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Direct & Indirect Quotes

Coates’ son went to a school nearby, and it was, at first, convenient. “I imagined that this was a place where a writer could just work.” He then motions to the other dark corner in the back of the café.

“There was a woman who used to sit, who does still sit, in that corner seat right there. She looked so serious. And I knew she was a writer right away, just by how she worked. She never socialized. We ended up being friends!”

That writer was Julie Otsuka, who wrote, among other novels, a haunting, boundary-expanding, award-winning book in 2011 about a group of Japanese wives sent from Japan to marry Japanese American husbands called The Buddha in the Attic. The women collectively narrate their journey in language that is lyrical

Coates didn’t ask her to read The Water Dancer as he was intimidated by her and simply didn’t want to bother her

Part of the reason Coates returned to the pastry shop is because he felt it allowed him to take on the trappings of the novelist throughout the 10 years it took him to complete the book

He’s made an effort to surround himself with other fiction writers. “I sent the first chapter off to Michael Chabon—we’d struck up this friendship—and he just blasted it. ‘This is not fiction, bro,’ he said.” Coates laughs.

“He wrote this long-ass note. It was great. It was really great. I was totally depressed. But it helped. I said, ‘Okay, this is where I have to go; this is what it has to be.’ Everything proceeded from there.”

“I was nowhere close, and he let me know, which is exactly what a good friend and good reader is supposed to do. I think so much of writing happens in those moments. Talent is important, but perseverance and high threshold for humiliation is maybe even more important?”

Coates sought writing wisdom from the women in his life. His wife, Kenyatta Matthews, is his first reader. “She reads everything,” he says. “She reads more than I do.” 

When he was writing, he listened to “a lot of sad-ass R & B,” he says.

“A lot of songs about longing. I played the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody,’ Isaac Hayes, ‘Walk on By.’ ‘Look of Love.’ ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.’ ”

“My mom reads serious stuff, and she also reads what people would refer to as trash, right.”

As a teen, he says, “I read a lot of what people refer to as trash too. And I told her years ago that I was going to write her a romance novel. I told her this when I was 20.”

“There’s something in black music, and I guess music, period, that expresses feeling that can’t be spoken or written. And I felt like in writing about slavery, I was going for a kind of emotion I didn’t quite know how to express.”

 “Music was like an audio cue for me. It would take me to the place I needed to go.”

“I started reading books about the Underground Railroad. It was the individual stories that got me. I was reading this biography of Harriet Tubman, and one of the biographies said something to the effect of, ‘To this day, we don’t know how she made some of these escapes.’ I said, ‘F***—well, how did she?’ To me, that’s where myth lives in fiction.”

Possible questions associated with the quotations above

1. Why’d you choose this café to be your office back when you were working on The Water Dancer?
2. Did you ask Julie Otsuka to read your novel for feedback?
3. Does it mean anything to you to return to this pasty shop where you worked on your novel for years, now that it has been published?
4. Did you ever look at other writers for inspiration, help, or feedback?
5. Was your wife always supportive of you and your novels?
6. How were you feeling in the process of writing Between the World and Me?
7. Why did you choose to listen to this specific genre of music when writing the novel?
8. Do you think there is a relationship between writers and music artists?
9. You mentioned having predominantly African influences, Do you have anything to say about Harriet Tubman?

Questions we would ask if given the opportunity

• Why did you choose Hiram as one of the names in your book? Does the name represent something that only you would know?
• What inspired you to become a writer? Why did you choose this career path?
• Did you have any role models growing up? How did they influence you and your decisions? Did you also have any writer influencers? 
• Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years? What do you think you would have achieved in that time period?

• How do you think race and culture impacted your writing?
• Do you recall having childhood memories from Baltimore? How is it different here than there?

• How did you come up with your book titles? Did they have any meaning?