The WD Interview: Tommy Orange
In 2018, Tommy Orange took the literary world by storm with his debut novel, There There, which told the story of 12 people from Native communities slowly discovering how their lives are connected as they all work to get to the present-day Big Oakland Powwow. In addition to being named one of the best books of the year by such varied organizations as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, and O, The Oprah Magazine (among many others), it was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Orange’s highly anticipated second novel, Wandering Stars, is out now, and will firmly establish Orange as one of the most talented writers of our time. It begins with Jude Star, a member of the Southern Cheyenne Tribe, remembering his survival of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 and his subsequent imprisonment at Richard Henry Platt’s prison-castle in Florida, an early precursor to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Gradually it shifts to Star’s son Charles, who is forced to attend the Carlisle school, and follows four additional generations until it meets up with Orvil Red Feather’s story, shortly after the closing events of There There.
Wandering Stars—which could just as easily be read as a standalone novel—therefore serves as both a prequel and sequel to There There, and features the same deceptively simple, lyrical writing style, with Orange’s trademark repetition of words and phrases (e.g. “Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry” or “He has forgotten that he has forgotten things on purpose”). Orange says this style is “kind of an unconscious thing. I hope it’s not some kind of writerly tic that becomes annoying. … I do like the way you can deepen words through repetition and deepen meaning if you’re using the same words in the same sentence. Something that deepens but can also be playful. I guess I’m trying to defend it and also recuse myself from it at once.”
While he’s writing though, Orange, who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and teaches creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, tries to “disappear the voices in the room,” as it were, and instead tries to “focus on sentences and pacing and readability.” Trying to quiet those voices is harder now because he says you “can’t not know that there’s an audience once your book becomes a New York Times bestseller.”
But a large readership wasn’t the audience Orange was initially writing for: “Gertrude Stein has a quote, I don’t know if I’m saying it exactly right, but somebody asks her, ‘What’s your secret to writing?’ And she says, ‘Small audiences.’ With There There, my first reader was my wife. It eventually extended to the small MFA program I was in, where most workshops were four to six people.” With an audience increased by magnitudes, we began our conversation talking about expectations.
Writing the second book is always different than the first because there are expectations involved. How was it different for you?
It was completely different and two years of that being a pandemic was not helpful either, even though everyone had the quote unquote “all the time in the world.” I think the whole sophomore effort thing—the living up to the success, all the new voices in your head when you’re at the page—I think I definitely felt like learning how to do it all over again. I’ve heard that’s already the case with a lot of writers—for each book, you kind of have to learn how to do it again. So, it was definitely challenging, and I had to learn new tools.
With There There, I thought of the premise in a single moment, and I always had as sort of a guiding structural guiding light: Everyone ends up at the powwow. And that’s a very convenient thing when you’re stuck—how does this relate to them getting to the powwow? With this book, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was going to happen in it and this historical piece was not something that I had planned when I first thought of it. So that also was sort of a monkey wrench. That didn’t come until a year after I started writing it. I was at a museum in Sweden, and I saw this newspaper clipping. I was being given a private tour, and they sort of were awkwardly saying, “We have your people’s stuff. Do you want to see it?” Like, they felt bad that they didn’t know what to do with it yet, because a lot of museums are trying to reckon with the problematic history of museums.
So, this newspaper clipping had Southern Cheyennes in Florida in 1875, and I didn’t know about this piece of history. It turned out to be the origin story of the boarding schools. My tribe was at the origin of the creation of the boarding schools at this prison castle in Florida. So, it went from being a fascination because it had to do with my tribe’s history, to being an integral part of the book, and even informed this generational structure that it now has in its complete form.
It’s so surprising that you didn’t know it was going to have that historical piece until that far along in your drafting process. I was trying to think of another book that serves as both a prequel and a sequel but could also be a standalone novel at the same time. I couldn’t think of one. It was very surprising to me, and I love that you were able to make it do all of those things.
It was certainly hard, really. My editor helped me to shape it, and there were books that I was reading along the way that helped me think of it better. Actually, Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance was something that helped convince me, in addition to my editor helping to convince me, to do this linear form where you have this generational piece. That was a really helpful book to read along the way to understand the way a narrative can build an energy by doing a linear thing. Because I often like to do nonlinear, and I was eventually convinced that it worked like this.
Then, the prequel/sequel/standalone piece was also a challenge because there were a lot of drafts where I was repeating myself from There There, or it was too contingent on having the reader have read There There. And I did want it to be its own book.
It does have that large cast of characters just like There There does, and they are all connected in various ways. How did you decide who to include and what perspectives to include?
It started with this character Jude Star. That’s the way the book starts, and it really happened organically from that single family-line source. He ended up having a son. I knew his son was going to end up at Carlisle, and he [Jude] was going to conceive of this idea that he was a part of what made this school that his son ended up getting sent to. I mean, he doesn’t know this in the book, but I proceeded in a really linear way from there. I had his son knowing his friend Victor Bear Shield’s daughter, and then their child being born. So as far as the historical piece goes, it really followed a linear time line. The characters from There There, as it happens in the second half of the book, was a lot more of figuring out who didn’t belong, and how to keep the story with this one family; [it] is a tighter storyline because originally, I had a lot of the characters returning from There There.
Since some of those characters in the present-day part of the story had established voices from the first novel, but there were some new ones in there too, were there any that were more challenging for you to write than others or others that were easier?
During the pandemic, I read all of Toni Morrison, and I had read some of her books before, but I hadn’t read all of her. And there’s something she does with third-person omniscient that is unique to her voice. I had not been interested in third-person omniscient at all. I hadn’t really written anything in that form, and I think I tried to do that in the second half of the book. I don’t think I succeeded. I think the voices end up intruding a lot more than I intended, which I think is fine. I’m happy with where the voices ended up, but that did shape the way that I was thinking of how to convey the characters, so they all have a little bit more of a distance than the third-person close that I was doing more of in There There.
All of these characters, we talked about them being related by way of the generations but even the ones that aren’t part of the family, they’re all interconnected, and they form sort of this web where what one person does sort of tugs and pulls on that web affecting all of the other characters around them. This was true of There There too. What’s your method for keeping track of all these characters and their time lines and actions?
It feels like total chaos. [Laughs] I don’t know that I can give you a method. I can tell you that structuring for me happens on long runs, and in my head is when I have the most clarity about order and how things fit together. I learned that while writing There There. I was just talking to a group of students, and somebody was asking me about structure and keeping track of characters. I had the experience of trying to map it out visually and realized while writing There There that I’m not a visual person at all. When I saw it all visually, when I mapped it all out in Photoshop, it made me feel more confused and like there was more chaos happening. So long runs became the key. It’s something that I already do as part of my writing process, but it also became this key to thinking about structure and how things could make sense together.
Going back to the idea of generations, so much of this book is about the idea of what we inherit, even if we don’t know it’s something inherited, or if we do, we don’t necessarily know where it comes from. The physical example that sticks out to me is the bullet left in Jude Star after the Sand Creek Massacre, and then the bullet piece that’s left in Orvil after he survives the Oakland Powwow shooting. It’s that idea that the past has never really passed, but it’s living inside of us. What did you hope to accomplish, or what was your approach to writing and connecting the past to the present?
I think we’re in a really interesting moment as a country where we’re realizing a lot of things in the past have not been dealt with. So, on one level, I think especially for Native stories, the way the past affects Native people and our relationship to this country and this country’s relationship to itself, has to do with there being things not dealt with to this day that make the past remain present in a really felt way. There’s been a lack of reckoning with the history of our country, the origin of our country, as it relates to Native people.
So that piece, along with on a personal level the way Native people feel history, I think, is different than [how] other people feel it. Part of that has to do with the institutionalized way we talk about American history and the absence of Native people from that teaching and from the conversation. It makes the past felt more than if we did. … For Americans to think of the country or how we did or did not get through the ugliness of genocide and the removal of people and all the different things that have been done, we don’t have any version of that. Instead, we actually just skip over—you hear about the Indians and the pilgrims, and then in institutions, as it’s still taught to this day, you don’t really hear anything. That absence is really felt as much as a bullet that stays in you.
There are a couple of interesting thoughts early in the novel about the idea of books and writing and what stories do or don’t do. One said, “I didn’t think stories were made to comfort. I believed what my father told me. Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.” How much of your own opinions or ideas about the power of writing and storytelling did you give to your characters?
I think they probably believe it more than I do. I remember when that line occurred to me. This character is talking about a story that his dad told him, about his dad sort of disappearing. On some level, I definitely believe that storytelling and when you get involved with the story—with a good book, with a good movie—at the end of it, you are taken away. You had the experience of disappearing into it, and when you came back, you were different and you were changed. I do believe that fundamentally. But I think that was something that came in a single moment of writing from a character’s perspective, rather than that’s what my belief was, and I wanted to give it to one of my characters. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. What made you want to be a writer?
I realized at some point that there were things that I could access through writing, and through fiction specifically, that were in me that I couldn’t access without writing. I think writing is another form of thinking, and storytelling is not only a way to remember, but a way to create something new that is a part of us. But, through the creation process and the telling of the story, I think it’s part of what keeps me wanting to write—that I don’t know what’s going to come. I don’t know what story’s going to come unless I make space to write and see what comes. That surprise element, the idea that I don’t know what’s there, is what first got me excited about it and also keeps me going. That the writing process has this mystery to it and this aspect of discovery and just bringing together a lot of different elements—memory and emotion—it makes me feel more whole to be involved with the project, to be thinking through something through characters.
It fills not only a restlessness I always felt that I didn’t know what to do with, but also a hole where I need meaning to be, that I think was left by my intensely evangelical Christian upbringing. My dad, he was a Native American Church peyote roadman, and they were both very intensely religious and talked about God a lot. When I first started writing I was really looking for something like a religion to fill a space and fiction ended up being that. I don’t want to sound too crazy to say that. But, I really went at fiction in a way that felt like I was trying to fill that kind of hole. …
What I love about fiction is that it doesn’t pretend to have answers. It poses more questions, and it renders a world where those questions can exist and where the reader can think about them and feel them, but it’s not dogma.
What have you learned about your own writing from teaching others how to do it?
There’s this emphasis that writing teachers give, that I was given, that I find myself giving, about emphasizing “scene” that I don’t always think is right. And sometimes, I’ll default to it because I think that’s what good writing is, and that’s what the reader wants—probably mostly because that’s what the reader wants. We know—I don’t know who the “we” is here—that readers enjoy the illustration of something versus being told some information. There’s a general truth we can all agree on, that scene-based writing is the way that we teach what good writing is.
But I think it can be over-taught. I think the way that I write is from the inside out. So, I’ll know characters’ internal thoughts and tics well before I put them in the world. And a lot of this stuff, as it comes out, is not necessarily something I would ever want to show somebody except certain people I trust and trade pages with.
I’ve learned to know when a scene should be there to anchor the reader and the character to a real world, and when to trust what internality can do, what thinking can do for the reader and, for the character development too. Trying to balance that is something you have to stay conscious of because the default mode is to just put a character into the real world and watch them do stuff and give them a desire, even if it’s a glass of water. I think part of what fiction needs to do is what only fiction can do. We have TV shows and movies that are filled with scenes that are honestly more brilliant than what most writing can do. If we’re only writing scenes, we have TV shows and movies. The interior is what fiction can get at, and I think we need to use fiction to do that as much as we can.
What advice do you have for the readers of Writer’s Digest?
Find a way to make your writing process a discipline in the way that musicians practice their instrument. I think writing has this mystique of like—there’s this binary of inspiration, of being visited by the muse or you have writer’s block, and I think this really detracts from a discipline. So, finding ways to write more, whatever that looks like. It depends on the person. Some people can set a goal of 2,000 words a day, and I probably did that for a year. Or, even just copying beautiful sentences that you admire and feeling how it is to write them isn’t anything new. Other writers have said this but transforming your writing practice into a discipline in the same way that, when you see somebody perform their instrument that they’ve put in the time. Writing requires that.
I don’t think it’s asking of you to be brilliant every time you sit down to write; I think it only asks you to sit down. Occasionally it will ask everything of you if you’re doing it right, and if you’re devoted. That’s sometimes where it’s the hardest, but I think most of the time you just have to be there. So that requires—and this is old writing advice—butt in the seat. But I think part of it is rethinking the way you think about writing. Not as like, Do I have a good idea? Am I interesting? Am I inspired or am I experiencing writer’s block? Instead, How do I put in the time? Trying to reframe it for yourself, because I think we’ve been told that writing is this one thing and it’s been taken outside of the realm of discipline. So, finding ways to convince yourself to be writing as much as you can, as much as time will allow, rather than waiting for the idea or waiting for the inspiration.
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