Tommy Orange on the Unconscious

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Tommy Orange about his new book, Wandering Stars.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: How would you explain that creative moment when the material just meets you?

Tommy Orange: I mean, I think you are getting involved with a novel and with your unconscious when you work on a project over a long period of time. I think the best of what writing is doing a lot of the time is beyond you, and it should be. I think if we were fully in control of everything that was coming out of us when we were making our best creative stuff, it wouldn’t be our best creative stuff. I think the best stuff comes from something that transcends us. So, I think you sort of submit yourself to the mystery of the process with creative works, and you hope that stuff can just drop in, and you don’t have to wrestle over the same sentence 100 times to make it sound right. And there’s plenty of that too, and  that’s why it’s a collaboration, or it’s this involvement where you’re doing it and then it’s being done to you. At the same time.

Mitzi Rapkin: When you were talking about that, I had this visual of the universe, of the stars all above and like that and there’s all these zippers. And the zippers, like, are these openings to this other sort of portal, like there’s all these things behind the zippers. And then when you start doing the creative work, it’s like there’s a zipper with your name on it up there. And when you’re doing the creative work, you’re just mentally opening the zipper, and then, like, these doves come out.

Tommy Orange: I think it is something like that. You know, you hear that all this writing advice, like butt in the chair, it’s not my favorite piece of writing advice, but like, how much of it is about creating the opportunity for it to happen. And I think what a lot of writers don’t like saying, or feel uncomfortable saying, is how much is not coming directly from the conscious you. That’s part of why you go at the keyboard and you don’t know what you’re going to say, but you have to put in the time and figure out what comes out when your fingers are sort of like going at the letters. It’s all more mysterious than we like to admit. And I think that’s true about a lot of things with life.

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Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts where he now teaches. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award. His new novel is Wandering Stars. He lives in Oakland, California.