![]() I’m arriving at the top of the year with the same leeriness that everyone is. Also, greater risk tolerance for genuine weirdness in storytelling.Ĭhan: Any branding or career advice for this year?Ĭhoi: I don’t know about advice but I guess it’s more a prayer. Great health insurance everywhere with protections against grueling, exploitive, hierarchical labor practices. And that’s why living your life only to avoid disappointment will result in a tiny, isolated existence where all your dreams calcify in the back of your throat and turn into bile.Ĭhan: What change would you like to see in your industry?Ĭhoi: More unions. That you will always make mistakes and that every triumph will contain disappointment. Probably both as most things are.Ĭhan: What is a life lesson you’d like to share with a younger version of yourself?Ĭhoi: That mistakes worth making, the ones that you will learn from and that will hone your talent and voice are not ones you can anticipate. I can’t decide if that’s sad or wonderful. My partner recently mentioned that I write about dysfunctional families to better understand my own or else force these families into made up situations that I wish my parents had created for me. I’m so interested in the work because I’m compelled to constantly mull over why people do the things they do. I am constantly in a race against mortality to get these stories out. And the pressure of this looming pilot I’m working on that contains every wish and dream I’ve ever had in my life. I experience every waking moment with a sword of Damocles held over my head because the material fact of a book deadline feels like homework forever. I just love how emo they come off, it gives me hope.Ĭhan: How do you navigate writing and life balance in your career?Ĭhoi: Badly. ![]() I can’t get enough of how compassionately they talk about each other’s foibles in the context of how they transmogrify into strengths through the machinery of their relationship. The time, labor and rewriting is almost a given but it’s a heart-expansive idea to consider that this ambitious, iconoclastic movie could be the result of kindness, humility and a truly collaborative process. I saw it at a screening long before any of the reviews and I didn’t at all understand what I’d just witnessed or why I was crying so hard. I loved Everything Everywhere All At Once. Every interview I’ve read or heard and all the anecdotes are suffused with joy and generosity. If you can’t guess, all my books are thinly-veiled biographies about how badly I bungled my twenties.Ĭhoi: The Daniels. It’s mortifying and humiliating to watch people flail so grandly and become spectacularly cringe and mincing about what they want most in life. It’s funny but some people call my characters unlikable but I think that’s what I find most relatable about them. Still, the characters are rewarding because they’re constantly startling me with their capacity for sabotage.Ĭhan: What elements define an emotional story?Ĭhoi: Stakes. The book I’m working on now also comes to mind not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s absolutely killing me. Everyone, including the location (New York is definitely a being), is unrepentantly messy, unpredictable and entirely indifferent to other people’s opinions of them. ![]() It’s about two sisters, Jayne and June and based in New York. I’ve always found it embarrassing to declare what I want as if saying it out loud would assure its failure and my humiliation but I’m learning to change that.Ĭhan: What has been your favorite book to work on?Ĭhoi: Yolk. I didn’t grow up with creative people around and my immigrant parents are incredibly pragmatic and risk-averse. I had this odd notion that it would be innate and that words would naturally just come pouring out of my head because that’s how it had been described to me by the kids who were on year book and won poetry contests in high school. I’d always adored books and stories but had this ridiculous idea that if I was meant to be a writer, I would know how to do it already. I wanted to major in creative writing at college but was too afraid and self-conscious. The truth is, I’ve always been cowardly about admitting to myself and others exactly what I wanted. My agent at the time (met through MySpace not kidding) didn’t love it so it sat in a drawer for a year and then another agent (over Facebook) asked if I was working on something so I showed them and then we sold it at a considerable auction. I wrote it based on a YouTube tutorial about how to plot a three-act, twenty-seven chapter novel and literally Googled how many words (approx.) when strung together would qualify as a book (80K-ish). From there, I freelanced, worked at MTV for a bit, worked at Vice News on HBO as a host, all while finishing a draft of a Young Adult novel, that became Emergency Contact, a story about love and anxiety that had been kicking around in my head for years.
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