how to structure a fine book

JULI MIN IS THE editor-in-chief and fiction editor of the Shanghai Literary Review. Currently, a resident of Shanghai, she was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in New Jersey and has just published her debut novel entitled Shanghailanders, with Spiegel & Grau. Listen in and read along as she and I discuss how to structure a fine book, and so much more.

Juli: Thank you. It’s an incredible honor to be here.

Marion: Well, I loved this book and I loved it for many reasons, but let’s just jump right in. It’s got family secrets, the future, multiple voices, a story told backwards in time from 2040 to 2014. Any one of these is a large assignment, but taking on all of them is ambitious indeed, and it pays off beautifully. It’s a highly skilled debut novel. So let’s jump right in first and talk about structure. I work with writers all day long, and I heard that little sound you just made. Yeah, I can say with great assurance that book structure is the single thing that makes more writers drink gin straight out of the bottle than any other aspect of storytelling.

So I’m going to ask you a couple of questions about it, but let’s start with working backwards in time. As a reader, working backwards works really well in support of the book’s themes, but my question as a writer is what were your influences in making that structure decision? Were there other books that you saw had done this well or hadn’t done it well? And was this decision to work backwards in support of the book’s themes or what?

Juli: Yes, thank you so much for that question. It certainly was in support of the book’s themes. The book is largely about change over time. The book is about how a family changes and grows over the span of about a quarter of a century, 25 years, the couple has been married. The book is also about the way that a country changes, how a couple changes, and then how an individual changes as a result of all of those factors. And when you’re trying to investigate change in a character, at the very least, I think one very kind of classic way to approach that is through backstory. And with backstory, you have so many options. You have flashback, you have memories, you can talk about the past or you can just move forward from the past.

One thing that I wanted to question throughout the novel was how much can we ever really know a person? How much can we ever really know the people even closest to us, our husband, our wife, our children, our sisters? And it’s my belief that on many levels, human beings are unknowable and the deepest parts of a self are unknown to others and sometimes even unknown to the self. And so I really wanted to play with that idea of unknowability and the way that the understanding of a person can unfold in a surprising way. And so when we start in the future with these characters and we start with Leo and Eko, the married couple who are … They’re both individually basically thinking about leaving their marriage and their family and escaping. And when we first encounter them, we read them and we judge them and we experience them in a certain way. And moving backwards in time, I wanted to constantly dig deeper and challenge the reader to new interpretations and new understandings, new dimensions of a character and a person.

Marion: Yeah. And it works. That’s exactly what it does. Anyway, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, but I love that. Yes, go ahead.

Juli: No. As to your question about influences, there were so many. I started the novel with basically a bunch of characters and I wrote into them, and then I thought kind of after the fact, how can I connect them and what structure can I use to portray the themes and the characters more kind of clearly? And I read so many different types of novels that kind of brought together different characters and recurring characters in different ways. So for example, I read Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth. I reread Dubliners, which is a big influence on this novel by James Joyce. I reread Drown by Junot Diaz. I read Anagrams by Lorrie Moore. So just across the spectrum, writers who are working with sort of piecemeal narratives, rotating narratives but doing them in really interesting ways. And I remember I had this aha moment after I read Drown by Diaz and that book, which is kind interconnected short stories, it’s from the perspective largely of the son of a family whose father had never been a part of his life.

And then the last chapter of that book is the son imagining basically the father’s story and the father’s reasons for leaving the family. And it was that act of incredible generosity and empathy on the part of the son. It moved me so deeply, and even though it doesn’t move backwards completely, that book, the last chapter was a backwards look. And I kind of realized, “Oh, that works so beautifully in surprising the reader and also telling us so much about this character who’s willing and able to look back and imagine from someone else’s perspective.” And I wanted that for my readers. And it was kind of after that, reading that and working through how that works, that I gave it a try with all the material that I had, and I realized that that was the way it had to be.

Marion: Oh, I love that. And it’s so full. The answer is so full and the references are so great. And when in doubt, I read Lorrie Moore. So there we go. So just love her.

Juli: So good.

Marion: Yeah, she’s so good. What about the multiple voices, the points of view in Shanghailanders, we get to witness the shared and separate lives of the Yang family over time through their eyes and the eyes of others. So what advantages does that give the writer, and what themes does that allow you to explore more fully if you’ve got people dollying around through the story?

Juli: Yeah, Marion, my initial goal with the novel was to capture Shanghai, was to capture beyond Shanghai, I wanted to capture contemporary Shanghai. And I felt like part of the mission then was to capture as broad of a swath of its population as I could. And as the story narrowed down, because it wasn’t all within the Yang household, there were characters who were white and European. And over time they became Eko, parts of Eko who is Japanese-French. And so the stories kind of merged into a household as I wrote them. But the whole urge, the writing urge was to try to capture a place. And in order to do that, I felt like I wanted to capture not just as many kind of people across the age and gender spectrum, but also across the socioeconomic spectrum. So we have the Yang family who are kind of crazy rich Asians living in Shanghai.

Marion: Kind of, yeah.

Juli: They’re extremely, extremely wealthy and they have so much privilege. And so we see their perspectives over time. So for example, we see the youngest daughter Kiko when she’s 16, but then we have kind of a glimpse of her when she’s 5 years old. So we see kind of how people change over time and how this family has changed over time. But then we also learn about the backstories of their nanny of years who has basically helped raise the children. And we learn about her, where she comes from. She comes from the Northeast of China, and she’s kind of a transplant to Shanghai. And she used to work in a factory, and she still kind of longs for this one child that she took care of and has a deep affection and kind of connection, attachment to one particular child that she’s taken care of in her career.

And then we also see a story from the driver, the private driver of the Yang family. And his story is kind of action-packed, a “Fast and Furious,” race story through the streets of Shanghai late at night. He’s kind of this natural talented driver, and he has his own incredible story about a childhood living in kind of a shanty town that’s set to be demolished. So yeah, I wanted to portray as much as possible, of course, within the confines of a novel and through the lens of one singular household, kind of the incredible disparity of this place, Shanghai and the real extremes in terms of wealth and poverty and experiences that this place can offer.

Marion: Well, it’s very effective, and whenever I interview a writer, I think it’s important to get some sense of how they work. So keeping the structure straight, just in the last structure question I have, my audience has heard of all matters from index cards for each character, to timelines on paper hung up in offices, to those writers who still carry it all in their heads. So how did you construct it? Can you just give us a sense of where this all resides in terms of the intent and what you know about each character outside of the printed page?

Juli: I’m very much like traditional pen and notebook kind of writer. And I just start with notes. I have just messy notes in one particular type of notebook that I’ve used for years and just keep buying the same one. And I don’t have a very organized way of doing it, but I write, just every day I journal and I think through what I want to accomplish that day in terms of my life, my personal life, my professional life, my writing life. And in terms of initial thoughts for the book, they were actually born out of an incredible fatigue that I had with this large historical fiction project set in the glorious Paris of the East, 1930s era of Shanghai. And for me, I needed a break from that really huge project that’s still unfinished, but I really wanted to capture kind of snapshots of life in contemporary Shanghai. I wanted something that I didn’t have to do a lot of research for, that I could just kind of …

I’ve lived in Shanghai for the past 10 years almost, and I’ve met so many people along the way. I’ve become a mother, I married in this city. And so all of the experiences that I know very intimately about adulthood and career and marriage and motherhood, I drew from a lot of those. And I drew from my friends and other people that I knew in the city. And when I sat down to just take a break from that other project, I just thought about kind of characters that I could write and aspects of the city that I wanted to capture. So for example, with the driver, his story was so clear to me from the beginning. I knew that I wanted to have a race scene. I wanted to challenge myself to write something action packed because as a writer before, I think probably a few years back, my inclination was always to write these very introspective stories about people walking around and having thoughts. And I wanted to push against that and challenge myself to write something that was incredibly cinematic and action packed and fast.

Marion: Well, you open with the Maglev, so that works.

Juli: Yes. Yeah.

Marion: That was a really interesting thing you did, setting up your novel, which is so difficult. It requires that a reader gets drawn in, but you set yourself on the Shanghai Maglev or the Shanghai Transrapid, which American listeners, I have to say American readers are going to be very surprised to hear is a magnetic levitation train and the world’s first commercial high-speed Maglev. It has a maximum cruising speed of 300 kilometers per hour. This opening scene gives us, oh, and it’s the Maglev in 2040, so it’s on its two millionth plus ride. So you do rather hurdle into the book with that. And I love that. So were you riding on the Maglev when you were noting in the notebook that you’re going to use the Maglev? Is that what you’re saying? You’re carrying the notebook around and you’re grabbing things from the city. And I loved, by the way, how much Shanghai is a character too. Yes. I thought that was very effective.

So you’re carrying a notebook around, you’ve journaled a lot, and you’re writing these things down. The Maglev, for instance, is just a fabulous way to jump in and get us there. I just loved that. There’s so much, I feel like you almost gave us snapshots of Shanghai in so many ways. It’s very effective. Very, very effective. So do you carry that notebook with you everywhere?

Juli: I don’t. I don’t carry a notebook with me. If I see something inspiring, I guess I’ll just jot it into my iPhone in notes. But no, the writing happens in the morning and the writing happens at my desk with my notebook. I’m very much an early bird. I kind of wake up naturally, it’s like 5:30 now, but I wake up very early naturally, and I have a lot of energy in the morning, so I love to do my drafting and thinking through projects in the morning, and I kind of save reading for afternoons when I can. But yeah, the Maglev opening of the book is actually an homage to a short story by Eileen Chang, the writer who wrote about Shanghai life in the 1930s and 40s.

And she wrote this incredible short story about these people on a trolley when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation during World War II. And the trolley that’s just going through Shanghai just shuts down, there’s an air drill, a war drill, and the people within the trolley have this incredible interaction. And it’s this really modernist piece that’s experimenting with narratives and jumping between narratives and train of thought. It’s beautiful. And I wanted to rewrite that story through the future. So in my novel, this transportation method is like you said, 300 kilometers an hour versus a kind of simple trolley kind of lumbering down the street. And in her story, the characters, the residents of Shanghai, they have interactions. Whereas mine, in my novel, the interactions are almost kind of imaginary and they’re kind of projections of the characters projecting their fantasies onto one another, and it’s happening in a blink of an eye as opposed to this stop. So the things are sped up and fast forwarded, and yet there’s something still, I hope, essentially Eileen Chang about it, and of course, Shanghainese about that scene.

Marion: Oh yes. Well, I like the reference, and I’m fascinated by that because I know you hold an MFA in fiction for Warren Wilson, and you studied Russian and comparative literature at Harvard, and I read in your Substack about you gave some insight into your reading Madame Bovary and that you are dedicating yourself to the study of writing. And I was fascinated by that because here’s someone who’s got a debut novel with a really good publisher, and we think, I think, a lot of people think that, “Oh, she’s got everything she needs on her to just write this stuff.” And I think, no, you’ve got the Eileen Chang influence, but you mentioned Junot Diaz, you mentioned Lorrie Moore and reading Flaubert’s masterpiece, Madame Bovary. It’s lovely and generous of you to offer those.

So you’ve studied a great deal of fiction. So talk to me about how reading changes if it does, when you’re engaged as a novelist? I always tell writers I work with who are writing memoir to stop reading memoir and read literary fiction, and I have my reasons, but what are you watching for, studying, noticing that maybe am mere plot-driven read at an earlier time did not allow, when you read Eileen Chang again, or you read Junot Diaz or Lorrie Moore or Madame Bovary again, what are you now mining for? Are you mining differently? I think we do, but I wonder what you think.

Juli: Gosh, what a rich question. I guess my first way in will be to say that I think that, although it sounds ironic coming from someone who studied literature for so many years, and with such seriousness, I feel as a novelist that I have to constantly recommit myself to the study of writing and the act of reading. And I think that’s in part due to changes in my life and different jobs that I’ve had, various amounts of time, motherhood. I remember after I finished my MFA and after I had worked within the structure of an MFA, carving out time to finish assignments on a deadline, I remember in that new space post-graduation, and I had had two children over the course of my MFA.

Marion: Wow.

Juli: In some way that was really helpful because I had been forced to always carve time out for my writing and for production and reading because there were always assignments and faculty waiting for that. And then in that new space post-graduation, I remember I was so focused on generating and I had kind of lost the time for reading. My daughter’s now four years old, and I remember over the course of her life really, and then my son’s life, I’ve had to remind myself almost that I love reading. I’m always trying to read. I love reading. I’m always trying to find time to read. But when it comes down to it, I always push myself to write and generate and edit when I have those snippets of time as a mother of young children.

And so yeah, just kind of remembering that reading is, and the studying of literature and craft is as important as sitting down and actually getting words on the page if not more important sometimes. And so that post on my Substack was a kind of reminder that yes, reading has to be almost like 50% of the effort. And if not more, and when I read something like Madame Bovary and anything, I guess in terms of the study of writing, I’m looking for moments of surprise and delight when writers are doing something new and exciting with language, with form, with structure. With Madame Bovary, for example, there’s a sex scene in a carriage, like a horse-drawn carriage.

Marion: Oh yeah.

Juli: Yeah. And I had never read that scene before. There are gaps in my knowledge, of course, in my reading. And I had never read that scene before. And the way that he … Basically, he doesn’t show us inside the carriage where Madame Bovary is having sex with her lover. He basically lists the streets of Paris that they’re roaming and how the driver of the carriage is like, “Well, why are they driving here and there? And why does he keep saying ‘Keep going?'”

Marion: Yes.

Juli: And it’s like an LOL moment. It’s like a laugh out loud moment that is so smart, so funny. It was better than reading the sex scene was to see the carriage like hurtling about in this janky manner and the driver listing kind of the streets that he was forced to drive around in Paris. And it’s like two pages of streets and just kind of thinking about why he made that choice and what it gives me as a reader and how he was able to pull that off in terms of the timing and the length. Just thinking through that and really analyzing that moment of delight and surprise. This is the kind of thing that I look for.

Marion: Well, it’s a great reminder, and I think you’re right. I think you can’t write unless you’re going to read and one begets the other. But it’s a great reminder about that scene in Madame Bovary. Thank you for that. I love that. So as we wrap this up, I know you say on your Substack that you’re writing another novel, and as you do so, is there anything specific you can say that Shanghailanders has allowed you to learn that you will be using again? A different year or a different way of looking at Shanghai? What does one of your books beget in terms of the next?

Juli: So I’ve been writing my whole life, Shanghailanders is not the first book that I’ve tried to write, but it’s the first book that I wrote really after becoming a mother. And there are all those technicalities of being a mother, like biting out moments, small pockets of time in your day. But really, I think the impact of writing this novel at the age that I am and with the experience that I have is a kind of fearlessness that has come and a kind of love of acceptance of myself as a writer. I’ll tell you something kind of funny. I met my own mother in a recent trip to the US, and I gave her a copy of the book and she started reading it right next to me, which is the most awkward thing to have somebody … And my book has these sexy moments, and she kind of stopped reading after a while, and she looked at me and she was like, “Wow, you’re not a kid anymore.”

And that moment was … I knew she was going to read it. I’ve dedicated the book to her. And I felt in that moment, a kind of … Like being seen, but also as a mother, I felt how it was being seen with a kind of loving acceptance. It wasn’t my mother judging me for writing this book that is in a lot of ways about mothers and daughters and grandmothers and sisters and family and sex and love, all these very mature topics. I knew that she would always accept me for what I wrote. And as a mother, having a daughter and having a son, when you become a mother, you realize that you have a capacity to love and accept anything that your child will throw at you.

And I think that love that I felt for another human, for my own child made me feel very fearless in terms of writing whatever I wanted to write, writing whatever I could, and accepting myself for who I am as a writer and what I wanted to tell, the stories that I wanted to express. Not caring whether people would think, “Oh, this is Juli’s story. Oh, Juli, is this a character or that character?” Or not caring that people would think that my novel is good or bad. It is what I could write in the moment and the best that I can do and the best story that I can tell.

And I think that transformation of really just accepting someone and knowing that someone accepts me and loves me in that same expansive, incredible, unimaginable way that you can’t imagine, you can’t truly understand until you have a child, I think. It gave me a kind of fearlessness and I think a maturity and a kind of self-acceptance that I think I will take with me in the future. And also just the drive to do something true that I felt capable of doing. And now of course, having written it and had this incredible journey with my agent, my editor, my publishers, I mean, I hope I can take that same fearlessness and acceptance into future projects.

Marion: Well, we certainly hope so too. That’s a wonderful answer. I love the laying out of hands from your mother to you, from your children to you, to fearlessness. That’s a great answer. Thank you, Juli. Thank you so much for the generous answers. Thank you so much for writing the book, and thank you so much for talking to me today. I genuinely appreciate it.

Juli: Thank you. Thank you for the incredible work that you do. Yeah, it’s really a blessing to writers.

Marion: Thank you. The author is Juli Min. See more on her at juli min dot work. Her debut novel is Shanghailanders, just out from Spiegel & Grau. Get it wherever books are sold. And if your library does not have it, ask them to order it. Read her on Substack at Shanghai Baby. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of the Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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