Author R.O. Kwon spoke about her writing process at a lecture hosted by the School of the Arts.

On the evening of Wednesday, December 6, the Columbia MFA Writing Program hosted author R.O. Kwon as their final speaker of the Fall semester in their Creative Writing Lectures series.

Held in Dodge Hall, the lecture lasted about an hour with time for a short Q and A session afterwards. Before she took the podium, Kwon was introduced by a student who spoke briefly about her works. Kwon’s debut novel, The Incendiaries, was published in 2018, and her upcoming novel, Exhibit, is set to release in May 2024. Her writing has also been published in The New York Times, New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo, and will be the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford next year.

After thanking the student and the organizers of the event, Kwon launched into her lecture about what she describes as her favorite part of writing: revision. She spoke rapidly, relaying with humor and a certain artistic intensity her personal experience and advice about the craft. She shared everything from her own creative process to the works and writers who inspire her, and some of the challenges she faces while writing and how she works through them. 

Kwon expressed her obsession with precision of language, referencing Susan Sontag’s idea of lexical inevitability, a term used to describe a sentence that feels impossible to improve, almost as if it was predestined to be written that way. She admitted that she often struggled with becoming hung up on the tiny details of her writing in the early stages, which she worked through by using drafting techniques that prevented her from looking back on what she wrote. Kwon spoke in detail about the ten-year-long process of writing The Incendiaries, sharing what methods aided her in her process of writing, rewriting, reading, and revising. The first version of her novel which she had worked on for the first two years of its creation, she scrapped completely and started from scratch. Following this reset, Kwon said that she hand-wrote several early drafts, taking advice from a friend whom she claimed would always write their first draft on paper and throw it out without reading it, just to get to know the story. She shared another technique from a colleague, which was blocking the computer screen with a sheet of paper while writing to prevent second-guessing and deleting. Kwon herself wrote drafts on a typewriter software that prevented her from going back and deleting paragraphs as she wrote, which prevented her from obsessing over the minutiae of her writing during the drafting stages. She estimated that she wrote and rewrote an estimated 40-90 drafts of her first novel before it was published.

Kwon encouraged the audience to not be afraid to fail and experiment to find what they value and enjoy in their own writing. She presented her advice in jam-packed bullet points doled out in rapid succession: She lauded switching up things like chronology or point of view. She advocated for more attention on the physicality of characters to understand their feelings. Quoting Simone Weil, she said that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” encouraging writers to embody the characters they write, to do research into the history and context in which they exist. She said to take a pen and stare at it for ten minutes and watch as it transforms into something else. She expressed distrust of absolute statements about anything and warned against using boring language. “If it bores you now, it will bore you forever.” She suggested paying close attention to desire: who is desiring what, where does the desire come from? She emphasized the importance of reading, allowing it to inspire and inform the process of writing. She specifically said to read and memorize poetry until it becomes a part of you, to be “desperately serious about reading.” Kwon shared her process of revising for precision once she creates a concrete draft, which is when she is finally able to indulge her obsession with the details and precision of language. She uses spreadsheets to keep track of how many times words are used in each of her drafts. She shared a story of when she realized she had used the word “radiant” five times in her first novel and managed to get it down to three in order to preserve its impact and meaning. It is things like this, she said, that excited her about writing, and encouraged the audience to find what excites each of them and write in a way that fulfills those interests.

To close her lecture, Kwon provided advice on how to write during times of hardship. She shared techniques she used to keep up with her writing during the pandemic, many of which involved establishing check-in systems with friends and fostering community between fellow writers. She emphasized the importance of a routine and setting goals to stay on track, and being flexible enough to change those goals if needed. She added that writing earlier in the day helped her to dodge the existential dread that tends to creep in. She suggested asking the question: “What could I write that could reach even me?” On a note of hopefulness, Kwon encouraged the audience to seek out the days, hours, and minutes during the writing process where time is forgotten and they become consumed by the love of the craft. The joy in writing, she said, is not in the acclaim or achievement, but in the work itself.

R.O. Kwon via Columbia University