Nora Ellis: You often say you were a child who read everything in the house. What did that do to you as a writer?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: It made writing feel ordinary, in the best way. Books were furniture in our house, so making one didn't seem like a mystical act. It seemed like work you could learn. And because I read mostly English novels first, I also learned early that the people in books didn't look like me. That absence is what pushed me to write my own.
Nora Ellis: Half of a Yellow Sun took you four years and a great deal of research. How do you keep research from swallowing a novel?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I read until I stopped feeling afraid. That's my measure. Fear makes you over-explain, and over-explaining kills a scene. Once I could hear the way people spoke at a particular kind of dinner table in 1967, I put the books away and stayed with the characters. History gives you weather. It shouldn't give you speeches.
Nora Ellis: Was there a moment you thought the book wouldn't work?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Many. There's a version of it in a drawer with an entirely different narrator, and it was dead on the page. I had to admit that after two years. That's the part nobody tells you about: the courage isn't starting, it's throwing away the thing you have already paid for with your life.
Nora Ellis: What is writing for, for you? Not the career — the act.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: To insist on complication. Single stories flatten people, and flattened people are easy to harm. When I write a character who is difficult and loving and wrong all at once, I'm arguing for that complication. That's the whole purpose, really. Everything else is publishing.
Nora Ellis: One thing to a young writer with a draft they're ashamed of?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Be ashamed later. Right now, finish the sentence. Shame is a very good editor and a very bad first drafter.