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Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in to the fourth annual Bronx Book

Festival. I am so excited for this virtual edition and even more excited to get to introduce this

wonderful fiction panel Unforgettable Characters. My name is Saraciea Fennell and I'm the founder

of the Bronx Book Festival and the first panelist that I will be introducing today is Naima Coster.

She is the author of Halsey Street, a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. In 2020,

Naima was selected by Tahari Jones for the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honor. It's

amazing. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Kweli, The Paris Review Daily,

Catapult, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University

as well as degrees from Fordham University and Yale. She has taught writing for a decade,

for over a decade, in community settings, youth programs, and university.

She lives in Brooklyn with her family. Her new novel, What's Mine and Yours, will be

released by Grand Central, well it has already been released by Grand Central. It's available

now wherever books are sold, so make sure you purchase a copy. Next we have Tracy O'Neill.

She is the author of The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2015,

and Quotients, a New York Times New & Noteworthy Book, TOR Editor's Choice, & Literary Hub

Favorite Book of 2020. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.

Congratulations, that's amazing, uh--long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize, and was a Narrative

Under 30 finalist. in 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship.

Her short fiction was distinguished in the Best American Short Stories 2016

and earned a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2017. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone,

The Atlantic, the New Yorker, LitHub, BOMB, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Believer, The Literarian,

the Austin Chronicle, New World Writing, Narrative, Scoundrel Time, Guernica, Bookforum,

Electric Literature, and so many countless others. Such a mouthful. I love it. She holds an MFA

program from the City College of New York; and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University.

While editor-in-chief of the literary journal Epiphany, she established the Breakout 8 Writers

Prize with the Authors Guild. She currently teaches at Vassar College. Welcome Tracy.

Next we have Elizabeth Gonzalez James. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in

The Idaho Review, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, PANK, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart

Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She is a regular contributor to Ploughshares Blog.

Her first novel, Mona at Sea, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen

Maria Machado, and is forthcoming this June 2021, so be sure to look for that, from Santa Fe Writers

Project. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Oakland, California.

Welcome Elizabeth. Next but not least we have Megha Majumdar. She was born

and raised in Kolkata, India. She moved to the United States to attend college at

Harvard University, followed by graduate school in social anthropo anthropologies, excuse me,

at Johns Hopkins University. She works as an editor at Catapult, and lives in New York City.

A Burning is her first book. Follow her on Twitter @MeghaMaj and Instagram @megha.maj. Um sorry you

all might also hear my dog running back and forth. I'll be sure to not pick him up and

have him say hello, but he gets needy sometimes, um. Anyway, thank you so much for

for coming together virtually so that we can talk about crafting unforgettable characters.

So to kick things off, I would like each of you to sort of give us a one sentence, two sentence

if you need it, pitch about your book before we dive into the craft. So let's start with you

Tracy. Hi, thanks for having me, um. So um I I have two novels. The first one is

called The Hopeful and that one um is told by a narrator named Ali who is a young woman

who's struggling to find a sense of purpose um after she has an injury that changes her body

and therefore her relationship with um her dreams and sort of her raison d'être, which

happened to have been figure skating, um. And my second book is called Quotients and it is about

a young family um and uh they are under surveillance as we all are,

um and I think you said a sentence so I'll just stop there. (laughter)

That is the perfect way to stop. We are all under surveillance, very true. Megha, can I

have you go next? Sure um, hi everyone. My name is Megha Majumdar. I wrote a book called A Burning.

It's a novel which is about three people who are chasing big dreams

while the society around them makes this dangerous turn toward right-wing nationalism.

I love the one sentence pitch. You got this down, wow. Elizabeth, can I have you go next?

Hi everybody, my name is Elizabeth Gonzalez James and my book is Mona at Sea and it's

about a young woman, Mona, who graduates college during the Great Recession and loses her her job

on Wall Street and has to figure out um what she's going to do with the rest of her life,

so yeah. Amazing, you also have your pitch down. All right Naima take us home.

Hi my name is Naima. I'm the author of two novels. My debut, Halsey Street, is about an estranged

mother and daughter trying to find their way back to each other and it moves between the Dominican

Republic and gentrifying Bedstuy, Brooklyn. And my second novel, What's Mine and Yours, is about two

families that are brought together when a public high school in North Carolina becomes integrated.

I feel like all of your one-sentence stories, if you put that into one book, it would be amazing,

mind-blowing. Um so all of you have crafted unforgettable characters, the name of our panel.

So I would like for you to sort of discuss how a character first appears to you. I've heard

writers talk about how they come and invade their their consciousness. Others they work really hard

to craft these characters and might take a little bit of pieces of people that they know

and weave them into one character. So can you talk a little bit about like the first spark

that usually comes to you when you're building your characters? We'll start with you Elizabeth.

Yeah um I think for me that the first thing that usually appears is not the character. It's usually

the situation. But the character has to evolve from that situation, right, so if the situation

that appears to me is um for instance like like in my book um somebody going through a long

period of unemployment, then I start asking myself um why why are they going through this long period

of unemployment? Well, she lost her job uh during the Great Recession, why, and she's really angry.

Why is she angry? She's angry um because she did everything right that that she was told to do

and the circumstances uh made it such that she uh still failed to to uh live out the dream that she

had for herself. And so the character for me sort of comes about in that way uh. It's a process of

being um pressed into who they are by the world around them um I if I understood like like rocks,

I I feel like that's also how rocks are made, right? Like like it's it's stuff that's compacted

um and then like uh like you get a diamond, I don't know. I I never studied geology,

but. I love that. I love that. So the situation comes to you first. That's awesome, um. Naima,

can we have you go next? Yes I mean Elizabeth said a lot of what speaks to my process so thank

you for that. I also start with the situation um, a difficult condition that my characters are in

for What's Mine and Yours, I have two mothers at the center of the book and one of them is a

woman I wanted to write about who's struggling to raise three girls on her own because her

husband is in and out of her life. And then the other woman is one who suffered a terrible loss

and who isn't really interested in the role of mothering, but now has to

mother alone without her partner. And so those conditions interested me. But the consciousness

of a character takes quite a long time for me to uncover and is what ultimately keeps me interested

in the fiction um and so to uncover that I also asked myself a lot of different questions. I

asked myself about a character's vulnerabilities and also their desires um and from there the the

person really begins to take shape. I love that. I love that, um. Tracy, can we have you go next?

Sure um you know, I think that I I know when I have a character um, when I figure out their sort

of central paradox, their central psychological paradox, so um in quotients um it really began

with Jeremy, who's one of the main characters, um and so his paradox is that um the way that he

tries to make himself and all, and later, his family safe, is through engaging in the behaviors,

specifically the behaviors that make all of us unsafe, um, and um and therefore

him and his family unsafe, um. And with The Hopeful um you know for Ali,

it was that she is incredibly invested in the notion that you can earn your destiny

and also earn love in some way. And so, but the way that she tries to do that is

through her body which can never really fully be something that she controls or has uh or can use

to earn because there are intrinsic intrinsic qualities to how she was born and who she is.

Um and so um yeah I think I think it really just comes down to these central paradoxes for me.

That's amazing, oh my brain is turning here. So Megha, let's let's have you go next.

Um well I really like what you just said, Tracy, about the central paradox and I think my

approach for A Burning was perhaps a little closer to what you both said, Elizabeth and Naima, when

you spoke about the conditions. I was thinking about, you know, what is the driving question

for my book and how can I break it down into manageable pieces of that question. And then

once I have those questions, it felt like I broke down the big question into three questions.

And those three questions kind of became the three characters, um. They were people who could help me

ask that question most forcefully, which I think is is another way of talking about those

conditions. Yeah that's that's awesome um, so you're starting with questions and you're

beginning to build build the world, right? You've built the situation out, you started

to build the character, um so now I want to talk a little bit about how how you decide,

this is going to be a female presenting character or a male presenting character

or a queer presenting character. Like how do you begin to build their identity,

right? Because you have the situation, you're asking yourself all these other questions,

how do you add in the other things that actually make the the character sort of 3d

right? Um like this this real tangible thing that readers get to experience, um. So let's start

with you first Elizabeth. Yeah um I think for me it's still it still goes back to the situation

because I think that in order to understand a character's personality, I have to understand

how they respond when they bump up against different circumstances. And so um I think I asked

um, you know, if this goes back into backstory and who they are personally, but also like how do they

deal with conflict? How do they interact with their family? How do they

uh, what are their hopes and dreams and all that kind of stuff? Um so I think it still goes back to

kind of understanding the context that that I've set them in. And then um also like

like um Tracy and others said, understanding what the central uh paradox is. What is what is their

deep psychic wound that they can't um address or can't um or or can't name or can't fix. Um

yeah. So I think it's I don't know it it's it's hard for me to put it into words because it feels

kind of nebulous, but it still goes back I think to to the the situation like um what is the what

is the box that I put them in. Yeah that makes sense. I think for a lot of writers out there,

it's really hard to build fully formed characters, so um and then weaving in other other parts of

their identity, right, because the way human beings navigate the world. So like a Black woman

or an Asian woman is going to navigate a little bit different than like, how a white person would,

so I'm just curious to see if those type of identities, as you're weaving your character

into the situations, if the perspective, if there's a certain perspective you're going

after to sort of narrow it in um. So Naima, let's let's hear from you next. Yeah it's an

interesting question. I mean, I'm very invested in questions of race and identity in my fiction,

so um my character's backgrounds are in part informed by what it is I want to look at in a book

um. So in Halsey Street, I wrote about a young woman with an African-American father and with a

Dominican mother, in part because I was interested in connections, tensions, points of solidarity

um between African-American and Latinx communities in Brooklyn, especially in the context of incoming

white folks with gentrification. So that was a part of my thinking about the book from the

beginning and also in What's Mine and Yours, I knew that I wanted to write about that again,

like intersections um and distinctions between Black and Latinx communities

and then also what it's like for people of color to navigate predominantly white spaces

in this integrating high school. How it's different for different people of color

based on how they present and how they identify. So there is a level of intention that goes into

it, but I'll also say that I think the backgrounds of my characters reflect my investments and also

the limitations of my imagination. I feel very aware of that. That's something that I reconsider

as I begin to plan books, you know, even if it's something like, why is everyone in this scene

slender and tall? Look, what is that, you know, what is that reproducing about what I've

internalized of who's worthy of attention in fiction? So, you know, I think that there is

um work that I'm hoping to do with my fiction and ideas that I'm hoping to explore that require I'm

really intentional about the backgrounds of my characters, but I also think that this is a realm

for me where instinct and norms can also populate the fiction and I try to be mindful of that.

Yeah, that's amazing. Tracy, what what about you?

Oh wait, Tracy, you're muted still. I think I maybe don't understand the question.

So you you have a character, right, but then you're thinking about race,

you're thinking about is this person going to be neural diverse. So I'm wondering like, as you're

building your character, you have your situation, you're thinking about all of these other things,

but how do they come begin to become fully formed, right? Like you can't just have a name like a name

for a character and and don't describe like their skin color, though some writers do that,

or pronouns. Like I'm wondering how do you make them three-dimensional, right, so like Naima

just mentioned, she's interrogating something, you know, and and using the characters to look

through a certain lens um and so I'm wondering if, you know, are those things that you do

when you're crafting your character, or is it just we have the situation, the race, you know,

gender identity or whatever doesn't really um come to you. Or maybe it does. Maybe it comes later.

Maybe it's not something you're actively thinking about, um. So that's that's sort of the question,

like how do you make them fully formed? So if we took your character out of the story,

out of your story, like what are readers going to walk away with? Are they going to say that was

a very strong queer character or a strong, you know, Black Latinx, whatever type of character.

Because characters I feel like are usually what stay with us outside of the story,

right, um especially if they're unforgettable characters. So what makes them unforgettable?

It's not just the situation that they're in, but it's sort of like,

the reactions that they're they're making to the situation. Do you do you understand

now? Is that helpful? Or if not we can just we can skip you and go to another another. Yeah I

mean I guess that the way you said it, right, it sort of presumes that the charac- that you can

separate the character from these identity car- uh categories. And that one precedes the other.

So I don't I don't think that I operate that way. So I don't think it's like that I have a character

and they're like, there's some sort of like shadow of a character who doesn't have

um those things yet, um. I I think that it they sort of um emerge um simultaneous to each other

um and so, you know, I think for me like, I um I take very seriously the notion

that um people's um psychological structures are um, you know, at least

partially um embedded and then um, you know, sort of either compounded by other experiences or not,

um but but are grounded in their socio-historical circumstances um. So like, I can't really have

a character who like before I have sort of these things about where they stand in a social milieu.

So it's sort of um it's more a contemporaneous um sort of emergence that happens for me.

Awesome, how about you, Megha?

Um I think it might be helpful to maybe think about one specific aspect. For instance,

in A Burning I was thinking very much about class and class mobility. So, you know, it it really can

rise, I think um if if a writer watching is having trouble kind of conceiving of it in the abstract,

it can really rise from specific events um. For instance, one character in A Burning

um is is quite poor and that means that she has experiences where her father is injured

in an act of police brutality during the demolition of the slum that they live in.

Then when they go to the doctor, the doctor doesn't really take their pain seriously because

they are perceived to be people who don't have very much education and don't have very much power

to advocate for themselves. So those are the ways in which belonging to a certain class affects her

life. And even though the narrative that she might tell about it later is a particular narrative,

the state can impose a narrative on her saying that because she has suffered in these ways,

she she is anti-national in certain ways because she has suffered because of of the society and the

structures around her. So maybe it helps to think about, you know, specific events and and um again

situations and structures that that the character lives within and for example you know you're

asking about gender. Like one character, um the reason he acts a certain way is because he feels

rejected um by a student of his. This character is a gym teacher who feels rejected by the student.

And then later goes on to work against her and work against justice for her. And that initial

feeling that, how dare this little kid not be grateful to me? How dare she not express gratitude

for all the things that I'm doing for her? I think that for me as I was thinking through it was very

much tied to this male expectation that you know um you know this kind of toxic masculinity of,

you know, expectations that you will be in the position of the giver and you will

receive gratitude for that, um. Yeah so those were some of the things I was thinking about.

Yes exactly that exactly that. I think that's amazing because then you're adding tension,

right, and also playing around with power dynamics. So that's that's also something I

would like for each of you to talk about um in in your in your world, right, in your fiction,

how do you decide um you know who's going to have more power than who,

right? I know that there's a situation, but we all we all as human beings have our own power,

have our own privilege, right? So what are you thinking about um when you're crafting your

stories about which character is going to have a particular privilege or a particular power

um dynamic and are you interrogating something with that? Like are you asking yourself a question

and you're working it out through through your writing? Um how do

you how do you play around with with stuff like that? Uh we can start with you Megha.

Um that is such a great question. I think it is linked to the ambition of the book.

For me the ambition of the book was very much about seeing who can move forward

and who can dream of something bigger than survival within this structure of a society that

does not serve anybody other than the very rich. And so in that case I had to see

how the world acts upon these people. There are certain ways in which they are very limited

and then there are certain ways in which they push back and that is where their power lies,

right? So for instance, one of the characters who is um shamed for being who she is still dreams

of being a movie star and her way of pushing back against all the people who laugh at her

is to put their shame back on them, you know. She teases people, she jokes with people,

she wields her power in humor and that was really interesting to me um. You might have a character,

you know, this this other character who finds herself in prison. It's her voice against the

state's voice and she knows that, you know, public opinion means so much. So for her, her power is in

going to the media with her story and getting her story out and telling the truth of her story to

counter the state's narrative. So that is one way in which she wields her power. So thinking about

these specific ways in which people not only, you know, have power in a passive way, but wield it,

use it, discover it. That was really interesting. That's amazing, um. Elizabeth, can I have you go

next? Yeah um that's that is a really interesting question um. So in my book um my character Mona is

um she's like me, she's um bi-ethnic, half Mexican American and half white. And um that is uh being

bi-ethnic is a question that um preoccupies me a lot. I can't stop writing about it and it's it um

it comes from uh growing up and where I grew up in south Texas. I lived in Laredo and it was like

96% uh Mexican-American or people who had had previously lived in Mexico and come to the U.S.

and so um I always felt like an outsider um. And then uh, so that it comes up a lot in in um

my writing again and again, these characters who feel dislocated, um. But then there's also

uh a privilege that comes from that as well from from uh appearing white, um. And that's definitely

something that that I did uh address head-on in the book, um. And in the in the novel Mona

has a brother named Danny and she has this um uh kind of scene where where she's talking about how

uh she looks white, but Danny has darker skin. He looks like their dad, she looks like the mom. And

she says they look like they independently budded off of their parents like hydra.

And um but, she she is a little resentful of her brother um, his skin matching his last name

and his ethnic identity, because in that way he's always taken for who he is. Whereas she's

straddling two worlds and never really feels comfortable or a part of or even wanted

in either world, um. And so yeah, it was it was definitely something that I wanted to

interrogate in the book and and uh have a character who is a a white presenting

uh Latina kind of moving through the world and and not feeling comfortable, um yeah.

That's awesome, yeah, that sounds like a really great way to talk about privilege,

too, because you have two characters who belong to the same family and like,

you know, a direct comparing um contrast um. Tracy, can we have you go next?

Yeah I, you know, I think that hearing Megha talk about the way that um humor is used um as a way to

wield power, I sort of realized for the first time that um maybe all of my characters have

are like working from a limited repertoire and like I think their repertoire might be secrets,

you know, um. So um yeah I think I think a lot of my characters derive a sense of power

um from from secrets. I mean, there's a more obvious case for that um in Quotients because um

the book is is taking on the surveillance state um and so um that's a sort of uh obvious move there,

but I think it's also true in The Hopeful um, you know, in that book um the the narrator Ali um is

adopted um and her parents are white and she is not um and I think that there's sort of um a

like a narrative going on or a backstory um in which um there's something um about uh about the

secret that to her is um is sort of um a way of not having to um sort of like um give up um or um,

you know, and give up in a way that I think is um connected sort of to to race, right. So

she does-, I think she doesn't have to give up on what people are telling her about her body, um so

um and it's it's like a delusion in the book and it's very much set up as a delusion um what

her secret is and sort of how she pursues it. But um but yeah I guess they're all

just um they all just have their secrets. That's all they got. That's amazing though because um

you know, secrets are powerful because it's like who gets to know the secret

right? So that's that's really cool. Uh Naima, can we have you uh go next? Yes um I was thinking as I

was listening to everyone speak about um feelings of powerlessness and the ways that they can shape

intimate relationships um and the kinds of dynamics that we see between characters in

a novel um, I think that many of my characters are grappling with feelings of powerlessness.

Um and part of what both novels chart is what people do with those feelings and how that affects

the way they connect to the people closest to them. So in my first novel Halsey Street um

there is a character Ralph who loses his record store. It's replaced by a health food store and

he's just devastated by the gentrification that he feels powerless in the face of. And

he is consumed by his grief and his loss in a way that prevents him from being able to see

the need that his adult daughter Penelope has for him, um and to reckon with their difficult

past and fractured family history. And in my second novel, What's Mine and Yours,

the two mothers at the center of the book are women who feel that they have thwarted potential,

that they could have gone further in life if they weren't consumed with the business of survival. So

they have this feeling of powerlessness for real reasons, but have this tremendous power as mothers

over the lives of their children um and one of the costs of their attempts to gain power is that

they um focus so much on the futures of their children, one mother opposing the integration,

one mother supporting the integration, that they miss giving those children space to make choices

for themselves. To choose the people that they love. And then of course they're the children

who have that difficult position of being a young person and being dependent on their families and

I think that I'm interested in charting young people's journey toward power in my second novel.

But it's not always what one might expect. I think sometimes a journey towards power sounds like

a triumphant thing necessarily and we can think about all kinds of victory narratives

that we have for marginalized people or for young people um and I'm interested in the

unexpected ways that particular characters um attain power on their own terms.

I love that, um. So each of you seems to have a different type of writing process,

um. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that, um. Do you usually feel like

you can sit and just write a book in a month, in in six months? Is it, is it something where the

story takes you a little bit longer to pull the threads together to have a complete manuscript,

or is it a situation where you're on deadline with your publisher because you have a two book,

you know, a two book contract and they're like, hey we need we need that next book from you?

So this time we'll start with Elizabeth. If you could walk us through what your process is like.

Yeah um so I've written two books, one um uh Mona at Sea and then I have another one which um is

out on submission now. And the process was really different for both of them, uh. For Mona at Sea, I

started writing it in 2011. I was um staying home taking care of my daughter when she was a baby

and um I literally wrote the rough draft like during her nap time. Sometimes she would be

asleep on my shoulder and I'd be like typing with one hand um trying to to keep her asleep and um

and I just um had this fire lit under me. I was like, I have to have a rough draft in six months.

And um I mean that was just my own deadline and I I did it. I I I finished a rough draft and then

um and then I was like, okay now what? I didn't know anything. I I I don't have an MFA. I'm

really self-taught and so um I didn't know how to revise or anything like that,

so that was like a multi-year process of trying to figure out like how do I take this

like not great rough draft and turn it into a completed novel, um. The second time around,

it was uh it was really different. The second book is, incredibly it has a very intricate plot and um

I spent two and a half years just trying to get the rough draft down. I would um I would outline

it um and then I'd start writing and then I'd get a couple hundred pages in and realize it wasn't

working so then I'd have to start over again and I I did that for like two and a half years

um and then finally I got a rough draft um and then after that, the subsequent drafts,

I did three on that one um it was just a process of of honing it um and just making it better

because with that one once I had the rough draft finally it was pretty close to exactly where

I wanted it just because I had done so much work um just trying to get to that point um

and yeah for for future books, I don't know, I hopefully I'll figure out how to do it the easy

way, but I haven't figured that out yet. I don't know if there is an easy way, but but yeah. Wow,

what a drastic difference um between you know the two books. Tracy, can I have you go next?

Um yeah I mean if I could write a book in six months then I'd have

lots of books written by now, um. Yeah I don't know, I mean I I work pretty slowly um

so um, you know, what I end up doing most days is reading what I already have um and sort of

waiting for the um like fingernail the fingernails with more that I can sort of push it forward um

and so um, you know, I I can't even really tell you in some ways like I'm I'm almost

so slow that um I can't even explain to you like how it works, you know. It's like

I don't know suddenly it's just four years later and I'm like well now I have

a little bit of something or whatever you know but um but yeah um it's it's for me a lot about

hearing um the language um in my mind and um so I think that is one reason that I'm so slow because

I don't really write um towards semantics alone. It's like I really have to sort of get um get the

sound and then um when I have the sound it's like uh working, you know, with and against it

um to create um you know patterns and anomalies. Um and uh yeah that's that's pretty much it. I

love that, I love that. Before I jump to the next person I actually have a follow-up question for

you then. Is it a similar process for you when you're revising? Does it, are you also a slow

reviser or do you feel like-- Oh yeah no I'm slow at everything. Okay Megha, can we have

you go next? Um it's such a relief to hear you speak about writing slowly, Tracy, because um I

think I'm the same way and part of it is that I have a full-time job and so my writing gets done

in really tiny chunks, um. For my first book, I would write for maybe about 45 minutes before

I had to go into the office every morning um and yeah it's just extremely slow. It's learning to,

you know, maybe there's a first layer of telling the story to myself where the writing is really

clumsy, very stiff, very wooden. I'm just trying to figure out what the story is. And then it's

kind of going back and trying to see the scenes more fully, trying to see nuances better, trying

to punch depths into the kind of stiff things that I've written um. And then maybe as as I progress,

I think more about, you know, how how is there movement within this chapter for instance.

What happens such that this chapter can be its own chapter? And then I move on to the next chapter

you know. What am I doing with the blank space between one chapter and the next. So just kind of,

those questions where I'm really trying to be tough on the book and ask it, well if

if I'm really bored and I pick up this book, am I going to read it or am I going to put it down

and you know scroll on Twitter for two hours? So you know, just kind of trying to be really

really hard on it in the later stages to make sure that the book is able to hold space for a reader.

I love that, I love that. Naima, what about for you? I think that something

that's critical to my process is having a lot of non-writing thinking time. I tend to think about

my projects a long time before I begin writing in earnest. For Halsey Street, it was probably

the story that I wanted to tell for something like seven years before I really started it.

And then for What's Mine and Yours, I thought about it for three or four years before I really

started it. And so that time was partially writing little scraps and having notes,

but also just turning over a set of questions and characters and possibilities in my mind.

So I like to think that I'm fast, but I'm not. I think I spend a lot of time before I begin a draft

and then I spend quite a lot of time actively planning, like thinking about all of the scraps

and possibilities I've collected and then outlining and writing character sketches. Just

like documents upon documents. And I do that I think mostly because it gives me courage to start.

Because novels are so large and hopefully deep that I know I cannot hold it all

in my mind when I sit down to write so I deposit it in documents then I can reference so part of it

I don't know how helpful it is to me beyond that it gives me courage and that's enough and

then I try to sort of plow through a draft quite quickly so that I don't lose my nerve. And then

revision is a really long process for me um and, you know, a friend of mine read What's Mine and

Yours and was sharing with me some of his favorite scenes and he said, I just they're beautiful I

can't imagine the novel without them. And I said to him well I could imagine the novel without

these scenes. Because they weren't in the first draft and they weren't in the second and they only

occurred to me in the sort of very final stages um because I cannot rush insight um or nuance.

But I do try to write quite quickly, if only as a way of managing my own anxiety about how much I

don't know and how much is missing. Because once I have a draft then I say to myself, okay like

now I can work to fill in those gaps. So it's mostly an emotional management strategy.

I love the variety here for uh the writing process, it's amazing, um. So

we spoke a lot about how you build your unforgettable characters. Are there any

writers or any books in particular where you felt um, you know, the story was great,

but the character kind of stuck with you, um when you when you finished the novel,

um. Naima, you're shaking your head. I think you I think you already have something,

so if you want to go ahead and go first and and then the rest of you can just feel free, if the

book comes to mind after she goes, feel free. Sure I love the novel Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis

about five queer women living in Uruguay under the dictatorship who escape to this remote

beach town as often as they can to be with one another and it's about friendship and love and

the desire to be free. And I love this book for many reasons, um but one of the things that I

adore about it is that it's about these five individual women but it's also about the web

of relationships that exists between them. Aand I often think about character as being made up

by a range of relationships. Rather than say an innate sense of like an innate set of qualities

I think that a character can be made up by how someone feels and relates to

their mother, their cousin, their brother, their half brother, their neighbor, their teacher.

Um like who we are is all of those dynamics together and I think that it's a book that

explores how each of those women relate to one another, relates to their partners, their families

of origin. And it's part of what makes the book feel so rich and so alive and multi-dimensional.

I love that insight, Naima. I feel like I'm learning hearing you speak, um.

I can go next. I read this book recently which I have right here, actually. It's called Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson and um I really loved the two characters here. It's a it's a love story

set in England. It's about these two Black British artists, and what I loved is that they are so

gentle with each other. There is such a space of softness in them. They they live in the real

world, you know, they they live in a world of racism and violence, but they are so, there's

something so beautiful in how they are very soft characters and very gentle characters and I really

admired that. Sounds amazing uh Tracy, Elizabeth with would either of you like to go next?

Um yeah, I I'm also Naima, still chewing over what you said that uh that a character um is

informed by a range of of other characters. That's so fascinating, um. One, a book that

I recently read that um I just fell in love with the protagonist was Mexican Gothic by uh Sylvia

Moreno Garcia. The character Noemi in that book um is this uh Mexico City socialite and

um her her life when the novel starts is kind of shallow, um it's just parties and boyfriends and

she's kind of bored and and she gets um dispatched by her father um to go kind of rescue her husband

who's I mean sorry, she's been dispatched by her father to rescue her cousin who's been dispatched

who's been kind of kidnapped by her British husband and is living in this like creepy British

manner out some weird part of the country. Anyway um but she just is a person that I think the world

and her father had kind of like written off as like this you know ditzy socialite girl.

And she just proves again and again in the book just how much um intelligence

and tenacity and fierceness and and and uh all of that um again and again and again. And she just is

is one of the most likable and um I mean I know like like there's the whole likable unlikable

character thing, I don't want to get into that. But she just was somebody I fell in love with um

after like the second page and um yeah I just I cannot recommend that book highly enough.

Amazing. Take us home, Tracy, take us home, um. Yeah so the character that

I thought of was um the narrator of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell

um and um so this is a narrator um who is um sort of deeply um deeply

illogical in a lot of ways, um but um sets out in a way as a sort of existential detective of

sorts. So the character's brother um has committed suicide and this character wants to sort of um go

on a sort of um forensic um quest right to find out um, you know, why this has happened,

um and um but this is not a character who um, you know, embarks on this journey necessarily with

even a very strong sense of connection to their own grief. Um and um and I was um really taken

with the voice of this character and um surprised um I think that one of the things for me um as

a reader, is that when a character's logic can surprise me um that is often when I think like,

okay like, I'm all in so um yeah Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. Definitely read it. I love that,

I love that, um. So we're coming up on on the last minutes of the panel. So we talked about a lot of

different things, but I would love to know what is your guilty pleasure. It could be a certain

genre of books that you read. It could be, you know, your favorite ice cream. Like what is what

has been your guilty pleasure for the last year as we've all been living in this lovely pandemic um?

Tracy, do you want to go first? Sure well I mean I don't even know if this is a guilty pleasure

because I don't feel like guilty about it, but and also everybody knows this about me I think

or a lot of people do, but um I like basically live on Popeye's um. I love it. Yeah I eat the

spicy chicken sandwich like multiple times a week. I love it so much. Amazing, have you tried it with

the um their sweet heat sauce? Okay I'm I might be getting into my guilty pleasure. (laughter)

It's so good. I have it I haven't gotten it with the sweet heat, just like how it

like normally comes. I'm just like, okay I'll take it. Like I don't care.

And of course it's terrible because it's like um I'm always looking at it and being like,

oh my gosh, like the whole vegetable here is two slices of pickle. (laughter)

But um but it's so good. Definitely true, uh. Elizabeth, can I have you go next

um? I'm trying to decide if it's if I should do the food one or the really bad TV one

um. I'll I'll say Takis. I discovered Takis. I mean, I had have had them before,

but um during the beginning part of the pandemic I was going through like a lot of Takis, um

and to the point where I was like starting to have stomach pains and I was like oh my god the

whatever makes them bright red is like really bad for you I think and you should not eat them in

massive quantities. (laughter) Oh my gosh yes yes Takis oh yeah oh yeah um.

Can I say Instagram? Although I don't even know if it's like actually a source of pleasure.

It might just be like a guilty habit, obsession, fixation,

you know, maybe. I actually don't think it deserves to be called a pleasure

in the way that like a Popeye's chicken sandwich does, sort of ,but yeah I'll say that. Okay okay.

Zoom just closed. That's okay. If we're living in a virtual world, these weird tech glitches happen,

um or like Tracy said they're they're they're listening to us, they're watching us, so

um. What is your guilty pleasure that you've been doing over the last year?

Hmm guilty pleasure? I don't know that I think of any pleasures as

guilty. I feel like I I try to read really widely um. I um started reading kind of

outside what I typically read, which is a lot of non-fiction and literary fiction. And I read

Jeff Vandermeer for the first time. Which was really fun and it was just nice to be exposed to

just a different kind of storytelling. And I really want to read

more, you know, speculative, fantasy, sci-fi, and see how those other kinds of storytelling work.

I love that. You're in for a real treat. There's a huge cannon. (laughter)

I don't even know where to tell you to start, to be honest

um the the last two things is, I would love for you all to go around and we'll start with Naima

and then Tracy, then Elizabeth, and Megha. If you could let everyone know what's next for you,

um if it's okay with your publisher if you mention what's next. I know some of them like

to keep things under wraps. And then if you can also let um all of our viewers know where they can

find you on social, your website, wherever you're hanging out virtually these days.

Well What's Mine and Yours continues to be what's next for me. My book came out in March,

so it's still very much at the forefront of my mind and where a lot of my energies are going. I'm

doing virtual visits to book clubs, so if anyone's interested in reading What's Mine and Yours,

through my website, the publisher's website, you can uh enter to win a drop-in visit with me to

your book club, which is exciting, um. So that's a big part of my life right now. I'm supporting

this book um. I hope to start working on my third novel this summer which will be about new

motherhood, female friendship, and class mobility. Will be the story of three three different women

um. And people can connect with me at my website www.naimacoster.com on Instagram at @naimacoster

and on Twitter at @zafatista and all that's linked on the contact page on my website.

Awesome. Tracy, you want to go next? Sure um yeah so I guess in the most immediate future I've been

working on um a short piece of journalism, like a feature, um that is about veterans disability um.

And so um that will be coming out at some point soon, um. And in uh, let's see is it August 31st,

um my paperback is out of Quotients, so um I think there maybe is gonna be a new book cover for it. So

um I don't know there's that, um. And I've been working on um a memoir project actually um

so um but it's, you know, I'm still living my life, so I guess we'll have to see how it turns out.

I love that. And and where can they find you?

Oh right, yeah um so I am on Instagram and Twitter um and my handles are @tracysoneill so at

t-r-a-c-y-s, "s" as in soccer, o'neill o-n-e-i-l-l. Awesome. Elizabeth, can we have you go next?

Yeah um so Mona at Sea comes out June 30th um and so I'm very much uh in full like book promo mode

right now. That's pretty much the only thing I'm doing um and it's available for pre-order and the

audiobook is is also going to come out, so you can get it in either format. And my website is

www.elizabethgonzalezjames.com um and then I'm on Twitter and Instagram at @unefemmejames,

u n e f e m m e j a m e s. It's the same handle for both. And I'm also on Facebook

for anybody who still uses Facebook so um. Yeah. I love that. Megha, bring us home. (laughter)

Um well can I just take a second to say I've loved Naima's and Tracy's books and I'm so excited to

read yours, Elizabeth. So I encourage everybody watching to read these beautiful books, um. I,

so my paperback also comes out soon. It comes out at the end of June. June 29th.

So that will be exciting. And I'm working very slowly on a new novel um I found that

not saying anything about my project worked really well for me the first time so I'm

going to continue doing that um and I am I have a website which I desperately need to update um

meghamajumdar.com and I'm on Twitter at @MeghaMaj and Instagram @megha.maj.

Amazing. Well thank you so much for for joining us virtually. It's very exciting,

a possible new cover for a paperback, a debut writer's book coming out at the end of the month,

um, you know, Naima doing more promo, drop-in book clubs, that's amazing.

Megha's paperback coming at the end of June. So many amazing things. Be sure to check out all

of these lovely authors' books. Thank you so much for your time. And that is all from me, folks. Enjoy.

Thank you for moderating so beautifully. Thank you. Thank you.