On Writing No. 1

Novelist Andrew Boryga

Since most of you will already be familiar with the mighty Andrew Boryga, I can give a different introduction here than I put in the print, which needed to make sense to readers who’d never even heard of Substack.

I first found out about Andrew’s debut novel, Victim, when Sam Kahn sent me off on that mission to find good, contemporary, rebellious literature. It was the best I came across during my hunt. If the literary renaissance really happens, its author may well become one its brightest stars.

The following interview, though short and straightforward, has significantly changed my life. The simple act of Andrew detailing his writing routine, which begins each morning at five a.m., transformed my own. After we chatted earlier this year, I too began writing every morning before work, hardly ever missing a day. For the first time I started treating writing like the most important thing in my life. My hope is that you, dear reader, also find one or two (or three) gems below, which you can use right away.

If you’d like to get your hands on the print issue, you can subscribe via Substack or buy on our website. Shipping is included in the price; we’ll also have them primed and ready for pick up at the ever-growing launch party this Saturday.

---

Magazine Non Grata

I saw you were boxing the other day. Are you taking that seriously?

Andrew Boryga
I love boxing. I’m Puerto Rican. I grew up watching Tito Trinidad, Miguel Cotto. I have a couple friends here in Miami that are only friends because we watch boxing together. I love it as a sport. I’m gonna write a boxing novel at some point. HAROLD and Sean Thor Conroe, who wrote the novel, Fuccboi, were saying they want to set up a boxing match.

Magazine Non Grata

There are a couple guys at Non Grata that would love to fight Sean Thor.

Andrew Boryga

He’d be down for it. I’m down for it, too. If you set it up we’ll find somebody for me and do a few matches.

Magazine Non Grata

Deal. Moving onto fiction: Did you always want to be a novelist?

Andrew Boryga

No. I didn’t understand how you became a novelist. As a kid all I knew was that I liked reading books. My mother used to take my sisters and me to Barnes & Noble on the weekends. Usually we couldn’t buy the books, but we’d read them and remember the page we were on. The next weekend we’d go from there. I read a lot of my first books that way. We’d just be there all day at Barnes & Noble.

In seventh grade my teacher, Miss Stein, pulled me aside and told me I could do something with writing. It happened again in high school with another teacher, Mrs. Negrin. By that point I was voracious, going to the library, fifteen or sixteen, carrying around Dostoevsky. All my friends in the Bronx were coming up to me like, “Bro, what the fuck are you doing?” It was weird to be doing that in my neighborhood. But I was into the shit.

Around that time I started thinking about journalism because it made sense to me. There was a guy outside the subway and I’d buy the paper, see the pictures of the columnists. They were real people.

At sixteen I started writing for a newspaper in the Bronx. Then, when I was about to graduate high school, I won a scholarship with the New York Times. Usually they don’t give interns anything of significance, but I already had two years of journalism experience, so I talked my way into writing. Suddenly, just out of high school, I was getting bylines in the Times. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but I was holding my own at the top level. That gave me a lot of confidence.

Magazine Non Grata

When did you start writing fiction?

Andrew Boryga

In college I took creative writing classes. I liked writing short stories and won some awards. After I graduated I went down to Miami to do this MFA thing. Five months later I dropped out. I had all this time to write but I didn’t have anything to say. So I came back to New York and got a job as an assistant at the Times. On the side I started writing a novel, which eventually became Victim.

Magazine Non Grata

How long did it take you to write it?

Andrew Boryga

A long time. From twenty-three to thirty I wrote about five versions of the novel. I tried getting agents with each one but no one was interested. So I just kept searching for a configuration of how to make the story work. I knew I wanted to write about the Bronx. I knew I had these two characters that are friends who grow up together—who take different paths and want to reunite—but I needed a plot. It took me a while to identify that.

Magazine Non Grata

When did it click?

Andrew Boryga

As I’m going through the journalism industry, I’m experiencing this wave of diversity and identity hype. And I’m in the center of it because I’m writing for these places and I’m a brown person and they don’t know how to deal with me. I don’t know how to deal with them. So there’s a lot of weird shit going on and I was just internalizing it.

The summer of 2020 my son is born, and I’m realizing I don’t want to be a daily journalist anymore. That’s when I locked in and finally stumbled on the idea of a character, like myself, who was getting these opportunities as a person of color to write.

In real life, as I satirize in the novel, agents would sit across from me and be like, “You’re so authentic, you can… blah blah blah.” They were saying all these words, but I’m a street kid. I could read somebody, and I knew they didn’t really fuck with me. I could see the dollar signs in their eyes. They were thinking this is hot right now, I could jump on this and make some money. My close friends told me it was fishy. I thought the whole thing was weird. So I backed out.

But then I started thinking: What if I created a character who did the opposite? Who leaned into it, who treated it as a hustle? Once I stumbled on that, everything clicked into place and the book was born.

Magazine Non Grata

Anais caught my attention because, when I was reading Victim, my friend was dating a girl like her. She was with him, to a large extent, because of his “marginalized identity.”

Andrew Boryga

Yeah, I worked hard with my editor to make her more dynamic. What is she getting out of this? Javi is spinning his wheels making his own hustle, but I liked the idea of everybody having an angle, so she had an angle too.

Yeah, she liked him, but she also was trying to portray an image to the world by being by his side. It happened to me in college. There would be girls who would date me and then they’d be like, “Oh, you’re my little ghetto boy.” And I was like… What? It was weird, you know? It was cool too because we were hooking up, but in my mind I was thinking that that shit is fucked up. With Anais I wanted to play with that idea and give her her own agency.

Magazine Non Grata

In Anais, in all the characters, in the plot: Your novel is one of the few successful, contemporary pieces that doesn’t toe the party line.

Andrew Boryga

I wanted to convey a message and write a book that wasn’t out there. I was reading a ton about identity, race, media, and publishing, but I wasn’t seeing my version of it. I wasn’t seeing the blue-collar working-class version of it. There was a lot of stuff coming from people who were swimming in these worlds already. I wanted something from an outsider.

Magazine Non Grata

Were you worried that no one was going to publish it?

Andrew Boryga

No, I was just having fun. Before I had kids the idea of becoming a novelist was the center of my world. I still care about it, but it was everything back then. After my son was born my world went from I need to become this famous writer to I need to parent this child. All of a sudden I’m in dad mode.

That reorientation was powerful. I no longer cared about being a famous writer or when I would get published. And, well, if that’s the case, then I might as well just have fun with this, you know?

I was writing Victim in secret, on my own, at five in the morning. I didn’t know if anyone was gonna read it or if they were gonna publish it or if I was gonna get canceled. But I didn’t care because I’d decided that I was going to write it the way I wanted to write it. If it doesn’t get published, it doesn’t get published. It wasn’t until I was ready to shop it around that I started wondering what people were going to think about it.

Magazine Non Grata

Do you ever worry about how hard it is to make money as a novelist?

Andrew Boryga

We grew up poor and I had a great childhood. I didn’t even know I was poor until I went to Cornell. So I knew you didn’t need a whole lot of money to live well. But I’ve never been of the mind that I’m going to make a career only writing novels. One day that’d be great if that happens, but that wasn’t what I was aiming for. I was trying to write the best book I could. That’s partly why I’ve always had a day job. I’ve never not had a day job.

Magazine Non Grata

I’ve noticed that your voice sounds the same in the book, over email, on Substack, over text, in person. Did your voice come naturally to you?

Andrew Boryga

The first story I ever tried to write was my version of On the Road. But it was dead on arrival because I’d never been anywhere. I’d only been on my block. I didn’t know shit. I didn’t even know Manhattan that well. The Bronx was my world, you know? Trying to write about this guy hitchhiking didn’t work. I don’t even fucking drive. And mimicking Kerouac’s voice felt so foreign to how I actually think and speak.

But then I read Drown by Junot Diaz and Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez. That was the first time I saw somebody expressing meaning and beauty in a vocabulary, in a syntax, that sounded similar to my neighborhood. It opened up a world for me. These guys were doing beautiful literature, but in their voice, in their language, in their swag. After reading Drown I wrote forty pages in one shot, single space, just writing shit about my neighborhood. Writing about my friends, family members, stuff I experienced. I wrote it how I speak and it came so easy.

When I showed it to people their reaction was: Oh, wow. This is different. People appreciated the difference, like I was giving them a look into a world they didn’t understand or know. I’ve never looked back since.

Magazine Non Grata

With the growth of self-publishing on Substack, there’s been a lot of talk about “the death of the editor.” Do you think that’s a possibility?

Andrew Boryga

My journalism background has helped me understand the value in editing. At first I was like: Damn, you chopping my stuff up, this is crazy. But as I got older and more experienced, I started to understand the value of edits. There is tremendous value in having somebody who reads words for a living—who tries to identify beautiful sentences on a daily basis—help you make your work stronger. My editor at Double Day, Cara Reilly, was excellent. We had a few people interested in the book but I went with her because, from our first conversation, she made it clear that she didn’t want to fundamentally change this novel. Working with her it just became more propulsive.

I love the energy on Substack, people finding their own audiences, getting around the gatekeepers, making their own path. I do think you need editors though. I don’t know if you know Alex Muka—

Magazine Non Grata

He has a piece in this magazine, a recipe on how to make white rice.

Andrew Boryga

Oh, yeah? That’s awesome. He’s a great guy and he wrote a phenomenal novel, Hell or Hangover. You could tell he not only put the time into it, he also got outside readers to help him on it. When we spoke he told me he got two or three editors that he paid with his own money. And you can tell. It sings in a way that’s difficult, dare say impossible, to make happen on your own. You have just so many blind spots as an author.

Magazine Non Grata

What do you think about Substack for fiction?

Andrew Boryga

I’ve never finished a Substack short story. The whole scrolling on the screen—it’s hard for me to read. I don’t put my ambitious work on Substack. It’s not a great reading experience for short fiction.

Magazine Non Grata

What’s your writing routine now?

Andrew Boryga

Even before I had kids, when I was at Cornell, I’d wake up at five and write. First thing in the morning has always been best for me. I haven’t read the news, nothing’s infiltrating my mind. It’s all downhill after eleven o’clock.

Once my son settled into a good sleep routine I started doing the five a.m. thing again. Sometimes I cheat a bit and do four forty-five. Then I’ll write until six-thirty or seven. I’ve done it for so long that I’m used to it. If I go to sleep at twelve, I’ll still wake up at five.

I’ve only gotten to where I am because of consistency. I think I have talent, but you have to be dedicated and consistent. It’s important to show up every day. Even if I don’t write a lot I still got up and sat down. That feels significant to me.

Magazine Non Grata

Do you try to hit a word count each day?

Andrew Boryga

When I’m drafting I try to hit around a thousand words a day. That allows you to produce a draft in four or five months. I’m not super militant about it, but I try to get at least a few pages in.

Magazine Non Grata

What do you do if you’re stuck?

Andrew Boryga

I’ll vomit something out. Sometimes I’ll write blah blah blah, or I’ll start asking myself questions. You’d be surprised by what you put down subconsciously. You step away from it thinking, there’s a sentence in there. And then you build everything around that sentence.

Magazine Non Grata

How do you revise?

Andrew Boryga

I focus on higher order characters first. With each successive pass I try to make sure that everyone else is feeding into them and the main story. A smaller character, for example, might start to clash with the protagonist because they have different perspectives on the core premise.

It’s a long process. I drafted Victim from 2020 to 2021 before giving it to my agent. She gave me notes and I did another pass on it. She gave me a smaller set of notes. I did another pass. We sold it and then did probably four or five passes, trying to drill deeper, drill deeper, drill deeper until it’s singing and there are no extraneous parts. I wanted everything to feel that it’s there for a purpose.

Magazine Non Grata

Is there someone you write for?

Andrew Boryga

I try to make sure I’m enjoying it. With Victim I was laughing when I was writing some of the shit. Even today when I read it it makes me so happy. But I also thought of some friends I have from high school. They’re not huge readers, but if they read my book I want them to think that it sounds like me. I don’t want them to think, Who wrote this shit?

Magazine Non Grata

What’s your relationship with technology like?

Andrew Boryga

I’ve been dying to do the dumb phone thing. Right now my computer and phone will block all these apps at certain times of the day. I have a thing called The Brick that locks your whole phone off. When I’m in revising mode, I don’t take my laptop with me to the table. I take my manuscript pages, my notebook, try to leave my phone out and just focus on the novel. I’ll bring a book with me, so if I get bored or distracted, I’ll at least read a book. But it’s a daily fight, man. It’s a daily fight. And it’s becoming harder because there’s just so many apps and notifications and shit, pinging at you all day.

I really hope there’s some countercultural revolution where we all get fed up with this shit. We see it happening again with the A.I. shit. They sold us a bill of goods around the internet, around social media, we’re going to be connected and blah blah blah. Fifteen years later you take a step back—what did this shit actually do for us? Did it make us any better?

Magazine Non Grata

What are your ambitions as a writer?

Andrew Boryga

I want to keep publishing books that I feel are important and valuable and entertaining, but that make people think about something differently, in my own flavor, you know? Books that will do what Junot’s book did for me. I’m OK with taking a long time between books. I’m not focused on being a career novelist because I don’t ever want the pressure of publishing a book every two years to keep my lights on. I’ll have a day job, you know? I don’t mind having a day job. The main goal is publishing stuff I’m proud of.

---