Celeste Ng and Adam Grant

 Adam Grant's podcast "Re:thinking" had a segment on Celeste Ng whose new book is "Our Missing Hearts." Here's the transcript.

On Noticing & Lowering the Filters

I think that's right though. One of the things that I love just is noticing stuff, and it's for better or for worse, it's, it's one of my, my quirks. And if you go on a walk with me, or you spend any time with me, you will probably be treated to a plethora of just little things that I notice that are really not relevant to whatever it is that we're actually doing. But that's sort of how my brain works.

If you walk around with a toddler, and I am, I realize as I dive into this, comparing myself to a toddler, but the toddler toddlers are always like, “Oh my God, look at that. Wow, look at this. Hey, look at that. Hey, there's a crack in the sidewalk. Oh, look at this. Hey, that grass is really tall. Did you know grass could get that tall? I think it's taller than me.” You know, this constant stream of observations that I think for, for most of us as adults, we learn to, um, tamp down for, for lack of a better term. You, you can't be commenting on that all the time. And one of the joys of being a writer is that I get to indulge that noticing aspect. I get to write it down and then ideally I get to take some of those things that I notice and try and find a little bit of meaning in them. Um, it's rare for adults, I think, to get a moment to slow down and notice. We’re, we have to move faster because there are things we have to do. And I like it when any kind of art, music, visual art, poetry, novels can stop you and go, “Hey, look at this for a minute.”

On Lowering the Filters

Adam Grant:  One of the things that I think is unusual about you, compared to other people who have that noticing skill, is they have a hard time raising their attentional filters. Like I know a lot of people who are very good at noticing, who can't stop noticing. They can't turn it off. And they end up being incredibly creative, curious minds, uh, with less to show for their time than they hoped in a lot of cases, right? And here you are kind of lowering the filters, noticing these things, but then raising them and saying, “I'm gonna write a story and it's gonna move people.” Do you have habits or strategies for navigating that tension? Is there a tension there?

On Writing as a process for crystalizing ideas

Adam Grant: I think it is and it isn't. So on the one hand, I, I strongly agree. I think that a lot of people see writing as a vehicle for communicating ideas. But it's also a tool for crystallizing ideas.So often I find that what's fuzzy in my head becomes clear on the page. And that when I try to write down, you know, an inkling, it could become an insight, or in some cases, I'll see the gap in my knowledge or my logic, or when I'm trying to spell something out in writing, I have to articulate my assumptions. I have to address counterarguments, and I guess I think a lot about the observation of how can I know what I think until I see what I say.

Advance the plot or reveal character

Grant: Vonnegut said that every sentence should advance plot or reveal character.  Ng: I think he's right, but I think those categories are very broad, and so sometimes, you know, you have a sentence that is there kind of just for decoration and beauty, but in a way that's, that's telling you something about the plot and the character.

On Learn to Write/Tracing

Grant: What surprised you that you learned being trained in the formal skill of writing that you didn't know going in?

Celeste Ng: I think one of the things that surprised me, related to what we were talking about, is that how much of writing is reading. And that writing, you know, it wasn't just that I needed to be sat down and made to write a lot of stories, although I was, and that helped a lot, but I learned so much from reading things that I wouldn't ordinarily have picked up. You know, books that I was assigned, or books that my friends or people in my cohort recommended and I went, “I've never heard of that. Let me go read it.”

Um, that was as much of the educational experience as being in the class, and that is said with no disrespect to my amazing teachers in the classes where I really learned a lot, but that I learned so much from other writers and I learned partly by imitating and then partly by shaping myself against other people. Not to say, you know, I don't like what you do, but I was like, “Oh, you're writing about that, but that's, that's not what's drawing me. What is drawing me?” And I had to figure that out.

And I really started to think of writing as something almost collaborative in that way. You don't always work with someone else on the page, but you're almost always in conversation with something when you're writing, or someone. And in that sense, it is a collaboration. You're speaking to someone or you're trying to explain someone to someone else. There's always another party in there that's, that's kind of part of that circuitry.

Adam Grant: When you talk about imitating, I think about, uh, Malcolm Gladwell literally learning to write by typing out William F. Buckley novels and getting a feel for the, the arc of a, a story. I, I imagine you didn't do it that literally, did you?

Celeste Ng: I didn't do it that literally. No. But I know a lot of writers who do that, who, um, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's not alone in kind of typing sentences that he loves and admires. I, I know a lot of writers who have done that, um, in one way or another. Even as simple as there's a poem you love or a passage you love and you copied into your notebook to keep it for later.

There is something about retracing the rhythm of those words that you know, this, this will be fodder for future neuroscientists, but I don't know if you are kind of engraving a neural pathway. I don't know what it is that you're doing. But, something about the act of going over those words again, whether you're rereading them over, whether you're copying them, whether you're typing them out, um, it kind of teaches, you almost like the rhythm. It, like it's learning how to improvise on the piano, kind of like that. Um, so for me, when I was imitating. It was more that I would read a book or a story that kind of blew my mind and I would go, “Well, I didn't know you were allowed to do that. I wanna do that.” You know, and then I would try to do that. And of course, what came out even when I was trying to imitate, would be very different. But it was my way of kind of feeling out what I wanted to do.

Adam Grant: It's fascinating how you called that tracing, because it, it makes me think immediately of learning to draw: where the first thing that you do, if you're trying to learn a new technique as an artist, is to trace someone else's work. And that's part of building your skill. We're not taught to do that as writers.

Celeste Ng: No, and I, you know, when you said tracing, it reminded me also of being taught to write cursive. 

I remember, in I would say about second or third grade, having to trace. Here's the letter A. Trace these, and then it would go to just dots and it would go to just the lines, and you'd have to kind of create them on your own. And we're, I, I don't think most kids are taught to do that. At least my son is not.

So you're right. There is something about, again, just kind of following in the footsteps or in the pen marks of someone else that I think is an important part of figuring out. You're like, “I don't want my line to go there. I wanted to go a different way.” But that's, you've learned something there too.

Adam Grant: So tracing seems like a beginner skill in a way. If you move to the intermediate level I think the next phase, at least for me as a writer, and I'm not the kind of writer that you are in any way, shape, or form, but, one of the things that, that I found enormously helpful was to internalize the style and taste of other writers, and then think through how would they tell this story? Where would they begin? What would the reveal be for them?

And you know, that, that gave me, it felt like it gave me more degrees of freedom. To say, “Oh, now I could think of telling the same story seven different ways.” Or “Maybe now I'm actually not focusing on the right character at all or the right story at all because I've internalized the point of view of a particular writer I admire. Um, and now I can imagine a possibility I wouldn't have seen before.” Did, did you go through a phase like that as well?

Celeste Ng:Yeah, I think I did and thought of it as almost reverse engineering what writers that I loved were doing. So, for example, um, when I started writing, um, when I was writing my first novel, Everything I Never Told You, I eventually realized that I wanted to tell it in this omniscient point of view because I realized that this book was gonna be about secrets and nobody in the family knew everything. But somebody had to know these things and that person was gonna be the narrator. That was gonna be the person who was gonna help the reader put it together. And I was really scared because I did not know how to do that.

And so what I did was I went to my bookshelf and I pulled down some books that I love. So I pulled down Oliver Twist by Dickens. I pulled down the God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I pulled down Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. You know, all these books that were told in that point of view. And I looked at their first few pages to go, “Okay, how did they do this? How did they create that voice? How did they structure the book? How did you know-- just can I look at all of these examples and distill from that any kind of guideline about how to put it together?”

And that's been, I feel like one of, one of the ways that I learn from other writers now very concretely, is I go, “Ooh, you're doing something cool. How did you do that? Let me study it.” And then maybe I can start to use those principles that this other writer has taught me for my own purposes.

On Being a Critic and a Fan

Celeste Ng: It's hard to turn off the writer part of my brain and just be a reader. In fact, I know that a book has really hooked me if I'm not thinking at all about any of the stylistic choices that the writer has made. Um, and it's rare, but it's a huge compliment. Like, "Oh, this book is doing something.” And I'll tell my husband, like, “I was not thinking about any of the writer stuff at all.” And he'll immediately take the book from me and go read it. 

I'm getting better at sort of just seeing how books are put together. And so when I'm reading, there's a little part of my mind that's always registering that people that I know and love who really get music, my, my son is one of them they can kind of hear things in music that I can't. And I imagine this might be what the experience of listening to music might be like for them. They're appreciating it and enjoying it in similar ways that I am with my no musical knowledge, but there might maybe also be hearing ike, “Ooh, there's an interesting chord progression.” Or “Ooh, it changed to a minor key.” Or, “Oh, you modulated, you know?” Or, “Ooh, the rhythm changed here.”

You know, things that I can't hear, but they're aware of, and I imagine, I hope for them, it adds a different level of understanding to the piece, and that's sort of what reading is for me. Ideally, those two things are running in parallel. I'm enjoying it on the story level and the readerly level, but then I'm also enjoying it on a writerly level as I'm going, “Ooh, interesting move that you made here. Ooh, we've switched into the second person.” Or, “Oh, I didn't even notice. When did you do that?” I'll go back and look and then I start kind of reverse engineering again and figuring out how they did it.

Adam Grant: This actually speaks to some recent research. I think the paper was called “Emotionally Numb,” and it was about the trade-offs between expertise and enjoyment. Hmm. It turned out that the more you learned about movies or photography or wine, the less you enjoyed them. Because they started to become critics instead of fans. it sounds like you've learned to avoid that.

Celeste Ng:And I feel like maybe one of the keys is to try and hold onto that joy and that discovery. And one nice thing about being a writer is that people are always doing new stuff. There's always new ideas and there's always sort of new things out there that are gonna catch you. And so you can always, there's always space to be surprised and I feel like when you were surprised, that's when you learn something. Um, and that's one of the joys for me. I mean, that's why I still read. Even as I have become a writer, because there's cool new stuff out there, and I, I kind of wanna see it. So I'm, I'm gonna keep that in mind and, and keep trying to hold onto that, that toddler excitement. Oh my God, there's a crack in the sidewalk. I've never seen a crack in the sidewalk before. Right? But that's--

Right? Why is there a crack in the sidewalk? Like, who put it there? Will it ever be there? Right. All the questions that toddlers ask you, where you're like, “I, I don't know, honey, let's go. It's a crack in the sidewalk.” In some ways, like, I get to indulge myself as a writer and say, “That's part of my job is to get to linger in these very small kind of unimportant details.” To keep the curiosity alive