This interview was conducted on September 4, 1999 via the phone with email follow-ups. Leonard then edited the text and sent it back to me for the website. Please don't quote or use this material for publication without written permission from William Han or Leonard Chang. Thanks.

--Bill Han

Q: I went back and reread your first two novels and a few of your short stories, looking for some kind of common theme. I found that the characters are often alone or isolated. What do you make of that?

A: It's funny that you mention it. The book I'm working on continues those issues of isolation and alienation, and it seems I can't quite escape characters who often move and work by themselves in some way. I'd love to write a big novel filled with messy families and friends, everyone spilling over into each others' lives, but it just doesn't seem to be my métier, at least not yet.

Q: Where does it come from?

A: I'm not sure. I know it has quite a bit to do with the way I am, the way I grew up, and the kinds of books and authors I like. It's all connected and is difficult to untangle for others. I became an avid reader because it filled something in my life as child, that sense of emotional and intellectual connection made vivid through the written word. I often escaped into books as a kid.

Q: What kind of books did you read as a child?

A: Everything, and I mean everything. I lived three blocks from the Merrick Library and went there almost every other day. I remember reading the Great Brain series, the Encyclopedia Brown series, the Danny Dunn series, the Alfred Hitchcock Young Investigators series, everything by Beverly Clearly and Judy Blume. I read a lot of non-fiction books about firemen and martial arts. Then my mother often gave me novels to read. She started me on the classics: Dickens and Steinbeck come to mind.

Q: As a kid? How old were you?

A: Maybe a little too young for Dickens. I hated A Tale of Two Cities. I liked Steinbeck's The Pearl and Of Mice and Men. I think my mother started pushing me towards the classics when I was maybe eleven or twelve.

Q: Isn't that odd? Especially for a Korean American family?

A: Maybe. It might be odd for any family, but my mother studied English and American Literature in Korea. When she came to America she carried over her love of literature and books. I remember seeing her shelves filled with novels.

Q: What kind?

A: I still recall seeing Faulkner's Sartoris in an old and moldy mass-market paperback edition. I remember seeing Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. What's interesting about that is when I took the book down and leafed through it, I saw my mother's margin notes in Korean script. That fascinated me. She had read and studied the book in a different language. It showed me the power of literature. This 150-year-old author had really affected my mother. Hawthorne was and still is my mom's favorite writer. Now I teach Faulkner and when I speak to her about him she still remembers taking courses and studying his use of language. She told me how difficult Faulkner was because they had to re-translate every sentence to try to figure out what the heck he was up to. I still get a kick out of that.

Q: Getting back to your work, I was wondering which authors influenced you. I assume those that you just mentioned. Any others?

A: I sent you that list of books I like, didn't I?

Q: Yes. It's posted in the bio section of the site.

A: Those books were important to my development as a writer. I left some out because I didn't want to repeat too many of the same authors, but all of James Baldwin, all of John Updike's fiction (and even his non-fiction), and more of Malamud's novels and stories. I tend to find a writer I like and try to read everything that writer has written. I find that I learn best by going through everything--the good and the bad--and follow the trajectory of the writer's development. I probably learned more from going through Updike's novels chronologically than any writing workshop I attended.

Q: Like what, for example?

A: His use of language and rhythm, the way he'll render a character through thought and point-of-view, the very interesting mixing of narrator and character in the Rabbit novels, the structure of his books (such as the way he likes those indeterminate endings). I also see the repetitions, whether it's different kinds of guises for the same character, or even the repetition of certain images throughout his books. I learned a lot from him.

Q: So are your themes and characters influenced by these writers?

A: I don't think my themes and characters are. I think it's more of a craft issue when it comes to authorial influences.

Q: Then what about your characters? Why, for example, is Thomas Pak and the unnamed narrator from Dispatches from the Cold so cut off from everything?

A: I wish I could tell you. It's not necessarily a conscious decision to make a certain character a certain way. What happens is that the character emerges and you, the writer, follow him as he moves through the narrative. I'm sure we can posit some kind of theory about the way I am and the way my characters are, but that kind of autobiographical criticism worries me. It's fine for critics and academics, but I'm going to stay away from that.

Q: Why?

A: The creative process is so unknowable and tenuous. When you sit down to write you never know what's going to happen, if the writing will go well, if you'll get stuck, if everything you write seems brilliant or dead--it's frightening. So, when you try to tamper with it too much, when you try to figure out why you tend to write certain things, when you overanalyze your own writing, you run the risk of making yourself too self-conscious of what's going on. That's a long-winded way of saying that I'm a little superstitious about my writing, and I prefer to do it rather than talk about it.

Q: But you teach writing.

A: I teach writing, but I don't teach my writing, thank goodness. I teach other writers and we look at students' works. We focus on their work, not mine.

Q: What do you think about teaching writing? Can writing be taught?

A: I think I talked about this at one point on the message board, and I seem to get asked this quite a bit. I think potential MFA students want to be reassured. I don't know. My answer to that is simple: you can be taught certain craft issues. You can be taught how to read better. You can be taught what seems to work and what seems not to work in fiction. However, I don't know if good writing can be taught. Functional and literate writing can be taught. But artful writing? I don't think so. I think it comes from reading and studying and self-teaching. No matter how often someone tells you about sensitivity to language, no matter how often it's pointed out to you, you only "get it" by reading and studying and writing.

Q: So is that your advice to aspiring writers?

A: Read, study, and write. Yes. Read everything, good and bad. You learn from the good, you learn what not to do with the bad. You study by reading and re-reading, by dismantling and seeing how a writer achieved certain effects. You study by taking apart scenes, chapters, sentences, words. You look at structure, language, characterization, and narrative. And of course you write. You write regularly and you write to learn. Many novices have an aversion to rewriting, which is the first biggest mistake to make. Most good fiction is achieved through countless rewrites, and I mean more than just changing around sentences--I'm talking about completely re-Visioning your work and rewriting it from page one, paragraph one. And doing this over and over until something great happens.

Q: It clicks?

A: Exactly. You find the right voice, the right character to focus on, the right story. Even then you'll have to revise and refine, which is why good novels take so long to finish.

Q: It sounds hard and scary.

A: It can be. But when it does work, when you hit upon the right voice, character, and story, you begin to get a taste of that feeling you had as a kid, reading those piles of books in your room. You become the writer and reader. You begin writing the books you want to read, and there's nothing more satisfying than that.

Click here for the Second Interview, four years later.

Copyright © 1999 by Leonard Chang and William Han.