Nora Ellis: You had the idea for The Underground Railroad sixteen years before you wrote it. Why the wait?
Colson Whitehead: I didn't think I was good enough yet, and I was right. The premise — a literal railroad — needed a writer who could handle real brutality without flinching or wallowing, and at thirty I would have made it clever. Clever would have been an insult to the material. So I wrote other books and got older and finally ran out of excuses.
Nora Ellis: How do you research something that painful and stay functional?
Colson Whitehead: Slave narratives, in the mornings, with a time limit. I read the primary accounts because the language in them is more exact than anything I'd invent. Then I stopped at lunch and did something stupid and human, like watching bad television. You can't live in it. You visit, take notes, and come home.
Nora Ellis: Each state in the novel works like a different genre. Was that structural from the start?
Colson Whitehead: Yes — that was the map I made before drafting. Each state is a different America and therefore a different kind of storytelling: horror here, satire there, a false utopia. It let me write about how the country changes its costume without changing its intentions.
Nora Ellis: Why do you write?
Colson Whitehead: To find out what I think, which I usually don't know until page two hundred. And to be useful to the fourteen-year-old version of me who was looking for a book with people like him in it and couldn't find one on the shelf.
Nora Ellis: One thing you'd tell a writer who's afraid of a big subject?
Colson Whitehead: Wait if you must, but don't wait for permission. Wait until you have the craft, then go in and don't look away.