In her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin tells the story of Sam Masur and Sadie Green, two kindred spirits who build a friendship spanning decades as well as a creative partnership developing video games. Don’t worry, though – you don’t need to be a gamer to read or appreciate this one.* Behind all the video game talk is a beautifully-written novel that explores the highs and lows of life through the eyes of two unforgettable characters.
Read on to learn more about Zevin’s process writing this novel, her opinion on video games, and which question stresses her out whenever it’s asked!
*If you are a gamer – or you’re just curious – publisher A.A. Knopf created a game from the novel for readers to play: Emily Blaster! Just like the characters in the book, you can blast Emily Dickinson’s poetry out of the air word by word to earn points and win the game! Check it out here.
Hi Gabrielle and thank you so much for taking time to chat with The Nerd Daily! To start, tell our readers a bit about yourself.
This will sound coy, but I don’t mean it to be! I find that the less readers know about me (or writers in general), the more they can read my book without thinking about me. And I feel like that is the optimal way to read a book. So, the first thing I would tell you about myself is I value privacy — privacy gives you creative freedom. Other than that, I’m a dog owner, a writer of many novels, a resident of Los Angeles, the daughter of a computer programmer, a reluctant participant in social media, and, like Sam in the book, a biracial Korean American.
Your tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, came out July 5, 2022 in the U.S. and I absolutely adore it! For those who may not already know what the novel is about, how do you like to describe it to others?
Thank you so much! Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of a thirty-year friendship and artistic collaboration. It’s the story of Sam Masur and Sadie Green, two brilliant people, who have a romance of the mind, if not the body. It’s about how rewarding and tender and volatile creative collaboration can be, and what it feels like to truly share one’s work with someone. It’s about how difficult it is to connect even though we have ever increasing ways to do so, and the possibility of making meaningful connections in virtual spaces. It’s about why it’s worth it to continue loving people and making things in an imperfect and uncertain universe. And yes, it’s about video games. I think the essential conflict of the story is between the perfect worlds Sam and Sadie create, as video game designers, and the imperfect world they live in.
What sparked the idea for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and how did you land on video games as a framework for exploring friendship, love, life, and human nature the way you do?
Ideas are strange. For me, the hard thing isn’t having them, but figuring out which ones are worth following. A great book idea needs to draw more ideas to it. The subject of video games was like a big bowl that held many things in it. What sparked the idea? I was looking for a game I had played as a kid, and I couldn’t find the game anywhere. It occurred to me that games, because they are tied to hardware, could be lost. And it got me thinking how games were an important part of my creative development and, in addition to tons of novel reading, were part of the way I had learned about storytelling. I’m a member of the Oregon Trail Generation, the microgeneration between Gen X and Millennial – so called because its members were the first generation of people to play video games as children. I thought it would be interesting to tell a story about this generation of people – a generational coming of age story where the characters would come of age alongside the video game industry itself.
I’m also curious, how did the timing of writing this novel play out against the COVID-19 pandemic?
I began seriously researching the novel at the end of 2017. I continued researching and did some writing in 2018 and 2019. Felt despair and gave up for a bit at the end of 2019. The bulk of the writing was done in 2020. I think the pandemic influenced the writing of the book a great deal – for obvious reasons, I felt more alone than I had felt since I wrote my first novel, and the quiet gave my writing an intense focus. I didn’t have to think much about what would happen with the book. I just knew that I wanted to write it, and in a strange way, the solitude gave me courage and silenced the persistent voice of doubt, which whispered, Would people even want to read a book about video game designers? The other way I can see the pandemic in the novel is in its settings. Tomorrow takes place in Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge, Tokyo – these are all towns where I’ve lived or worked. Writing was a way to travel without traveling.
One thing that really stood out to me when reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow are these beautiful moments of hope and pure joy juxtaposed against the bitter struggles and pain life brings. How do you go about capturing these feelings and experiences so authentically on the page?
Thank you. That’s a wonderful compliment, and I don’t have a great answer! To answer as a human being (and not a writer), I find it challenging to be a thinking person and an optimist.
I think the trick of being alive is to accept that the world is some parts horrible and some parts wonderful all the time. Sometimes, as a person, I can only see the horrible. To answer your question in an oblique way, I suppose I demand more of myself as a writer than I do as a person.
There is also such a wonderful nostalgia to this novel. As someone who grew up largely in the 1990s, I found so many great pop culture references and reflections of my own coming of age in your story. Did you have a particular audience in mind when you were writing?
I am a hair younger than Sam and Sadie, but their references are my references. Still, I hope that one doesn’t have to be born in a certain decade to relate to these characters. The book spans several decades, and what interested me were all the subtle shifts in thinking and mores that have occurred during that time, my lifetime. At one point in the novel, Sadie talks about generational differences and this is something I think about as well. Whenever anyone makes a blanket generational statement like “all millennials are entitled” or some such, I roll my eyes. Because it’s ridiculous to think that having a shared birth year/decade/era makes any one individual particularly like another. To put it another way, there are all kinds of people in every generation. I think generational differences are often used as ways to create division and to market products. (e.g., women’s jeans) And yet, I do think having access to certain technologies, having lived through political eras and incidents, and having consumed the same kinds of pop culture, do connect people. I just don’t believe these things change our essential characters.
I think about audience a lot less than I used to – but when I did, I saw the audience for Tomorrow as less tied to nostalgia and more the kind of person who has ever given themselves over to a creative pursuit or truly tried to make something. Maybe, the kind of person who sometimes prefers imagined worlds to real ones.
Forgive me, but before I move on to a few questions about your writing in a broader sense, I have to ask the obvious question readers of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow want to know: Where do you land on video games?!? Do you love them? Hate them? Couldn’t care less either way? Have you played many of the games you reference in the novel or have any favorites?
I really appreciate that you allow for the possibility that I might “hate video games.” I don’t, by the way! Still, I don’t think of myself as a gamer in the way people think of gamers. I’ve played games for many decades, and until about five years ago, I never once did it with an ulterior motive —I never thought, Hey, there might be a book in this! I played what amused me, and that was it. I had to expand what I normally played when I was researching the book and fill in the gaps — for example, I’d never played Grand Theft Auto. But yes, I dipped into just about every game that is referenced in the book.
My favorite games are probably the games made by Sierra, which I played when I was a kid. King’s Quest IV, Space Quest III, Colonel’s Bequest. I loved the beauty and intricacy of their worlds and how difficult they were to solve – back when I was playing, you couldn’t just Google the solution.
Your 2014 novel The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry was an absolute smashing success and I understand the film adaptation is now in post-production. Can you talk a bit about writing this adaptation and how involved you have been with the filming/production itself? Any juicy tidbits you can share with fans eagerly awaiting the film’s release?!
When A.J. Fikry was first published, people didn’t necessarily think it would do as well as it did. But even once it was quite successful, there weren’t that many film offers. Producers liked the story, but they wanted to cast a lead that wasn’t a POC, and repeatedly, that was a dealbreaker for me. In any case, I never found anyone to whom I wanted to sell the rights. My partner, Hans Canosa, is a director – we have made two other films together. Since no one else wanted A.J., we decided to develop it ourselves. I wrote a screenplay in 2018. We found producers (BCDF, a company I had met with about the rights several years earlier – one of the few sets of producers who didn’t think A.J. should be white!), and in the intervening time, the film industry had become far more open to stories with POC leads. The movie stars Kunal Nayyar from The Big Bang Theory, as A.J., and you aren’t going to be able to recognize him! It will be in theaters late this fall.
Readers will also be excited to hear that Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is being developed into a feature film with you slated to write the script. What are your thoughts about novel-writing as opposed to screenwriting? Pros and cons, so to speak?
Screenplays have rules. They are usually 90-120 pages, and their stories are largely told through external action. A novel can be any number of pages, and obviously, one of the great joys of novels is that they can be so internal, can go deeply into character. I enjoy screenwriting as a break from novel writing. A screenplay is more manageable, which is to say, a completable task. I can be lost in writing a novel for years.
A profile done by Harvard Magazine a few years back says you have never formally taken courses on creative writing, but rather “the way you studied writing was by reading.” (I love this, by the way!) What are a few books you feel really taught you something profound about writing?
This is a difficult question because I would say I learn just as much from books I don’t enjoy as books that I do. I can learn from a book I don’t think is particularly good. And I am learning all the time, and often what I learn is something small and not profound at all. But I will give you two examples from books I enjoyed a great deal!
Normal People – the part about the Debs. Obviously, we don’t have a precise equivalent for the Debs in America, but I was fully invested in the outcome of this situation. The lesson for me is that you can get a reader to care about anything, even something they have never heard of, if you dramatize it fully and characterize richly. I thought about this when I was writing the part with the game engine in Tomorrow. Obviously, many readers will not have heard of a game engine before encountering it in my book.
Some years ago, I was given a Litograph poster of The Great Gatsby, a novel I’ve read a half dozen times. I was probably given this poster because a younger version of me had said it was her favorite in an interview. Litograph posters have an image that is created using the complete text of the novel. I hung this poster in my hallway and I’d read a few random sentences of the novel every day when I passed by it. I remember a professor of mine saying that The Great Gatsby is a great novel “on the sentence level,” and if you’d asked me before getting this poster, I would have probably agreed. Reading this poster highlighted for me that there is no such thing as a novel that is great “on the sentence level.” There are many, heartbreakingly beautiful sentences, in The Great Gatsby (the first and the last, e.g.), and some hardworking, quotidian ones in it, too. But a novel is not great because of its individual sentences, and so to call a novel “great on the sentence level” is meaningless. It is the spell created by all the sentences when read in a particular order. I have always cared a great deal about my sentences, and this poster was just a reminder to me to think of my novels both locally and globally, if that makes any sense.
Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 9 Quick Questions
- First book that made you fall in love with reading: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- 3 books you would take on a desert island: Honestly, I know how this question is meant, but it stresses me out whenever it’s asked! What’s happened? Shipwreck? Plane crash? General apocalypse? This would be a nightmare. 1) a survival guide (because I am not trained for this life!), 2) an enormous blank notebook, and 3) the most comprehensive collection of poetry I could find.
- Movie that you know by heart: My brain is basically 80% movie dialogue at this point.
- Song that makes you want to get up and dance: I’m not really a dancer. It would be easier to answer the question, “song that makes me want to get up and leave.”
- Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: Lives are so many things; I try not to make prescriptions for what other people should do.
- Introvert or extrovert: Introvert, who presents as an extrovert.
- Coffee, tea, or neither: Both. As often as possible.
- First job: Teen Music Critic
- Person you admire most and why: There are a handful of artists I could name. People who are remarkably open all the time and not judgmental about what being creative means— their whole lives are creative. I try to be like them, but I’m not sure I always succeed.
