On figuring out what beauty means to you

How do you balance writing novels and writing criticism, and do you feel like you’re flexing a different muscle when writing either?

I had been working on a book that was kind of like this, but then I scrapped all but one page of 7,500. That was in 2016 when I signed my first contract to be a staff writer at The New Yorker. So they’ve always been concurrent for me, and they’ve always seemed like two sides of the same coin. My writing is just my writing. It’s just like, what am I directing it towards? Who is this narrator? Is he paying attention to art as a critic? Is he following along with some person of note as a profiler? Is he telling you a story as a novelist? All of these things are quite mutually implicated, and I think at least that you can read my work and see mutual interests swimming back and forth between whatever you think of as genres.

In terms of balance, though, I’m more of a fanatic than a balanced person. When I still had full-time jobs, all of my writing would happen at night and during the weekends, whether it was novels, freelance assignments for magazines, whatever. I’ve got that structure in my head, and I did a lot of that in terms of finishing my novel at the same time as working on New Yorker work and teaching and all the other things that I have done over the past couple of years. It’s a matter of waking up early or going to sleep later. Something’s got to give, but for me, it’s all coming from the same source of energy.

How was the idea for Great Expectations born?

It’s interesting. I obviously had this experience of working on the first Obama campaign. I did that when I was 22, 23 years old. The story of a campaign was never the most action-packed, riveting thing such that I must turn it into a novel. That was never the idea. I had an idea for this narrator, David Hammond, the protagonist, who would think about national themes and think about America and try to weave his observations about his country together with reminiscences about his personal history and little acts of criticism. Whether they be cultural or artistic criticism, trying to synthesize and understand the world he was born in and the world in which he is finally growing up.

I was trying to figure out where that voice, that intelligence, that mind could fit. And it suddenly struck me: a presidential campaign, because presidential candidates are the people that purport to tell us what the country’s about. On some level, a successful political campaign is an act of criticism. It’s like the person who best defines America and its challenges and struggles, its opportunities, is the person that gets their “message across.” Often, when I hear people talk about their work in fiction, the setting and scenario come first. But I guess it was a little bit backwards for me.

In most of your writing, politics is a focal point. How do politics shape your writing? And did you know early in your writing career that politics would shape your work?

I wanted to be a writer before I ever wanted to work in a political campaign. I was always attentive to politics in the way that most people who think of themselves as responsible citizens are. I remember, I think I’ve written about this, one election day I wrote a column about Langston Hughes and his weird Democratic pageants. These plays were all about the history of the country, they’re really interesting. In that piece, I wrote about my mother taking me into the voting booth. My mom cares and always knows what’s happening in the news and what’s happening in Washington. She stressed for me that my vote was won, that people like us didn’t always get the vote. In that way, the political has always been important to me–I belong to this place and therefore I have something to do with its fate.

Of course I have my ideas, we all do, but more important to me is–whether it’s criticism or the novel–I want to put forward a capital I, a narratorial voice that doesn’t just seem like it popped up out of nowhere. I’m telling you about this play, or I’m telling you about this television show, but I walked into the theater on a day where things happened. I read the news that morning, and then I walked through the streets and had observations about the city as I walked: the homeless on the street, the mentally ill struggles on the subway, the awkward nature of New York’s public transportation. In that context is how I saw this thing. For me, politics as a context is the thing that happens before the speaker opens his or her mouth and speaks or sings. That’s what’s interesting to me. That nobody speaks out of a void, that we all have the pressures of the day at our backs when we finally do the literary act.

You write about theater, politics, the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef. Tell me about how your writing practice became this expansive and how you maintain curiosity in your writing.

I have many interests and my way of understanding everything is to write about it. I often don’t have strong opinions about things until I write about them. Writing is how I figure out how I feel, and therefore, in order to complete the circle of my interest, the writing act becomes important.

It’s also institutional because you have to have places that allow you to express all those things. Often, venues try to slot us into categories. You’re on the race beat, you’re a sports writer, you’re this, you’re that. I have to express my gratitude to the New Yorker that the idea, at least in my experience, is that they want whatever I’m thinking about. Whatever I am most interested in is what the magazine is most interested in from me.

That has been really wonderful and helped me develop as a writer who has his ear open for many different kinds of phenomena. I was one of the two theater critics for about five years, which was a serious education for me and has really helped define me as a writer. Now, I am one of two television critics and have been encouraged to take that as wide as possible. Sports happen on television, news happens on television, politics happens on television. That’s why that Kendrick Lamar piece was a TV piece, because I watched that video on a screen.

This new critical role will help continue that pattern of opening up, seeing what else I can fit into my gaze. I’m interested in a lot of things, but I’m interested in this country, and I think that paying close attention to our TV entertainment will be a really interesting way to continue to ask questions about where I’m from and where we’re all headed.

You said that being a theater critic was an education for you. Tell me more about what that education looked like for your writing and for how you view the world.

I ended up just being an American literature major in college but before that, for a while, I had a double major with theater. So I studied a lot of plays. Reading plays more than seeing them was a big part of my literary education.

Lorrie Moore has this book, See What Can Be Done and it is a collection of primarily pieces that she wrote for the New York Review of Books. In the introduction, she talks about how she wrote about many things that she did not know about. Criticism is not expertise. And when people get that mixed up, when people want to read the critic and have them be a PhD in theater studies–of course, sometimes the scholar can also be a good critic, but those two things are not the same.

So she found herself, she says in this piece, learning things. It was her writing pieces for the New York Review that became her education in the humanities. That is a model that I can relate to. What I bring to this is I can write and I feel very confident about that. I can grab insights out of new things, I can make music out of other people’s music. Therefore I can go into a situation and be humble enough to learn. Researching the pieces and finding out ways to present them, build a hard-won expertise that has more to do with experience than it has to do with formal study. That is one of the benefits of criticism–you can accrue that kind of individual expertise piece by piece by piece.

What is the recipe for compelling criticism and how have you learned or practiced it over the years?

Honesty is one thing. Rigor in terms of getting things right, and fairness in terms of the empathetic act of understanding somebody else’s intentions. Those are important. But the most important thing is style. Yeah, I want to be the walker in the street looking around, gathering new facts, hoarding new experiences, and turning them into a form of entertainment for others. But I also, in the classic sense, want to be dressed well myself. I want to convey style even as I’m pulling things in.

I think what people come to, not only criticism, but all forms of writing for is the feeling of an individual. I’m sure the judge is somewhere in there with criticism, but I don’t like the judge metaphor because what is the judge? Somebody who puts on a black robe and in so doing symbolizes that they’re an agent of the state. Whereas the critic is somebody who shows up in their own clothes. I quote this in the novel, and it’s one of my favorite moments in all literature, it’s The Bostonians by Henry James. A bunch of people are waiting for a speech to begin and somebody cries out in anticipation, “A voice, a human voice is what we want.” That’s what criticism is. A human voice.

How does teaching inform your writing practice?

Teaching, much like writing but in a very different way, helps you clarify what you actually think. You say things, and if you’re like me, you’re very skeptical of the idea that writing is simply a set of tools that you can pick from one mind and give to another person. It’s more about like, hey, read this, or here’s a sensibility that might match with yours. In doing that, I end up saying a lot of things that sometimes mid-sentence, I’ll be like, wait, did I really think that? And if I do, then that’s important because then that might show up in my work.

It’s also the act of putting together a syllabus as a way of drawing connections between this piece and that piece, between not only different genres or different forms, but also over time, creating temporal connections. That’s why it’s exciting to me. It’s about trying to create an open space where people can bring in their findings from the outside world that we can all learn.

That’s so important because when I was in grad school, I looked at everything you all taught me as “This is good.” Instead of, “this is something I can learn from and this is the way I can learn from it.”

Before you get published, before anybody acknowledges that what you have is valuable, you think of anything that’s published as almost a guidebook. But once you start on your own path, that particular anxiety about these played-out notions of quality–I believe in quality, don’t get me wrong–and emotions of anything that is published is therefore valuable, then you can relax into your own taste and style. It’s weird because at the beginning of your life as a writer, you love reading more than anything. When you start having aspirations and hopes to be a writer, reading becomes this weird, painful thing that reminds you of what you’re not.

All of a sudden reading hurts because it’s like, can I do that? Should I do that? But what I have found is that once you’re down your own path, reading becomes joyfully pleasurable again, even more than it was when you were a child, because you can relax and trust. It becomes, again, this generous fountain for you.

What have you learned from writing your novel, and what do you think other debut novelists should know?

What I learned is trust: the connections I want to make, the rhythms I want to put down on the page, the sounds that I want to hear, which is for me what writing is about. You have to trust those, and you have to trust that all your reading, all of your writing of other things before this, are what have prepared you to make something that matters to you and to other people.

All I care about is I want to make one beautiful thing. And I feel that I have done that. I feel that I was able to do that because I had honed and really devoted myself to figuring out what beauty meant to me in the first place, such that while I was writing, in the good moments, I could just trust that I had my own self as a guide as opposed to all the other hierarchies that you can imagine that always get into our brains.

So I have started to–and I say start seriously, because I’m too young to be as good at writing as I’m ever going to be–write in a way that truly is self-expression and not trying to meet some external standard. It’s very freeing. I think it’s good to remind oneself that we’re making art, and there is freedom in that.

As for the specific process of debuting, treat every single milestone like it’s your birthday. Every single thing. You sign a contract, you finish a draft, anything that seems important to you, it’s celebrated. Because there’s no guarantee that anybody else will but also, it’s important to remind yourself that this is meaningful to you. Most people who write for a living dreamed of writing for a living before they ever did, and therefore, we can forget that “I’m doing something I really always wanted to do, shout out to me.”