“My Firstborn:” A Conversation with Jemimah Wei on Writing Life and Her Debut Novel, The Original Daughter

Singapore-born fiction writer Jemimah Wei shares insights into her process, her relationship with writing after completing her debut novel, and advice on building community.

Fiction writer Jemimah Wei previously lent her expertise to NYFA on residencies, grants, and fellowships alongside writers Jonathan Escoffery and Maggie Millner (highlights compiled here). As the publication of her book The Original Daughter (Penguin Randomhouse) approaches, NYFA spoke with Wei on process, community-building, and making literature the center of one’s life.

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA): You’ve had an eclectic career prior to shifting your focus to literary pursuits. What was it that made you commit to the writing life? 

Jemimah Wei (JW): It was the other way around, actually – I was always focused on writing, and my entire career had been an attempt to fund my writing life, which would take place either in the early morning hours or late at night. I’d been trying to write this novel for years and had never been able to finish it. But by the time 2018 came around, it’d gotten to a point where I felt terribly stuck on my own and was really craving mentorship and writing community, plus I knew how drastically my work was impacted by proximity to literary conversations and other forms of art from short stints doing masterclasses and an editorial attachment in the UK. That’s when I seriously considered the MFA. In 2019, when I was accepted to Columbia, it felt like a real turning point, as if I was finally articulating to myself what a life that gravitated entirely around writing might look like. I told myself that I’d put my life on hold and relocate internationally with no backup plan for this book, and therefore I had to finish this book, or else.

NYFA: Do you have any advice for writers from other countries and cultural contexts who are aiming to build a writing community here?

JW: For me the idea of community has really been interchangeable with just making friends. If you’re brand new to the city, the main thing is encountering other writers, so: attend readings, apply for conferences if it’s your thing, volunteer for magazines, read widely, and champion the work of people you’re excited about. Grab coffee with people you like, lean into your specific interests, don’t be afraid to nerd out. Social media has made it a lot easier to keep up with people, so the pressure to hit it off immediately has been somewhat taken off in-person interactions. After that, however you conduct your friendships pretty much takes over. 

NYFA: Your debut novel The Original Daughter will be out this spring. What’s something that’s surprised you most about bringing it into the world?

JW: I don’t know about surprise. But I feel incredible gratitude that the novel has found her greatest champions at every turn—mentors, readers, booksellers, my agent, editor, and various members of my team—who have read, understood, and felt the book deeply. I joke a lot about The Original Daughter being my firstborn, and I feel really content watching her go off and do her thing. I feel like she’s gifted me this wonderful new stage of my relationship with my writing, where I’m able to respect the book as a subject with its own integrity separate from my overall body of work as an artist. It’s a really incredible thing to experience, because when you’ve been laboring over one book for many years, it can often feel as if your identity as an artist is codependent with the work, and any struggle in the work can take over your life. I don’t feel that way anymore, at least for now; the completion of the book has given me this incredible sense of well-being, and freedom to evolve moving forward. 

NYFA: Can you speak a bit about your revision process for the novel? How did you decide what to keep, what to let go of, where to go deeper, and the like? 

JW: My revision process is pretty extensive, but one of the things I do is create an ongoing ‘emotional synopsis’ of the novel in between drafts, where I write out a summary of the book’s events with the emotional motivations and interior conflicts alongside the facts. I adapted it from a revision exercise in Matt Bell’s Refuse to be Done—his version is to keep the novel outline to pure facts, but because of this novel’s nature, it works better for me to have psychological conflict woven in. The point is to create a macro view of the novel you’ve just written. Each emotional synopsis tends to be about 6 or 7 thousand words, and I go over it again and again, identifying weak connections, repetitions, bloating, things like that, before creating a to-do list of what the next draft has to tackle. 

I have a simultaneous document going where I log my goals for the next draft versus the final draft—Elizabeth Tallent once said to me that a draft cannot serve two masters, which I found to be very helpful, because it allows me to write deeply into the book while shelving other craft concerns for a future draft. 

I also actively keep a dated log of narrative changes I’ve made, as objective proof to myself that the book is improving in the (frequent) moments where I feel as if I’ve made no progress, and in the later stages of revision, as I was preparing to query, I constantly talked through my book aloud with my writing partner, Grace Shuyi Liew, and my husband. The act of articulating the story helped me identify areas where my confidence in the story lapsed, so I could return to interrogate it more, and eventually, when I could literally not look at the book a second longer, I knew it was time to let the book go. 

About Jemimah Wei
Jemimah Wei is the author of The Original Daughter. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA degree. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, she was named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and appears in Guernica, Narrative, and Joyland, amongst others. Born and raised in Singapore, she is now based between Singapore and the United States. Say hi at @jemmawei on socials, and you can preorder her novel here.

– Kyle Carrero Lopez, NYFA Literary Consultant

This post is part of the Immigrant Artist Program Newsletter. Subscribe to this free monthly e-mail for artist’s features, opportunities, and events. Learn more about NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program.