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I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It's really harder if you've already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren't working.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Working
Aren
Tell
Beginning
Back
Hundred
Firsts
Students
First
Realize
Rewrite
Really
Already
Finished
Always
Realizing
Pages
Four
Harder

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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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No one is immune from either taking the wrong action or not taking action at all, but the sense that something is completely out of a person's control is stronger in China.
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But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others - a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.
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Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.
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You can write about a country without taking a stand, but you cannot write about a country without noting that there's history, and that there's politics going on. To me, that's the same if you write about America. You don't have to write about politics, but the politics have to be present in the characters.
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Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.
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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it's the same as calling them a villain.
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I think the isolation in China also has to do with people's memories being wiped out, collective memories as well as individual memories, by the fact that the recent history has been constantly rewritten and revised.
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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.
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There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.
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Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.
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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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