Viet Thanh Nguyen

I suffered all the agony and the doubt and the fear that you described.

And then at the end of that process, I thought I wrote this book partly for me, but also partly for the community of Vietnamese readers, but other people who have influence who can publish the book.

And that is a very human experience to do something for other people.

But at the end of that, I thought, I've had it.

I'm going to write my next book for myself.

That was a sympathizer.

And ironically, because I didn't care about what other people thought, I wrote the best possible book I could.

And that is actually kind of a life lesson for writers, but also for others as well.

Well, I mean, the colloquial way is to say, I don't give a you know what anymore.

And we spend most of our, many people spend the bulk of their lives actually giving that.

Like they care about what other people think for obvious professional and personal reasons.

But I think for artists, as an example, but I think probably for other people too, we have to reach a space where we don't care what other people think so we can give completely nothing

I grew up a Catholic, and I feel that if I hadn't become a writer, I would have become a priest.

Anything that required discipline.

In other words, the discipline is what matters.

The calling is what matters.

It's not the world.

It's what you believe.

And the challenge for me as a writer was to spend 17 years learning the craft, the art, the technique, all these kinds of things you need as a writer, but also being preoccupied with the world, what the agents thought, editors thought, reviewers, and so on.

But the thing about a discipline for me is that after I spent 17 years being disciplined and disciplining myself...