Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.
I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.
PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses. . . It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.
The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.
The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.
Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.
I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!
I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.
I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.
I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!
With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.
Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.
Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.
My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.
Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.
It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.
As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.
The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.
Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.