Interview with Alexander Chee

by Matt Salesses

Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island and raised in South Korea, Guam, and Maine. He is the recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the VCCA. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out, The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys Like Us. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught fiction writing at the New School University, Goddard College and Wesleyan. He is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College and lives in Western Massachusetts.

I caught up with him at a bar in Cambridge to talk about both his forthcoming novel and Edinburgh, which is one of my favorite novels and a book that sticks deep in your lungs and forces you to breathe its rhythms. We later corresponded over email.

MS: You have a new book coming out, The Queen of the Night, maybe you could tell us about it? How was it like working on it compared to your first novel, Edinburgh?

AC: One of the things that I figured out about this project is that the second novel versus the third novel is almost like being a debut novelist again, because typically, if you’re being honest about trying to grow as an artist, you choose an entirely different set of challenges.

[Also] I was used to working on the finished draft of Edinburgh, and it was a shock working with rough drafts again. Working with language that was really not as worked over, and also figuring out the book, and all those early draft things. I wasn’t used to being lost! With this book, I was reaching for something that was very far away from myself, but I was also trying to reach for a story that was much bigger than me, bigger than what I had done before.

With Edinburgh I realized I was writing Edinburgh. That is to say, I was writing all these different things that seemed to have a common voice. I was leaving graduate school, going through them, when I had this realization. So I put them all together in a folder and I said, “Decide what you are.” Then I got to New York, took them out, and read them, and I started to sense the pieces that were missing between the fragments. I sensed a larger whole.

MS: That sounds similar to what I’ve read about Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. That she wrote all these metaphors in this notebook, and one day she realized they were a novel.

AC: I studied with her at Iowa. That’s kind of funny. That is kind of like it.

MS: And The Queen of the Night?

AC: The Queen of the Night was something I actually started in 2000 when I first turned Edinburgh in, and it was more popular than Edinburgh initially, so it actually became an obstacle to selling Edinburgh. Editors were saying to my agent, “Oh, but I want that book.” After a while, my attitude was, If you want the pretty sister, then you have to take the weird, dark sister first. (laughs)

[At first] I resented it, and even put [the manuscript] aside, weirdly angry that people liked the idea so much. And then a few years went by, Edinburgh sold, and it was time to think of what the next book was. Around that time, Dave Daley, now of FiveChapters.com, wrote to ask me if I had something in a drawer, for a special fiction issue he was doing of the Hartford Courant’s Sunday Magazine. I took out the old first chapter of it out and dusted it off, rewrote it, and sent it to him. He loved it and published it, and it became clear to me that this really was the next novel.

Anyway, so what it’s about… it seems to be about power. It seems to be about the way in which people who are so incredibly rich become dangerous to people around them in ways that they have no ability to perceive-or desire to perceive. It’s set in 2nd Empire France, so it’s historical. The central character is an orphan whose parents died shortly after moving to the US as settlers. She tries to get back to the country her family is from, and in the process ends up in some very dangerous places. When the novel begins, you meet her as a maid for the Empress Eugénie. She works in the Tuileries Palace and as she believes her voice is cursed, she pretends to be mute. She takes care of the Empress’s furs, a job that nobody wants. Among the maids, that is. She feels very close to her goal of getting home, and in trying to take the last step, she’s drawn into plots that unwittingly involve her in what turns out to be the end of the second empire.

MS: Did you do a lot of research for this?

AC: I did a lot of research. I’ve read over 50 volumes, autobiographies of people who were living through those times, like the brothers Goncourt, who were writers. [They] were Zola’s mentors. They would write together-it was very strange-they kept a journal together. They were very strange guys. And it’s kind of sad when you read the journal because one of them dies, and the other debates not continuing the journal but then does continue. It’s an amazingly written document of that period from, like, 1851-1876. You meet my character in about 1867, three years before the Second Empire ends.

MS: So the Empire ends during the book.

AC: Yes. France goes to war with Prussia-the Franco-Prussian War-a war essentially conducted by the Emperor to raise the morale of the French. You could say the Prussians sort of baited the French into it, which is part of the plot of the book, but the result was a unification of Germany. And then once the French go to war, the Prussians actually capture the Emperor and his son. And instead of trying to rescue the Emperor, the French Senate ran in and declared the Third Republic, because they all hated him. Even though he had appointed them. And then they chased the Empress out of the Tuileries and then the country.

MS: You’re making me feel like my history is really bad.

AC: I wanted to write something that was really far away from my life after having written something that was so close to my life, and I fell in love with this story about an Opera singer named Jenny Lind, whose nickname was the Swedish Nightingale. That was the starting point and then it just kind of moved away from her-in all these ways that I thought were basically appropriate because the idea of writing a novel about Jenny Lind was actually really daunting. She’s a very interesting character but she’s also one of the few opera celebrities who no one’s ever heard because she performed before the era of recording, and retired a year or two right before recordings were being done. So she has this legend that’s incredible and technically has, I guess you could say, fans, people who love the story, the legend, [though] none of them have heard her sing. And that’s the thing that I didn’t really want to mess with, because I didn’t want to run the risk of running afoul of what they loved about her.

MS: Have all those angry fans after you?

AC: They all have their own kind of private knowledge about what they think her life was like, and they would just be comparing mine against theirs.

MS: Did you read any biographies of Jenny Lind?

AC: I actually started to read around her life. I read the autobiography of a famous opera manager, back then. I read the biography of a woman who was one of her contemporaries, and who became a very famous music teacher and who has a role in the book as the voice teacher of my character once she decides to use her voice-Pauline Viardot-Garcia. I found her very interesting because she moved out of France to Baden-Baden, Germany, protesting the policies and lack of freedoms under the Second Empire.

MS: So does your protagonist run into Jenny Lind?

AC: No. Jenny Lind’s career concluded in the early 1850s-she announced she was resigning from opera because she thought opera was immoral-and she was very moral-but ironically her farewell tour lasted for two years. (laughs)

She made a great deal of money before she really said farewell. When she made her farewell concert in London, for example, she was so famous the House of Lords actually stopped doing business for three days, so that the members could go. I can’t really think of a modern singer who would have that kind of power today over, say, the American Congress. I was fascinated by that.

Also, PT Barnum was her promoter [and] part of what was interesting to me about the time was the intensity of the fables people built around themselves. It made complete sense to me he was involved, in other words.

MS: Was it hard to write about historical characters? How true did you want to stay to who they “actually” were, like in the research?

AC: You really do have to try to come into ownership of them. Because otherwise it becomes this sort of weird history karaoke. And that doesn’t do anyone any good. You try to be true to what you believe, based on what you do for research. You try to move off your hunches and your intuitions. When you’re doing this kind of writing, you’re looking for that moment in the research where you read the two things and you think, that means that this third thing probably could have happened. And that third thing, over time, you have enough of them, that becomes the novel.

MS: How much of the character was in your head before-I mean, did you have an idea of who she was in your novel-before you did the research, or did the research at all dictate what she was going to be like?

AC: I dreamed her up first and then she started talking to me. As in, one morning I woke up and I just heard this voice, and had a first line, and I thought, okay, we’re starting now. And then I wrote for about four pages.

I don’t always start with a voice or line. Usually a poem starts that way for me, but not fiction. That seemed significant. Though I’d be lying if I said Edinburgh wasn’t driven in large part by voice. Maybe it’s that both poems and novels are voice driven for me.

MS: Edinburgh seems to live a lot in symbolism. The fire, the foxes. Were those in the notebook before?

AC: No. The fire stuff was but not the foxes-the fire let me know the fox stuff might apply. I’d been writing Edinburgh for a good four years when I came across the fox myths and then I instantly sensed the possibility of it, as a kind of frame for the larger narrative, as well as a leitmotif running through. I remember standing in a bookstore reading a book about demons, and reading the description of the fox demon and being electrified with how it could work.

Once I attached that, the whole thing sort of exploded into the rest of what it is now. It was this terrific combination of elements. But for a long time, I was writing it not knowing that that would be there by the end.

MS: The fox that you wrote about was-well because there’s another fox, isn’t there? A demon nine-tailed fox? But the nine-tailed fox seems more malevolent than the fox in Edinburgh…

AC: The Lady Tamamo is a figure from Japanese myth-when she escapes, in the legend, it’s said she leaps from a rock that split from her standing on it, and she vanished into the air.

I looked up where it took place, and it was easy for me to imagine her flying through the air and landing on an island off the coast of Korea. This was one of those third things-a ‘if this and this then this’ moment. She didn’t strike me as the self-destructive type. She struck me as an enormously resourceful character. And I suppose it was then I became fascinated with women who can leave and recreate themselves entirely somewhere else, which is more the topic of The Queen of the Night. If you’re a creature who can live for hundreds of years, it seemed to me, you’d go looking for a new life somewhere else.

In Edinburgh, I was interested in a couple of things, and one of them was the relationship between Korea and Japan, and the relationship between their mythologies, and what emerged for me out of the gap. The stories in the novel that the narrator’s dad used to tell about foxes-that was real, my father told me those. And it’s funny given the other malevolent idea of foxes-and that’s prevalent in Japan-so that was sort of why I chose this very famous, almost celebrity fox demon. That contrast, I guess, was part of what I was interested in, like why it was there, how it came about, what it could possibly mean.

MS: Are there differences other than in the content of your new novel-structurally, for example? Could you talk a little about some of these? What point of view is it?

AC: I like to joke that it’s yet another autobiographical novel from Alexander Chee. It is another first person narrative, but the central character is a woman. It is not present tense, though. Or at least, not yet.

Structurally, it’s a picaresque. It’s an adventure story of the 18th and 19th Century kind, like Kidnapped, for example, by Robert Louis Stevenson, which I’ve looked at a lot as I thought about this.

My agent joked that she thinks the novel comes from my time working as a waiter, as a cater-waiter, and I think that’s right. A lot of time spent serving the very rich. Learning the difference between a millionaire’s kitchen and a billionaire’s.

So, 19th century adventures with opera and money, I guess. And curses.

MS: You said the tone was different?

AC: Someone recently described-I gave a reading and they used a phrase I really liked-they called it a kind of “lush fatality.”

I mean, there are certain similarities. It’s another singer. But opera is very different from choral singing, nearly the opposite-choral voices are supposed to blend, and opera stars are soloists taking turns telling you the pieces of a story. And it’s not a love triangle this time but a love quadrangle. The central character has a very powerful lover who is trying to control her, and she leaves him for someone else who is also leaving a powerful lover-and who is also trying to control him. Each of them is not free.

MS: At the beginning of Lawrence Durell’s The Alexandria Quartet is a quote from Freud, I think, about how every sexual act involves a love quadrangle.

AC: That’s interesting. Did you like it?

MS: I love it! It’s a great series of four books. Three of them are amazing.

AC: It’s four novels?

MS: It’s three from one character’s point of view and then one in third person about a different character in the world of the story. Edinburgh kind of follows that structure, in a way.

AC: Yes, that’s true. Though I’ve never read The Alexandria Quartet.

MS: How did you choose to use another point of view in Edinburgh? What did you do to distinguish them?

AC: Early on in writing the novel, I knew there would be another narrator. I didn’t know who it would be. I tried different characters out. I tried writing it from Peter’s point of view for a little bit. That was not really good. Peter’s not particularly talkative, doesn’t like to share about his life very much.

Then I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, on a residency, in ‘98 or ‘99, and I remember I was in the laundry room talking to a friend, and I think I’d written right up to the end of section two, and I was thinking, what is next what is next what is next. I hadn’t figured it out. And I’d just gotten some feedback from someone who had read some of the manuscript and was talking to the friend in the laundry room about all of this, and she said, “I always write about characters who are really far away from me, because in the act of writing about them, they necessarily become close,” and as soon as she said that, I had this image of a choir director throwing a little baby boy up in the air, and I thought, when Fee’s an adult, he will be seventeen. From the image, how that would fit and how that would make sense appeared immediately, and I turned to my friend and I said, “Would you put that in the dryer when it’s done?” and I booked it to the studio and proceeded, over the course of the next week or so, to write about eighty pages of that, which have basically stayed the same. It was very immediate. It happened very quickly.

In terms of keeping it different, I just tried to listen to him, tried to imagine who he was and then just listen to his voice. Fee’s voice I tried to construct syntactically around the way you would speak if you were around people who spoke English as a second language, which is to say your grammatical structures would be a little fragmented. A lot of the fragmentation you see there was me trying to approximate that. Which isn’t to say if you’re a native speaker you’re speaking full sentences. Also, I see Warden as being a little angrier in certain ways, and hovering between these highs and lows that typically come about when you’re a teenager, moving back and forth between this incredible and intense happiness and excitement and incredible and intense darkness and despair. Whereas Fee is just kind of like, “Yeah, everything in my life burned down, and this is just me.” He’s a lot more shut down, a little more freaked out, but in a low-lying kind of way.

Some people have complained that they feel like I could have done more to make the voices different but the other thing too is that they both live in Maine and they both grew up in Maine. When you are from Maine, you talk a certain way and that is also true. So there’s not much to do about that.

MS: You mentioned you did promotion on Edinburgh for two years?

AC: Two and a half years.

MS: Was it mostly on your own or was it dictated by Picador?

AC: Publicizing a book is really a collaboration. Both my hardcover publisher, Welcome Rain, and Picador each sent me on a book tour, though the Picador tour was 5 times as large-Welcome Rain, as an indie, wasn’t able to do as much. While I was on that tour, more book stores were wanting me than Picador was able to send me to, so then I decided to do yet another book tour by myself. Then I began getting invited to different schools to read. It was a great deal of travel. And I hadn’t really made enough money to not have a job, so I had to do this whole juggling act where I was working around my jobs, which was all very exhausting.

MS: Did you start the blog at the same time? Was that part of the promotion?

AC: Ironically, I started the blog when I stopped promoting the book, unlike basically every other author blog. I’d won some grant money, enough so I could quit my jobs, and I moved to LA. And all these people I was meeting-they all had blogs. I thought, what’s that like? I remember at the time I was really excited to do it. The intense ambivalence that seems to hit every blogger who’s also a literary writer hadn’t really set in.

MS: And now it has?

AC: Yeah, you could say that. But I think I’m finally at peace with the idea of blogging. I’ve figured out what do you do it for.

MS: What do you do it for?

AC: You have to think of it as a broadcast, first of all, instead of as a document, and yet it is, mostly, prose. And you have to be blogging about something you’re really interested in. For example, Scott Heim has an excellent blog writing about indie music he loves. Blogs are maddening in part because they’re quick takes typically drawn from your life, but they last forever on the internet. But I do think that Emily Gould’s idea, that the internet is what you make of it, is the right one. And so if you decide to engage at a literary level, then it rewards that. If you decide it makes you insane, it does that. So right now I’m interested in how blogging can interact meaningfully with not just the other kinds of writing I do but with my ideas. I think it needs to be considered a form like writing novels, poems, short stories or essays.

Also, for authors, it’s different. I’m not one of these bloggers whose identity is concealed and who’s telling the truth about their life at fill-in-the-blank: a publishing house, as a waiter at a restaurant, or working at Apple.

MS: It’s not a tell-all?

AC: It’s not a tell-all. In fact, what’s interesting to me in watching blog culture is how people who do it treat their blog like it’s a diary that would be private-all their secret truths confessed-except for all these strangers who can read it. (laughs). It’s a weird trick they play on themselves. I think people do it because you’re in your house, you’re alone, you think, yeah, who’s going to read this? How could it matter? You lie to yourself, in other words. Then later you find out that actually many people read it. And then it starts to affect your life. People losing relationships over it, losing jobs, people are angry about what’s been said there. These bloggers were just learning all the lessons writers have had to learn for centuries, which are: don’t write about people who are alive when you can avoid it, try not to write about your family or your lovers or your ex-lovers, and especially while you’re with them.

MS: You said Edinburgh was close to you-how close is it to you? You probably get asked that a lot.

AC: It’s-I mean, it’s fine. It was initially much more autobiographical than it was. The problem with that is that describing a life doesn’t actually tell a story. And we’re actually not usually given to know our place inside of our lives in quite the same way we do with our characters. So writing autobiographical fiction is in some ways much harder than writing fiction. You know less about what is happening.

I remember I initially wrote about 125 pages, showed it to my agent, and she was like, “The writing is really beautiful but nobody’s going to believe this much bad stuff happened to one person.” And I said, “Oh, right, okay.”

MS: I’m surprised she didn’t say, “Memoir! We can sell this!”

AC: This was a little before the memoir craze-that’s the thing. It was right before Elizabeth Wurtzel hit. But also, she found it too painful to read, and… that’s because if you’re only describing painful things, instead of looking to make something meaningful out of your experience, for the reader it’s the equivalent of being made to sit in a busy Emergency room-people screaming and you don’t know why.

MS: You know, I guess I was really interested in things like swimming, and singing. They’re so huge in the novel, and you write about them with such authority. I really found myself wondering…

AC: Yes, I was a swimmer. Until the beginning of high school. I quit, I think, sophomore year. And I was in a boys’ choir. And the scandal in the novel is based on a scandal I witnessed as a child. But I didn’t want to tell that story, per se. I wanted to tell something that described what I learned from that story. So I set about doing research, inventing something that would have the ability to communicate the truth of that experience. I guess the way to think of it is, I tore out the center and left the edges, the details that would convince, and then invented the events at the core.

But it’s funny. Even my brother-in-law, who knows me really well, after he read the novel, was confused about the difference between my life and the character’s life.

MS: I think, in a way, that’s a good thing, that it was so authoritative that people would believe it was the author’s life.

AC: Thank you. I remember people trying to work this in during Q and A’s at readings…

MS: What was the strangest question you got?

AC: This really obnoxious guy at the launch party.

MS: Right out of the gate.

AC: Right. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop event for it. The room is packed. I’d just finished reading and I’m answering questions. My mom is there. And this kind of snotty Japanese guy in the back raised his hand and was like, “So I haven’t read the book, so…” I was like, where does this go? And he says, “From the excerpt you read, it seems like the narrator’s really obsessed with blond white guys. Are you obsessed with blond white guys?” I was like, that’s the question? And then I noticed he had dyed blond hair.

MS: How did you answer?

AC: I just laughed and said no. And I said, the only thing my exes and I have in common is me. And that got a big laugh out of the crowd, and we just moved on. I just don’t even know what to do with questions like that. What if I said yes? Would I be chased out of the room? Sent away to reeducation camp?

MS: It was such a sensitive subject too, with the scandal. You must have had a lot of questions about that from people who’d gone through it, right?

AC: Actually, no. The people who’d been a part of the scandal that I was in, who read it, said I’d really captured the emotional truth of what happened. And they’ve said that they really appreciate the book.

MS: That’s a high compliment.

AC: That’s a huge compliment, yeah. You know, the best reaction I got was something that I didn’t know that I wanted. I received a postcard from a bookseller who sends books to prisons. And he’d sent my book to a convicted pedophile, and the postcard was from the pedophile, addressed to the bookseller, thanking him for sending it. It said, “I couldn’t talk while I was reading this. I couldn’t talk for four days. Everyone kept asking me what was wrong.” And then he wrote, “This book is the only thing that ever showed me that what I did was wrong.”

MS: Wow.

AC: Yeah. That just blew my mind.

MS: Did you write back to him?

AC: No. I wrote back to the bookseller to thank him. The bookseller had passed it along saying, “I just wanted you to see this.” It was pretty amazing.

MS: In the new novel, did you feel any pressure to write about Asian American characters, or gay characters? Especially since you just wrote Edinburgh, and a lot of times, writers seem to get pigeonholed into “genres,” or what the publisher calls “genres.”

AC: Well, I am partly white. But even saying that feels sad and ridiculous.

My narrator in The Queen of the Night, Lilliet, is raised for a while in America before her parents die-but she doesn’t feel she belongs anywhere. She feels orphaned by the world and a need to hide that from the world also. Which is how I feel, for being mixed race, and the novel has been a way to explore that feeling. The experience of passing, of allowing people to believe what they need to believe about you, that’s very much a mixed race experience, and defines the novel’s sensibility.

There’s been no explicit pressure. In fact, industry people and Picador, in particular, were so great about it, especially in the way they promoted Edinburgh. They treated it like it was any other kind of novel, which is to say they didn’t put a dragon on the cover, or chopsticks, and they didn’t put a semi-nude muscled man showed from the chin down, or any of the crazy things they could have done for either a traditional Asian American novel or a traditional gay novel. They still really care about that book, which I appreciate.

I did get hung up on it-and then a friend said, “Just trust that your readers will follow you.” And that helped. One friend even said, “Well, a novel about opera is still technically gay fiction.”

But at the same time, I’m not naïve, I know there’s bound to be a certain amount of resistance in certain quarters-and the irony is, the book is a tribute to my Korean immigrant father, who loved Russian novels, sang songs from his favorite Italian operas at home, and believed that you weren’t really educated unless you read Russian novels and went to the opera. He’s the reason I love opera, the reason for all of it.

I understand the complaints about representation inside of literature and so forth, but I also feel like in trying to correct it, the mistake is to insist on trying to control what the artists produce-to force artists to work to correct it. That makes us a little like the writers in the factories of North Korea, made to write novels for the workers. I think any artist is annihilated by those kind of controls. I remember when I was a writing student in college feeling like literature was a big food court at the mall, and for being half-white and half-Asian, I was like, will I be able to work at the Korean restaurant, or at the white people restaurant? Like what if I can’t work at either restaurant because I don’t belong there? I was just thinking about these things while having lunch at a sushi restaurant in Middletown, CT where all the waiters there were Asian, even though all of them were not Japanese. And they were standing around looking sort of dejected and it made me think about that food court idea of literature again. Like, “Here I only get to work at the sushi restaurant or the soondubu restaurant.” I think that’s disgusting. It’s beneath all of us and I’m looking forward to the day when we all collectively get over it.

MS: But it must be so much easier to get a job, too. You think, “I could just get a job at an Asian restaurant.” Some people probably just take it because it’s so much more convenient.

AC: And that is also true. There certainly are a lot of cultural rewards for deciding to fit in with that group. But then you lose yourself, even though you also have audiences who are there because of what you are as opposed to what you wrote, and that’s not cool. That’s just weird.

I feel like certain writers have their careers not because they’re any good, but because they’re willing to represent a kind of collective projection on the part of a particular community as to what that community wants to see itself as. And I’d much rather be a little more chaotic than that. And a little more connected to life.

MS: There must be an issue of saleability, though. Publishers saying, “You could do this, and you’d sell more copies.”

AC: That is the argument of people who don’t have to write the book. But you don’t have to work with those people. You have choices. I have a friend who is publishing an Asian American debut novel about three generations of women. One of the editors who saw it said, “Why don’t you have the grandmother character die and come back as a ghost and guide her,” you know, in this really cheesy-in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, we call that “chinking it up.”

She didn’t work with that editor.

MS: I feel like she must have had her publisher saying, “Well, let’s just call her the next Amy Tan,” right?

AC: Well, that’s the thing that’s weird about a lot of entertainment in general, whether it’s literature or music or… They’re always looking to say, “Here’s this thing that’s totally new, except it’s [also] exactly like this thing that you really like.” I’m buying it!

One of the things that I loved about my debut was that no one compared me to anyone else. Nobody said, “He’s the next blahblahblah.” I think that’s what every writer really wants, in a way. Not to feel like you have to match yourself up.

MS: I read Nam Le’s The Boat recently, and in that first story, there’s a part where the main character’s fellow workshoppers at Iowa are like, “Why don’t you write about Vietnamese Australians-why write about vampires?” Like, “You have such a huge thing to use.” Did you have people telling you that: “Why don’t you?”

AC: Well, Koreanish-that manuscript is all those things that, all my life, when I would tell people things about my family, they would be like, “Oh my God, you should write that down,” and I would roll my eyes and act like it was beneath me, to write about my life. That’ll be, I guess, that book. But the thing is, I had to see the way to do it my way-I had to want to write about it. And until you do, you can’t.

Koreanish is nonfiction, which does interest me as a form. And I haven’t done it before now because I have a problem with a certain kind of memoir-that afterwards, if it does well, it leaves you feeling like you have to perform yourself for the rest of your life. So it’s not that kind of book. I’m calling it a nonfiction novel because it will have a novelistic structure, and will have parts that will be invented-but openly acknowledged as such. I want it to fit the shape of my experiences and sensibility without foreclosing on the part of me that needs to be a fugitive to really write fiction.

I have a theory, that for those writers who write just fiction, they’re people who are very uninterested in the details of their own life, no matter how fascinating their lives might be.

MS: Let’s talk about fiction, and the craft. I read on the blog about you putting the novel up on the wall. That sounds interesting.

AC: It’s a lot of fun.

MS: You can’t put the whole novel up there, I guess.

AC: Not all at once, no. It’s a pretty big room right now, so I can put up about forty or fifty pages at a time. It’s a pretty good way to work with it, systematically. It narrows your focus-it’s hanging on the wall, you’re marking it up with a pen, you’re staring at it, and you can’t just suddenly decide to go check email. I mean, you could, but in not quite the same way as when you’re at your computer. You kind of feel more alone with it, in a physical way.

MS: You ever think about switching over to a typewriter? I think about that sometimes.

AC: I actually bought a typewriter in March. I bought the same kind that Patricia Highsmith used, an Olympia. That actually got me through a certain part of the drafting.

MS: What else do you do to revise? What do you look for?

AC: I like to read parts of it aloud, if not all of it. Because there’s a way in which your eye will kind of lie to you about what’s wrong. Not exactly lie to you, but it won’t react quite the same way your mouth does. If you’re reading something with your eyes that’s wrong but it’s familiar, you don’t really notice in the same way. If you’re reading it out loud, then you will automatically correct it as you say it. Saves a lot of time, actually, to do it that way.

MS: Do you revise in phases? Do you spend a phase thinking about character, or about plot, or do you try to do it all at once? Step by step, could you walk us through the process?

AC: I do revise in phases. First, I print it out, and I essentially try to read it like it’s a book.

MS: Separate from you.

AC: Yes. Try to imagine what it would be like to read it for the first time if you were someone else. And I have a legal pad and I take notes on that, and I may make a few notes on the manuscript. I try not to get too caught up because this is the place where you try to feel the momentum of the whole. That’s a pretty important part of the process, to see if that works. I mark it up and I take notes, and that’s when I start hanging it up on the wall, after I finish that first reading.

I then have a series of readings with the intent of paying attention to different qualities. So, first, story: I try to pay attention to scenes that I’ve missed. The thing that makes it easier to edit after having finished a draft rather than before, is that you can let the story be the editor. If there are parts that really aren’t telling the story it becomes much more clear to you in a way that it’s never clear when you’re drafting and you don’t know what the whole story is.

Then, I try to pay attention to the verb choices. I start to interrogate some of those, make sure I have the right verb choices.

Then I try to pay attention to some of the visual qualities of it and the supporting physical qualities. A level of description.

But throughout, I look for what’s missing, what I forgot to say.

MS: How many drafts do you run through?

AC: God! Well, there’s so many partial drafts along the way to the first full draft. I probably have around three hundred of those.

MS: How about after the first full draft?

AC: I would say probably two. I write pretty slowly, and when I’m drafting, I typically try to work on it, say, in the morning, and in the afternoon, try to line edit the draft in that particular part of the day before moving on to the next thing. Sometimes I write a little bit more that day.

MS: How do you know that it’s finished?

AC: I think you know when it’s time because you begin to get this incredible excitement. Or at least I do. I start to get this incredible feeling of excitement of finally being able to see all of the thing that I’ve only seen parts of for so long. At the end it should feel like the only thing you could have done with what you had, even if it isn’t what you set out to write.

MS: Do you have any advice to give new writers?

AC: Stay close to your excitement. Don’t describe your novel to too many people before it’s finished. Don’t pay too much attention to industry talk, because whatever they believe now, they won’t believe in three months and they won’t remember. Don’t get an agent before the book is finished. In the end, I’d say excitement. I guess lately I’ve been trying to teach excitement.

MS: How do you teach excitement?

AC: It’s more like teaching people to stay close to their excitement. The thing that I see so many people do with their books is they break it up into all these nutty little pieces where they’re talking to me about character development and backstory. All these phrases that were really just meant to describe something have suddenly become orthodoxies. And they’ve lost their sense of the unity of the thing. They keep asking me, “How do I develop my character?” And I say, “Tell the story?” I feel too many people are working from the wrong end of the stick. They’ve got something very abstract they’re trying to make specific and exciting, and they’re doing it in this Frankenstein’s monster sort of way. So it’s like, “Here’s my backstory sewn onto my character development sewn onto my climax, and now I add the ending and apply electricity!” It’s just a horrible way to live, and I think you’re much better off finding the character and the situation together, looking for situations that you think are really interesting.

So the advice is, don’t be afraid to have a plot, and to tell a story. Too many writing students are trying to become masters of style and not masters of story, and they do so to their detriment. They have all these beautiful beautiful sentences and we don’t really know what they’re doing with them. Be sure to tell a story.