A Bolt From the Blue: A Guest Post by Rumaan Alam
Where does a novel really come from, and how does a writer find their ideas? Bestselling author Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) has pondered this question for a while, wondering how his favorite authors come to their ideas. Read on for Alam’s thoughts on the genesis of a novel and how our everyday lives can inspire the smallest of details.
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Entitlement: A Novel
Entitlement: A Novel
By Rumaan Alam
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Hardcover
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Reading a novel by Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) is always a pleasure — sharp dialogue, surprising characters (even the ones that make us mad), and very smart observations about who we are and what drives us, from love and money to family and more.
Reading a novel by Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) is always a pleasure — sharp dialogue, surprising characters (even the ones that make us mad), and very smart observations about who we are and what drives us, from love and money to family and more.
Often when I read a novel I want to know where it came from, how the author came up with it. So I understand when readers occasionally ask the same of me. That I struggle to answer feels disappointing. But writing a book seems to me to have little to do with inspiration, a bolt from the blue. In my experience it’s a process that is slow and kind of strange, requiring patience as I find myself returning to a handful of ideas, and trying to transform those into a story.
If I’m inarticulate about where Entitlement came from, precisely, I can say what ideas I had been mulling in the years before I started writing it: whether the dream of home ownership was within reach of younger Americans, if the gulf between the very rich and the rest of us had reached some untenable breaking point, what it means to have a meaningful job.
There was more I wanted to tackle in this novel, too: the general optimism I felt during the Obama administration, what it was like to go to a restaurant or bar in pre-pandemic New York City, and what it can be like to be friends or intimates with someone much older than you. These are all abstractions, but a story emerged from these intersecting notions.
One thing that is simpler to answer is how I arrived at some of the concrete choices inside of the novel. A painting by the artist Helen Frankenthaler is mentioned in a pivotal moment; I certainly landed on her work because I read Mary Gabriel’s extraordinary group biography Ninth Street Women. Later, there’s a scene involving Mozart’s Maurerische Trauermusik; that’s a piece of music I personally love, and chose it simply for that reason. There’s a moment in which the protagonist and her family dine at a Chinese restaurant; they call this “sit-down Chinese,” distinct from ordering in, and that is something my own family says. The novel mentions (more than once!) another character’s private chef. The reason for that is because if I ever win the Powerball, my first splurge would be to put someone on the payroll who would fill my refrigerator and prepare every meal.
I don’t think these particular choices—a book I once read, some classical music I love, my family’s shorthand, my own wish for someone to cook for me—mean anything, really. They’re just small decisions I made to help animate the story, or to keep myself interested in the story as I was writing it.
At any rate the question of where a novel comes from, at least for me, remains unanswerable, but I suppose I prefer it that way. Where a book comes from doesn’t matter as much as what the reader makes of it.