Jack Wang

How did you become a writer?

I decided on writing relatively late. My first year at the University of Toronto, I dropped a full-year course in calculus at Christmastime — I was pretty much failing — and took another course in the spring called, simply, The Short Story. That’s when I got turned on to literature and had the first inkling of becoming a writer myself. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Influence is a cumulative and lifelong thing. Every book is a “rep” in the thousands of reps you need to become a writer, and everything you like or dislike influences you in some way. Recently, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan helped me unlock some things in my own writing.

When and where do you write? 

A few years ago, my wife and I renovated the second floor of our house in Ithaca, NY, and we converted the master closet into a small windowless office. That’s where I write. I like to write in the morning, but I’m a slow writer, so I often push on into the afternoon. 

What are you working on now? 

A novel called The Riveters, about Chinese Canadians who served in shipyards and various branches of the military during the Second World War to earn citizenship and the franchise. The novel is due next year.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Yes. In my experience, there are different kinds of writer’s block, each with different causes and remedies. One is a kind of existential block, when you don’t yet know what your true subject is. You want to write, but you don’t really know what story is yours to tell. There’s no remedy for this kind of block except to keep reading and living and coming into yourself as a person.

 Another kind of block is rooted in perfectionism. It’s when your skills don’t yet meet your own lofty expectations for yourself as a writer. Jennifer Egan says, “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly.” Give yourself permission to write badly, put in the reps to get better, and eventually your skills and your expectations will meet somewhere in the middle.

Yet another kind of block is your unconscious mind telling you that something isn’t right about the work. Sometimes our intuition senses problems before our conscious mind does. In that case, you have to obey your instincts and try to puzzle out how to approach things differently.

Finally, there’s a kind of writer’s block that’s rooted in lack of information. You don’t know enough to make the scene or the story convincing to yourself, much less anyone else. Sometimes, the answer lies in imagination, but often it means doing some research — sometimes deep dives — until you have the knowledge to make the scene or the story seem “real.”

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Lauren Groff says to write where the heat is. You don’t have to write in a linear, orderly, or plodding way. Write whatever’s on fire in your imagination.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Remember Flaubert: “Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.”

Jack Wang is the author of We Two Alone (House of Anansi, HarperVia), winner of the 2020 Danuta Gleed Literary Award for best debut collection in English in Canada. His stories have been longlisted for the Journey Prize and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2014-15, he held the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and he is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He teaches writing at Ithaca College.