Lily Hoang is daring writer. I initially wrote “young and daring” but realized that Lily Hoang’s daring on the page is not a quality related to her (relative) youth. Lily Hoang is a daring writer because she attempts to make something new with each piece that she writes. She plays with form and sometimes applies compositional constraints. And she does amazing things with narrative voice.
Lily’s latest project is a large-scale collaboration with multiple writers. In May 2009 she issued a call for unfinished manuscripts, contacting more than twenty writers and asking them to send along their abandoned story ideas. She proposed to complete their story remnants: “I basically told them, ???Send me your trash.’”
The resulting collaborations with Brian Evenson, Michael Martone, Kathleen Rooney, Zach Dodson, Kate Bernheimer, Ted Pelton, Debra Di Blasi, and others will be collected as Unfinished, forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press. I saw Lily read the Evenson-started story (“Your Ballad of Milt & Stanley”) at the &Now Conference last fall in Buffalo and was blown away but its structure and humor, and I just read the equally impressive collaborations with Dodson and Rooney (which is featured in the new issue of Make).
Here’s a Q&A with Lily Hoang about this unique collaborative writing project.
You approached a number of writers who are known to be prolific. I would see those writers as finishers and imagine that any unfinished manuscripts in their files would be absolutely unfinishable. Was that part of the challenge for you?
Yes and no. I’ll start with the no part first: I have dozens of stories and novels on my hard drive and my notebooks that I simply abandoned, not because they weren’t good, per se, but because I couldn’t find my entry into the narrative. I imagined all these other writers–because they are prolific–were probably in the same position. In many ways, I asked other people for their “trash,” thinking it would motivate me to finish my own abandoned stories.
But yes, of course, I wanted the challenge of finishing what other writers didn’t or couldn’t, but I didn’t see it as a conquest. More than anything, I wanted to play. I didn’t think of the story starts I got as “unfinishable.” They were all finishable. They were all great story starts, but they were things their original authors had abandoned for any number of reasons. It was more like I was taking on stray pets than anything else.
Why did you want to begin collaborating on stories in progress–especially stories that had been all but abandoned by their initial authors?
I used to teach at a college, and when I taught, I couldn’t write. I used summers as writing time. When last summer (09) rolled around, I didn’t have any project I was keen to start. A month or two earlier, I’d joked about swapping unfinished novels with a friend and we’d finish them for each other. Whereas I was joking when I suggested it, the idea of finishing someone else’s work became appealing.
So I started to send some emails to see if anyone would even respond, and people did! Writers I love and respect generously gave me their unfinished stories, many of which I considered better than anything I could have written on my own.
Without naming names, were there any writers who declined your request to collaborate? Or can you describe any negative or qualified responses to your query?
There were many writers who declined my request, though they declined by not responding. I did notice, however, that I had a disproportionate number of men offer me their story starts. I had to make a concerted effort to contact women to make the collection even somewhat balanced. I don’t want to make any kind of hypothesis about this gender divide and writing, but there is something to be said here.
Did you find that some of these stories were unfinished because of specific flaws? What kind of prescriptive work did you do to finish these stories? Was the revisions process entirely addition or was there some subtraction involved?
No, none of these stories were unfinished because they were flawed. They were all promising story starts. I abandon plenty of promising story (and novel) starts, and not necessarily because they’re flawed. Writers abandon stories for a range of reasons. I don’t want to speak for the writers in this collection, but I can say that most of the story/novel starts I “throw out” are trashed because either I can’t the right voice and/or form or I don’t think the voice and/or form I’ve chosen can be sustained. I don’t think of these as flaws though. I’d prefer to think that the decision to stop a project shows insight, that the writer is patient enough to not push, etc.
Most of the story starts I received were really short, some just a sentence or a phrase, some a paragraph or two. Only in a couple instances did I receive more than a finished page, and these were the most challenging stories to finish. These stories had established both voice and form but no plot. I didn’t do “prescriptive” work on them though. I just picked up where the original author left off. I literally finished what they started.
But it was a long process going from their story starts to a finished story. There was a lot of addition, obviously, but also substantial subtraction. My goal was to keep the original author’s voice, style, and narrative as best I could. Nonetheless, these story starts were given to me with the freedom to modify, and so I did. I did a lot of renovations: removing extraneous words, adding more words, changing the narrative voice, changing the narrative as a whole, etc. On the whole though, almost all of the authors were happy with the end product.
What were the biggest surprises in the process?
How easy and fun it was to finish other people’s stories! I conceived of this project as an extended writing exercise. I wanted the constraint of another writer’s voice, style, story, etc. I expected it to be difficult, but I found that because I was familiar with almost all of these writers, the process was fun. If anything, I did a lot more playing than working!
You play with form and often use compositional constraints in your storytelling. How did you apply this approach to these unfinished manuscripts?
All of my books have some kind of constraint to them, and with this book, the constraint was to maintain authenticity to the original authors’ voice, style, and substance. This is a fairly common writing exercise. I’ve given it to my fiction students: take a story (usually a canonical story) and add something–a few paragraphs or change the ending–to it while maintaining the author’s voice and style. I’ve done the same thing, only with living writers and unfinished stories. The concept is the same though.
Can you talk about the title of the collection, Unfinished? Do you see the completed stories as still, somehow, unfinished? (As if these orphaned texts will always be unfinished.)
I called the collection Unfinished because the abandoned story starts are still on the original writers’ hard drive somewhere, still unfinished. I’ve finished their stories, but they’re now my stories. Even though I tried to maintain the original author’s integrity, in the end, these stories are mine. I hope the reader can’t tell where one author ends and I start, but I can tell and so can the other writers. So I’ve offered these stories one possible ending, one possible finishing, but they will all remain ultimately unfinished, until the original author finishes them.
Do you feel the project changed you as a writer? If so, in what way(s)?
Whereas I don’t necessarily feel changed, the project did challenge me as a writer. For instance, most of my other writing is overtly fabulist. I have some grounding in realism, but the ties are loose at best. With these unfinished stories, however, I had to work with what the original authors gave me. So if a story was fabulist and/or conceptual, I was comfortable, even though I still had to negotiate plot, character, etc. If a story was realist and/or traditional, however, I had to work within those specific constraints. The challenge was part of the fun.
Did you have similar feeling(s) in completing this manuscript as you did with your previous books?
That’s a really great question, especially considering the title is Unfinished. I always have a rough outline before I begin writing. I write towards a goal, whether it’s a certain development in narrative or a decided number of chapters. This book was no different. I knew I wanted 21 stories. My first book had 21 chapters, so I’ve come to have a sentimental attachment to the number.
When I finished this book, it felt more decisive than when I finished my first book, which felt like groping through darkness. Finishing Unfinished felt like finishing something unfinishable.
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Lily Hoang is the author of Parabola (Chiasmus Press), Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press) and The Evolutionary Revolution (forthcoming from Les Figues Press).