I talked to Yaa Gyasi about how to know if a manuscript is worth finishing

The author of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom on writing book three.

We’re back with another edition of Working Title, this time with Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom. I’m a big fan of both books and have long admired Yaa, who has this ability to write transportive, sharp and intimate prose. Below we talk about her current work in progress, how to know if a novel idea is a good one, and what she does when she isn’t writing her next book.

How do you know when you've landed on a good idea for a novel?

It's really messy. I'll have what I think is an idea. I write a lot of pages that go nowhere and I won’t know that I'm writing the wrong book until suddenly I see that I'm writing the wrong book. There's this point, usually around 50 pages in, where it clicks into place. Once I get that feeling, I know I can finish it. I've described it as having a big ring of janitor keys and you are trying to fit each one into the lock and you're like, maybe this will open the door, and it doesn't. Then finally you find the key that opens the door and you can go in. That's what it feels like. 

For Homegoing I thought I wanted to write a book about a mother and her daughter. My initial idea was to use this fellowship I got to travel to Ghana and conduct research. I was moving around my mother's hometown thinking something would come up for me. I don't recommend that because nothing happened. Then a friend came to visit and he wanted to go see the Cape Coast Castle. I just knew immediately what the book was going to be about. I didn't know the structure, I didn't know any of the larger things, but I felt that space. That's the only time I can say I had a quintessential spark of inspiration. For Transcendent Kingdom, I had been working on something for a while and it wasn't going anywhere. I wasn't excited about it. I had about 50 pages of that and I showed it to my partner and he was like, yeah, this isn't working. As I was trying to think of what I really wanted to write about, I came back to a short story that I had written years before in grad school about a woman who was taking care of her mentally ill mother. And I thought, what if I flesh this out, but used the research that my best friend–who was getting her PhD at the time–was doing. 

That makes a lot of sense. I always go through this phase with my manuscript where I hate it. I'm telling everybody I know it's really bad. Then I get very dramatic and I'm like, maybe I should pivot to private writing. So with the thing that you're working on now, how did you know it was viable?