From The Interview Archives

Susan Choi's short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals, including the Iowa Review and Epoch magazine, and recently her first novel, The Foreign Student, was published to critical acclaim. This interview was originally conducted for a story on MFA writing programs for Playboy.com, and we're pleased to be running it in its entirety here at Bookmouth.com.

Bookmouth.com: Had you just came out of the Cornell MFA program when The Foreign Student was published?

Susan Choi: I got my degree in January of 95. And then my book came out in Sept. 98, so it wasn't right away.

BM: How many years between undergrad and the MFA program?

SC: Slightly less than two.

BM: When did you decide to enter into the MFA program?

SC: I had always sort of obscurely thought that maybe I would apply to an MFA program after college, but I didn't really decide to apply until the last minute in early 92. It's something that I had been thinking of doing, and that I had always thought I would do eventually, but when I decided to apply it was kind of impulsive.

BM: When you were in that space between applying for the MFA program and graduating from college, were you thinking in terms of being a writer? What were you doing to make ends meet?

SC: I didn't really know what I was going to do. Before I did all of these applications, I was no more certain than I was later of whether or not it would work out that I could be a writer, or even if I wanted to exclusively try. But I wasn't doing anything else, which is kind of why I applied for grad school when I did. I was just knocking around, I had deferred all my student loans, and I was working in a health food store. I did not have a plan. Partly the reason I applied to grad school when I did is because I started being alarmed at not having a plan. Not having a plan seemed like bad idea.

BM: Those were the days...

SC: Yeah, it was great. It didn't last long.

BM: I seem to fall back into that not having a plan every two and a half years.

SC: Ultimately I'm not unhappy with anything I did, but I do wish I hadn't gotten so scared so early. When I think back on it now, I was what, 23, and I had been out of school for less than 24 months. It's not a lot of time to let yourself do whatever you want to do. In retrospect I feel like I should not have panicked so early. But that's what happened.

BM: A lot of people say go live your life and do something unusual instead of going back into school, and that can have a much greater impact on what you end up writing.

SC: Absolutely.

BM: It's sort of romantic advice Ñ go live your life...

SC: I don't think it's that romantic. You'll never know until later whether or not it was worth it, to not go to school, but I'm much more of that mind than 'go get your degree early and promptly.'

BM: But you did go into the program. How much impact did that MFA program have on getting stories published in literary journals and getting the book deal?

SC: Having an MFA does not in and of itself, and this is my belief, it's just my opinion, I'm not saying I have The Knowledge, but in my opinion, having an MFA does not in any way effect anyone's reaction to your writing, at all. No agent is going to be more inclined to accept your manuscript if you have an MFA. No journal is going to be more inclined to publish your story if you have an MFA. You can have no degree of any kind, and if the person in question likes your writing, that's all that matters. It sounds corny, but it's true. The MFA, in terms of getting published, is of very dubious value. I think it's useful in a lot of other ways, but it certainly has no link to whether or not you are going to get published.

BM: In the [Playboy.com] article, several people say the exact same thing ÑÊ an MFA has no impact on getting published Ñ but what about the other side of the MFA, taking the craft out of the equation, and thinking in terms of the people you meet and the other writers that you're involved with?

SC: That is certainly the one major benefit that I gained from being at Cornell. Even that benefit took a long time to show.

The crucial difference that it made was I met a lot of people who were really, really talented who have achieved various levels of success, and because we met each other then, it matters to us now, and we keep each other in mind now, we help each other out now, we recommend each other for things, or we let each other know if there are fellowships that might be good for each other, or if a magazine is looking for somebody or a university is looking for somebody. The MFA was the basis for a network of professional colleagues that I know now, but at the actual time, for me, it wasn't like I had to be among writers to write. Most of the benefits I gained from being in the MFA program I gained over time.

BM: You wrote The Foreign Student after you finished the MFA program?

SC: Yeah.

BM: Were origins of the book started in the MFA program?

SC: Barely. It's not fair to say that the book didn't in any way benefit from the MFA program. It did. I was writing stories that sort of worked over some of the material that I later used in the book. I was experimenting. Also, the MFA program gave me a lot of time to figure out who I was, which ultimately helped me write my book. But the actual, physical work of writing the book all happened after I left.

I actually wrote maybe five pages of that book while I was [at Cornell]. At the time, it wasn't even for a book. It was like a piece of a short story that I never finished that later was incorporated into the book.

BM: When you finished the program, did you say to yourself, 'now it's time to write a book.' What were you thinking right after the program ended and you didn't have anymore classes to go through?

SC: When I finished I was really burnt out... I just felt like I had wasted a lot of time. I felt like I was leaving with nothing in the way of manuscript pages. I moved to New York and concentrated on getting a job and making a living. I didn't know what I was going to do next.

BM: Is this the job at The New Yorker?

SC: Yes.

BM: What were you doing there?

SC: I was fact checking.

BM: Were you writing your novel at night?

SC: Yeah, but not for a long time.

BM: But there aren't that many years between finishing your MFA degree and getting published?

SC: I finished my degree in January 95, and then in May of 95 I moved and got my job. And I really don't even remember giving any thought to writing until the following spring. That summer, fall and winter of that first year in New York, it never even crossed my mind that I could start writing again, because I just didn't know what I would write about. I felt really unfocused, unconvinced that I could do it. I just decided not to think about it. I really don't know how it is that I started writing again. I guess I just started doodling around in the spring of 96, and digging up old unfinished stuff and I found this old unfinished story from [Cornell], again this 5 page thing, and started working on it. I honestly can't remember when I figured out that I had finally pulled my thoughts together and was working on a book. But when I did, at that point I was writing at night and on the weekends. As it progressed and started going better, I devoted more and more of my free time to it.

BM: That kind of discipline, that separates the writers from the published writers.

SC: Yeah, it does, but you know, and I can tell you this from current experience, because I'm working on my second book now and it's been a real struggle, and it's going a lot better than it was, but for a long time it was not going at all and it's like I find it's impossible to have that kind of discipline unless you have a clear sense of what you are doing. And the hardest thing for me is having a clear sense of what I'm doing. Sitting down on a Saturday morning and deciding ÔI'm now going to figure out what I'm writing about,' it doesn't solve the problem. You just have to wait until your mind is in some sort of condition to work well.

That was what happened when I went to Cornell. I didn't have a clear project in mind. A lot of the people I was in the program with, most of them, interestingly enough, older writers, but not all of them, had a much more precise idea of the project they wanted to finish, and they worked much more successfully as a result than I did.

With the MFA, it's necessary to have a clear idea of what you want to do with your time. The great thing about an MFA program...is time... and if you don't have your project ready, for you to use that time wisely, it's a real waste.

That's how I feel about my experience. It wasn't a total waste, I learned a lot, I learned about my habits. I learned that I can't deal real well with unstructured time unless I have a project.

BM: Talk a little bit about the experience of the period after you finished the book.

SC: I feel everyone has a different story of how they found an agent. I don't feel that there's one sure fire way to get an agent. I know people who got one of those books and wrote to the agents in the books and got an agent that way. That's not the way I did it.

I essentially asked everyone I knew who worked in publishing or had ever been published to recommend an agent to me, and that's a great course to take if you live in New York. I wanted people I knew and trusted to tell me who they had heard was good. I called all of the writers from the MFA program who had gotten published and asked them who their agent was and who else they knew about.

BM: One of the things that has been said is that it helps to mention a name in a query letter to an agent.

SC: That's absolutely true. It's a shame, because it sounds like the whole thing is a bunch of insiderism, but it's the truth. In the same way that writers want inside information on an agent, like, Ôis this agent reliable,' Ôhave they gotten good money for their writers,' Ôare they not insane,' in the same way all agents want the same kind of reference for the writers that they're dealing with. They don't want to waste their time, so it's helpful for an agent to look at a letter which says, Ômy friend X, well received published writer, suggested that I talk to you,' because they know that that friend is not going to let you use his or her name as a reference unless they feel you're a likely candidate for publication.

BM: So networking is important...

SC: It's really a question of time. The reason this whole networking thing is so important is just because no one has any time. The truth is I don't know how likely you are to get your manuscript read if you send it blind to an agent and it lands in their slush pile, just because they don't have the time or the manpower to look at that stuff. But if you have a lot of contacts and know a lot of people and you write a terrible book, the contacts aren't going to make a difference.

BM: The long term goal for you, having gone through the MFA program and having a novel under your belt, is to be a writer?

SC: Oh yeah. That is the long term goal, to write a book and then another one after that.

BM: What would your advice be to someone who is an undergrad, that thinks they might want to be a writer?

SC: I would say, and this is advice that I've never, ever taken myself, they should write as much as possible and not be at all impatient about getting published. Once you start writing with the aim of being published, it can blind you to a lot of things, like the quality of your own writing. I would say to that person, write, and find the pleasure in writing, and try to figure out what they like about it and what kind of stuff they want to write. The more you write, the better you write.

I want to buy Susan Choi's book, The Foreign Student.

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