Matthew Salesses Believes Being Better People Makes Us Better Writers

Akanksha Singh interviews Matthew Salesses about his new novel “The Sense of Wonder,” decolonizing storytelling, and what K-dramas can teach us about plot.

I first came across Matthew Salesses through his book Craft in the Real World, a bestselling text on fiction, storytelling, and who gets to tell stories and how. It’s one of those books that’s rich with aha moments, and on my first read, I repeatedly woke up my cat from her slumber as I highlighted chunks of words. It was validating to hear someone else renounce the Aristotelian plot structure as outdated: “When we continue to teach plot this way,” writes Salesses, we “ignore the many other kinds of plot found in literatures around the world.” I felt ignored—I still do—but I breathe better knowing it’s not just me who feels this way.

The book is a critique of the traditional ways in which writing is taught and which kinds of creative decisions get regulated as “good craft.” “A workshop should not participate in the binding, but the freeing of the writer from the culturally regulated boundaries of what it is possible to say and how it is possible to say it,” Salesses writes in the preface. And yet, that’s still so much of what fiction and nonfiction (including journalism) is: a list of dos and don’ts that look to keep words digestible, bound, and often algorithmic and white.

His new novel, The Sense of Wonder, mingles the lives of Won, a Korean American NBA player, and Carrie, his Korean American girlfriend, with snippets from the K-dramas Carrie works on as an executive producer. Told through their two (at times overlapping) viewpoints, Won’s narration centers on his being signed to the Knicks as a “marketing strategy”—a move that keeps him benched until the team’s star player is injured. Carrie’s narration, on the other hand, is softer and more nuanced: it wends through her sister’s cancer’s diagnosis while she juggles producing K-dramas for the American palate. With its entertaining plot and feather-light prose, the novel shucks open the grave realities of the model minority myth in a most enjoyable way.

In the interview below, which has been edited for clarity and concision, we discuss representation, tokenization, and the beloved storytelling form that is the K-drama.

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Akanksha Singh: You chose to tell this story from two points of view—Won’s and Carrie’s—alongside sections dedicated to two different K-drama plots Carrie’s working on. Before we talk about the K-drama as a form, I wanted to ask how you arrived at the decision to have two viewpoint characters.

Matthew Salesses: I actually started the book from Won’s perspective. I was writing according to prompts from Robert Boswell, [which] were prompts to write the beginning, middle and end of a novel [while] I was in my PhD program, and I had this idea for a novel about a Jeremy Lin-type character. So, I wrote those over about a six-month period.

After [my last novel] was published, I was thinking about what the next book would be. I remembered I had written this, “beginning, middle, and end” of a novel, and I asked [Boswell] at the time, “Now that I’ve written these three parts, what am I supposed to do with them?” And he said, “Oh, you just write the parts in between!”

But when I went back to it, I didn’t really want to write the parts in between. I thought, well, I could just write another “beginning, middle, and end” from a different character’s [viewpoint], and then put them together.

I think it would have been kind of a lie to write a novel like this in a very traditional Western realist form.

AS: That’s so interesting! Coming back to K-dramas more generally, I think there’s something to be said about how they’ve garnered a global following, sort of proving that there is room for “unfamiliar” stories—something the novel itself acknowledges. Yet, the novel’s protagonists themselves are constantly brick-walled by their identities. Was it important for you for this book to be about alternative storytelling forms as much as it was about how two non-white characters navigated the world?

MS: That’s a good question. I didn’t really set out to write an alternative story structure, but that was always going to be a part of it anyway because I’m interested in them. The way that I was writing the story dictated this “other” kind of structure, and then I was writing about K-drama, of course, which is another kind of structure [too]. The kind of story that I wanted to tell was already about “alternative stories,” and the ways in which our stories are often untold or unlistened to, or fit into these overarching stories. So you’re always kind of already dealing with that material. I often try to match form and structure together. And I think it would have been kind of a lie to write a novel like this . . . in a very traditional Western realist form.

AS: If you were to give viewing suggestions to readers who weren’t familiar with the K-drama as a form of storytelling, which ones would you pick?

MS: Some of the ones I was thinking about as I was writing [were] “The Lonely Shining Goblin.” “The Legend of The Blue Sea” is another one—where a mermaid becomes a human, there’s a love story there. And then “My Love from the Star,” which is [about] an alien and a human. If you explain any K-drama, it just sounds terrible! Oftentimes, the titles are also terrible!

AS: I thought the structure advanced the story well, and I liked that we saw notable overlaps in time between Carrie and Won’s narratives: it wasn’t one of those books where one character picks up where the last one left off. Knowing what I know now, of how you wrote this, was this deliberate or did it happen organically?

MS: It was deliberate. I wanted to tell both their stories over the same period of time, so there [was] always going to be some overlap. I spent a long time in revision trying to figure out how to move sections around so that it wasn’t too confusing, while also allowing for the ability to see the story from two different angles. I moved a lot of things around [in] time [and in] space in the book in order to make it easier to read, to group things thematically, and be able to retell certain points from both perspectives.

AS: One thing I appreciated about this novel was how it challenged a lot of what Global North readers know/feel/think about storytelling. You write,“Unlike in Hollywood, in Korea, plot happens because of who people are, not what they choose. They have to deal with the circumstances of their lives whether they cause those circumstances or not.” You touch on this in Craft in the Real World, but can you speak to me about the importance of decolonizing the idea of “plot,” as a writer?

MS: I think it’s impossible not to live with a colonized mind in a country that’s so colonizing both abroad and domestically, [and] physically, emotionally, mentally, and [in] all these different ways. I’m a strong believer that we become better writers as we become better people, and I also like to believe [that] as we become better writers, we become better people as well. I needed to decolonize, or rethink, the stories that I’ve been told and [have] taken hold of, and the stories that I told about myself. As we read stories that challenge the way that we’ve seen stories before, in the ways that we’ve accepted the story should be, then we’re also giving ourselves space to retell stories in a way that can be more useful to us outside of the structures that are pressed upon us. I wanted the book to be able to do that, while also teaching somebody how to read the book, as they’re reading it.

AS: Would you say there’s more space for these decolonized voices in publishing? Have you seen a shift in your own time as a writer?

MS: I think it’s a trickle. I’d love to see a change, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the way that progress works in our country. Especially when everything has to go through the machine of capitalism.

I needed to decolonize, or rethink, the stories that I’ve been told and have taken hold of, and the stories that I told about myself.

AS: There’s a character’s death in the novel. There’s a buildup to the death but how it happened was completely unexpected! How do you choose how to kill off a character?

MS: It felt as if the book was leading toward a death. The character [who] dies in the book is the character who is the least supportable character in the book and is also going down a certain kind of path that might lead toward death. Yet I didn’t want her to shoot somebody up or commit suicide. I think what happens to us [in real life] is far less predictable than that most of the time. So, I thought it’d be more both amusing to me and to readers, but also more true to the way that life seems to work.

AS: Do you believe character deaths have to serve the plot? I feel like, a lot of the time, we (mistakenly) believe fiction owes us answers, and I didn’t necessarily get the closure I expected with a lot of characters, which is how real life goes. Do you think that is part of decolonizing our expectations as readers?

MS: For sure, it sometimes seems like a very Western idea. The idea that we have, like, even the sense that in the West, there’s an apocalypse, right? We have this sense of apocalypse coming. But in many cultures, the world kind of just goes in circles, right? There’s no apocalypse, because every ending is also a beginning. Closure’s like that, too. I think we expect closure. We especially expect closure in certain situations like grief, where there is no closure—and closure [itself] often seems very untrue to me. I don’t think actually we get those kinds of stories [with closure] that often, except for when we’re kind of making it up. [Finding closure] in our minds seems much more important to me; [what] we are making of [something] as readers. I think some people will find closure in ways that they want, or maybe ways that they don’t want, in the book. But the book itself is not going to offer something like that, because it doesn’t believe in it.

AS: Another thing that struck me was that a lot of the basketball stuff wasn’t explained in the same way the protagonists’ racial experiences were explicitly spelled out. I’m curious how you go about balancing the identities of your characters as a writer. Do you think we have a duty to let people (especially white people) into our worlds with some hand holding or is it up to them to do the work?

MS: I think it’s about what you want to explain and which audience you’re writing to. Like the basketball, I find it interesting, but it doesn’t really help you understand how to read the story. So I didn’t feel like I needed to explain that. If you know more about basketball, you might enjoy the basketball parts more. I felt I had to explain more of [the K-drama] because I’m using it as a way for somebody to understand how to read the book as they’re going. So, even though I, in some ways, didn’t want to explain that much about how K-dramas work, I felt that it would help explain the “rules” of the book in a way that didn’t feel like it was explaining the rules of the book.

And [with regards to] thinking about and reflecting on incidents of racial tension and aggression in the book, I wasn’t trying to explain how those felt, but rather to show that I understood how they felt—and to reflect the kind of experience that somebody who has had it before can relate to and see meaning in. In real life, we don’t find a lot of meaning in [these experiences]—it’s just a kind of thing that happens [and] brings up trauma. I’m not really interested in re-traumatizing readers, but I am interested in thinking about the ways in which these moments can, on reflection, tell us something about our lives in a way that we often find difficult in the moment.

AS: What’s one piece of advice you’d give to (primarily white) writers incorporating racial minorities in their fiction?

MS: I would say live a life that incorporates BIPOC! Don’t try to do it if you’re not living that life.