Program. This is our special your fiction on in depth. Youll see authors this month we are pleased to have Colson Whitehead as our guests. His most recent book is the underground railroad. Whats the appropriate response when its praised by oprah, president obama, was the appropriate response . Guest this book is taken off in a way thats unexpected and wonderful. Mostly i thank my lucky stars and i sleep a little better, im in a better mood generally i try to enjoy it despite my best efforts. Host what is up regina better food . Ive been writing for 20 some years. Sometimes you read a book and people understand and sometimes you write it and nobody cares. And it disappears. So ive the pride and thinking i did a good job with the book. The bonus of other people liking it as well. Host your first book was intuition us. How do you sell a book like that . Guest exactly. With that book either when i send it to my age in either you dig the concept of the two groups or you dont. Further along for the ride or youre not. When i was writing it was my second attentive novel. The first one was terrible went to a bunch of publishers, the agent taught me as it wasnt going anywhere. A year and half i said my friends am writing a book about elevator inspectors. They would make fun of me. Eventually after year and half got it down to what sounded like an interesting book. My new agent. Host is there a connection between the intuition us in the underground railroad . Theres a few topics i circle around. Cities, new yorker and love writing about new york. I get a lot of energy from the city. Pop culture, race, technology a book about new york, a racialized take on new york its just they are, doesnt have much to say about technology but those are for five areas i tend to circle around. Host how should people read your book . Social commentary,. Guest definitely sag harbor which is my fourth novel growing up in the 80s and takes off from my childhood. Underground railroad is my least autobiographical book. Im not in there and some sort of coded way which is probably why people like it. So greeted from the beginning to the end is a good way. Some books are funny, some are a little more tragic. I hope spirits is worth your time. Sometimes theres commentary on whatever weird thing going through that year. Host and sag harbor are you benji with a bad haircut . Guest benji is a kid growing up in new york in the 80s. As i did, unfortunately my life was a very interesting so i have to exaggerate. When i started the book i wanted to base characters on my friends and unfortunately whenever they appeared on the page they became less and less like my friends as the book took over. It started autobiographical and im in there but the demands of the story supersede any other urge. And try to make a compelling story which means exaggerating what actually happened. What is the process to get to elevator inspectors are zombies or railroad that actually exists . I wanted to mix it up and not do the same thing. If you know how to write a certain kind of book then why do it again. Writing a book that is very plot heavy is a way to varied up and not to the same thing. One that has a firstperson narrator is a way to keep it varied for me. So im on a perverse street. I went from sag harbor historian 80s to zone one, and a pop lip takes on be true so i am keeping it very different. I get my ideas from articles i spent a lot of time on my couch. Sometimes the ideas stay with you when you get an open spot in your schedule you could consider sometimes i fall away. They come from a lot of different places. Theres a common theme about a guy who didnt get the rules of life and had a certain unease around other people. Thats a little biographical. But i dont want to get that too early. Theres something about an outsider. Whether an outsider makes a good observer. A good storyteller. Youre in the action but also standing apart. So someone who observes but also removed is good for telling the story. Nice to have a point of view character for the reader most of us are not elevator inspectors of my out side characters become a way for the reader to enter the story. Host zone london camacho 2011. But you wrote that is young guy like an eighth or ninth grade. Guest no. As a big horror fran writing horror fiction and Science Fiction i wrote to terribles dories in college but and start writing fiction to my mid 20s. But it does go back to my childhood. Parents who love horror movies we watch for movies together i remember seeing night of the living dead at an early age. It stayed with me. To refresh your memory its about the eve of the zombie a pop. Ellipsis the main protagonist is a black man being pursued by will why people who want to daveua him and need him. Growing up as a horror and Science Fiction fan five books and i was ready to try my hand. You said you watched for movies but i get the impression there is an obsession. Sure. A real interest. My brother and i came of age with the vcr boom and we go to crazy eddies and brent five for movies and every friday go through them and return them and start over again. It was sciencefiction horror and had a lot of comics growing up id read comics and my brothers room. So fantasy, horror has always seemed to be a potent storytelling to her. Zone one a few other ideas about what zombies mean for me my own interpretation and put my own stamp on the genre was fun and important. Host what are zombies mean to . I think different generations interpret different horror genres differently. Vampires need something in england, they need Something Different to the twilight generation zombies mean Something Different to teenagers now. To me its always been an expression of social anxiety and fear of other people. You go to bed and you wake up in the world this change. There are zombies out to get you and they stop pretending. Now theyre out to get you. Of course it be through psychology that i interpret zombies that way. When i was finally ready to tackle it i had various ideas ready to put on the page. Is social anxiety a common trait among novelists . I dont know think it helps when you worry about your work are you doing a good job maybe good skill for being a novelist helps you not coast. Host worrying about what others may think of your work . Guest i think a healthy amount of worry helps you make sure youre putting everything into that paragraph for that page, making sure is coming out right even if you have done eight or nine times. Host in the new yorker and 2012 you said to be good novelists to fully and have ones delusion to give into every cookie aspect of ones freakish myths is a handy survival strategy. Guest what i like about my different books as they are on and allow me to express different ideas about the world and myself. Different theories. I think writing has become a way for me to interpret the world for myself and to figure out how i feel about things and how i feel about societal systems and politics. So that license is very important for me. Not being tied to expectations following my own inclinations. Just because it sounds like a bad or dumb idea can you make it working can result to the reader at the same time youre selling it to yourself . The delusion that you have something to say that your work is worthy of being read by others is useful. Where did the thought of an intuition come from. Were you on an elevator . Did you see and expect her . I read the book that everyone brought the book that everyone hated. Is about mary during coleman the tv star, here is a tv critic at the time writing about black imagery and pop culture. Thought id write about it gary coleman like child star. Seem like a good idea to me. The novel is on the sitcom called on moving in because user is getting adopted by rich white people. So i moving it seem like a soft realism. Everyone hated the book. Think i became a writer them. Like i was going to become a lawyer or something and would can write another book that i was gonna learn how to write by the end of it. I figure people like potts, i could try that so i studied suspense and is watching 2020 as i often do in those days in my 20s. In the 1990s and there was a piece of the hidden dangers of escalators. Apparently a few dont repair them they can detach from the sides and you can lose a toe. So there is an escalator inspector i thought that was a random job. And growing up in your carry see theres a law necessarily enforced but they sign a certificate, ive been here things are fine. They come once a year, your work or school and suddenly you see that they been there so i thought when to be cool if an elevator inspector had to be, inspector and solve a criminal case. A postmodern detective story. Went to the library to see what type of skills elevator inspector would bring to the case of it was non. So is like i made a different culture for elevator inspectors. A figure there conservatives and progressives in will look at the people who do it the perfect way. There is an elevator Inspector School and philosophies so really i was teach myself how to write. And have a female protagonist before. Did not have a book that had a plot or any linear momentum. Then i took this weird whimsical idea of an elevator inspector solving the case. Host prior to starting centerview you looked at your books on the table and said, sorry for the clunkers you had to read. What do you consider to be a clunker . Guest i think theyre all good but hopefully if you do something for long time to get better at it. Certain books ill think about and wonder, why doing so many adjectives, with their simpler way of saying that. Maybe the book could lose up a chair there. But her flammability writer doing things in a more efficient way. Hopefully you get better and better and then a plateau and start sucking. Play absalom to get a better phase Getting Better at my job and learning from each book. Host does on moving in still exist . Guest the manuscript is there. For a while thought maybe i will stripmining but its really terrible and the energy it would take to bring up to my now very high standards would be well spent doing something else. So my children have like a gambling debt they can sell money 30 years from now to make some quick cash. Host so was a female protagonist. Was the reason to write through a womans point of view . Guest women exist and if you tell different stories you should pick different points of view. I had the string a male protagonist before this book. So it seemed wise to mix it up. If you know how to do something, why do it. With watson i could into my hipster new york voice my first novel. I was i chose a third person narrator so i cannot rely on my firstperson narrator tricks. The female protagonists i had not done before. By doing it i could hopefully become a better writer. Then with core i had a few female their raters in a row. Theres a famous narrative been by harry jacobs as she writes about how when the slave girl becomes a slave woman shes into a much terrible form of slavery. Now you have to frontier masters desires. Youre supposed to pump out more babies. So that predicament of the female slave sound seems worthy of learning more. So just to keep the challenges going. Host what was your favorite lunch right . Guest this book was hard to write because i was broke, this book was harder because i was broke and depressed. Then when youre finished you can look back and think this is terrible but there it was a special time in my life. So with the noble the noble hustle was the most fun to write. So humor book taking off from the trip i took to the world series of poker. I tried to cram as many jokes as i could in there. As a journalistic framework that is trying to cram as many weird jokes and bits of myself into it. Was fun. It started from a journalistic assignment. They call me up to see if i wanted to write about the world series of poker. I said no i dont want to go to vegas atop. So what if we could see them page you the entrance fee anything or to the world series. I said okay id go that. But i didnt know how to play it so i started cramming. Drop my daughter off at school and the other parents would say what he up to . Like im going to Atlantic City to train poker term the that i go there and gamble that i got to the world series. For the first time i had to get out of my comfort zone which is basically a 5foot area around my couch. I need to learn how to play poker so i went in verse my family and the city of new york. When i was writing and utilize what a joke you make yourself laugh. Then sometimes you feel stupid laughing at your own jokes for a while. With writing in the serial way like dickens did you get Immediate Response of people liked it. It was a special writing experience in terms of the material and how it came to be. I look upon that sixmonth rate fondly. Host you said i got to wear sunglasses inside it was good because im half dead anyway. For years i was told i have a good poker face. I realize that because i was half dead inside. My natural lack of aspect was for once an asset in a social situation. Tammy unpacked. Half dead . You do read about having the mask on and the fact that you are some my depressed when youre writing in your different person when youre done with the book, is that important or pain or depression important . I think it partially is. Lynn partially its good to have a healthy joking relationship in life. Whether its art or anything else. So not taking myself too seriously is important. I think in terms of sharing how i feel about other people, demystifying it is important. Most writers i know are crawling along the pavement trying to write some pages and hand them in so we can keep doing what we like to do. A lot of times rating is unpleasant. Like when he figure out any sentence or character but for me not taking too seriously and i think the character of the oppressive shed and is fun to play. Sparsely true. Its also the default setting in my public relations. What was the easiest book to write . They were all hard. Im a go at the shorter one. The book im working on now is pretty short, short is an easy but it does not prolong the agony of a 400 page or. When you when the pulitzer praise by oprah praise by president obama does that put a lot of pressure on the next book . Theres pressure imposed on myself because i dont want to coast. Unfortunately when i get good news and im in the middle of something i can feel the good. The menace like all is terrible. Its always hard when the pressure is selfimposed but its always been there but should i read a book, theres always somewhere pressure on you. Whether things are going well or theyre not. Good afternoon and welcome to book tv on cspan2. This is our monthly Index Program and this entire year we are doing a special action in addition with bestselling action authors. And this month, our author is bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead. Heres a list of his books, weve referred to several of them through the first half hour iwant to give you a list , the intuitionist is his first book in 1998, johnhenry days, 2001, the colossus of new york, 2003. Apex heights in 2006, sag harbor 2009. Zone one about the zombies, 2011. The noble hustle which we talked about a little bit, a Nonfiction Book in 2014 and of cou and of course is most recent the underground railroad. We want your participation this afternoon. Here is how you can participate. Host what is the first line you wrote in the underground railroad are the first row will get the first word . It was the opening line. I always do an outline before i start working to do the beginning and the end the last couple of books i have known the last line of the book before i start writing. I did not have that with this book without personal and i think came really quickly when i was organizing the book and o inived the horrible editing process to get into the book. Host what is the vetting process . If i think it is genius and then they think it is stupid but in this case the first linean it was durable and sturdy and spoke in that one sentence and it stayed with me. Host from the underground railroad the negro became a human being only then is he the white mans equal t1 so in the early part of the 19th century and going to medical school and the book takes a route through American History with the main storyline that was my cut off for technology was certain slang and then there were some side stories in the book with the supporting cast. So in that section dr. Stevens who meets correlator was a young medical student in the 19 century learning about biology. On cadavers and then you dig them up so there is a healthy trade of grave robbing. People would compete to find fresh cadaversd or games gangs so he considers himself liberal and to talk about prejudice in boston and uses that despite racial prejudice or the dispersions cast upon black folks in america and ironically used for dissection and they become equal suddenly elevated only in death to the level of equality. One of those many uplifting moments inin the book. Did you know you would write about that when you started the book . I mentioned that South Carolina but the white supremacist state but then i knew i wanted to have the opening of the overture of us slaves wife life so her grandmother empowered her from africa, the passage, different plantations and i figured the typical slaves story that it seemed they could open up the world so even though they were auditioning for the short biographical chapters and after certain sections i would think after North Carolina need a husbandandwife team who is more interesting . What can the upbringing bring to the book . What can ethel bring to the book . Even though i have a strong structuree obviously with that process those are very useful in terms of giving voice to how itth was evolving. Host can you read this as historical fiction . T1. I thank you know this didnt actually happen i moving from late 19th century i had the idea to make the underground railroad into Something Real. That was something i had as an idea on my couch f years ago so there was this element. So now i can do a lot of things in the book and the books power comes from that structure. Ru but no. It is not because they take many liberties. I would not stick to the fax but the larger american truth. It is not bound by chronology. It did happen but but trying to move those different historical episodes around. Did that randall plantation actually exist . Did you visit these places in your research . Where cora was raised is my own creation. I did the research and made my own plantation one of three slaves on the smallre family farm or domestic slave in a townhouse in baltimore that that serves the artistic needs. But in terms of visiting plantations, thirds of the way through i figured with decent