Reading time: About 2 minutes
A.H. Kim says that having an accountability partner helps her to get her butt out of bed and into a chair every day….
A.H. (Ann) Kim is an immigrant, mother of two sons and a rescue pup, long-time cancer survivor, community volunteer, and happily retired attorney. Ann is the author of two novels, A Good Family (think: Succession meets Orange is the New Black) and Relative Strangers (a modern-day Sense and Sensibility with Korean American sisters). After raising her family in the Bay Area, Ann and her husband now call Ann Arbor home.
I was excited to talk to Ann about how she approaches writing.
Q. Roughly how much time do you spend writing every day?
I set aside two hours every morning to Zoom with my writing accountability partner. I’ve been going through a dry spell lately, so I tend to respond to emails or pay bills rather than write, but at least I’m showing up.
Q. What’s a simple activity or habit that makes you a better writer?
I always say the best training to be a writer is to be a reader. The more you read, the better you’ll write.
Q. What interferes with your writing?
Honestly, the current state of the world is making it very hard for me to write.
Q. How do you persuade yourself to sit down to write on days when you really, really DON’T feel like doing it?
I haven’t been very successful at the writing part lately, but I think that having an accountability partner is helpful. Knowing that someone is waiting for you to show up is very motivating and gets your butt out of bed and into the chair.
Q. Is there a particular motto or saying that you’ve found helpful for writing?
I love Anne Lamott’s phrase “Bird by bird.” When faced with what feels like a daunting task — whether writing a school report on birds or drafting an entire novel — it’s helpful to remember to take it one step, one bird, one scene at a time.
Q. Which stage of the writing process do you enjoy the most: researching, writing or editing/rewriting and why?
I love the initial drafting stage. I find it thrilling to come up with story ideas, interesting people, and fun locations, and to get into the hearts and minds of the characters. It always feels magical to me how these people and situations come to me out of thin air, and how the random pieces of writing that flow out of me somehow come together to form a cohesive story.
Q. What’s one of the best books you’ve read (either fiction or non-) in the last five years?
I’ve read a lot of great books in the past five years, but if you made me pick just one, it would be Julia Claiborne Johnson’s Be Frank With Me. It has everything I love in a novel: sharp writing, sparkling humor, and characters so distinct and quirky and human that you go through a mourning period when you’ve read the last page.
Q. What book are you reading right now?
Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh (Beth) Nguyen. I had the pleasure of meeting Beth last year at the Ann Arbor Community Book Festival. When she mentioned that she’d written a novel that combined her Vietnamese American immigrant background with her love of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, I was sold.
Q. What do you think is the biggest misperception that new writers have about the act of writing?
I never imagined that I could be a writer because I thought it required God-given talent and years of formal training, neither of which I felt I had. But there are plenty of writers who didn’t major in English or get an MFA and who aren’t necessarily literary geniuses but who put in the work of writing, revising, and revising some more. Writing is perseverance. I always tell aspiring writers: if I can be a published author, so can you!
