Interview: Graduate Ai Jiang

Your Personal Odyssey graduate Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer; Ignyte Award winner; Nebula, Locus, Bram Stoker, and BSFA Award finalist; and an immigrant from Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. She is a member of HWA and SFWA. Her work can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Dark, and Uncanny, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of Linghun and I AM AI. The first book of her novella duology, A Palace Near the Wind, is forthcoming in 2025 with Titan Books. Find her on X (@AiJiang_), Instagram (@ai.jian.g), and online (http://aijiang.ca).

You attended the Fall 2022-Winter 2023 session of Your Personal Odyssey (YPO). How did you fit the YPO schedule into your life at home?

I had just finished my MSc program at the University of Edinburgh, so I was transitioning from a school schedule back to writing full time. With Odyssey, I attempted to balance work I had for the program with external projects I had been working on at the same time. But it was difficult, as I found myself dedicating the majority of my hours to Odyssey. During this period, I had shifted regular responsibilities with my spouse so I could dedicate more time to the program, but given my usual sleep schedule, I was able to work throughout the day with interruptions, but also through the night while everyone else in the house was asleep.

How did your writing change as a result of going through the workshop?

Prior to Odyssey, I had a very line-by-line writing style that I was used to when writing short stories. This consisted of character, plot, setting, and worldbuilding considerations placed into every sentence written, but this practice was unsustainable for long form. During Odyssey, I was able to practice thinking about these elements separately as well as more broadly and extensively for longer pieces of work. Prewriting was something I lacked prior to Odyssey, and it is one of the most useful tools I’ve come away from the program with now that I am shifting into long-form projects rather than focusing solely on short stories. Consideration of character arc developments and their connection to casual chains is something I have also been implementing more during the outlining stages of my writing.

During YPO you met with and received detailed feedback from Odyssey Director Jeanne Cavelos, received and gave critiques, and had the opportunity to virtually attend lectures. What did you find the most helpful about the workshop?

I found that practicing how to give detailed and in-depth critiques during Odyssey has really helped me in doing the same with my own work during revision stages. With receiving critiques from Jeanne and the guest critiquers, I am better able to identify my weaknesses and strengths and make note of them during both the drafting and editing stages. The lectures were extremely useful in offering more strategies, tools, and approaches by different writers. I later tried to see which would work best for my own writing processes and practices.

Your novelette I AM AI came out in 2023. How many stages did your work go through before you sent it off to your publisher? How much of your time was spent writing the first draft, and how much time was spent in revision? What sort of revisions did you do?

From what I recall, I AM AI underwent about three drafts before going to my publisher. The first draft was around 9,000 words, and I had turned it in as my first submission during Odyssey. From start to finish, the novelette took three days to complete, but the amount of time I had spent thinking about the project leading up to when words were actually placed on the page might be around one to two years. The revised draft after Jeanne’s critique hovered around 9,500 words, then I returned once more after brewing further on the critique and expanded the novelette to 12,300 words before turning it in to my publisher. The final version after edits landed at 12,500 words.

The majority of my revisions were centered around fleshing out the main character’s relationships to the secondary characters, and how these relationships impact the main character’s decisions and direction of her growth throughout the story. Another thing I had worked on was clarifying the MC’s motivations and actions, as well as addressing issues with the plot’s casual chain. Sensory detail is also something I often do not include enough of, so I also worked on adding that in and diversifying the sensory descriptions included.  

You’ve published numerous poems, most recently “We Drink Lava” in Uncanny Magazine. What poetry techniques carry over into your prose? What do you think prose writers could learn from writing poetry?

What I find most fascinating about poetry is that it relies, at least for me, entirely on metaphor, language, imagery—on the show rather than the tell, and I think this is extremely important when it comes to writing fiction because it often is easier to tell the readers what is happening, how our characters feel, rather than show these things through subtext. Though in prose, there is more of a balance, rather than in poetry where we have very few words to work with and often have to do multiple things within a single sentence to create the feeling and expansiveness of entire worlds and lives. But also, poetry has the ability to narrow in and pick apart in detail a single moment, instance, and make it feel like an entire galaxy. And I think this is a technique that prose writers could use to do more with less and prevent overwriting by adding in sentences that do the work for entire paragraphs.

What’s the biggest weakness in your writing these days, and how do you cope with it?

As I am moving into long form, I find that I am doing far more telling than showing in attempts to get the bones of the story down before digging into the details. As a result, I end up losing a lot of what I previously considered as strengths in my story fiction—subtext, interiority, and weighted sentences. I’ve found that I simply have to let go of the idea of perfect first drafts and try my best to make them polished but not berate myself if they turn out awful. I can’t remember who said this, but I remember a quote that I try to hold on to in moments like this: “Revision is an act of love.”

What’s next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

I recently finished my first YA novel and plan on riding the momentum into working on my second novel of the year, one I have been putting off for far too long. The novel I had worked on as a part of my time in Odyssey is now complete, but I am still undergoing revisions for it. It is the first full novel I have ever written, and it is clear that I still have much to learn about the mechanics of noveling and how different they are from short stories. But I am slowly learning to love the process, and I hope, equipped with tools from Odyssey, this will only be the first of a great many!