This Wednesday, award-winning author Ling Ma led a Columbia School of the Arts Creative Writing Lecture, centering around the craft of the draft.

For the past 13 years, the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Creative Writing Lecture series has been a centerpiece of the school’s Writing Department. The popular lecture series brings distinguished writers to Columbia for original talks on craft—recent guests have included John Keene, Sarah Manguso, Lynne Tillman, and Carmen Maria Machado. In addition to preparing a talk on the writing process, these authors also leave room at the end for a Q&A with audience members, providing insight to Columbia’s budding writers.

Ling Ma is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Severance, which won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction and was named a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR Best Book of 2018. Her fellowships include a Whiting Award and an NEA creative writing fellowship. Her upcoming short story collection Bliss Montage will come out this fall.

After struggling to join the Zoom meeting for ten minutes (yes, I have been a Zoom user for over two years, don’t ask me how I got so confused), I joined during the middle of host Ben Marcus’s introduction for author Ling Ma. After Marcus concluded with a list of Ma’s accolades, Ling Ma took over and began her talk.

Ma began by explaining the goal of her lecture: “to trace how one of my short stories evolved” from a first rough draft, entitled “House Husband,” to the final draft, entitled “Los Angeles,” which was later published on Granta. After dropping a PDF of two excerpts into the Zoom chat, one from each draft, Ling Ma gave two notes before reading her works. First, a content warning for domestic abuse mentions in her final draft of “Los Angeles”, and second, she warned us that in the second draft, we’d encounter “a character who only speaks in dollar signs.” After promising to “shake a thing of coins when the character is speaking,” we participants exchanged muted laughter. Following these two footnotes, Ma commenced reading the polished final draft, followed by the first rough draft.

Upon finishing her reading of both drafts, Ma began to describe her process of moving from a first rough draft, like “House Husband,” to a final cut like “Los Angeles.” For this particular short story, Ma wrote nine different drafts over two years which was “pretty quick” for her. When comparing the two drafts, she first touched on “the disparity in the language” between the two—and not just the addition of the character who speaks only in dollar signs. 

First, the rough draft is littered with blanks, such as the following sentence: “We were together for six years, and ______.”  Ma explained that these blanks are placeholders for when she can’t think of a word, entry points for revision. Second, she described the language of the first draft as “baby-speak” in its simplicity, containing “fragments that read to me like spurts of subconscious.” These little sentences also work as placeholders for fuller ideas, signaling to her future self questions like, “Do I have a Sheryl Sandberg joke to insert in here?” to replace a sarcastic Lean In reference. Finally, she noted that the most off-putting characteristic of the first draft was the voice: “The voice is very shrill and sour and kind of sarcastic.” She was trying to satirize something without knowing her exact target, overcompensating by “writing in this sarcastic tone.” However, this tone refined itself throughout several drafts as she determined the heart of her story. Ma closed her comparison of the two drafts, saying that while “the first draft is more summary, the final draft is more experiential” and more fully inhabits the story. 

After this close comparison in language, Ma went back to describe her process of finding her starting idea. She started by explaining that she always enters an idea through wish-fulfillment and fantasy. For example, her first draft “House Husband” encompasses a very specific fantasy of being rich: “I had this dream about this trophy wife who bankrolls all of her artist ex-boyfriends, so the starting idea was a trophy wife artist colony.” She recognized the intense specificity of this idea, referring to it as “the gimmick.” Ma shared that all of her starting ideas tended to share this gimmicky attribute—for example, Severance began with the gimmick of a girl working through the zombie apocalypse. The real challenge of crafting a story is, “Can I inhabit this gimmick so fully that this story is able to transcend the gimmick?” It doesn’t matter where you start, Ma explained, as long as you reach that cruising altitude where you hit that emotion.

Shifting to the revision process, Ma touched on the importance of specificity when inhabiting a story. For example, Ma described her process of choosing the short story’s setting, and eventual title—”Los Angeles.” In her rough draft, Ma initially chose not to name the large city that the story’s couple lives in: “We live in some big city, LA or New York, or London.” She was afraid that by naming the specific city, “the story would lose its surreal quality.” However, after a few drafts, she found that “rooting the story in a specific locale makes it easier to inhabit” and more pleasurable to write about. 

Despite never having been to Los Angeles, Ma chose the California city, hoping to recreate the city through secondary sources like films (David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive), novels (Brett Easton Ellis’s works), and photographs. For example, Ling Ma found one unexpected source to find locations to set her scenes—Tumblr. She described “scrolling through Tumblr, like Moby [the musician from the aughts] randomly used to have this Tumblr devoted to LA architecture, so I would scroll through that and start setting scenes at some of the sites that he photographs.” By synthesizing these various secondhand sources, Ma was able to achieve her goal of creating a setting that is LA-like and yet has something a bit off about it. This also built tension between “the familiar and the recognizable” and “the surreal and the dreamlike.” 

Before taking questions, Ling Ma closed with her thoughts on revision. In college, she dreamed of being an archaeologist, and while she eventually chose a different path (see: award-winning debut novel), she noted that she still feels like an archaeologist in her writing. “I do feel like I’m blindly searching for little pieces and shards of something, and then I’m trying to take these little bits and pieces together and glue it back to what this artifact used to be.” In addition to this recomposition element to her writing, Ma also noted that she has an idea of the perfect version of her story that exists beyond her mind. In her writing, she sees herself as “just trying to get the draft to be as close to its original form” through the process of completing multiple drafts, adding details, and finding the story’s voice.

When asked about how she decides what to keep and what to discard from a draft, Ma noted that she hangs on to “the ideas that are the most compelling to me.” Meanwhile, things that “feel tired like the Sheryl Sandberg joke” get dropped if she doesn’t find herself laughing or reacting to them.

When one audience member asked about her approach to each revision, Ma explained that she likes to tackle many changes at once (new details, new dialogue, etc) while inhabiting the draft from her new angle. Ma has two viewpoints on shaping her revisions—(1) controlling what she wants the story to be, and (2) getting out of the way of what the story wants to be. The tension between these two ideas influences her writing.

When asked about how she knows she’s done with a story, Ma admitted that she’s never 100% satisfied. When adding “Los Angeles” to her short story collection, she made some changes but had to acknowledge that “I can’t reinhabit who I used to be” because only her past self could have written the story, and “there is very little of that me here now.” She closed this explanation by reminding the participants that “some fiction is a snapshot of anxieties from a certain era.”

One participant asked if Ma views her debut novel Severance, centering around a young woman working through a pandemic that kills nearly all humans on Earth, differently after living through the COVID-19 pandemic. She started by explaining that while she recognizes the numerous similarities between the fictional Shen fever and COVID-19, she doesn’t know if her perspective on the novel has changed. Ma instead touched upon “the deeper resonance that has to do about work, capitalism, and the surrealness of working through what feels apocalyptic,” a familiar experience to many of us over the last two years. She also brought up a key detail she felt contributed to the horror of the pandemic in her novel. While many zombie apocalypse movies invoke causality in their infections (i.e. a zombie bites you and you thus become a zombie), Ma aimed to disrupt causality in favor of the arbitrary. “I wanted it to be arbitrary—why does Candace Chen not get Shen fever? Maybe that’s one similarity to the events of COVID, that it’s arbitrary… It’s much scarier if your God is arbitrary.”

Another participant asked about her approach to worldbuilding and research when writing Severance, particularly about the novel’s apocalyptic setting. Ma started by saying, among her most helpful research, “I watched some zombie movies and read the first chapter of The World Without Us” in addition to reading How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. However, much of her research was also about the mood of the novel. For instance, she referenced many zines, stating that “I was thinking in terms of zine voice, which in my mind is a gold standard for first-person voice”. In personal zines, she explained, “the stakes are so low, people sound like themselves”. 

One student asked about Ma’s takeaways from her MFA program at Cornell University. The main takeaway from her thesis advisor was to “write a novel to find what the question even is,” a way of thinking that reoriented her draft of Severance.

When asked about writing about tedious work without making the writing tedious, Ma shared that often in her former day jobs, she discovered that “the work we’re doing was pretty interesting, but it’s the repetition of work that makes it boring”. Therefore, in stories like Severance, she kept the interesting details about an industry like Bible-publishing while cutting out the repetitive mood of daily work. 

When asked if each subsequent draft is a straight rewrite of her previous draft, Ma explained that she takes her previous draft and typically makes many changes throughout the text. She then alluded to the fact that most of her stories don’t have an exact outline—for example, she had a general story arc for Severance, but no concrete outline. Instead, “a lot of the writing is exploratory” where details pop out and inform the story. Additionally, she mentioned that Severance was written out of order—“I wrote the novel mostly out of order and then I would put the scenes together to see how they formed, and I would write transitional scenes in-between”. She recognized that it was a nonlinear way of storytelling, but it was very helpful to write the scenes that excited her most first: “I would encourage that method just to try it out if you are working on a novel and you feel like you’re trudging through a transitional scene. Just write the scene you really want to write. Write all the scenes you really want to write. See how they play out with each other.”

This was the final Creative Writing Lecture of the semester. Check the Columbia School of the Arts’ online events calendar to stay up to date with more author events.

Header by Elizabeth Walker, with Author’s Headshot via Columbia School of the Arts