Xhenet Aliu: Premises Aren’t Stories

Xhenet Aliu’s debut novel, Brass, won both the Townsend Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year First Novel Prize. Her debut fiction collection, Domesticated Wild Things, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Aliu’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Hobart, American Short Fiction, LitHub, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere, and she has received multiple scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among other awards.

In this interview, Xhenet discusses the process of writing her new literary novel, Everybody Says It's Everything, having a sandbox document to play in, and more.

Name: Xhenet Aliu
Literary agent: Julie Barer, TBG Literary
Book title: Everybody Says It's Everything
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
Genre/category: Literary
Previous titles: Brass
Elevator pitch for the book: Twins growing up in the United States in the 1990s unravel larger truths about identity and sibling bonds when one of them gets wrapped up in the war in Kosovo.

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In the 90s, the Albanian Kosovar population in my hometown swelled because of war crimes against Albanians in the then-Yugoslavian controlled Republic of Kosovo. My own father was an Albanian who’d emigrated from Yugoslavia in the 70s, but as a second-generation teenager more interested in Sassy magazine than current events, it wasn’t until I began meeting and working with people who’d been forced to flee for their lives that the Balkan wars really became more than a story on CNN to me. At the same time, the Albanian concept of “besa,” which loosely translates to “pledge of honor,” meant that many Albanians around the world, including some who’d never even lived in the old country, felt a blood-bound duty to protect their people. Before NATO intervention, in fact, the diaspora was largely responsible for furnishing the Kosovo Liberation Army with supplies, weapons, even conscripts. The idea of everyday people–construction workers, pizza makers, students–arming an insurrection overseas on behalf of strangers struck me as a fascinating premise, though at the time writing about it seemed as fantastical to me as sprouting wings and flying away.

By the time I discovered that I was actually allowed to be a writer, I’d also discovered that premises aren’t stories, and that stories required distinctive, individual characters struggling with their own personal battles. I didn’t feel I had the authority to write a story of a refugee, which I have never been, but as a second-generation Albanian (and general human), I have often struggled with questions of identity, belonging, and purpose. The twin protagonists in the novel, to me, embody two divergent—and at times, equally misguided—perspectives on those questions, forged in their fledgling understanding of besa.

I didn’t get the first words down on paper until maybe 2017, in the waiting period before my first novel, Brass, was due to be published. (I think it’s always a good idea to have another project in the works when shopping or publishing another project, so you have something to be excited about that’s still fully in your control.) Initially, I thought the story would take the characters to Kosovo, and I had it in my head that the climactic scene would take place in the Hotel Mother Teresa, which was a real-life hotel that became a de facto communication center for the KLA and international journalists. Truthfully, I just thought it’d be cool to use Hotel Mother Teresa as a title for a book, which is not enough of a reason to steer a novel in a direction it doesn’t really want to go. Ultimately, I learned through the writing—which is really the only way I’ve ever gotten to learn anything about my own stories—that this was really a novel about a particular family whose vulnerabilities and fissures are amplified by the political conditions of the moment, not a novel about the war itself. Things came much easier after that, and it was about five years from first draft to contract. Five years, on my personal writing timeline, is fast.

My editor—who I also worked with on my last novel—left my publisher to take another job about six months before publication, which isn’t an uncommon situation but was new to me and a bit scary. In my case, edits had been completed and the marketing and publicity teams had already been assigned, so it wasn’t terribly disruptive overall, but you really need an editor to advocate for and usher the book through publication, and I was nervous that whoever I was assigned wouldn’t be invested in this project. To my relief, my new editor has been very kind and feels like a real ally, and I’m grateful for that. Beyond that, BookTok literally didn’t exist when my last novel came out, which doesn’t seem like that long ago, and now it’s a major market driver. Of course, I’m not on TikTok myself, so I’m not quite sure how to adapt to this new reality.

I like to keep sandbox document in which I can explore side stories for characters when I’m feeling stuck about their motivations or histories or they’re just otherwise falling flat. The point isn’t to incorporate the sandbox material into the main text, just to investigate, but I made a major discovery about the twins’ adoptive mother, Jackie, by writing a flashback that ended up becoming a pretty substantial storyline in the novel. I do tend to create general outlines just to ensure the overall text is building toward an arc, but without a space to play without boundaries, writing by outline alone would feel to me like filling out a Mad Lib.

I have no intention of this novel serving as a history or political book in any way, but I do hope I was able to convey some of the particularities of Albanian culture and remind people that there’s a humanitarian crisis that seems very far away affect people everywhere. Beyond that, I hope readers with messy families full of secrets—which is maybe everyone?—can identify and commiserate with these characters, even when they don’t agree with their choices.

This has nothing to do with craft or process at all, but I’ve found that it’s extremely important to my overall well-being to have hobbies and pastimes that have concrete outcomes, since so much of what we do as writers is esoteric and intangible and therefore leaves tons of room for debilitating self-doubt. (Things like word counts and book sales are quantifiable but have very little relation to the quality or value of the writing.)

For example: I like to sew, because at the end of the a prescribed, step-by-step process, I’m left with an object with a practical utility, and that’s satisfying in a way that I really need for psychological balance. This is going to sound very virtue signal-y, but I also find doing service work helps maintain a sense of perspective when I get too in my head and get wrapped up in writerly problems, which, as a matter of scale, are pretty luxurious problems to have. I’ve been volunteering with Habitat for Humanity since it gets me both working with my hands and appreciating that I have a safe, secure place from which to dream up fake stories that a few strangers have wanted to read. In short, I’d say try to remember that being a writer in the world first and foremost requires being a human in the world.