The Creative Conversation #7 - Susan Choi
Photo of Susan by Adrian Kinloch
In this episode of the Creative Conversation, I spoke with US novelist Susan Choi. Susan is the author of The Foreign Student (winner of the Asian American literary prize), American Woman (nominee for the Pulitzer Prize), A Person of Interest (winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald award) and My Education, which comes out in paperback in the US on May 27. She is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Endowment of the Arts, and teaches undergraduate students at Princeton University.
One of my favourite quotes from the interview was in regards to research:
Now my preference is to do just enough research to fake it, and then fake it for long enough to get a draft, even if the draft is like a disaster. Researching on the basis of a draft is so much easier than researching on the basis of an idea. ‘Cos when you’re researching on the basis of an idea you could research forever, you know, you could truly come up with an infinite amount of things that you don’t know. But if you have a draft you can think like oh I didn’t need to research that model of powerboat, cos no-one’s going to drive that powerboat in my book, as it turns out. - Susan Choi, in The Creative Conversation #7
For a 'best of' transcript' of the interview, go here.