The Secret to Overnight Success

This interview with Arthur Golden, the author of Memoirs of a Geisha is ten years old, but new to me. A friend in a writing group passed the link to me, and I pass it on to you, with these thoughts:

1. This” overnight night success” took fifteen years to research, write, rewrite and sell.

2. Golden wrote a complete draft before he was able to interview a real geisha. “But I wrote a draft based on a lot of book-learning. And I thought I had a pretty good idea of what the world of a geisha was like, and wrote a draft. Then a chance came along to meet a geisha, which, of course, I couldn’t turn down. And she was so helpful to me that I realized I’d gotten everything wrong, and I ended up throwing out that entire first draft and doing the whole thing over again.”

3. He then rewrote the entire book again, this time changing from third person to first person.

And I also found this insight to the point:

O’BRIEN: What’s it like, sitting there at the computer keyboard, trying — as a white male, trying to put yourself into that skin?

GOLDEN: You know, I think that it’s pretty much like writing anything else in fiction, in the sense that even if you sit down and try to imagine a story about somebody who lives on a street you’ve never seen, you really can’t escape the hard work of just bridging this divide between you and an imagined other. And the difference for me was that I had to do a lot of research to put myself in a position where I could begin to know enough about that imagined other to make that leap. But the leap, I think, is the same, really, whatever kind of fiction you’re writing.