Bravery Comes With Practice: An Interview with Alexander Chee
By Nick Fell
The following interview was conducted over email.
You probably get asked this a lot, but it feels like something that needs to be covered, especially in a publication for college students: what is/was your journey to the literary arts? Have you always been passionate about writing?
Most of this is in my essay collection, but maybe what isn’t perhaps is this: I was a passionate reader as a child, more or less compulsive. But I also loved inventing stories, for myself and then for others. The first book I made up was for a book report in grade school. I did it to see if I could get away with it—could I invent a book in a book report such that my teacher wouldn’t catch it? I got away with it, and while I never felt the need to do this again, I was hooked on the idea of making something up (and getting away with it). If this seems dark, it could have been.
What I found next was Dungeons & Dragons, as a Dungeon Master, which taught me the power of storytelling. And then a teacher in high school encouraged us to write journals, and that is where I learned to tell a story about myself that was true, as it were. I wrote my first poems in that journal, and he encouraged me to send them to a contest, which I then won.
Writing let me take the good (reading a lot) and the bad (seeing what I could get people to believe) and put it into the service of art. Using these powers for good, basically.
Do you find that your writing process differs from novel to novel? Or, do you feel that you’ve found a method that works well for you which you generally stick to when writing a new book?
I’m always experimenting, so I suppose that is what is the same. So far each of my books has been very different from the next and the next ones seem set on making further departures. There’s an accidental coincidence in two of them—both The Queen of the Night and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel begin with a section called The Curse. I have joked Queen is basically autobiographical, so perhaps that will encourage the joke. One novel I’m working on now began as a series of short stories and was going to be an interconnected short story collection; another is something I’ve been pushing around since 1990. I suppose the thing that is the same is that each is the result of experiments. Each is usually abandoned for a while. The Title so far comes first, and then the book forms around it, almost as if the title has something to it that the book explores. A recent revelation to me was that titles are structural elements. They show the reader how to read the book. They can show the writer how to write it also.
Does the process of writing a novel differ, in your experience, from writing essays and shorter pieces for publications? How so?
I think of the difference as being approximately the way I have a recurring dream of a home of many rooms, vast and each time larger than the last, and which expands each time I return, as if it is made of my life, vs. say the memories I have of any of the places that I have lived. That is the spiritual difference for me, and it points to the epistemological difference also, in the writing and the pleasures of the writing of each.
It’s also the difference between living to write and writing for a living. The writing you feel you were put here to do, and the writing you do because you need some money. All writing is on that continuum somewhere. Not that needing money ruins anything. One you get used to the transaction, it doesn’t feel odd or crass to sell writing for money. It feels like magic.
In writing both, I’m trying to figure something out. They’re two ways of thinking of something. Both require me to be willing to encounter myself and learn what I don’t know, and what I do. Both can take many years—some of my essays in the new collection were written over decades of gradual occasional work with huge gaps between. But with a novel, I’m planning to also learn about the world, through people I have just met, and with an essay, I’m learning about it through myself. Sometimes that is a self I’ve just met—but it still is me.
How has your attitude towards writing changed since it became your profession?
I love it more. But I also remain a student of how it can change people, affect people. Including myself. And my sense of that is what keeps me writing. And when I teach, I teach out of that.
How, if at all, are you able to balance your professional pursuits with casual enjoyment? For example, writing for the simple pleasure, rather than for work, or reading for enjoyment rather than reading a book to write an essay about it.
The thrill of writing, and getting paid to write, these are still powerful to me. I still read for pleasure but the pleasure has changed or there is more, there are different kinds of pleasure now. My capacity to get lost in a text remains one of my greatest joys. With time, the pleasure has become a sign that I should return to a text as a different kind of reader—as the reader who hopes to learn from it how to write. But I have also found the pleasure of learning to read something that I don’t particularly like in a critical way. The pleasure in figuring out why something works well has joined the pleasure of figuring out why something fails. I also now listen to books, for example, when I am commuting, which is something I never imagined enjoying greatly. But I do. I especially like the way I can analyze the text when it is read to me.
In addition to the many other things you do, you’re also an associate professor at Dartmouth. Could you tell us a little bit about how you started teaching? Is it something that you’ve always wanted to do?
I began teaching at the University of Iowa, as a rhetoric instructor, a sort of graduate school job that teaches you pedagogy. I had always known I would teach, and I come from families with teachers in them on both sides, a mix of professors and school teachers, including my mother, my paternal uncle, an aunt on each side. My sister also teaches. I don’t know that I wanted to do it, I just knew that I could, and would. My brother, who works in private equity, used to joke that he figured someone in the family should make some money. But I do ok.
Has your relationship with writing changed at all since you began to teach about it? Do you think that your writing improves because of the teaching, and do you think it has been affected by your students’ work?
Teaching forces you to articulate what you know in ways that surprise you, and that in turn makes it grow. I try to stop and restart if I’m boring myself, because it is easy for me to fall back on certain sayings. When One Story Magazine made me mentor of the year, they gave me a book of stories about myself from my students, and one of the most quoted lines among them became a part of the title essay of the collection, so yes, it does affect the work. My favorite part of the term is the end, when the last projects return and I see the breakthroughs in understanding and performance. And it is thrilling to see student work go on to be successful. Aja Gabel, Angela Flournoy, Ayana Mathis, Carmen Maria Machado, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Nicholas Mancusi, Amy Meyerson, Stan Parish, Victor Vazquez, these are just a few with recent publications.
In “How to Unlearn Everything” for Vulture, you wrote that you currently have five novel ideas and another book of essays in the works. How do you view these projects? Do you have concrete plans to finish them, or are they just pieces of your writing journey that will remain as they are?
I apply with them to different grants, and they develop accordingly. Even applying for something makes you think about it, develop it. So they don’t exist within a plan as much as a kind of garden in the mind and files. I may die before I finish all of them, but they are definitely in various kinds of progress.
How do you come to terms with writing what you fear? Could you describe how writing about your fears helps, or doesn’t help, you to cope with these feelings?
“This novel will destroy you” is a feeling I had about The Queen of the Night. And I had to figure out why I felt that.
Fear is you telling yourself a story, sometimes too fast to hear. What is the story? That’s what makes it valuable. It brings something to your attention, or, it can. And there’s something to going in after what you fear that changes you. You may not feel brave, but doing it makes you brave—I think bravery is made from practice more than a constant virtue. It isn’t the same as thoughtless action.
In her story, “The Other Place,” I heard Mary Gaitskill at Disquiet a few years ago describe how she made a fear of hers into a narrator for the writing of that story—a good prompt, to be honest. She had a fear of someone watching her at night from the woods while she was alone in her house, and she decided to imagine him. But all fear is not equal. There’s the fears you imagine, which can become fiction pretty easily, and the fears you know well, because you know the world, which might become essays. And then there’s surviving your own writing process, which is essential, and is a trial and error operation.
As an example, you provide the notion of writing “stories that [you] always tell but never write down.” Has this always been the way that you approached writing? What experiences helped you to come to this realization?
In 2017, I wrote about the writing and publishing of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son for Playboy, and in my reporting, I found two interviews where he said the stories were stories he would tell to friends, made partly out of his experiences, partly out of those of others, and that he had a rule: if he told the story, then, he couldn’t also write the story. Then he needed some money, and decided it was a dumb rule. There’s certainly anecdotal evidence he was also writing the stories—a friend recalls he had files with character names on them around the time he moved to Idaho—but I didn’t find that in his files at the Ransom Center. I did find a folder that said, “Collection?”, with the four stories in them.
So I decided if breaking that rule resulted in these stories—and it is an unspoken, perhaps even unconscious rule for many of us—then I would too, and turn into a writing prompt. I asked myself, what are the stories I tell but never write down? I had a few. And now it is also something I teach, because I realized that the stories we tell are stories we already use to connect to people—a kind of ‘greatest hits’—and that there’s much we don’t explore in the telling that we can in the writing.
Finally, as an aspiring novelist myself, writing for a publication that will mostly be read by writers, I feel that I must ask: what is the best advice that you have received during your writing journey?
My sense of that changes, always. Calling something the best advice almost always makes it feel too small as you’re about to pass it along. But it is probably this: don’t be too precious about writing. Don’t need rituals or ritual objects too much. And if you can’t put aside an hour, find 15 minutes. Even one sentence every day keeps you alive.
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels “Edinburgh”and “The Queen of the Night,” and the essay collection “How To Write An Autobiographical Novel,” all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared recently in Best American Essays 2016 and 2019, T Magazine, Harpers, and The Yale Review, among others. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Award, the 2004 NEA in Prose Fiction, the Lambda Trustee’s Award, the Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award, and The Sewanee Review’s 2018 Monroe K. Spears Award in the essay, and has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, Leidig House and Civitella Ranieri. He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Nick Fell is a senior at NYU studying Creative Writing. He likes to write anything and everything, but he specifically focuses on young adult fantasy— a genre in which he is currently writing his third novel. If you wanna be friends, or you have a job to offer him, you can find him on social media @nickfell25.