet with the overnight rain, probably haiku. But if I get the idea of writing a new history of World War II, probably a book. But to me, it’s all of a process. And I, being self-taught, didn’t understand there were people who specialized. Jim Morrison sang for The Doors and wrote books of poems. I thought, Cool, man! Leonard Cohen—I worshipped his records until I saw his novels and his short stories and his poetry. So, I thought, OK, that’s the secret. We are covering as many bases as possible here.

I thought I was a generalist like my dad. My dad was a blue-collar worker against his will. He worked in a bowling alley, and I learned from my father: This is how you shellac the bowling lane. This is how you clean out the toilets and the baskets of dirty stuff from the bathrooms. This is how you rebuild broken pins on a lathe. This is how you climb around the Brunswick machines. I thought, OK, my dad can do anything, so in writing, that’s what I thought. I was like a handyman carrying a box of tools. I had to try to figure out how to use it all.

What are you working on next?

There’s a lot more coming. At the same time that this mind-boggling experience is starting to happen of the Irene Machine, I have a book of poetry coming out from a little tiny press no one’s ever heard of. That’s the soul work. It’s just me being honest to the muse. …

Then my next book for Little Brown is a kind of a deeply mythologized and fictionalized history of Tijuana. It’s called The Zebras of Tijuana. It’s a wild picaresque romp. I just wanted to reassure my Mexican readers, I’m still here.

Do you have any last advice for the readers of WD?

Don’t miss any of the interviews. I learned so much from what other writers have to say, to this day.

Wear the bastards down. Just keep coming back. You’ll be told no. You don’t know when someone’s going to say, “Maybe.” …

My first book, Across the Wire, was rejected nonstop for 10 years. … It was published in 1993 after years of stuff like, direct quote from an editor in New York, “Nobody cares about starving Mexicans.” I told her, “That’s why I wrote this book.” … I’d been working with people actually starving 10 minutes from downtown San Diego. I wanted somebody to know. So, you just have to be really stubborn. 

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