by Mair Allen, MCWC 2021 Conference Assistant
MCWC is excited to welcome Lillian Li to the conference as the 2021 Novel Workshop instructor. Li is the author of Number One Chinese Restaurant. This multi-voiced book was described as “darkly funny and heartbreaking” by the Wall Street Journal. It was an NPR Best Book of 2018 and longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Li’s essays can be found in the New York Times, Granta, One Story, Bon Appetit, Travel & Leisure, The Guardian, and Jezebel. Li’s MCWC 2021 workshop will focus on the set piece in the novel, a self contained portion of writing that can elevate underlying aspects of the narrative. Li answered a few questions for MCWC about her process, her parents, and how characters can shape a book, but not write it for you.
Your novel Number One Chinese Restaurant came out in 2019 and started out as a short story. Can you talk about how you worked through the expansion?
Transitioning from a short story to a novel was tricky at first because I assumed I could take the plot from the short story and retrofit it onto something novel-length. I had never written a novel before, and clearly hadn’t thought very critically about how someone does write a novel. You can sometimes take shortcuts in your writing, but this wasn’t one. Luckily a teacher diagnosed the problem and helped me find the right scale of events, which altered everything that the short story was, even the questions I was interested in asking. From there, the novel quickly became its own thing.
Two pieces on your website are candid portraits of your parents. How do you approach writing about people you have close relationships with?
Besides my parents, I actually don’t write about people I am close to. Maybe because it’s not only that I’m close to my parents…My mom likes to joke that I’m “obsessed” with them. I write about anything that I think about a lot, anything that I’m invested in trying to understand for years on end. With novels especially, which take so long to write—sometimes it’s less about sustaining your interest and curiosity in a subject over the years than having a prodigious, and even unhealthy level of it to begin with. So I guess my approach is to only write about people I am or have been obsessed with.
You wrote your book in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. How has your writing process changed outside of that environment?
I’ve had to learn the hard truth that I do need to be disciplined to be a writer. With a student’s schedule, I could afford to write when I wanted to and stay up all night writing a short story from start to finish. I’ve also learned how to write more in a vacuum, without workshops and other readers easily available.
In your interview in Midwest Gothic you were asked about upcoming projects and said, “There’s no plot, but the characters are feeling realer every day.” You have also mentioned in several interviews that you kept all the characters from the draft of Number One Chinese Restaurant. What does your character building process look like and how does it shape your narrative?
I’m not good at tricking myself. Which means, even if I know that my writing process requires that I go through multiple aimless drafts in order to understand what my characters would or would not do, who they are and who they are to each other, I can’t set out and plan to write plot-less drafts in order to find my characters. I’m not writing hundreds of pages of glorified character sketches on purpose. I have to honestly think that I have a plot, a reason for these characters to exist and move around. I had to unlearn the fact that my first drafts are for exploring and building character when I started my second book because I ended up with aimless characters who had no purpose because their only purpose was to tell me who they were. Now I write every draft very earnestly, but also flexibly. I let the characters change what the book is about, but I don’t rely on them to build the book for me.
In your interview with Vivian Ludford in Mythos you say, you “wanted to expand the landscape of Asian American writing” and talk about the writer as a prism for experience. Can you speak on how you see personal narratives working as challenges to dominant narratives?
I can only speak to my own experience, which was growing up in a town where my background was unremarkable even though, a few towns over, I would have been seen as different from the norm. Being Chinese American with well-educated immigrant parents was a dominant narrative in my hometown, and so what I’m often interested in is challenging that dominant narrative, the one I belong to and the one that I can sometimes be blind to. There are many dominant narratives outside the one of white America, outside the ones that dominate each of us, and I think that personal narratives can challenge what’s dominant because they are a challenge to ourselves.
To find out more about Lillian Li, visit her website at www.lillianliauthor.com.
General registration is now open! To register for the workshop of your choice, visit mcwc.org/2021-registration. There is no application required to attend MCWC and registration includes the morning workshop and all afternoon and evening events. All events will be held over Zoom this year. Workshops are limited to ten participants and all spots are first come, first served.