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Shadow
Novelist
PAGE 3 OF 4
SC: I had originally applied to be the assistant to the fiction editor, and a friend of mine then working in the fiction department suggested I try factchecking instead she thought it would be a better day job for a writer than spending my days reading other aspiring writers' fiction. Stimulate the brain without draining the exact part of it that makes fiction. She was right; it was some of the best advice I've ever gotten.
GS: How did you spend your workdays as a factchecker?
SC: Um, factchecking? Not to be flippant.
GS: Were there any benefits to working at The New Yorker from the standpoint of your literary career?
SC: It was great when I needed an agent. I just went up and down the halls asking people what agents theyıd heard were good.
GS: When did you start working on The Foreign Student? What was the impetus that triggered your focus on that novel?
SC: Well, I'd had that fragment in my computer all the while and I just started poking away at it again. I don't really remember what my intentions were. I started working on it again in earnest some time in late 95 or early 96.
GS: Give us a picture of how you wrote The Foreign Student. When did you do your writing? What was your writing routine? How long did it take?
SC: I wrote weeknights after work from eight or so to midnight, and many Saturdays. Once it was underway I was really driven. I didn't have much of a social life. I was finished with a decent draft by May of 97.
GS: You've said that Chuck and Katherine are very similar while seeing each other as being very different. Did you consciously work into the novel the metaphorical parallels between the relationship between Katherine and Addison and the one between the Corea and the U.S.?
SC: No, I was not consciously trying to establish metaphorical parallels at all. I think that kind of premeditation leads to lousy writing, at least for me.
CONTINUED BELOW
GS: How did The Foreign Student evolve from your original conception of it during the writing process?
SC: Katherine was never meant to be such a principal character; she was originally meant to be just one of many people Chuck meets in the U.S. But she was very aggressive. She kept annexing more and more of the book.
GS: Did the novel live up to your original conception of it on a literary level? What aspects of it are you most satisfied with? What aspects of it are you least satisfied with?
SC: I'm proud of the book, but I do wish I'd had more control over the narrative structure of it. I've tried hard to do better with this new book.
GS: Did you have any difficulty in finding an agent to represent you? What aspects of your credentials or earlier experiences proved most significant in finding an agent?
SC: I had no trouble finding an agent, but I had trouble finding a good agent for the long haul. My original agent, the one who sold TFS, then dropped agenting and went off to an Internet startup. Living in New York helped me in terms of the actual finding of agents. As I said above, I just asked everyone that I knew. So many people here work in publishing; everybody has an agent or knows someone who has an agent, or knows someone who knows someone.
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| "It was great when I needed an agent. I just went up and down the halls asking people what agents theyıd heard were good." |