Author Gabrielle Zevin discusses ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ at Portland high school

Gabrielle Zevin is a lifelong devotee of video games, which is obvious to readers of her newest book, the bestseller “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” The book tells the story of two video game designers who find professional creative and intellectual synergy that doesn’t always match in their personal lives. The book starts from the premise that designing video games is the highest of artistic pursuits. “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is the Multnomah County Everybody Reads 2024 selection, and Zevin joins us to discuss it in front of an audience of students at Grant High School.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you in front of an audience at Northeast Portland’s Grant High School. We’re going to spend the hour with the writer Gabrielle Zevin. Gabrielle Zevin has published 10 novels in the last 19 years. She crosses genres and audiences. Some of her books, like “Elsewhere,” are intended for younger readers. Others like “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” are for adults. A number of Zevin’s novels have hit best seller lists and won critical acclaim, but none of them have become as big a sensation as her most recent book. “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” came out just a couple of years ago. It’s a novel about video games for gamers and for people who have never picked up a controller. It brings to life issues of creation and collaboration, art and commerce, and the sometimes invisible line between friendship and love. “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” has sold more than a million copies worldwide. It is also this year’s selection for the Multnomah County Library program, “Everybody Reads.” Gabrielle Zevin, it’s a pleasure to have you on Think Out Loud.

Gabrielle Zevin: Thanks for having me, Dave.

Miller: Let’s just start with a question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Charlie Williams [audience member]: Hi. My name’s Charlie Williams. And my question is, what are the main aspects that inspired you to write “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow?”

Zevin: As Dave said in his introduction, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is a book about love, art, video games and time. But I think what it actually is about…I almost object to the idea when people say it’s a book for gamers, because I don’t think of it as a book for gamers. I think it’s a book for creators. I think it’s a book for people who try to make things. And so for me, that was what I wanted to depict, what it is to have a long career in the arts, across many years.

Actually, it’s funny because I’ve been talking about the book for two years, so I should find it quite easy to synopsize, but I don’t find it that easy to synopsize, because in a sense it’s about many things. I think it’s about how difficult it is to connect, even though we have so many ways we could, in theory, connect, and yet we don’t manage to connect, even with the people closest to us. I think it’s a book really about how volatile and wonderful creative collaboration can be, and yes, it’s a book about video games. There’s a quote I really like, it’s from Marshall McLuhan and he says that the games of a people reveal a great deal about them. And I think it’s true. We think of games or video games as being maybe a silly thing or a childish thing. But in fact, they can be quite revelatory about all of human beings, all of human history.

Miller: For people who haven’t read the book or read the book yet, can you introduce us to the two main characters, Sam and Sadie?

Zevin: Yes. Well, just to kind of step back, when I’m writing a character, the thing you realize about writing characters is that, in a sense, the only way you can write anybody is if you know yourself quite well, because in a sense I’m the center from which everyone else emerges. And so until you know yourself, accept the privileges you’ve had in life, or the disadvantages, it’s difficult to calculate the distance between you and anybody else. I have things I share with Sam and Sadie, for example, Sam and I have the same ethnic background, we are half Korean, half Jewish people. But something that I don’t have, the same disability that Sam has. So in a sense, I had to do quite a bit of research to figure out what that was going to mean for his life.

But essentially, I looked at all of the characters through the lens of, why do people play and what did video games bring to their lives? So, in the case of Sam, he wants to be in a body that works perfectly all the time. If you think of the first scene of the book, he’s in a train station and it’s really difficult to get through the train station for him. And in a sense, for Sam, real life is difficult, video games are easy.

Miller: And when you said he has a disability, he was in a…I think I can say this, right? We find this out early on, he has a mobility problem because of his foot.

Zevin: Yes, that’s true.

Miller: OK. And Sadie Green, what about her?

Zevin: I think Sadie comes from a lot of my own experiences as a person who’s made creative work professionally for a number of years. I think so much of Sadie is… and in fact, it’s quite funny. You’ll hear people who love the book say “I hate Sadie Green,” to where my partner was saying to me, we should have t-shirts that are made, “Everybody hates Sadie Green.” And I think in a sense it’s because people are still quite uncomfortable with ambitious women. Sadie is somebody who would rather succeed than be loved, and people are incredibly hard on her even when they talk about the book. And I think it’s quite interesting, we’re seeing a young woman, by the end of the book, she’s still only in her mid thirties, most of the book, she’s in her twenties.

I wanted to write about that period of my life, when you feel like you only have a certain amount of time and you’ve got to make your impact on the world, right now, and so that was really Sadie for me. There’s a German word in the book - “torch panning” -  gate-shut panic, literally, the idea that time is running out and you’re going to miss a chance to have an opportunity. And for me, that was me in my twenties and it was definitely Sadie, too.

Miller: Have you been surprised at all by the, maybe hatred is too strong a word, but the reaction among some readers to this character you created? I mean, your read is that this is a kind of a misogynistic societal response to a young, female creator. Were you surprised by the vitriol?

Zevin: Nothing surprises me anymore. I’m rarely surprised, actually. But the benefit of writing books across many years is most of the things audience responses start to be a bit predictable, in a way. So I knew that, I think there is some percentage of people that read the book and you see that there is a male character and you see that there is a female character and you think to yourself, why won’t they just get together? Why won’t that girl just love that nice boy? And so, if it doesn’t lead to that, people will object to it. We are so trained to expect certain kinds of stories and certain kinds of endings. So, no, I wasn’t particularly surprised.

Miller: The novel starts in college. Sam goes to Harvard. Sadie goes to MIT just a couple of miles away. You went to Harvard. What was it like for you to revisit, through these characters, some of those years?

Zevin: So you have memories of things and you think you know, you can count on your memories as being reliably true, but it had been quite a bit of time since I’d gone to Harvard. So I had memories of things that when I would literally go, physically look at say, Google Maps, places would not be exactly where I remembered them to be. And I think the thing about a place like Harvard is when you go there, there are so many buildings that have been there since like the1600s. And then there’s an Abercrombie and Fitch or something, and so this kind of feeling of time travel, like certain things are locked and then other things are  always changing and you can really feel the sense of time passing, which was why it was interesting to write about it. I was a terrible Harvard student.

Miller: Is that different than saying I was a terrible college student?

Zevin: I mean, for me, it means the same thing. I just mean, I didn’t experience that time as being… I didn’t really know what to do with myself at Harvard in a way. I didn’t find it to be a particularly creative place. And now, many years later, I’m quite sure it was me, not the place, but back then it seemed like it was definitely Harvard. For many years I definitely winged it.

Miller: You say it didn’t feel like a creative place. Did you already know then that you wanted to create things, whether it was novels or something else?

Zevin: I did know and I didn’t see obvious ways to start doing that then, but I also think something I didn’t know until much later was that there are periods in your life that will seem dormant, but they aren’t actually dormant. They’re kind of just maybe reading and learning and looking and absorbing because if you don’t do that, honestly, what are you going to write about later? What are you going to create around? There are some times where you have to refill.

Miller: Do you have advice for the young people here who are anywhere from one to four years away from going to college themselves? In terms of, I’m thinking about being creative. I mean, that’s what your life has been about and what these characters’ lives have been about. But if that’s your goal, how would you approach the four years of higher education?

Zevin: I don’t have advice because as I mentioned, I was a terrible Harvard student. But, my advice, I guess sitting from where I am now, is that college is a gift, if you’re lucky enough to be able to go to it, in which you can just learn and see as much as you can. If you’re fortunate enough that that doesn’t have to lead to definitely making income in four years, which for most people, it does, you can really use that time to fill up with all the things that will take you through the rest of your life.

Miller: I wanna turn back to video games. Your narrator writes early on, “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It’s a human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back. I know you won’t hurt me even though you can. It is a dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.” Do you agree with your narrator there?

Zevin: It does. I think so much of Sam and Sadie’s relationship is built on play and when you say I’m going to play with you, you’re saying, I trust you. I trust you that we’re gonna enter this other place that we’re in and that nothing that happens here is going to hurt either of us, and dogs do it. I have a dog who really was one that never played. But when we got another dog, she was a player and watching the process of them teach each other to play was really beautiful in a way. And at first, it kind of scared me because the way dogs play is quite violent. But then I researched the matter and it turns out that when a dog plays that way, they are building a foundation for years of a future relationship. And it’s really important for two dogs to play that way, in terms of the relationship that they’ll have forever. And I think, for Sam and Sadie, it’s kind of the same way.

Miller: With first person shooters or with whatever.

Zevin: With whatever it is. And again, I kind of touched on this before but we tell people, like when maybe you go to high school, now is the time when play is over and we’re going to become adults and do serious things. And it’s a terrible thing we actually do, when we say, no, play is childish, because play is not always childish. Play can have therapeutic benefits. Play can be educational, play can be many different kinds of things. Play can be theater, play can be all kinds of wonderful cultural things, too. And so I feel quite sad that that’s the way kind of play sits still in our culture.

Miller: One of the more interesting paradoxes about this is that, for video games in particular, often that you are not ostensibly yourself, there’s some kind of avatar. You’ve taken on a mask or you’re a different gender or you’re a different version than who you are bodily in the world. But your argument is that despite that, or maybe because of that, you’re also being a more authentic version of yourself in the act of play.

Zevin: Well, it can be many different things. I don’t want to say it’s one thing, it’s sometimes more authentic. I think sometimes it can help you discover, maybe, who you actually are and sometimes, but it also doesn’t have to be authentic. I think the kind of creation of identity through play is a very underexplored topic, actually. I don’t think it’s completely coincidental that we have an exploding sort of definition of personhood in the year since people began to play video games, commonly.

Miller: Draw that out. What do you mean?

Zevin: In terms of even thinking about, so you maybe have like the manliest man. And he spent, say, 1,000 hours playing Tomb Raider. So he’s playing Lara Croft and he’s been inside a woman for 1,000 hours or more, 10,000 hours. I wonder how that changes how you might experience personhood.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we are talking with the novelist, Gabrielle Zevin. She’s the author of 10 novels, including “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name?

Anyanka [audience member]: Hi. My name is Anyanka, and my question is, what is your favorite video game right now? And why?

Zevin: It’s hard to choose favorites among video games because they serve different functions. But right now I’m gonna say something that is on like borderline, just a productivity app, which is Duolingo. I think the idea of Duolingo suggests kind of the highest form of play. More people are learning a language because of Duolingo. And the idea that all these people who otherwise would not be spending that time learning languages is actually quite beautiful. Even if you don’t become fluent in Spanish or Mandarin or whatever it is, just the idea that you can take these other languages in your world into your brain and into the world. I think, at least for me when I use it, it makes you feel closer to everyone else in the world and also to have greater insights into language itself.

I kind of use that example only because I think people only think of maybe one kind of game, maybe they think of like, “Angry Birds,” if they’re that kind of person or maybe they think of “The Last of Us.” And both of these are actually beautifully designed games, but sometimes I say that to kind of convince somebody who’s a doubter about it, that there are worthwhile things to be gained from games and play.

Miller: But aren’t you there slightly talking about gamification as well?

Zevin: I think it’s a gray area between those two things. So on a related point, I will go and do events and people will say to me, “I have never gamed in my life.” And then they’ll list all these things that they do that are actually games. So for instance, Instagram is a kind of game. If you’re using Instagram, it has like a reward system, it has currency, it is gamified. And in a sense it’s just a game that is without ending and very dull.

Miller: At a certain point, I mean, life is then a game too, right?

Zevin: I think so.

Miller: Except it does have an ending, which is one of the key points of your book. I mean, that is maybe the single biggest difference between most video games or most games and life – death, true death.

Zevin: Right, and I think that’s what draws Sam and Sadie to them. They both experience brushes with death in childhood. And I think in a sense by playing games and what the gamer learns is that you can keep starting over and over and over. And the funny thing is, I think part of the message of the book is that life is more similar to video games than you think. There are actually many chances to start over in life. Every day you wake up is a chance to try again, effectually.

Miller: Have people been pitching you their games since you released a spoken to the world?

Zevin: Not too much. I have more game designer friends than I did, I will say that. But I don’t hear tons of game pitches. It’s funny because people will complement the games in the book. And I think to myself, my burden as the writer of a video game in a novel is much less than the person who actually makes a video game in the world. As a person writing a video game in a novel, I don’t have to worry about if it’s fun, if it works.

Miller: If it’s pretty, if it’s exciting.

Zevin: Right. I’m telling you, it is, so it is. But the reality of say a game like “Both Sides” or “Ichigo” is that these are made by teams of…in many cases, like if it was a triple A game, we’ll say we’ll go with “Both Sides” as the example, that would be something made by 100 people across at least five to six years, that kind of thing.

Miller: And it would cost tens of millions of dollars?

Zevin: More than that even. I mean, games are expensive. So, I think there’s just such a long way between a game in a book and a game in actual life.

Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name? And what’s your question?

Lillian [audience member]: Hi. My name is Lillian and I was wondering what your process for researching game development was like.

Zevin: Yes. My dad was a computer programmer and so the first video games I ever played came preloaded on a computer that he brought home from work. So I had some background in computer programming. My mom also worked at IBM. And I think something that, having a dad who was a computer programmer made me realize early on, is that programming is just another kind of language. It’s like learning French, it’s like learning Pig Latin or whatever it is.

Miller: But, it wasn’t an invisible, mysterious thing for you.

Zevin: It was not. It was in my house from the time I was a child, and I think that made a difference. I realized that programming was a way to communicate with somebody else. It’s a form of communication. And so I think that kind of spirit runs through the book, the idea that there’s not as great a divide as you think between the sciences and the humanities.

Miller: Were you interested at that age in pursuing tech or programming as a career?

Zevin: I learned how to program a little incidentally but no, because my parents did it. My dad would have loved for me to have gone into the family business. And I kind of joke with him that the closest I’ll ever get is writing “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” which he’s happy with as an outcome. He was a great reader as well. But for me, and in terms of the process of researching it, I had played my whole life, but not with any ulterior motive. I’d never played a game for any other reason except that I thought it sounded fun. But when I went to research this book, I didn’t want Sam and Sadie’s tastes to be limited to my own tastes, which meant I had to kind of start forming a canon of the greatest video games of all time, really. What pushed the tech forward, what pushed storytelling forward, what was the most popular in any given year?

So I started to just, again, research this topic that way and I feel like maybe a thing that I began to realize, at some point, was that the entire history of video games was contained within my lifetime. And that was the big breakthrough for me, once I realized that what the story was going to be was the ‘coming of age of an artist’ story, two artists. The Germans call this a “Kunzler Roman”. And also the coming of age of an entire industry, which was video games.

Miller: Can you explain one of the things I don’t think I’d ever heard of, that is a part of video game development early on, is a design document. What is this?

Zevin: I mean, it can have many different components to it. It’s just kind of a document that includes all your ideas for what the game might be, your theories about… it’s not different from a design document or design brief in almost any other kind of field. It could have concept art, it could have references that you’re thinking about making, it could have maybe ideas about tools you might employ to create the game, and so really, it’s just this all encompassing thing. They can be relatively short, but they rarely are, like 25 pages or they can be 300, 400 pages.

Miller: Is there an analog for you personally, as opposed to a book proposal? But is there an analog for you for a novel?

Zevin: I’ve never written a book proposal. I don’t believe in them. I’ve only ever sold books to people.

Miller: I want to turn back to that in a second. But I’m wondering if you have something, I don’t know if I’m talking about an outline or a vibe notion, but something that says this is what I hope this work will be?

Zevin: I do have that. So when you start writing a book, in the case of “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” I keep notebooks and the notebooks, I don’t censor myself in them at all. And the notebook for “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” the first kind of note I have about this book idea is a story of two game designers, the games they make mirror their lives, some things like that. But on the same page where I have that note, I have a drawing of my bathroom, because we were thinking about remodeling the bathroom.

So it wasn’t obvious to me that this is definitely going to be an idea I’m following. But I think with any idea, what you need to figure out is, how much is it going to hold? Because the only ideas we’re following from your ones that are big bowls, that have many other ideas that are going to fit within that bowl. And once I started flirting with the idea of video games, I began to realize how big the bowl was, that in fact, when I looked at the history of video games, I could really see the story of what it was to be a person and artist, from the 1970s to the 2010s. And I think with any subject you could think about, [such as] women’s diving or bread making and if you study any subject closely enough, you’ll see a shadow history of what it was to be a person during that time as well.

Miller: So, back to your saying that you don’t write book proposals, I mean, and you’re not alone in that, right? It’s not uncommon for novelists to not write proposals.

Zevin: For novelists, I would say it’s very… some people do if you’re trying to sell something before you’ve finished it, but I’ve never wanted to sell anything before I finished it.

Miller: One of the hallmarks of most video games is that the player in one way or another is in the game, has agency, is a character or is something that’s doing something. That is the way most games work. Novels don’t work like that. I mean, the specific magic of novels is that you can often feel like you understand the consciousness of their characters, even if it’s in the third person, you still…

Zevin: Their interiority really.

Miller: And that’s something that is almost unique to novels. Films don’t get you inside in the same way, even if the camera is like the eye, it’s not the same. I’m wondering if once you decided you were going to make a novel that featured video games so prominently, how did you think about how you wanted the narration to work?

Zevin: In many ways, I wanted the narration to feel almost old-fashioned at times, because I wanted people to know that the illusion is that video games are terribly modern, but really what they are is just another form of storytelling. All art historically involves some kind of tech. So if you’re painting, the tech is paintbrushes, the tech is paint. And so there’s this idea that because games are tech, that they are not art. And so for me, I was conscious, from the title to kind of the way the book is written, of wanting it to be a novel that was recognizably fluid in the way kind of I guess classics are, that it was going to be again, extremely interior, extremely subjective.

But a thing that fascinated me was the ways in which video game storytelling is not like novel storytelling. It said that you can’t lose a novel, you can’t, and that kind of thing, but you can lose, obviously, a game that you play. So I got really interested in what I think novels can do that games can’t do, and vice versa. If you look at the section called the NPC, for example – and NPC, I know you all know it, is a non player character. I wanted that section to be in second person, the you point of view, because second person is so linked to the earliest video games. So you have games like “Colossal Cave Adventure,” which are basically just text-based and they say, you are standing in a cave, you pick up a book from the shelf, whatever, that kind of thing. I thought it was interesting to me that the beginning of sort of video games was just like interactive fiction. I wanted to use some of those techniques in it as well.

Miller: It’s hard to talk, maybe, about some of those deep choices there without too many spoilers.

Zevin: That’s true.

Miller: But you employ that in a very specific point in the book.

Zevin: Well, it’s funny, the most old fashioned section of the book for me, the one I wanted to feel quite old fashioned is “Pioneers.” “Pioneers” takes place in sort of an, ostensibly, a video game world. But what I wanted it to feel like was a western, that it’s an old west kind of thing. And those were my references for it, these muddy… I don’t know if you’re familiar with the idea of the “muddy hemline” movie, the kind of lesbian romance, where you have two women and their dresses that invariably get muddy at the bottom because of the prairie that they’re on or what have you. But that’s what I was going for. And so it’s always quite funny to me that because somebody’s been told, it’s a video game, they’re like, no, it can’t possibly be this kind of sweeping romance that is being presented.

Miller: I want to turn to teachers and teaching. One of your characters says about another one that he was a terrible boyfriend – and there’s a lot of evidence in the book that that’s true – but a great teacher. And he becomes a kind of model for [Sadie] when she becomes a teacher of a class for how to create video games later in her mid-thirties. What, to you, are the hallmarks of being a good teacher when it comes to shepherding young creators, helping young people who want to make things in the world?

Zevin: I’m not a teacher so I don’t have that much advice about it, but I think...

Miller: Did you have good teachers?

Zevin: I think I did. I think sometimes a good teacher is somebody who shows a great deal of interest, who shows a great deal of investment and commitment. And I had teachers who took my work very seriously and didn’t think what I was doing was silly. I think that is what a good teacher really does, especially. I’m talking more about the work I do. It’s not so much a job where you’re right or wrong, or that kind of thing, but just the level of an investment and engagement in the work of a young person, I think is what feels the most valuable

Miller: I mean, what may come with that is a kind of toughness but it stems from actually engaging, and as you’re saying, taking the work seriously, caring enough that you could be tough.

Zevin: Right, caring enough about the work that you can say to me that you can do more, and not just to be satisfied with where you are. I think sometimes it seems like we think a good teacher is just one who praises us, in a sense because it’s the conflict between, we need grades from those people. And so we want their praise, but the reality is a good teacher, and in terms of life, has very little to do with that kind of reward.

Miller: I want to turn to the issue of artistic collaboration, a partnership, which is one of the main themes that’s throughout the whole novel. At one point from Sadie’s point of view, we hear this: “She didn’t know if an idea was worth pursuing until it had made its way through Sam’s brain too. It was only when Sam said her own idea back to her slightly modified, improved, synthesized, rearranged, that she could tell if it was good.”

What made you want to explore artistic collaboration?

Zevin: Because it’s interesting. And in a way, you can write a book that’s about, say, one genius struggling against the world, but most art isn’t created alone, even novels which ostensibly look as if they are created alone. There are many, many people involved in the process between the day I finish writing and the day I end up in a library in Portland. There are so many people that are involved in the process of putting art into the world, and so I wanted to write about that.

Miller: Were there any particular collaborations or artistic partnerships that seem like fruitful models for you, that intrigued you?

Zevin: Well, I personally have a collaboration that’s been ongoing for many, many years. But also I started to think about bands. And classically, bands are always at war with each other. And that has always fascinated me; why you can make, if it’s necessary, conflict, to make beautiful things. It sometimes seems like maybe it is.

Miller: Do you believe that, or that it’s just a by-product of big personalities who are engaged in something and have strong ideas?

Zevin: It goes back to your other question about teachers and their engagement. I think if, when two people deeply care about something, conflict will ensue. And so I think kind of the key in life is not to be afraid of such conflict. And by conflict, I don’t mean you have to be nasty, you have to be horrible, but you can’t be afraid of being disagreed with.

Miller: Can I ask you about that? You said that you had one long term artistic collaboration of your own. What’s that?

Zevin: Well, my partner and I, we make movies together and some of them have done OK. And some of them have done badly, but we keep trying to make them. And so I know a lot of my best creative collaboration material comes from work with my partner.

I think the funny thing about it is when I was writing the book, a lot of it was written kind of during the bleakest part of the pandemic. And so I didn’t really have a sense if… again, we’ve all kind of processed the trauma of the pandemic, but in a way, it’s this thing that happened to all of us.

But for me, I felt incredibly alone during that time and one didn’t know if there would even be publishing or more books would be published. I think one of the reasons I felt like I could really explore the particularities of a creative collaboration is because I wasn’t even sure if there would be an audience for this book at all. It was something I wanted to explore, I wanted to figure out. And the surprising thing has been how many people say they have found themselves in this relationship.

Miller: And that’s after having said earlier that few things surprise you at this point, but that has.

Zevin: When I say that, I mean, I know quite a lot about how audiences respond to things because I’ve made a lot of things. So for instance, one of the things you’re taught is you never want the pace to slow down in a book, that you want the pace to be consistent throughout the whole thing and just propel forward. But I mean, because I’ve been doing this a long time, sometimes you do want to slow down the pace. Sometimes you want to make a section a little more difficult, that there are more things you can do than just to entertain, I think.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name? And what’s your question?

Claire [audience member]: Hi. My name is Claire. And my question is how did your agent, publishers and reviewers react to your portrayal of platonic rather than romantic love?

Zevin: I don’t know that any of them reacted to it. I think they were, I think most people found it refreshing, that again, this was a book about something else. I haven’t written the kind of books necessarily that ever really relied on an audience getting certain, I think, satisfactions from them. I don’t write romance – not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I don’t typically write those kinds of stories, anyway. So no one was shocked that this was the story and, for me again, I see it as the story of these two people who are not great at being friends, but it’s about their work together and that the work they make is better than, I guess, other things they might do, the more traditional things that they might do in their relationship.

Miller: I want to turn briefly to the really important third character in this partnership because there’s a character named Marx who is not seen, certainly by Sam or Sadie, or by the general public as an artistic genius, but he is a crucial piece who is a producer and a fixer and does have some ideas of his own. But he enables the work they do, to actually go out into the world. What were you interested in exploring in terms of the skills he brought to this endeavor?

Zevin: Yeah. In a way, it was the same as the thing we were speaking about before. I wanted to show that there are more people in a creative process than just the creatives. If you look at the book, every single chapter of the book, of the 10 sections of the book, are always plurals, you have like “Unfair Games,” “Sick Kids,” and then there’s one singular section which is “Marx” and that’s the NPC. And I just wanted to explore a character who kind of seems secondary, who kind of seems like a facilitator and in a way, that’s who Sadie and Sam allow themselves to see. And then I wanted to know what would happen when that character took center stage, like, what that point of view, exercise, would be.

Miller: Do you feel like to be a successful writer on some level, you have to be both the Marx and the Sam or Sadie, or you can outsource that to other aspects of the corporate publishing world?

Zevin: When I’m writing, I am fully an introvert in that book. And then when I go out in the world, I’m an extrovert and a rodeo clown, so I feel like the introvert and the extrovert have to coexist. I think something that I feel like I’ve gotten better at is learning how to go out in the world and explain to people what my books are, but it’s not something I was necessarily born knowing. It’s something that’s in the book really with Sadie. Sadie talks about how Sam is more naturally great at self promotion, and Sadie struggles with it. She’s not somebody who instantly knows how she wishes to present herself in the world yet, and that was something that I was aware of.

But I think, to an extent, the person writing the book should have as little to do with the world beyond the world of the book as possible. And then the person who is promoting the book gets to go out in the world.

Miller: And be the rodeo clown.

Zevin: And be a rodeo clown.

Miller: Is that how you feel right now?

Zevin: I’m a pretty dull rodeo clown. I mean, yeah, to an extent, I think you have this feeling that this person has little to do with the person who wrote the book. And so what I mean by that is, I think the person who wrote the book would be quite annoyed with me, that I’m out there trying to reverse engineer why we did what we did. In that sense. There’s like the sense, there is a translation where you’re trying to articulate the book to somebody outside yourself.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name? What’s your question?

Anyanka [audience member]: Hi, Anyanka, again. What plot piece or character changed the most since you started writing this?

Zevin: I’m trying to think. Well, without kind of talking about spoilers at all, I would say that there was a section in the book – I wrote the book largely from the beginning to the end – but there was a section in the book that wasn’t there and I won’t say which one it is, but basically, when that section wasn’t there, it would have been a space of time in which we didn’t know what happened to our characters. So if anything, it was just realizing that I wanted to never look away from their experiences. When I talk about the fact that I’ve learned things about writing books over the years, sometimes it’s maybe having a little bit of wisdom that there are times when you don’t want to cut away, that you want to keep going deeper into a thing. And I know that was such a vague response to…

Miller: But I appreciate this. Many books, I sort of don’t believe in worrying about spoilers. This one, I feel like it’s more salient.

Zevin: But from my point of view, I don’t really care about spoilers.

Miller: So then you still want to…

Zevin: But I know most people in the world, people deeply care about them. And so for me, like sometimes a good spoiler can actually compel me to read something. I’m like, oh, great, something interesting is going to happen because it wasn’t apparent to me from just the description in the cover.

Miller: Do you lead your media consumption life with that philosophy? I mean, do you seek out spoilers or just don’t worry about it?

Zevin: I don’t seek them out, I just don’t worry about if they hit me at some point.

Miller: But I’m curious, without getting into the specifics of the chunk of the narrative that you realized was missing, you had to stick with the characters. How do you physically learn that? I mean, was that about you editing and looking back, reading the manuscript and saying, oh no, I got out of it here, or is that something that a reader might tell you [or] an editor might tell you?

Zevin: Yeah, I think nobody told me to do it but everybody had, that was reading the book, the book instantly sold very fast, into movies and and to publishing. Nobody articulated the solution. But what they articulated was that there was a sense of something, like a lack of resolution in these two sections. And so it made it so that the transition was just too abrupt, that you wanted to return to something that felt more like stable ground for a time in the book. Something I’ve learned over the years is that when you take on a strange formal device, that formal device really has to work or you will lose some percentage of people, and you’ll lose some percentage of people when you do it anyway.

Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name, and what’s your question?

Jackson [audience member]: Hi, I’m Jackson. I loved and deeply related to the character of Sam. And I was wondering if there was anyone in your real life that you drew from, for inspiration for that character?

Zevin: Yes. So much of Sam does come from myself, and in a way, because I am a woman, people don’t see it necessarily. But again, a lot of knowing Sam started from the place of that I knew I was gonna write somebody for the first time that had a similar ethnic background to me. When you see the things about Sam going to Koreatown for the first time and wondering who he’ll be as an artist, now that he knows that the world can be a huge percentage Asian, versus like where he had lived before where there were less Asians. These were things that I had experienced myself as well. So a lot of Sam was me, in that sense. And then a lot of Sam is fiction too.

Miller: You’d written nine novels before this and you hadn’t ignored biracial identity at all. But do you know why it was for this 10th novel that you made the decision that you wanted to have a character who, like you, is half Jewish and half Korean?

Zevin: I think when I started out, I thought of fiction as a kind of mask, and that for me to write books, I wanted the characters to be as far from myself as possible. I didn’t want anybody to possibly mistake the parents in the book for my parents, and that was at that time, freeing, that nobody would possibly think these books were biographical and everything that was biographical about them would be hidden, more autobiographical. But as I got farther into writing books, I just felt more interested, I felt more restricted by that idea and more that like it would be possible to say more by allowing myself into the books more, that this distance was actually limiting me and not as helpful as it had been at the beginning. So I think it was that it just became more interesting to let the mask slip.

Miller: I want to turn to questions of art and business. There are a lot of conversations that your characters have about how they’ll sell versions of their great ideas and they have debates about what the names of games should be, or will this have a broad enough appeal, is this too much of a niche, and a lot is at stake. I mean, they have their own company and if they don’t sell their games then they’ll be out of business. I’m curious to what extent those kinds of conversations are ones that you are a part of in the book publishing world?

Zevin: Well, I think less rides on book publishing in a way, again, because we’re not talking about $100 million in seven years. Although in the case of “Tomorrow,” but it is just one person…

Miller: It’s like Random House doesn’t go out of business if a particular book that they bought doesn’t work.

Zevin: Yeah, I mean, there is not really a book that will break Random House, but a game can break even a big game studio. So in a sense, I think there are these discussions in book publishing but maybe less rides on them, in a way.

Miller: Your characters, like you, have massive successes and then they have games, or in your case books, that have more modest sales. And like you, they have a hit right out of the gate and then a follow up doesn’t do as well. You’ve had three huge bestsellers, including your first book, “A.J. Fikry” that I mentioned earlier and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” out of 10 books. If you didn’t know which ones were the best sellers – you wrote them, this is a weird hypothetical – but could you have guessed these are the three that would sort of hit the jackpot?

Zevin: I think, when what is plaguing me, what I’m thinking about aligns more with what the world is thinking about, the books have tended to do better. When there are more points where somebody might connect with it. But otherwise, I think so much of it is there’s a kismet to books that do well. When I first started going on the road for the book, I would tell people the book was about failure and that nobody ever wanted to talk about failure. And then I said that enough that everybody wanted to talk about failure all the time. And I wish I’d never said it. But, the truth is, I think people, something people misunderstand about failure is that something can be a commercial failure and a creative success.

It’s funny, like the game “Both Sides,” in the book, it’s a big failure for Sam and for Sadie and for their company. And so when I ask people, what game would you be interested in playing? Nobody ever says “Both Sides” because I’ve described it as a failure. But from my point of view, it would be the game that I would be most interested in playing as a player. And that’s the thing, when I look back at my career, some of the books that sold the least copies are the ones that really represented creative breakthroughs for me, or places where you’re learning a lot of things.

Having now spoken quite a lot about failure, I would say that the fear of it is not an interesting way to organize one’s life. There’s a way to have a successful failure, I think is what I’m saying, by which I mean, if you have the financial means to have this failure, in fact, that can be a really great time.

Miller: Well, I’m curious about the flip side. Maybe you answered it by talking about artistic breakthroughs, but what is a success – separate from commercial success, just raw number of books sold – what makes you proud?

Zevin: Well, I’ll tell you when I finished writing “Tomorrow,” I said to my partner, I don’t really care what happens with this book because it’s just the closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling like the thing I wanted to write, and the thing I did, were the same thing. The young woman at the beginning mentioned the quote, about the period of time when your taste and abilities do not align. And I felt that strongly and really the only thing to do was to make art anyway during that time. And so for me that felt like success. And of course, it’s easy to say now because the book became very successful. But I still hold on to that moment when I thought to myself, I had really done it creatively and that had nothing to do with how the world was about to receive it.

Miller: Your characters, they deal with a lot of physical pain, psychological pain, what maybe, not their generation, but younger generations now call trauma. And they respond to it in different ways. And then over time, even individually, they respond to it in different ways, sometimes wallowing, sometimes somehow pushing past it. It’s one of the themes that sort of woven throughout. I’m curious how you’ve come to think about how much power we have to respond to what life hits us with?

Zevin: I think that we all have stories we tell about ourselves, and it is useful to come up with a story, even if it’s not entirely true, that helps you get to the next thing.

Miller: To create a narrative of resilience.

Zevin: Yes, I think so. Even if it’s more an idea of yourself as a heroic character in that, I think this is very useful. And so I think that’s some of what the book is about. It’s about this guy, Sam Mazer, who transforms so many things he dislikes about himself into art, and so many things that are unfair also become art.

Miller: Gabrielle Zevin, thanks very much.

Zevin: Thank you for having me.

Miller: Gabrielle Zevin is the author of “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” Thanks very much to Paige Battle, the librarian here at Grant High School, to Olivia Jones-Hall from Literary Arts who has made this series of shows possible and a huge, big thanks to our student audience here at Grant.

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