WEBVTT NOTE Episode 126: Half of a Yellow Sun: Writing a War You Were Born After 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 You often say you were a child who read everything in the house. What did that do to you as a writer? 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:26.000 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. 3 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:35.000 Half of a Yellow Sun took you four years and a great deal of research. How do you keep research from swallowing a novel? 4 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:58.000 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. 5 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:02.000 Was there a moment you thought the book wouldn't work? 6 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:21.000 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. 7 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:25.000 What is writing for, for you? Not the career — the act. 8 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:42.000 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. 9 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:47.000 One thing to a young writer with a draft they're ashamed of? 10 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:57.000 Be ashamed later. Right now, finish the sentence. Shame is a very good editor and a very bad first drafter.