Chloe Gong: A Bestselling Author Bringing Representation to Young Adult Fiction
Chloe Gong, an English literature and international relations student at the University of Pennsylvania from New Zealand, reimagines the classic tale of Romeo and Juliet in her debut novel These Violent Delights, set in 1920s Shanghai. Just weeks after its release in November 2020, the book became a New York Times Bestseller. Now, as Chloe works on the sequel, Our Violent Ends, she reflects on why she started writing, her creative process, and her journey to publishing.
Like many authors, Chloe’s journey with writing started with reading. As a child, she loved disappearing into the worlds of different novels and following the lives of her favorite characters. Every week, she would go to the library and come home with a new stack of books to delve into. Quite tellingly, Chloe loved young adult fiction, including The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare (she was a die-hard Jace Herondale fan) and the Divergent series by Veronica Roth. “I got so invested, and I would run to the bookstore every time the next book in the series was dropping, and it really, really made up my teen personality,” she recalls.
After a while, disappearing into other authors’ worlds was not enough. “I would go to the library every week and come home with a huge stack of books. But I was such a fast reader that eventually within two days or so I had finished reading all of my books,” she remembers. So, more out of boredom rather than a pointed interest, she began writing her own stories. She created her own worlds, characters, and settings and began to envision her own main characters and the actions they would take. All throughout high school, she wrote stories upon stories, creating eight or nine manuscripts that were each almost 100,000 words long. “At first, I didn't call them novels. I just called them stories, and I didn’t think of myself as a writer,” she says. “I was kind of just entertaining myself. But the more I wrote throughout high school, I realized that I was effectively just writing manuscripts.”
Her hobby became something more as Chloe began to advance in her writing. When she first started writing, her stories were copies of books she had cherished. She would create new characters, but the plots were essentially the same. In her words, it was “just telling a fun story.” As she kept writing, her ideas evolved into more original concepts, stories that she wished to read herself, “something that [she] would be interested in, as a stranger, to see on the shelves.”
With that in mind, she set out to write These Violent Delights. Chloe describes her process of writing novels as ever-evolving. She spends a large chunk of time mulling over ideas before even putting pen to paper. For These Violent Delights, in particular, Chloe invested time into researching the history of Shanghai, colonialism, and Shakespearean literature. Researching leaves her brimming with ideas and plotlines, which she then sifts through by outlining. “My brain likes to work with overwhelming information,” she explains, “so I have it all up there and then slowly release it until I can get down a solid outline. [The first draft] almost reads like a screenplay because I'm leaving instructions for the future me.” In the end, Chloe finds that her final drafts are usually very similar to her first ones as they all draw upon her detailed outline and notes.
“I realized that [These Violent Delights] feels like something that I would be interested in, as a stranger, to see on the shelves.”
Her creative process has developed naturally over time. Since she first started writing without having ever taken traditional writing classes, she learned how to write by just doing. This separates her from many other authors and novelists, who typically begin their projects after taking formal writing classes. “If people start writing later in life, they pick up writing books [by finding] a mechanical angle to go into it,” Chloe explains. “I came at the angle of just reading so much that I stumbled on how to write by just writing a lot.”
As she finished up These Violent Delights at the end of her freshman year of college, she set out to publish the novel. Lacking connections within the publishing industry, Chloe spent a lot of time googling the publishing process (which includes writing a query letter, sending it out to various agents, and finding a publisher). While researching, she faced a lot of pressure to attend book fairs to meet agents face to face and advocate for her novel. But, at that time she was living in New Zealand for the summer. Completely removed from the traditional American literary scene, she did not have access to these events. She instead chose to find agents through cold emailing agents who aligned with her values. “It's actually possible to publish even when you are completely removed,” Chloe emphasizes. “You don't actually have to attend these events, and you can still get to exactly the same place as someone who goes face to face to meet with agents.” Reflecting back on this decision, Chloe is glad that she chose to forge ahead without succumbing to the pressure of attending these networking events. She hopes that it proves to authors that they can achieve success without following the “rules” perfectly.
Beyond the challenge of publishing remotely, Chloe is also cognizant of the particular burdens that authors of color carry, including the danger of enforcing a monolithic story about a culture. More specifically, Chloe acknowledges that authors of color carry huge burdens of representing their culture without falling into stereotypes and staying true to their own experiences. “The burden is that you can't represent your people in a negative light or play into stereotypes because people have been stereotyped for too long. But that’s so unfair on you, the marginalized creator, because all you're trying to do is tell your story in your most authentic way,” she says.
This struggle stems from the long-time phenomenon of white authors trying to tell the narratives of people of color. Now, when authors of color, such as Chloe, enter the scene and write from personal experience, the expectations of telling the story in the “right” way are much higher. “It's much different writing from a white lens taking advantage of the culture than writing from within the culture,” Chloe continues, “So it's this burden of writing to other people's satisfaction, which is very unfair to authors of color who are just trying to tell this one story.”
Chloe has seen these burdens play out in different ways within her own writing. With the early reviews of These Violent Delights, some readers focused on the idea of Shanghai and its foreign location, rather than the plots and characters of the novel. “People say I learned so much about Shanghai, I'm sure I know everything about it now. And [I am] kind of just sitting there thinking that actually wasn't the point of the book.” Though this can be frustrating, Chloe chooses to focus on solving the problem rather than just discussing it. Her solution is encouraging more marginalized authors to tell their stories and diversify the kinds of content that audiences see about intersectional identities and minorities. “Let's encourage more marginalized writers, specifically who want to be telling their own stories, to come out and tell the stories. Only then do you actually have the range that we really need.” Her personal work is contributing to that range. By publishing her novel without any connections to the publishing industry, Chloe hopes to show other authors that they can do the same. She also is optimistic about recent shifts in the industry in telling diverse stories, “In 2010, you hardly could find a single representative character in books. The fact that it feels so much better now gives me so much hope.”
STORY MALLIKA CHENNUPATY
PHOTOS CHLOE GONG