WEBVTT NOTE Episode 123: Sixteen Years of Waiting: Colson Whitehead on Getting Good Enough 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:19.000 Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis. My guest today has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, which is a sentence very few writers get to hear: Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys, Harlem Shuffle, and the novel we are here to talk about, The Underground Railroad. Colson, welcome. 2 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:26.000 Happy to be here. Thanks for reading the book instead of the jacket copy. 3 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:30.000 Give the listener the premise. 4 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:53.000 A young woman named Cora escapes a Georgia plantation on an underground railroad that is, in this book, an actual railroad. Real trains, real tunnels. Every state she surfaces in is a different American experiment in what to do with Black people. It is a slave narrative built like a series of nightmares with a timetable. 5 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:59.000 You had that idea sixteen years before you wrote it. 6 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:14.000 I did. I had it in two thousand, and I was too scared. It needed a writer who could handle the violence honestly, and I was not that person yet. Waiting was not laziness. Some books need you to become someone else first. 7 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:20.000 How do you research atrocity without drowning in it? 8 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:32.000 Mornings only. Notes, not immersion. And then something extremely stupid on television at night. You owe the material accuracy, you do not owe it your health. 9 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:35.000 What did you want the book to achieve? 10 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:54.000 I wanted the reader to feel the machinery of it. Not slavery as an atmosphere, as a system with paperwork and engineers. And I wanted Cora to be a person, not a symbol. If she is only a symbol, the reader gets to admire her instead of walking beside her. 11 00:01:54.000 --> 00:01:59.000 You switch register constantly, horror to satire to crime. Why? 12 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:12.000 Because I would be bored otherwise, and a bored writer makes a bored reader. Also, the jokes matter. Humour is how people actually survive heavy things, so a book without any is lying slightly. 13 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:16.000 How far do you want it to go? 14 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:31.000 Into schools, mostly. Prizes are lovely and they last a week. A book on a syllabus gets a new set of sixteen year olds every September for twenty years. That is the reach I actually want, and I will do the podcasts and the posts to get it. 15 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:36.000 Last thing, for the writer with the file that will not open. 16 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:43.000 Stop researching and start writing. The research is a very respectable way to hide. 17 00:02:43.000 --> 00:03:07.000 Colson Whitehead, thank you. As with every guest, our work continues after the recording: The Underground Railroad is on our promoted books page this month and going out to our readers everywhere. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell one person about this episode. I'm Nora Ellis. Thank you for listening to Behind the Book.