Lisa Ko: How Writing a Novel is Like Wandering a Flea Market

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . I never start a novel knowing where I’m going. I don’t write linearly, and not in clear, numbered drafts, from a beginning to an end. I gather and cut and gather some more. I call it the flea market process of novel writing. Like rifling through a thrift store bin of clothing and putting together an outfit from disparate pieces, the process involves collecting things for their potential and possibility, then trying them on for size. Storing them away, a rat’s nest of hoarded scraps and materials, to use if not now, then maybe later. Even the writing that doesn’t make a book’s final version can be placed into a folder called COMPOST. In the past, I’ve wondered if I’m doing it wrong, if there’s a more efficient way of novel making that more closely resembles the freshman comp stages of outline, draft, revision, done! But I’ve since come to embrace the circuitousness. When I was growing up, my parents and I ran a stand at craft shows and flea markets, where scavenged objects were seen as valuable. The objects we sold were made from junk that had been destined for the trash, like a box of wood, for breaking boards, that my father volunteered to dispose of from the tae-kwon-do studio where he taught night classes. Instead, he took it home. How can these ingredients be useful? we asked. What could we create out of this? So much, it turned out. We cut the wood into the shapes of tea kettles and teddy bears, “country crafts” which I painted in bright colors—I might have been in middle school, but my hand was steady enough. Or the bags of fabric remnants tossed aside at a family friend’s textile factory, too small for adult-sized clothing, but the perfect size for doll clothing, which my mother made on her Singer machine. I snipped the loose threads; my father ironed the hems. Flea markets are full of people selling found junk that’s been fixed into something else. There […]

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