Faith, Loss, and Fiction with R.O. Kwon
Description
What’s it like to spend a decade working on your first novel, become a bestselling author, and still have the first thing people say about you be that you’re “adorable”? We talk with Korean American writer R.O. Kwon to find out.
R.O. is best known for her 2018 novel, The Incendiaries. It’s a story about young love, religious fundamentalism, violent extremism, and coming to terms with the loss of faith. It was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Atlantic, Bustle, Buzzfeed, the BBC, and a bunch other outlets—and it’s finally out in paperback this week.
It was a dream to talk with R.O. about finding massive success after working on her book for 10 years, loving literature she couldn’t see herself in, and why we all need to stop calling Asian women “cute.”
I was desperately in love with an art form—literature—in which I physically could not and did not exist… the books I had around the house that I loved and still love were Henry James and Jane Austin and Edith Wharton. All these books by very dead people in a world in which—if I were ever to appear in, say, Edith Wharton’s world—I couldn’t have even gone into the rooms where things are happening. Nobody would have talked to me. At best, I might have been a circus attraction.
—R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
We chat about:
- Why reworking the first chapter over and over isn’t the best way to finish a novel. “I had twenty pages of the most elaborately reworked prose I had ever read. I threw it all away and then I started again.”
- Why including sexual violence in the book came so naturally. “It would have felt unrealistic to me I think in retrospect to have a more sanitized version of a college world. That wasn’t the college world that I knew, at least.”
- What it’s like to lose your faith at 17. “My entire life is divided into before and after. And that aftermath has in a lot of ways felt like an aftermath where a predominant note has been grief.”
- How she handles online harassment. “Every woman writer I know who is online in any way is getting harassed—that seems to be a part of our online lives, which is so awful. So, there has been harassment, especially anytime I write a nonfiction piece that has anything to do with gender or race or, god forbid, both.”
Links:
- R.O. Kwon’s book tour details
- R.O. on Twitter and Instagram
- The Incendiaries
- On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted in The Paris Review
- 48 Books By Women and Nonbinary Authors of Color to Read in 2019 in Electric Literature
Plus:
- Embracing a shitty first drafts mentality—in writing and pretty much everything else.
- How perfectionism makes us feel safe and in control, but actually shuts down progress.
- Fuck yeah to saying no! Did you know you can rest even when you’re not sick?
- Why capitalism hates that you have a body.
Sponsor
This episode of Strong Feelings is brought to you by:
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</figure></figure>Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Go to getharvest.com/strongfeelings to get 50% off your first month.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher Do you want your projects to stay on time and on budget? Then you need Harvest, the simple tool for time tracking and invoicing. Harvest is trusted by customers in more than 100 countries, and they’d love to be trusted by you too. We even use them here at Strong Feelings! Make this week the week you try Harvest free. Go to getharvest.com/strongfeelings for all the details and you can get 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com/strongfeelings. [theme music plays for 11 seconds and then fades out] Hey, everyone, I’m Sara!
Katel LeDu And I’m Katel.
SWB And this is Strong Feelings! A podcast about work, friendship, and feminism—and what happens when you bring them all together.
KL Today we are talking to author R.O. Kwon. She wrote the incredible novel, The Incendiaries—it’s got stories of young love, religious fundamentalism, and coming to terms with the loss of faith. And, okay, the book is so great and we dig into it with R.O., but something we also talk to her about is how long it took her to write this book.
SWB It took her a decade! Oh my gosh, that was so wild to hear!
KL Yeah! And, obviously, there was a huge payoff because the book has been a bestseller.
SWB Right! And I think it’s amazing to stick with something like that—that you have so much faith in that project. But something that R.O. mentioned that I thought was really interesting was that for a long time, she kind of got herself stuck in a rut where she had the first twenty pages of the book done and she kept trying to make those twenty pages perfect instead of…writing the rest of it. [KL laughs]
KL Yeah. I mean, I really relate to this—getting obsessed with the minutiae of grammar, reworking sentences over and over down to the placement of an em dash she talked about. And don’t get me wrong, I can see how that is very satisfying.
SWB I love it too, I’m not going to lie.
KL Yeah!
SWB I know.
KL Yeah! It’s the reason I like copy editing and doing book indexes. I can kind of tinker with these smaller things that feel like they have to get done—and they probably do—but it can also distract me from stepping back and looking at whatever I’m working on as a whole.
SWB Yeah. I mean, are you familiar with Anne Lamott’s concept of “Shitty First Drafts”?
KL Oh my gosh, yes! She wrote Bird by Bird—I love that book! I actually recently started re-reading it.
SWB Did you really?
KL Yeah!
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SWB Yeah, she’s a great writer and she’s a great writer on writing. And what she talks about when it comes to shitty first drafts is this idea that you just have to get something out. And she tells this story about how she used to write restaurant reviews, and every single time she would start the review, she would get hung up on herself. She said even after she’d been doing it for years, she would just get panicked. She’d try to write a lead and instead she would just write these—she says the word “dreadful”—sentences. So, she’d cross them out and try again, and cross it out and try again. And then she would just get into that hole of despair because she didn’t feel like she could ever get the right words out. And so what she talks about is this way that we get ourselves stuck by thinking that we have to make the first thing perfect, as opposed to letting ourselves make something shitty at first, [laughs] and letting it be shitty, and then saying, “I’m going to come back to that later.” And I love that [laughs] so much!
KL Oh my god. Yeah, I love that she says essentially that most good writing starts with a terrible first effort. That you need to start somewhere by getting something—anything!—down on paper. And then you go through the process of fixing it and refining it later. Because the first pass is always…awful!
SWB It is! And yet…it’s so hard to actually do that, right? [KL laughs]
KL Yeah.
SWB It’s really hard to do.
KL Yes.
SWB I think being okay with a shitty first draft is obviously really good for you writing, and it’s what R.O. needed to get The Incendiaries done, but I also want to talk more about embracing a shitty first drafts mentality for life in general. [laughs]
KL Yeah!
SWB I think I’ve really struggled with perfectionism about different things—not everything, but certain things. And I think at
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