ART IMITATING LIFE, OR LIFE IMITATING ART?

An interesting read in the March/April issue of The Writer's Chronicle. An interview with Nora Okja Keller.

Nora Okja Keller was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in Hawaii where she attended the University of Hawaii. In 1995 she received the Pushcart Prize for a story, "Mother Tongue," which later became a part of Comfort Woman, her first novel and winner of a 1998 American Book Award. Fox Girl is her second novel.

Just a snippet:

Interviewer (INT): How did you get started writing fiction?

NOK: I had always been writing since I was in elementary school, doing little poems or stories that I would illustrate myself! I've been writing for as long as I can remember, but I never thought that I would do it for a career, or that I would become an author and write for a living. That wasn't a part of my family life. No one in my community was writing, no one that I knew personally was doing any sort of writing.

INT: How did you come to writing professionally?

NOK: Even though I'd written as a hobby over the years, it was only after I wrote Comfort Woman that I realized writing could be my profession. I started writing Comfort Woman in 1993 after I heard a talk given by a former comfort woman at a human rights symposium.

**Funny how things in life, morph into stories, huh?? Awareness has got to be fifty percent of it all, you think?**

snip....

INT: What did you do, and what do you continue to do to develop and deepen your craft?

NOK: I read. I read a lot. I consider reading the best way to learn how to write, reading with awareness and consciousness of the choices an author makes to bring a charachter to life or to brighten dialogue. I don't think you can be a good writer without being an avid reader. I've had students say they want to write, but they're not really interested in reading, which is bizarre to me.

***And to that I would add, please read well. You are what you eat. Which is why I have had to set DaVinci Code aside. The plot may be good but the writing....oh dear.***

INT: Who are some of the writers who have influenced you, and who do you admire now?

NOK: I always say Maxine Hong Kingston because she was the first Asian American writer I read. (She goes onto talk about the dirth of Asian American writers and when she asked a professor if she knew of any Korean American authors, the professor said a flat, No. Her literature courses were made up of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner...the Great White Males. No surprise there.)

INT: How do you know how far to go with a scene like the one in which Hyan Jin has sex with three men during her first prostitution experience. The scene is very horrifying and graphic, and it goes from bad to worse. With a scene like that, how do you know how far to go?

NOK: I actually didn't know how far to go. That was one of the last and most difficult scenes that I wrote. (snip)

INT: It seems important that you have that one brutal scene because it lets readers know the reality of what goes on. You don't have to have innumerable scenes like that, but the one scene says, "This is what it is."

NOK: I didn't want to turn away from that. It's ugly and it's brutal and it's graphic and it's violent. I didn't want to ignore that those kinds of things do go on. While writing, I tried to walk the fine line between dwelling in it, not wanting to dwell in it, not wanting to exploit it, and yet not wanting to deny it either.

INT: I guess it comes down to honoring the charachter's experience.

NOK: That's always what I came back to: trying to get in touch with the view point of the charachter, to empathize with her and feel her emotions and her spirit and her voice. But it was hard. As an author, I went into Fox Girl knowing that it was a novel. I couldn't trick myself the way I did with Comfort Woman, and I was very conscious of the choices I could make as an author. I wanted to challenge myself. I didn't want to take the easy way out. I wanted to let the charachters do their own unpredictable things and not try to guide them along a preconceived plot. At one point, it got very difficult, and the girls had made so many bad life choices. About two thirds of the way in, I got stuck. I'd come to a dead end where I didn't know how to get the girls out. I didn't have the energy, and I was emotionally and intellectually stuck. I showed up at my monthly writing group empty handed, ready to quit. I told them I didn't know how it was going to end, and they all said they'd been reading for months and they wanted an ending. They wouldn't let me quit. (**Damn! that kind of support is good, isn't it?**) For four or five months I was determined that I was done with it, that I wouldn't go back. It was very difficult to go back because some of the charachters' cynicism was working it's way into my life. After a few months---I realize now that I probably needed those months to gain some perspective and have some breathing space----I thought that not only was I obligated to my writing group, but to my charachters as well. I owed it to them to get them out of this horrible mess. I went through from the very beginning and looked for places to interject some hope so that when they reach that dead end, it wasn't a dead end. There was a little window of light open at the top that they could escape through. But I almost had to quit.

INT: So much of your themes have to do with the mother-daughter relationship. What draws you to this complicated and unruly terrain?

NOK: In part, it's the life that I'm living now. I'm raising two young daughters [and it naturally filters down].

INT: What do you look for in an ending?

NOK: In an ending, I want the charachters to come to some sense of peace or realization, and also an ending should offer hope for a new beginning.

INT: How long was there between Fox Girl and Comfort Woman?

NOK: Five years, and part of that was spent writing what I thought would be my second novel---which was not Fox Girl---but I got distracted by the research I did....snip....part of the trouble with that second novel was that I told so many people what I was going to write. I told the whole story, what the charachters were like, what was going to happen, and so I lost that vital sense of discovery which is one of the joys of writing.

snip

INT: I like what you said earlier too about letting your charachters surprise you and be spontaneous and not being married to some idea of what you think they're going to do.

NOK: That's so important. When you first start out, you don't know your charachters well enough to know what they're going to do. The fun of writing is the discovery of who your charachters are and what's going to happen to them. When you start with an outline and a preconceived idea, I think you kill something off. It deadens your charachters.

INT: What would you say to writers working on their first stories or novel?

NOK: I would say to not worry so much about the end product, or if it's going to get published or what the message is. Start from your charachters and let your charachters tell the story. Let the story develop on its own from your charachters' viewpoint and be as honest as possible to that. The rest will come. If you keep trying to get to the emotional heart or truth of the charachters, the story will come from that. I've read so many things that say to plot out your book, and I feel that puts even more pressure on the writing. I tried it once and found my story going off in different directions and had to bo back and erase my outline and rewrite it to make it conform with how the story was developing. Now that's backwards.

snip/end

***Gee, a lot said here and it's funny because the opening page for my second novel has come, which I'm considering posting. I told this woman that I cannot not start her story yet. My idea is to finish one thing before I start another. But why can't one write one novel and flesh out another? Why can't I listen to what she's saying and just record it. I do know for sure this is a novel and not a story. She's gone through a lot and she's got a lot to tell. But it's funny how that first page just poured right through me; me just writing and writing. Bearing witness.


A.