I tried really hard to make that work, and I guess that version was something more along the lines of a portal fantasy. The version of the book that sold had actually braided together two time lines-one in a fantasy world, and one in the contemporary real world.
I think of this book as “contemporary with magical elements” rather than magical realism, since the bit of magic that exists in the book is not in response to oppression and colonialism, which is how the magical realism genre was born. Did you know from the onset that you wanted to write a book in the magical realism genre? Or did the categorization happen once the book was written? But I rewrote it again after that, so even the final version that became a real finished book is quite different.įrom the start, readers get the sense that this novel, though realistic, is very much hovering between fantasy and realistic fiction.
In 2015, I sat down to rewrite it from scratch (for the umpteenth time), and that was the version that got me my agent and then quickly sold. I rewrote it many, many different ways, giving it whole new casts of characters, altering the premise and voice and format quite a few times. I was quickly overwhelmed by the research, so it didn’t take long for me to reframe it from the perspective of a modern-day teenage girl.
It was originally meant to span the first 40 years of a Taiwanese woman’s life (based on my grandmother), starting in 1927 in the mountains of Northern Taiwan. I started writing it in 2010, but it was a very different book back then.
It may have taken many years to write The Astonishing Color of After (Little, Brown March 19, 2018), but the results are what SLJ calls in its starred review “an exploration of grief and what it means to accept a loved one’s suicide,” with “lyrical and heart-rending prose” that “invites readers to take flight into their own lives and examine their relationships.” Pan discusses the novel’s many iterations, why it’s important to talk about mental health in YA, and what she’s working on next.Ĭan you tell us a little bit about this manuscript’s journey, from initial idea to final draft? How long did it take to write The Astonishing Color of After?
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