I'm not a writer who works off an outline. I don't do file cards. Some writers know where they're going when they sit down to write a novel. I know t… - Jessica Hagedorn

…Research is always involved, to make sure details, language and atmosphere feel right. Then comes the hard work of a writer, which is the writing itself. One sentence leads to another and then another… You try to maintain focus and discipline, writing for as long as you can, everyday until you’re done with a draft. Then you go back and start revising and the mysterious creative process begins all over again. Each time you begin, you hopefully go deeper into your story and your characters and end up surprising yourself.

What made me want to write a novel was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Garcia Marquez. I was turned on to that by a friend from Mexico who gave me the book. It was like Holy Communion or something. I said, "Yes!" Here is a novel that reads so lyrically and so poetically, and yet is a novel. It's a wonderful story. You want to know what happens to these people. And at the same time I saw the connection for me. It was like the Philippines was something I was carrying around and I didn't know what art form it would take to convey the story I wanted to tell, and I read that book and said, "That's it. One day I'm gonna do it."

If I were to write with that agenda in mind, then I'd destroy the writing. No, I write really because I have to and if the writing also destroys some of those myths and subverts forms and makes people question the very idea of the writer, the woman, the Filipino American, the whatever, great! (INTERVIEWER: Where does art have to come from to accomplish those kinds of ends? If you set out directly to accomplish them, you probably wouldn't have writing that is, in your opinion, worth reading? So, where does it have to come from?) JH: It has to come from the deepest, deepest, deepest insides of your soul. And it's got to be brutally honest. It's like pornography. You know it when you are doing it and you know when you're bullshitting. You know when you're being self-conscious and contrived and forcing something to be there because you want to make sure that people get the point. You know when that's happening. But if you just really listen to yourself and to your characters, you don't go for the easy stuff.