On creative routine as spiritual commitment

I’ve been thinking a lot about community lately. Our meeting, and subsequently this interview, came about because we met–briefly–at a mutual friend’s wedding in New York in 2024. We then met, again, the next day when a different mutual friend introduced us. In the spirit of that community, I do have a couple of questions from some of our mutual friends and my personal writing community who I read your debut novel with. But I wanted to first ask, what has the role of community played throughout your writing life?

I think community has been very central to, if not my writing practice, I would say very much the characters and ideas that I’m trying to explore in my book, [Masquerade]. I do have an MFA, and I think the primary motivation of enrolling in such a program is to find that community and structure. That was something I did when I was in New York City. I was at Queens College, a CUNY (City University of New York) school. I really enjoyed my time with my peers. I think that was the first place where I felt: okay, this is the beginning of my journey of not just [calling] myself a writer and not really [doing] anything about it, but [starting] to work towards actually producing fiction and producing more work that I was submitting and putting out into the world. Masquerade takes place primarily in New York City. I started writing [the book] in March 2020, right around the beginning of the pandemic. It was during a time when I knew I was about to leave to go to Tokyo for my PhD. I ended up getting to Japan in fall of that year and, I would say, a bulk of the book was written while I was getting settled in Tokyo and reflecting on the 12 years of time that I’d spent in New York and thinking about the relationships and the friendships I had and the ways in which those shaped me as a person throughout my 20s and into my 30s. Not all the things in the book necessarily directly correlate to my own experience. I think, in some ways, I did draw on a lot of formative experiences and relationships that made me think or feel differently about myself or about the city or about just existing in the world as a queer person. I think those are all the elements that were swirling about in the background when I was working on the first draft of the manuscript.

In your acknowledgements, you shared that some friends read partial drafts of a novel and then you said, “Though I abandoned that sapling of a story long ago, many of its seeds drifted onward, found fertile soil again, and bloomed into this present work.” With that in mind, how or what do you consider failure, and how have you found success in it?

I think as a writer, I don’t know if anything—I mean, this is going to sound very hokey, but like, maybe there’s no such thing as failure. I started really writing short stories probably towards the end of my undergrad years. Then, I had some time after I graduated and before I enrolled in an MFA program where I was doing other academic stuff. I was working and still writing but I didn’t quite have an end goal in mind.

I would say, over the years I’ve written quite a bit of work that never made it, so to speak. That was either rejected from many journals or was like a full length novel manuscript that I never got off the ground and, well, I guess you could look at those past works as possibly failures . I think it’s true that as a writer and somebody who’s engaged in any kind of craft, the repetition and the diligence that you have to practice in approaching the work is maybe the most important part of being that person or embracing that role. So I feel like all the things that I wrote before that didn’t really go anywhere were great training grounds for myself in terms of both the actual mechanics of putting words to the page and also just understanding more about my own rhythms as a creative person. My own tendencies and idiosyncrasies.

I think that’s the other thing that I’ve really struggled with over the years and really couldn’t figure out how to manage until this novel. How do I actually finish something of this length? What does my work schedule look like? Like, what’s feasible for me, individually? I think so many writers have different pieces of advice about this, right? But I feel like you really have to come to a self understanding and just [assess] the things that you have going on in your personal life, your creative life and make accommodations for all of that. It took me years and years to actually figure out how to do that for myself.

You’ve mentioned in past interviews that you’ve struggled with follow through. That is something I struggle with too. You just spoke about diligence and practice and I wonder what that actually looks like in terms of figuring out how to follow through with something? What did that diligence and practice look like for you, in a more practical sense?

I think, for me, having a vague timeframe in mind like, okay this is going to be a novel and I want to finish it, let’s say, a year from now or something like that. Then, essentially, I worked on Masquerade in a period of my life when I had relative flexibility in my day-to-day schedule because I was a student again. Apart from some of the academic work that I was doing, I set aside time every day, every weekday, to sit down and write and I would plant myself at my desk. It would probably be no longer than two to three hours, at most. But I think just creating that physical routine was so important so that once I eased into that rhythm, it became more natural for me. Some days I could only get out like, a paragraph or less than that, and other days felt great. If I could get a page or so, that was amazing. I realized that, personally, I’m somebody who really thrives on structure and routine. Once I sort of instilled in myself that this is going to be a habit that I’m going to carry forward from now until completion, then I think it’s something that I can commit to, not easily, but at least spiritually.

I think in all the years prior, even during the MFA program, I look back on it now and I think I’d always wanted to write a novel. I think I just didn’t understand what it looked like in practice. So I’d have these ideas, I’d work on stuff in sort of like bursts, and get out some pages, and maybe get out a significant number of pages, but then very quickly lose steam. I know lots of other writers, maybe [Haruki] Murakami is most famous for this, but, you know, writing a novel is kind of like running a marathon or whatnot, right? It’s about stamina and maintaining a pace, but also knowing when to ease up and when to push yourself during that process.

Did the habit change or evolve after the Masquerade project ended?

Yeah, after I finished the first draft, I kind of let it sit for a little while before I went back to edit. In the years since that, honestly, I didn’t keep up a very good writing practice. I think that I was, of course, navigating publishing things: finding an agent, then editing the work. So, I felt quite busy, I had my hands full with that and also my academic stuff. I think, more recently, starting in January this year, I’ve returned to sort of planting myself at the desk every morning to work on a new project. And that has felt familiar and good.

Some of my favorite parts of Masquerade are in your scene building. You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that the space of a scene is very important to you. From a craft and technical standpoint, what was the development process of these scenes? Where did you start, what were the things you were looking at as you tried to, for a lack of a better term, make it “better?”

A lot of the physical spaces that the characters inhabit in the book are modeled after–or at least, I use as a starting point–spaces that I knew well myself, whether they were places I lived in or homes of friends that I had. I use my memories of those spaces as a blueprint for imagining a scene in there and how characters might move through it, especially when there’s dialog.

I feel relatively comfortable writing dialog, what gets tricker is when you’re in a party scene, or sitting with multiple people and trying to imagine how the dynamics of that room are playing out. I just started watching season three of White Lotus and thinking about how that show is so good at building tension between characters and how people can have dialog with one another that kind of crosses over an awkward space; or, people talk over each other; or, don’t quite understand one another. I’m deeply interested in people, in general. That’s, of course, one of the main reasons I write; so, building and thinking about the sort of environments I wanted to put characters in, spaces that would add something to the scene, add to their understanding of each other or grease the cogs of the dynamic I am trying to produce in some way.

This is a question from a writer friend who read this book with me. We were both curious about how do you decide when to weave in details from the past? Specifically, you have several flashback scenes within the novel. Some that are just a moment, and some that are whole sections devoted to a moment in the past. How did you make those decisions, especially since there aren’t any discernible titles or headers to indicate the switch.

It was a tricky balance. I found that I have a really hard time writing a narrative that stays in one place and one time and unfolds in that space alone. When I write fiction, I always have this tendency or even urge to unpack a little bit of what’s beneath the surface of a particular moment and oftentimes it means revisiting, flashing back, or going to another space or time. You know, dipping our toe in that, in order to provide a better understanding of the present. I tried to balance this in Masquerade.

First, I wrote by instinct. I did have in mind from that beginning that I [wanted to start] in the present day of 2019-ish, New York. And then, a considerable chunk of the middle of the book concerns [the main character] Meadow’s earlier years in the city. So that would be like rewinding to 2009. Although the years are never explicit, that’s kind of the general time frame. I had in mind that I was building a little bit more about the backstory over the years that moved into the present again. For the most part, the flashback chapters were pretty much linear. From the beginning, I was hoping that it would be relatively easy to kind of latch onto. But, as you mention, there are also moments in other parts of the book that are in the present day, where there are brief flashbacks or memories.

I’d have to say, in general, having a good editor is really a huge help to kind of make this movement through time feel understandable and clean. I feel really grateful because I worked not only with my editor Elizabeth DeMeo at Tin House, who gave me wonderful advice [and] helped me massage the beginnings and ends of chapters in particular, but, before we were at Tin House, my agent, Heather Carr, was also somebody who looked at quite a few drafts of the manuscript and also helped me tighten up a lot of things over time. I feel like their support, especially, I was able to really hammer something out that was hopefully readable and kind of smooth for the most part.

Can you say a bit more about the conversations you were having with your editor and agent in terms of structure in the overarching work?

With Heather, we did quite a few pretty dramatic overhauls of the manuscript, this is in part because I also changed a lot over the months. Essentially, the book within a book [concept] was always there, but it [had] a completely different plot and a different set of characters and much more expansive kind of world.

When I first went out querying with the manuscript, it kind of melted down and coalesced into the form that it ended up as in the final novel. Heather was very open, thankfully, to my making these very dramatic changes to the book within the book. But we had lots of conversations about the beginning and the end.

I would say the stuff in the middle more or less has stayed the same. But, I had a hard time thinking about and trying to figure out where would be a good beginning and end. This also involved shifting of timelines a bit. I think in the first version of the manuscript, the Shanghai stuff was at the end of the book, so the book [was] very much in New York the whole time and then moves to Shanghai at the end. Whereas, we flipped it for the version that ended up getting published. I think a lot of questions [were] about how to create dramatic tension because in earlier drafts of the book [Meadow, the main character] doesn’t find the book until chapter three or four. It seems really basic in retrospect that it should be something planted earlier, but for whatever reason I guess I just like to dilly dally and take my time to establish a world first, and then kind of move into the thing. That’s really what we worked on with Elizabeth. It was more so looking at the individual chapters and concretizing the bets within them, trimming some fat. I think she really helped me find the shape of each chapter as a discrete unit of this book.

In addition to being a writer, you are also an editor, a Chinese-to-English translator and, I learned through a mutual friend, you also speak French and Japanese. In regards to language, do you embody a different personality or mindset when you translate, edit, speak or write across languages?

As someone who edits pretty regularly now–I’m working as an editor for The Japan Times–I’ve done a lot of editing of cultural and academic writing over the years. I feel like editing is something that really has helped me gain a lot of confidence in my sensibilities within the English language. I can look at a sentence, a paragraph and try to really imagine all the different possible ways you could spin out and kind of take on different nuances of meaning depending on whether you shift a clause, punctuation marks, whatnot.

I really enjoy that sort of mechanical side of editing that also unlocks a world of creative possibility and different shades of expression. That’s something I feel very happy to be doing in my day-to-day life. With regards to other languages, I translate from Chinese and I think I would probably say that’s the second language I feel most comfortable in. Although, to be honest, I also have a very kind of awkward relationship to Chinese. I think this is something I try to talk about very bluntly as somebody who is a literary translator, but I think there’s oftentimes an idea of a translator [as] somebody who is 100 percent fluent in this language and 100 percent fluent in that language and that’s why they do the work. And I think there are maybe some cases where that’s true, but that’s definitely not me.

I feel pretty comfortable in Chineses and tackling literary translations on my own time. Spending time by myself [and] being able to research and think about and look up words. But I am definitely quite awkward in my spoken Chinese. It’s maybe just me making up excuses, but I have not had a Chinese language environment around me for my entire adult life. My parents live in China and I do spend time there, but it’s never enough time to fully feel grounded. It’s definitely shaped my own sort of ambivalence toward my linguistic capacities. I feel very confident manipulating the English language end of things, but I guess what I’m trying to say is I recognize the need to level up more in Chinese and I’m self aware of my limitations as well.

I know that you also translate Taiwanese manga and have become a fan of Japanese manga. Are there things that work from a storytelling perspective in those stories that maybe don’t work or you haven’t seen in another?

I’m a relatively late bloomer when it comes to manga and anime in general. I don’t think it’s something that I necessarily had a big passion for before I moved to Japan. It’s been a really fun way to explore a certain side of Japanese culture. I really love how emphatic and outlandish the premises for certain anime and manga franchises are. Very interesting, super hyperbolic characters [and] they live in this sort of really crazy world and there’s these rules that you find out about over time that are revealed through the plot lines. I don’t feel like that’s specific to Japanese culture, per se, but I do think it’s very much threaded into what kind of storytelling is popular here. Personally, it’s very inspiring to see and read more of that work. Anime and manga are things that remind me of the sort of infinite potential for storytelling and for that reason, it’s sort of like a creative wellspring that I find really exciting to tap into and think about.