Jinwoo Chong

How did you become a writer? I started writing when I was nine or ten years old: a succession of really terrible derivations of things I was reading and obsessing over at the time: The Hunger Games, The Magic Tree House, etc., come to mind. I assume, all the usual suspects for someone my age growing up in the 2000s. You become a writer when you write, and forever after, so yes, I was a writer back then. I did not become a published writer until I was twenty-five, when the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum published a short piece of fiction in their annual anthology.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My debut novel, Flux, was inspired by—among other things—Ellison's Invisible Man, Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Yu's Interior Chinatown, the short stories of Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Carmen Maria Machado. I am inspired most days by my dad, and his dad. 

When and where do you write? I write almost exclusively at night, after dinner but before any sleepiness has set in. I also tend to work in short, intense bursts that can take over an entire week/weekend, then come to an abrupt halt for a month or more.

What are you working on now? I'm writing a new novel, something more joyous, grounded, and autobiographical than this first one. I turned to writing and reading during the pandemic as a way to cheer myself up, and as a result found myself avoiding especially sad or desolate fiction. This has bled, somewhat, into the types of stories I'd like to tell moving forward.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I seem to have the opposite problem: I am sometimes distracted by so many different ideas that I have a hard time making any real progress on any one thing.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Stephen King wrote in On Writing that he often abandons his work for months at a time, comes back to it, and becomes energized by all of the opportunities for revision that reveal themselves after he's taken some time away from it. It is, genuinely, the only thing that I've tried that helps me revise.

What’s your advice to new writers? Writing and publishing are so different. They are two halves of the lifecycle of anything you put out into the world, in which it is at first yours alone, and, after you publish it, in which it no longer belongs to you but to everyone else. New writers: learn to let it go. Work on something new. I think about this every time a bad review begins to sting me. What am I going to do? Go back and change it? There's no point being upset. 

Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, published March 21, 2023 in the US and UK from Melville House. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, LitHub, Chicago Quarterly Review, andElectric Literature. He received the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Fiction from The Southern Review and a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart Prize anthology. He received an MFA from Columbia University and is an editorial assistant at One Story.