Literary Birthday – 30 July – Celeste Ng

Happy Birthday, Celeste Ng, born on 30 July 1980.

Celeste Ng Quotes

1. Read a lot—things you love, and also things outside your comfort zone. (Think of it as trying a new food: you don’t have to finish it, but at least take a taste. You never know what will spark new ideas for you.)
2. Write a lot—like playing an instrument or a sport, it takes practice. Keep at it.
3. Most importantly, tell the stories that are important to you. Write the stories that you’d want to read yourself, the stories you need to tell, the stories you need to hear. It doesn’t matter if they get published or read—it can be great if they do, but writing them down is the important part.
4. Connecting with readers on an emotional level is one of the greatest things a writer can hope for.
5. I can’t remember a time before I wanted to write. But it was a long time before I started to believe that was a legitimate possibility.
6. I get to know my characters like you’d get to know someone at a cocktail party. You sit down with them and listen – whether they talk about work or their families or sports or politics, whether they seem open-minded or opinionated, whether they’re logical and articulate or rambling – and you get a sense of what’s important to them, who they are as a person. So I sit down and write about a character, or write in the character’s own voice and see what emerges. It’s a lot easier to bring characters to life on the page when you know them well.
7. Once you’ve taken the manuscript as far as you can, the most important thing is finding the right people to work with you on the book. That might include an agent, an editor, a copyeditor, a publicist – all of those people have to have a similar vision for the book as you do.
8. Some of the writers I idolize are Ann Patchett, Arundhati Roy, Elizabeth Strout, Toni Morrison. I end up returning to their work again and again.
9. I always have to have the general shape of the story before I can even get started, because otherwise I feel like there are too many decisions to make. When I have an idea about where the story is going to begin and where it’s going to end, the rough shape of it and a few little points along the way that I know are going to be significant, that’s when I can kind of get going.
10. I usually begin each day by rereading what I did the day before. And then I will sometimes write about what I think I’m talking about, almost as if I’m analyzing somebody else’s text.
11. I know that there are writers out there who outline and then write from the outline, and my process is actually the reverse, which is that I write first and then I have to go back and I outline what it is that I was writing about.
12. When I am trying to figure out what motivates character, I am digging further down into them. I am trying to get closer and closer to who they are. The themes arise from this digging.
13. My writing process for my first book was very convoluted and I didn’t know what I was doing. I rewrote the book in four drafts with very major structural changes. I felt like I had learned something from writing my first book and I tried to set myself a task of writing a book that went in chronological order. I didn’t quite manage either of those things, but I tried to set a goal to avoid the impossible.

Source for quotes 1-3: Celeste Ng FAQs and quotes 4-8: The Writer and quotes 9-11: Literary Hub and quotes 12-13: Friction

Celeste Ng is an American writer and the author of several bestselling novels. She studied English at Harvard University, graduating in 2002, before earning an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. Ng first gained recognition when her short story ‘Girls at Play’ won a Pushcart Prize in 2012. She is best known for her novels Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Little Fires Everywhere was adapted into a television miniseries that premiered in 2020. Her fiction often blends mystery, family drama, and social commentary. In addition to her novels, her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. She has received numerous honours, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Source for photograph: Author’s Website, Photo: Kieran Kesner

by Amanda Patterson
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