Interview by Leslie Pietrzyk

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

A Complete Fiction is about a writer who takes to social media to accuse an editor of stealing the novel she submitted for publication, and is then herself accused of revealing her sister’s secrets in the book. The novel examines the questions of who has a right to tell a story and has cancel culture gone too far in our social-media obsessed world?

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

I most enjoyed creating P.J. Her aspirations are frustrated, as often as not she gets in her own way, and she just manages to stumble toward her goals, but I found all of that endearing and recognizable. She continues to create in the face of repeated disappointment, which is true of a lot of writers, present company included, and which I find admirable. It’s challenging to create a flawed character that readers root for and remember, rather than just complain about in reader reviews. Reaching a balance between the flaws you give the character and the redeeming qualities is hard. I don’t think I had the right balance with P.J. until one of the very last drafts.

And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

If there’s a victim in the story, it’s George. I say if because both P.J. and George are complex characters and there are ways that George contributes to his own troubles. But he’s more of a victim than P.J. for reasons I won’t go into to prevent spoilers. What I will say is that it’s tricky to create a victim. A character has to have some agency or there will be no character arc. I struggled with that in the book until I found ways for George to take control of his own story.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Wow. This was such a torturous road. The low was when an editor strung my agent and me along for months, repeatedly assuring us that he wanted to buy the novel, and then ghosted us. I hope he reads this. All told, more than two dozen editors rejected the book. All of that was very tough. The high came after that when I had an insight into how to improve the book, took it back from my agent, and rewrote it. It sold two weeks after that rewrite. I’m glad all of those editors rejected it, so I had a chance to make the novel the best version of itself. I’m happy readers will get to enjoy it, happy I can stop obsessing about selling it, but mostly happy for all my friends and family and the Trader Joe’s clerks who won’t have to hear me go on about it. Writers can become very one-dimensional when their books are on submission. We should be exiled temporarily from polite society without any electronic devices and with an enormous pile of chocolate and an equally enormous pile of literary classics all of whose authors are dead. It’s hard to envy a dead author, though not impossible.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Fifteen years ago, I took a novel workshop with Karen Shepard. I was working on my first novel, which I later abandoned. But she taught that once you set a plot in motion certain events will naturally follow, and you can just think about what those events would be to keep the story moving forward. That advice has helped me write both of my published novels. I think about what would naturally follow not only from the plot I’ve set in motion but also from the characters I’m developing. What would these characters in particular do in the situation I’ve put them in? I also think about something Jennifer Egan once said in a class I took from her, which is that your characters shouldn’t be consistent because people aren’t consistent. That shocked me at the time because in all my fiction workshops I’d heard the same orthodoxy that characters had to be consistent. So I imagine what my characters might do that is inconsistent and might, like a mutation, allow them to grow or change. Egan’s linked stories A Visit from the Goon Squad make an appearance in my new novel. Go read the novel and find the reference.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Without giving anything away, I’ll say the end very much surprised me. I had a different ending through all the drafts, until I did a final big revision and thought about what my brilliant developmental editor, Erika Krouse, says, which is that “endings make meanings.” The revised ending means something very different than the earlier ending did. It will give readers more to think about when they put down the book, at least I hope it will. The new ending couldn’t have existed without the changes I made in the final revision, and it surprised me.

How did you find the title of your book?

The book went through many titles including Blank Page, Cancel George Dunn, and others, but neither my agent nor my editor at the publishing house liked the title I had, so I literally stared at the novel for three days until my sacrifice to the publishing Gods was recognized and I was rewarded with the current title, A Complete Fiction, which pleased all the relevant parties.

Who is your ideal reader?

My ideal reader is someone who likes to laugh. I might even say someone who’s generous in that way. It’s also someone open to new ideas and who’s willing to engage with nuance. It’s someone who says to their friends, “You have to read this.” Someone who buys books as gifts. A lot of them.

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Leslie Pietrzyk is the editor of South 85.