The Art of Crafting a Novel: In Conversation with Larissa Pham
Larissa Pham’s debut novel Discipline (Penguin Random House, 2025) questions how moments of the past hunt us and how we hunt them. The novel follows Christine, a young painter-turned-author as she goes on her debut novels’ book tour, which is a revenge fantasy based on a sour relationship she had with an older mentor. As she encounters characters of her past life as a painter while promoting her first book, she receives a surprising email. Her old mentor, the old painter, wants to tell her his side of the story. Daunting, elegantly written and exquisitely paced in order to flesh out the tensions between relationships and the creative process, Pham’s debut novel hunts the reader.
Pham sat down with Hijab Ahmed and Camilla Marchese Gonzalez to share the writing process and inspiration behind her debut novel.
CM: What sparked the idea to write this book?
Two things—first, I had just published my essay collection, Pop Song. While working on that book, I’d really had to grapple with the nature of nonfiction writing, which is that you’re always beholden to the truth—your own truth, but also factual truth. Nonfiction makes a promise to the reader, which is: “This happened.” I found myself wanting to explore outside of factual truth, and so I was very drawn to fiction, as well as all these meta questions that Discipline ultimately brings up.
And second, I was in my last term of graduate school, and really struggling with a big, epic, historical novel project that I had come in with. I was really craving first person narration, and I opened a secret, side document, and that’s when Christine’s voice came to me.
CM: What was the selection process behind the art mentioned in each chapter? How does art inform the meaning of the scenes in Discipline?
I had planned Christine’s tour geographically, so I wanted her to be looking at pieces of art that she’d conceivably encounter. The Art Institute of Chicago does have some Celmins in its collection; the Frankenthaler really is at the Portland Art Museum. I usually began by picking an artist, then a specific work; the visual themes of the art piece would then often intersect with the themes of each chapter. Realism and genre with Celmins; role play and costuming with Hopper. You could say each informed the other, but perhaps the art forced my hand a little more often than not.
HA: Going off from the last question, in our class last semester, we talked about ekphrasis, the act of writing while drawing from a piece of art, like a painting. There is a scene, early in the novel, where Christine goes to the bar, and they have the painting Automat by Edward Hopper. Josephine Hopper’s figure is exactly how I imagine Christine to be stationed at the bar: dark and introspective, haunted by her decision to leave behind the craft of painting. Would you say that much of the novel felt like writing an ekphrasis based on paintings?
I’d say a large part of it does feel a bit like an ekphrasis! But I think that what most interested me with Discipline, as opposed to other arts writing I’ve done, was not visually describing the work for the reader but rather engaging with the emotions and memories that surfaced for Christine while she was looking at it. I did want the reader to get a sense of the paintings without reference images, but what I really wanted to draw out was Christine’s own meditations on art and art-making. I do love that comparison to Automat, though—the beauty of drawing upon a painting is that it plants an image in the reader’s mind.
CM: The reader does not have access to Christine’s novel, except through short excerpts used as chapter divider during the first part of the book. What was your process to write these? Was there anything, either fun or surprising, compared to the writing process for the rest of the novel?
The excerpts from Christine’s novel came quite late in the process, after I had already sold the book. My Canadian editor, David Ross, had actually suggested including some kind of excerpt in a conversation with my American editor, Marie Pantojan—publishing a book is very collaborative; I also had a UK editor, Rowan Cope—and we loved that idea, so I ran with it. I liked the idea of the excerpts being interstitials, rather than embedded within the text, so that they might stand out more to the reader. I’d also just read Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, which uses a similar kind of bolded, mysterious interstitial.
Writing them was really fun! The main purpose of those excerpts was to create mood and foreshadowing for the events of the following chapters. So it’s quite keyed-up, pulpy writing, which I think is true to the spirit of Christine’s actual book. Her book is a much more thriller-y thriller than mine is, I think.
HA: In the act of crafting Christine, were there aspects of her character that you imagined or developed in writing earlier in this project that ended up not making it into the final work? What parts of Christine, if any, didn’t make it into the novel?
Yes! I had spent some time thinking about Christine’s childhood and family, and I’d written quite a few paragraphs about it, particularly in the Frankenthaler chapter, which I ultimately removed. In particular, I’d thought about Christine’s relationship with her mother, who shows up just one or two times in the book. I’d talked with my editor and agent about whether to include more of Christine’s mother, actually, and there’s surely a version of this book where that relationship is more fleshed out. But ultimately, it felt more true to the spirit of the book to keep it as streamlined as possible.
There are other aspects of Christine’s character that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the book, but which I had in my mind as I was writing. For example, I know she and Frances met at Harvard, and the nonprofit she works at in NYC is loosely based on a combination of the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Asian American Arts Alliance. Other details: Christine is 5’7”, she doesn’t like sweets except for black sesame, and she has perfect eyesight.
CM: The novel centers a lot on themes of the creative process, in a very meta manner. There are many instances where the novel gives us insight into Christine’s creative process both in visual arts and writing and how they diverge and are similar. What is your own version of your creative process?
At this point in my career, I find that I work in two modes: accumulation and generation. When I’m in an accumulative phase, I’m reading a lot, taking lots of notes, doing research, and not actively putting prose on the page, but gathering material so that I’m ready when I do. If you’ve taken a class with me, you may have heard me refer to this time as “putting things in your pan”—the metaphor being, a hot pan with nothing on it burns. The accumulation phase can last for anywhere from a few days (in the case of an article or review, during which I am reading frantically and trying to become an expert on something) to a few months (like right now, as I gear up for what I hope will be my next novel project).
In the generative phase, which also might be called the exertion phase, I basically become an art monster and hole up in my office and write for hours each day and only stop to sleep and eat. I’m never entirely aware of how this works, but as best as I can understand, having confidence in my notes and an idea of where I’m going allows me to fully immerse myself in the work. I love this moment in a project and it’s what I live for. To continue the hot pan metaphor, this is when I really get cooking 🙂
HA: I am interested in your pivot from Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy, a work of nonfiction, over to Discipline, a work of fiction. I am broadly wondering how compiling a series of personal essays differed from the act of creating a novel, but I am more specifically interested in how the shift from writing about the self to inventing a fictional character felt for you in terms of intimacy with the reader.
To answer your first question, I think a series of personal essays is very different, structurally, than a novel. I talked about this a little in an interview with Emma Olivia Cohen, but I think that with nonfiction, you can get away with telling people what an essay is about; you can let the facts of life or personal experience just sit there, without much connective tissue or explanation. To speak a little abstractly, I think a collection of essays is like a skeleton—it’s all these bones that make up a shape. Whereas I feel like fiction is so much about building a world, line by line, that it’s almost all connective tissue; it’s a body, interdependent within itself, it’s flesh and blood.
In terms of inventing a fictional character—it was so freeing! The narrative voice in Pop Song is still a construction; my character in that book is a little more tender, a little more porous than I am in most areas of my life—she’s a snapshot of not only a point in time but an orientation. What had originally interested me about a book-length project was the insurance, if you will, that when a reader picks up your book, they’re committing to spending time with it, more time than a tweet or an article. And I was interested in going deeper and being more ambivalent—and vulnerable—in a book-length work because of that insurance, knowing that if someone got halfway through it was likely because they were reading the text in good faith. So I felt like I could write about topics that I hadn’t really covered in my essays online.
However! With a novel, the only thing you’re trying to do is make sure the reader keeps turning the pages. So I wasn’t as concerned with gaining the reader’s trust as much as I was trying to make sure the book’s project is clear from the outset—that if a reader can make it through the art writing and the discussions of genre and Christine’s kind of zooming first person narration, if they like that stuff, then they’re in for a treat. And if not, they can always put the book down. But I hope that readers will want to spend some time with Christine. I loved writing her: she’s so impetuous, and smart, and mysterious even to me.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.