Lina Chern: On Remembering to Love the Process

Lina Chern has been published in Mystery Weekly, The Marlboro Review, the Bellingham Review, Rhino, The Collagist, Black Fox Literary magazine, and the Coil. She lives in the Chicago area with her family. Play the Fool is her debut novel. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

In this post, Lina discusses writing her debut novel, Play the Fool, her advice for writers, and more!

Name: Lina Chern
Literary agent: Joanna MacKenzie, Nelson Literary Agency
Book title: Play the Fool
Publisher: Penguin Random House (Bantam)
Release date: March 28, 2023
Genre/category: Adult Mystery
Elevator pitch for the book: Katie True is a whiz with tarot cards and a natural at reading people, but feels stuck in life until she meets the older, mysterious, free-spirited Marley, who encourages Katie and becomes her closest friend. When Marley is found dead in the mall where both women work, Katie finds that the curiosity and intuition that make her a great tarot card reader also make her the only one who can solve Marley’s murder—no matter the cost.

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I’d been trying to write all my life, but anxiety and perfectionism kept me from getting very far with it. I had all but given up when I came across a freelance gig that required me to ghostwrite a series of psychic detective stories. They were a bit silly, and my writing was not stellar, but I was floored by how much fun the stories were to write.

For the first time in my life, I was staying up nights because I could not stop writing! Something about the disposable nature of those stories eased some pressure valve in my mind and allowed the fun to outweigh the fear.

When the gig was over, I decided to try a hand at my own novel. I had a vague goal of writing a lighthearted mystery in the vein of Elmore Leonard by way of Janet Evanovich, but I think my real goal was purely selfish: I wanted to keep having fun writing, now that I knew I could.

It’s been about 10 years since I started drafting the book, although I took a long hiatus once I discovered that writing a novel was—surprise—not actually that easy. I honed my skills on some shorter pieces, got more familiar with my own process, and got a taste of the satisfaction of completing something. I returned to the manuscript in earnest in 2019, so it’s been about four years from that restart point to publication.

The idea has been changing almost constantly since the beginning, even down to basics like whether or not Katie, my main character, would be a true psychic (this mystery was almost a science-fiction novel). The biggest changes came once I started getting feedback from agents, editors, and most significantly, my mentors in the Pitch Wars mentorship program. Their suggestions helped me nail down who Katie was, what she wanted from life, and how solving her friend’s murder was going to give it to her.

At the same time, I was also digging into my own experiences to deepen Katie’s story, and soon realized that her conflicted relationship with tarot reading was a stand-in for my own complicated relationship with writing. Once that connection clicked, the story leveled up from a fun but superficial mystery into a more personal story that resonated with potential readers.

Trying to break into traditional publishing is such an arcane process, with so many oddly specific steps and unspoken rules, that even the most well-prepared author can’t see the whole picture until they’re looking back at it from the other side. A little ignorance may be a good thing here; if I had known early on how subjective the process can be, and how much depends on the right person glancing at your manuscript at the right time, I suspect I might have given up.

I’m not trying to discourage anyone who wants to be published traditionally, but only to stress how important it is to save your strength for those things you can control, and not worry too much about the rest. It can be tough, when you’re in the thick of it, to know which is which.

This won’t surprise most writers, but since I tend to be pretty curmudgeonly about seeking feedback, I was amazed and delighted at the difference a skillful, experienced editor can have on your work. The ability to detach yourself from your story and look at it purely from a reader’s point of view is absolutely crucial to writing, and no matter how good you are at it, at some point you are going to be too deep in the weeds to know what your story needs. There is something tremendously freeing about realizing you don’t know everything.

No matter how edgy and tough I set out to make my writing, it always drifts into goofy territory, so I guess I must want to give my readers a fun, entertaining story about believing in yourself and taking comfort and pleasure from your closest relationships even if they are not perfect.

Figure out what makes writing fun for you and do that. If you know you want to write, but can’t seem to get into a groove, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer, or weren’t meant to do it. It just means you haven’t figured out your own process … yet.

Be patient with yourself and keep trying different ways to write until you figure out how to have fun. The pleasure you get from writing is the only thing that will keep you doing it through the anxious and stressful bits (which, sorry to say, never go away completely).

Easier said than done? Sure. Also, there’s the not-so-small matter of having the time and resources (read: money) to explore your own process. I would not be in the position right now of giving other writers advice if I hadn’t had the privilege of another earner supporting our family while I worked on my novel.

There’s no easy one-size-fits-all solution, but I think most writers who keep at it do so because they’re getting a certain baseline pleasure from it. That has to be the reason, because there certainly isn’t enough money and fame in this business to go around!

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