2/9/2024 0 Comments Charles yu imdb![]() How has that changed now that you write full-time? While I was a lawyer, I dreamt of unlimited writing time. You started as an attorney and wrote when you could. ![]() You’ve had an idiosyncratic journey as a writer. I’m not sure those are unequivocally good things, but in many contexts they are. Writing for television has made me more concise and less precious. You can conjure an entire universe for one sentence, then discard it. You have an infinite production budget, limited only by your imagination. When you write a book, you are director, actor, set decorator, everything. It’s also a tangible and highly practical medium, constrained by money, time, physical reality. You’re drafting blueprints that many people (production and lighting designers, costumers, actors, directors, cinematographers) will use to generate visual images. Prose means nothing in TV-or very little. What’s the relationship between writing for the page and writing for television? The main thing-and this is obvious, but it took me surprisingly long to understand it-is that television is a visual medium. In 2014, you became a writer for HBO’s Westworld. ![]() The world of Interior Chinatown is delicate, I think, and it does have its own internal coherence, but you have to sort of soften your gaze like with one of those Magic Eye stereoscopic illusions and just be in it, if that makes sense. There are some features that are implied. Then, I had the challenge of understanding the “rules of the world.” I had to accept that these rules aren’t like gravity or laws of science or anything that strict. Was the process different here than in your previous work? It was much longer. Willis being trapped inside that construct, of a story where someone else is in control, is a core idea of the book. Readers can see what is inside the story (the script) and what is not (Willis’s inner monologue, told as stage directions or asides). A script provided that, both visually and conceptually. To have a character, Willis, dancing in and out of a story, it helped immensely to have a clear delineation. He gets there, eventually, but in the process, he has to negotiate some boundaries. Why write Interior Chinatown as a screenplay? What did it offer you? The screenplay format offers the ability to work on two levels: “inside the story” and “outside the story.” Willis Wu, the protagonist of the novel, starts outside and desperately wants in. This article appears in Issue 23 of Alta Journal. Recently, Yu and I corresponded by email about his exhilarating, groundbreaking work. Yet Yu has long been a boundary pusher his debut novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, revolves around a time machine mechanic named-wait for it-Charles Yu, who essentially rewrites the fiction in which he is living, even as we read. The novel, which addresses, among other issues, the stereotypical ways Asians have been characterized in Hollywood, was written in screenplay format, a strategy that might seem unusual. W hen Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, it took a lot of people by surprise.
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