Amy Tan's Lonely, 'Pixel-by-Pixel' Writing Method

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" helps remind the Joy Luck Club author to capture the "microscopic" details that make her characters unique.

Joe FasslerDec 10 2013, The Atlantic

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Sherman Alexie, Andre Dubus and more.

Doug McLean

If Supreme Court justices determine what should be true for all people in all cases, author Amy Tan told me, writers do the opposite—they focus on what makes individuals unique. To create convincing fiction, Tan feels she must “look microscopically”: Her characters grow out of the singular details, impressions, and secrets they share with no one else.

In searching for these small, telling facts, Tan’s learned that startling things can happen when you start to look closely. By spending hours looking at old photographs, examining every tiny detail for story possibilities, she unearthed a discovery that led to her new novel, The Valley of Amazement. In a book on Chinese courtesan culture in turn-of-the-century Shanghai, Tan found a picture of five women in professional garb: long coats with cheek-high, upturned collars and tight-fitting embroidered caps. It was the exact outfit worn by Tan’s grandmother in a favorite early photograph. If her grandmother had been a courtesan, Tan wondered, how would that recast the family story?

The Valley of Amazement begins in 1905, at the Hidden Jade Path, Shanghai’s most exclusive courtesan house. The book’s main narrator, Violet, is the daughter of the brothel’s American madam. In this latest book, Tan chronicles this fraught mother-daughter relationship through 40 years of conflict and renewal.
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