Episode 161: Leading with Images: Interview with Yang Huang

In today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth interview author Yang Huang about her new novel, My Good Son. Ideas come to Yang as images first, which she sees as mysteries to be solved and as uncensorable. She wants to tell the truth—through fiction and in English. Topics of discussion include the free will of characters, parents’ control over and visions for their kids, rebellion and surprise, clean beautiful language, and the many, many drafts it takes to finish a novel. In the initial draft, Yang avoids an agenda and follows her curiosity. They delve into the mystery and advantage to a single point of view, the art of pacing, the time it can take to occupy another character, and China in the 1990s and today.

Links Discussed:

Yang Huang Interviews Feng.

Link to NYT review of My Good Son, Yang’s book

Henry James

Patricia Highsmith

Nina Schuyler

Lava Falls by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Yanghuang.com

Upcoming events:

June 7 Virtual Event at Folio

Launch Party June 9, 6 pm, Booksmith SF

Don’t forget to send in your questions!

YANG HUANG

Yang Huang grew up in Yangzhou, China and came to the U.S. to study computer science. While working as an engineer, she studied literature and pursued writing. Yang attended Boston College and earned an MFA from the University of Arizona. Read about her journey: Why I Write In English.

Her novel My Good Son won the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize. Her linked story collection, My Old Faithful, won the Juniper Prize for fiction, and her debut novel, Living Treasures, won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal in fiction.

Her essays, stories, and screenplay have appeared in Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, The Margins, Asian Pacific American Journal, The Evansville Review, Futures, Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, Nuvein, and Stories for Film.

Yang lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works for the University of California, Berkeley. Besides her day job and family life, she writes fiction and creates a more tolerant and hopeful world in stories.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.