How I Wrote This Book: Mary H.K. Choi’s “Pool House”

“I’ve been very, very shrewd about where I spend money because I will always want it in the form of time.”

For the latest installment of “How I Wrote This Book,” a Deez Links Q&A series on craft and creativity, we have a wildly honest conversation with the legendary Mary H.K. Choi about her fourth novel (and adult debut) Pool House, which comes out June 9.

For those of you who aren’t already familiar, Mary is one of the all-time millennial media greats: She is a screenwriter, essayist, and the bestselling author of Emergency Contact, Permanent Record, and Yolk. You may also recognize her as a former culture correspondent for Vice News Tonight and also because she now blogs in such an inimitable Mary way about fashion, style, and culture on her choitotheworld newsletter.

Like so many folks in the New York literary community, I’ve had the pleasure of benefitting personally from Mary’s hard-won advice on everything from writing to money to major life decisions. She has a generous habit of taking fledglings under her own wing and being utterly clear-eyed about The Work, so it’s very exciting to be able to pass on some of her wisdom below.

We talked about how she sold Pool House on without a manuscript; how she maintains her creative discipline amidst a million development projects and other unfinished novels; and how she cultivates a life that centers her writing, often in the most unromantic terms possible…