Lan Samantha Chang on the Joys of Writing Homage

Lan Samantha Chang is the guest. Her new book, The Family Chao, is out now from W.W. Norton.

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From the episode:

Brad Listi: What a good way to land on a plot if you’re struggling to find a story to tell. What better way than to do an homage? I thought also in a similar vein about historical fiction and how wonderful it must be to be writing historical fiction if you’re modeling true events, you know, some sort of political intrigue or span of time that has the structure kind of built in. You know where it’s going to end. And then it becomes a question of how do you execute without copying too much and to distinguish your work from the book that you’re trying to honor.

Lan Samantha Chang: Having written a historical novel, I would say that writing an homage is more fun. Because when I wrote the historical novel, I was constantly worried about whether I was being historically accurate. And I’m aware that it’s possible to write an historical book that is not accurate and just accept that and own it and tell everyone about it. But for me, because I was trying to reconstruct a history—I didn’t know what my parents, to a certain extent, had lived through—I wanted to know as much about it as possible and to be accurate. Real events unfolding in time don’t necessarily unfold in the way that a narrative unfolds. And so, writing historical work means that you have to cut, nip, and tuck things that really shouldn’t be. And I had trouble doing that. It made me uncomfortable. Whereas if you’re writing an homage, there are dramatic bones laid out, and all you have to do is decide what works and doesn’t work with your project.

I will say that I’ve now tried to write two homages, and one of them worked, this one, and then the other one I’ve tried to write has not worked. It didn’t work because I was fascinated by a book that has a completely linear structure, a very specific storyline that ends in triumph. I can’t tell you what it is because for all I know, this is still a life project, in which case it’s bad luck to talk about it.

But it’s got a really specific linear structure that ends in triumph. It’s bildungsroman. I was trying to write a künstlerroman, which is the artist’s version of the bildungsroman. And what I discovered as I was doing it is that my story may not have that really clear linear structure and it may not end in triumph. And if it does not end in triumph, which would be fine, then I need to rethink the structure period. I just could feel it; I could tell that the material and the structure didn’t work, that the homage that I was trying to write wasn’t close enough. I didn’t want it to be so close, either. I wanted to be able to write a book that followed a certain structure and did not call to mind exactly the same book.

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Lan Samantha Chang is the award-winning author of the collection Hunger and the novels The Family Chao, Inheritance and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. A recent Berlin Prize Fellow, she also has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Chang is the first Asian American and the first female director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Iowa City.