Season 4 · Episode 123 · Revision
with Colson Whitehead, Novelist
A two-voice studio conversation: Nora Ellis and Colson, with clickable questions below. Our interviews are written and voiced dramatisations, drawn from each author's publicly documented remarks on craft.
Why he shelved his best idea until he could carry it, how he rationed the research, and building a novel where every state is a different genre of America.
Nora Ellis in conversation with Colson Whitehead · click a timestamp to jump
Nora Ellis
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.
Colson Whitehead
Happy to be here. Thanks for reading the book instead of the jacket copy.
Nora Ellis
Give the listener the premise.
Colson Whitehead
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.
Nora Ellis
You had that idea sixteen years before you wrote it.
Colson Whitehead
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.
Nora Ellis
How do you research atrocity without drowning in it?
Colson Whitehead
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.
Nora Ellis
What did you want the book to achieve?
Colson Whitehead
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.
Nora Ellis
You switch register constantly, horror to satire to crime. Why?
Colson Whitehead
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.
Nora Ellis
How far do you want it to go?
Colson Whitehead
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.
Nora Ellis
Last thing, for the writer with the file that will not open.
Colson Whitehead
Stop researching and start writing. The research is a very respectable way to hide.
Nora Ellis
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.
Keep listening
Ep. 12603:59Craftwith Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Novelist & essayist
Four years, one abandoned narrator and a shelf of Biafran war memoirs. Adichie on research as a cure for fear, the danger of the single story, and why she threw away two years of work.
Ep. 12503:13Craftwith Kazuo Ishiguro, Novelist, Nobel laureate
On the four week writing 'crash', building a narrator whose feelings are all in the silences, and why he drafts imagining a reader in translation.
Ep. 12402:46Craftwith Margaret Atwood, Novelist & poet
Frame stories, longhand mornings and why she'd rather be called a filing clerk than a prophet. Also: read your contracts more carefully than your reviews.
