Method Writing: A Conversation with Angie Kim on Mysteries, Medical Outsiders, and Inhabiting Characters’ Minds

Angie Kim moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea, to the suburbs of Baltimore. After graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy, she studied philosophy at Stanford University and attended Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award and the ITW Thriller Award, and was named one of the 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time by Time, and one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the Today show. Happiness Falls, her second novel, was an instant New York Times bestseller and a book club pick for Good Morning America, Barnes & Noble, Belletrist, and Book of the Month Club.

On March 6, 2024, Angie Kim joined The Interlochen Review editors Charlotte Lucas, Zoe Lenz, and Shreya Ganguly for a conversation about her bestselling novels Miracle Creek and Happiness Falls.

Zoe Lenz: Miracle Creek is a literary courtroom drama which follows a court case centered around a scientifically complicated oxygen therapy process. Obviously, this required a lot of prior knowledge. Were there gaps, or things you had to learn? What kind of research did this project entail and what was your process like for completing that research? 

Angie Kim: One of the things that made it easy for me to do the research was that it was real lived-in research. I actually did this hyperbaric oxygen therapy similar to the setup that I described in the novel, in an experimental group setting with one of my kids for his ulcerative colitis issues. That was maybe twelve, thirteen years before I actually wrote the novel. But I had that background knowledge of having lived through that experience, so that made it easy, and the only thing that I had to do was basically update it. I really loved that way of doing the research. It was lived in, so that gave me a lot of authentic little details that if I was trying to learn about it after the fact I might not have picked up on. 

Charlotte Lucas: Control of information is an integral part of Miracle Creek. When the story starts there’s the sense that the world has already existed before the narrative, and there’s gaps in information between narrator changes. How do you view control of information and the effect it has on the reader?

AK: I feel like the control of information is integral to the way that you think about how to reveal information in flashbacks that start after the narrative is already underway, what to reveal when. One of the things that I used to control information was by the choice of which perspective I used. In Miracle Creek there are seven different Point of View narrators, so by choosing which narrator would narrate this particular scene and then who would come after to  show us the same scene in a Rashomon way, from a different perspective. That’s how I tried to control the narrative and the release of information, trying to keep it suspenseful without cheating or trying to withhold things unnaturally from the narrator. 

ZL: In the beginning of your novel Miracle Creek  you include a cast list of characters similar to that of a script or screenplay. Can you talk about what went into this decision, or what you were trying to convey to the reader with this specific choice?

AK: This was actually a very practical thing. What happened was in the first hardcover edition we did not have this cast of characters, and one of the things that I kept seeing in the Goodreads reviews—which authors are not supposed to look at, but I actually do like looking at because sometimes it can give you an insight into how the world at large is responding to your work—was that a lot of people were like, “Oh, I read this over like a couple of weeks, and I kept on forgetting who was who because there’s such a large cast of characters, so I had to make a list for myself.” I do that for myself when I’m reading relatively complicated books. So I asked my editor, for the paperback version, why don’t we have a cast of characters? So we did, and I noticed people did not have that reaction anymore.

CL: In Miracle Creek, there’s descriptions about conflict with protestors against the HBOT experiment. How do you approach writing from the perspective of characters you philosophically disagree with and humanizing those you aren’t writing from the perspective of?

AK:  I didn't think about it from the perspective of advocating for any particular position philosophically, or morally, or politically, or anything like that. When I was at Interlochen as a student back in the ‘80s, I was actually a double major in theater and piano, and I did a lot of method acting. I had never done creative writing before I started writing short stories in my forties. I went back to the theater world [when] creating characters. Following characters and their arcs is the most important thing from a writing perspective for me, so I use what I call “method writing,” where I really try to inhabit the POV character, and try to see things from their perspective and inhabit their worldview and how they might be feeling politically, morally, emotionally certainly, psychologically. When I was writing that scene from the protestors, I wrote it from a couple different people’s perspectives, and whoever’s perspective I was inhabiting I would think, who are these people vis-à-vis me, how might I be feeling and what might they be saying and how would I react to that. I did think about incorporating one of the protestors' POV voices, but seven just got to be too much, so I decided to focus and only give voice to the people who were part of this hyperbaric oxygen therapy world, whether they were the owners or the owners’ family or the customers. So it’s really the choice of character more than any particular ideology that’s going to control what worldview comes out in the narrative.

CL: How did your writing experience with Miracle Creek inform your decisions in the construction of the plot and pacing for Happiness Falls?

AK: Regardless of how your debut novel does, I think your sophomore novel is just so hard. Because if it does really well—which I think Miracle Creek did and I was really happy with the reception—then you feel like, “Is the second book going to live up to it? Am I writing too close to it? Or is it too far? And are people going to be mad that I’m not doing the same thing?” I thought of Happiness Falls as a companion book to Miracle Creek. It was in the same world as far as some of the themes— being medical, ethnic, and linguistic outsiders— but I wanted it to be really different from a craft perspective. Because I don't have an MFA and I didn’t get into creative writing until my forties, I want to use whatever I’m working on to give myself a broader education with respect to creative writing. So whereas Miracle Creek was written from seven different POV’s in close third, I wanted Happiness Falls to be one character throughout, in first person,with the limitations that that entails, which was really hard for me to do. I wanted there to be a difference in the way that things unfolded, less reliance on courtroom drama and seeing the same scene from different perspectives. I wanted to lean on the limitations of staying with one character. And then there’s the ending in Miracle Creek where we find out exactly what happened because we cut to the relevant people who give us all the pieces of information that we need to solve the mystery. But in Happiness Falls, because of the limitations of staying with one character who doesn’t necessarily know everything, we end with that resolution not quite as neatly wrapped up in the same way

Shreya Ganguly: Your short story, “Buried Voice,” was written years before Happiness Falls came out and deals with the same characters experiencing a different story that is more of a magical realism tale rather than something one would classify as a thriller. Can you discuss what the progression from short story to novel was like?

AK: That short story may have been one of the first short stories I ever started working on when I started working on short fiction. And the characters, Mia’s voice especially, stayed with me to the point where I actually tried using Mia and John, the twins in Happiness Falls and in the short story “Buried Voice,”  as sort of investigator types in Miracle Creek. The voice just didn't work for that particular setting so I abandoned it pretty early on. “Buried Voice” won a fiction prize judged by Charles Baxter, who I admire greatly, and he praised Mia’s voice as being funny. I think humor is so important, especially in literary fiction, because sometimes things can seem so serious and dark. So I think that’s why her voice stayed with me—when you’re as new to writing as I was at that time and you get praise from someone you admire, you think, “Oh, if that’s good, maybe I should try to use that again.” 

So I stayed with it, and then I found the characters growing up in age as my own children grew up, because I have three boys. And even though they’re very different from Mia and John and Eugene, the siblings from the story, I felt myself being drawn to them. Whenever my kids were applying to colleges, for example, I would be thinking, I wonder if John and Mia were applying to college, and I wonder what colleges they’re applying to, and what were their essays about? They became real in my mind. Then I heard from some of my friends who have kids like Eugene who have been diagnosed with “severe nonverbal autism” doing spelling therapy and how they learned to communicate and how they blossomed. It naturally made me think of Eugene, and I wondered if this family has heard of these therapies, if they’re going to try them, almost like they're real characters in my mind. That was the seed for the story in Happiness Falls. 

SG: Stylistically, Happiness Falls is experimental in nature, incorporating scientific research, visual diagrams, and even equations at times to quantify the conception of happiness that concerns the lives of the characters. How did you include these aspects into the story while ensuring that they don’t bog down the reader’s experience?

AK: For me the playfulness in Mia’s voice was really important to me. When I was in Mia’s head she is such a quirky character. She’s a little bit neurodivergent herself– she talks about how she’s “Asperberger’s-ish,” and she’s hyperlexic, and she has ADHD qualities where she finds tangents so interesting and she gets lost from time to time. I have a similar quality to my own thinking, which definitely got developed a lot more as I was in her head for three years. So to me it was just a natural extension of the way she thought, and because I was writing in first person it seemed natural that she would use all of these different variations, like the footnotes. Footnotes in literary fiction are nothing new, but that also was a practical thing too in that when I had all of these long long parentheticals, I was like, wait, where were we in the narrative again? So putting it into a footnote form and then giving the reader explicit permission to not read it if they find it boring or if they’re getting confused, it seemed like a good way of straddling that line between propulsive thriller and more intellectual storytelling. 

SG: Happiness Falls is set over a decade after Miracle Creek. How was your process crafting Mia, a younger character, different from the primary experience of the third person point of view adult and parent perspectives you incorporated in your first book?

AK: I’m not sure they’re all that different in the sense that it’s just me trying to be in a particular character’s head and writing from their perspective. Even though the narration in Miracle Creek was close third, I feel like it was close enough that it felt very first person-y to me. It felt very intimate, we had complete access to what they were thinking. The challenge was that I found staying with one character to be difficult. With multiple POV’s, I found it much easier to figure out pacing. When a scene would end, I could be like, “okay, what’s the next thing that should happen?” and we could skip over a lot of the parts that are less interesting in that character's day. It made the manipulation of scenes and time much easier to deal with. 

Whereas, when we’re staying with Mia, at the end of the first chapter she falls asleep, and one of the reasons for that is because she is so focused on the minutiae. She is telling the story from a retrospective narration, and feeling so much regret and guilt, which you can tell from the first sentence,“We didn’t call the police right away,” which is her fault. Because of that, she was looking at every single thing that happened and looking at all facets of it. So she would be describing something that happened over five minutes and it was taking like thirty pages of narration to deal with, and I was like, wow, so I’m going to write 400 pages and we’re going to have gone through three hours. That’s not cool. I needed to figure out how to jump from moment to moment and manipulate time without going through this pedantic, “Then this happened, and then that happened.” The problem was that I could never leave her, so I was forced to relive everything in the minutiae. 

CL: You mentioned Happiness Falls is retrospective. When outlining a story, how much of the plot do you decide before you start writing and how do you decide the space the narrator has from the events in the story?

AK: I wish I was one of those writers that could outline the plot and knows where the story’s going before I actually start writing because that would be very efficient. Unfortunately, I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work for me. I find that I can only think one scene at a time, so I can only focus on how this next scene is going to start and then get in the flow of the writing in that scene to figure out what’s happening in that moment, as I’m writing in real time. Even though both of these stories have mystery elements to them, I didn’t know the answer to the mystery that was posed, like who set the fire and how did the fire start in Miracle Creek, or what happened to the father in Happiness Falls, until two to three years into writing the story. 

As far as deciding the space the narrator has from the events in the story, I knew that Mia was telling the story retrospectively and I remember one of my editors asking in the very beginning, “So she’s clearly telling the story retrospectively, how far in the future is it?”And I actually had to say, “I don’t know.” I don’t think it’s forty years in the future where she’s an older woman—it’s much closer because she still has that young girl’s voice. That twenty-year-old arrogance, thinking that she knows everything and at the same time being naive about the world. It wasn’t until I got to the ending, when she was telling us where she is at that time and why she wrote it, that I was like okay, I get it now. A lot of these things were mysteries to me as I was writing. 

SG: One thing that you’re writing about across your short stories and novels is the autistic experience, which is not something that you’ve lived with personally. How do you integrate those experiences into your characters authentically and was there any particular research or interviews conducted to do justice to that narrative?

AK: In Miracle Creek, because I did the hyperbaric oxygen therapy with my own son, I got to go through that experience with parents and kids who were on the autism spectrum. I saw a lot of the things that happened in the chamber itself and I also got to be very good friends with a lot of the moms who went through that experience. So I had ten years worth of research to draw on, talking to these moms. A lot of Miracle Creek is telling about that family experience from the perspective of wanting to explore extreme parenting sacrifices and then drawing the parallel between that and being medical outsiders to being the parents of an immigrant family and being cultural outsiders. So it made me feel like I could write that experience authentically. I was able to give those early drafts to the moms themselves and get their direct feedback. 

In Happiness Falls, I really wanted to focus more on the kids themselves—the autistic child, as well as sibling experiences. For that, I did a lot more formal research and talked to people who were my friends and people that I was introduced to who are non-speakers, not only with autism but with this very rare genetic condition called Angelman syndrome. When I happened upon Angelman syndrome, which is something that I found out about when I was doing the spelling research,  I realized all of the descriptions were things that matched how I had seen Eugene, the fourteen-year-old in the novel, in my mind. Even in the short story, “Buried Voice,” Mia describes Eugene as being the happiest baby in the world, which is an Angelman characteristic. 

I did a lot of talking to these families, a lot of zooms and going to them in-person once the pandemic allowed me to. I was sharing my stories with those families and therapists and also some of the non-speakers themselves, and getting direct feedback throughout the writing process, which I think is just really important because it’s not just about getting information one way. When people who go through the experience read scenes, then their reactions can be like, “actually, that scene reminds me of something else that I went through,” and then give you details that really add flavor to it. They also can correct things, like some of the words that I used to describe things, they were like, “I’m not sure that I would because of…” and then they would list the problems. It became this great learning experience for me.

CL: In Miracle Creek, you discuss the American and Korean view of age and antiquity, and the differences between those two perspectives throughout the novel. How do you approach telling Asian and Asian American stories with different audiences in mind and when do you decide to give context behind different cultural ideas?

AK: It’s not just the Asian American experience that I was talking about, but in both stories I was trying to juxtapose that experience with that of a family going through a medical condition, and being a medical outsider in our current society. That made it easier, because it would be organically true to the character that they would be thinking about their own experience and then trying to make sense of it in light of something they’re witnessing from a different person. Young, for example, who is a Korean American immigrant mom, witnessing the mom of a girl who is sixteen just like her own daughter, but who has cerebral palsy and who’s in a wheelchair and can’t talk, and thinking through her own experience and trying to juxtapose it to the mom of that girl. I think juxtaposing those two things actually made it easier for me to explain all of these things to the reader without necessarily making it like, “Okay, I’m going to teach you something about an experience that you don’t know.” I hope that came across a little more naturally. I think for Mia because she is so overtly analytical, “hyper-analytical,” as she calls it, it was easier because she has a natural tendency to do that anyway. 

ZL: Before starting your writing career, you pursued a career in law and studied performing arts at Interlochen. Where did your interest in creative writing begin and what was your experience with writing before publishing your first novel? How do you believe your other pursuits, performing arts and law, influenced your writing?

AK: Being a writer is actually my fifth career. I’m not putting theater or music into that because that was a high school thing. I was a lawyer, a litigator, and then I was a management consultant in business, and then I was a dotcom entrepreneur, and then I was a full time stay-at-home mom, and then I started writing. Being a stay-at-home mom spurred on my writing because I went through some medical challenges with my three kids. They’re all fine now, but all had a variety of medical issues as babies and toddlers that just made it all-consuming, and when I came back out on the other side of that I really felt like I needed catharsis. There was a little bit of me who was like, “Oh, I wonder if I should write some nonfiction to help other parents going through some of the same things that I did,” and there was also this need for catharsis by writing personal essays about what I went through. So I started with personal essays about my medical experience, dealing with my kids’ illnesses. And then my husband, who is also a lawyer, read them, and he was like, the thing about trying to publish some of these is that they’re not just your own stories, they’re our family’s stories, they’re our kids' stories, and they’re too little to  meaningfully give consent. So he was like, so why not try fiction, and I was like, I’ve never written fiction, I don’t know how to do that. 

So I started taking some classes and workshops in places that were near me, and I fell in love with writing short fiction immediately. For short fiction I started by taking some of the personal essays I had written and changing the characters to be different versions of me. Different names, maybe different fathers, different mothers, or girls instead of boys, that kind of thing. Then I found myself incorporating a lot of my experience being a new immigrant in this country and having that sense of vulnerability and loss. That’s where it really just flourished for me—I did a lot of short stories that were set in Korea and were from the perspective of characters like Mia who have experienced both cultures. Once I had a little bit of footing as far as publishing some of those stories, that’s when I  turned to Miracle Creek, my first novel. I thought that Miracle Creek was not going to be a novel, I had a sign up on my writing nook that said “This is not a novel.” I still have that sign up today. Because I wanted to remind myself, “Hey, this is a first novel attempt, it probably won’t even be published, nobody will read it, so you can do crazy things like have seven POV characters and start a murder mystery without knowing what happened.” 

SG: As a writer, what draws you to the mystery and thriller genre as opposed to other literary genres?

AK: I think for short stories, just like with “Buried Voice,” mystery/thriller is not something that I’m necessarily drawn to. The next novel that I’m working on is more dystopian, and it’s linked stories. But for these first two books, I think one of the things that I kept on hearing and seeing about the marketplace currently is that readers have short attention spans, which I can definitely relate to. I am finding myself having a short attention span, and as a reader I get drawn in very quickly to novels when there is a central question that I’m just burning to know what that is. So I really like the idea of using a mystery or a question, like in a romance that might be, “Are they going to get together?” It doesn’t have to be a mystery, but some kind of question that I want to know the answer to that keeps me turning the pages. For Miracle Creek and Happiness Falls,  the mystery element of it is more a Trojan horse that I’m using to draw the reader in, and once they’re in, sitting and turning the pages, I can use that to explore other parts of the characters’ lives—their past and their thought processes, happiness and all sorts of things. 

CL: Regarding your endings with your novels and short stories, what emotional impact are you looking to have on the reader and what impact are you looking to have?

AK: I suppose in some ways what I want is a sense that the characters have been through something and that they’re landing in a different place, no matter what that may be. It’s not necessarily a place of satisfaction—I think it’s more a sense of having been through something and learned and been changed by it. To me that’s what a story is, a successful novel or short story. It can be a flash. The thing that I want most of all is that the story is worth telling because the characters were changed by it, and if they weren’t, why are we picking this particular story to tell? I want to justify my having picked this particular story by showing us what is happening at the end that’s made them focus on this. Because there’s a reason why Mia wanted to tell us this story, and why she’s ending the story where she is. It’s at a moment where she’s had some critical realization about her relationship to her family and to the world, and her ideas. And I want that sense of “aha” for the reader, not necessarily about what happened, because in Happiness Falls there’s an open-ended ending and there’s some ambiguity as to what actually happened. But more an “aha” as far as why she’s telling us this story from that point in her life. 

ZL: What advice would you give to young artists who want to pursue a variety of different careers or are unsure of where they will probably land?

AK: For me, given my own journey, I went through all these other careers, some of which you would think is the opposite of storytelling and fiction writing, and yet I still landed there. I can see the influence of everything that I’ve gone through in fiction writing. I would say definitely pursue what you love on a day-to-day basis as well as on the macro basis, so that you know when you’re looking back on your life and are taking stock of it, you’re satisfied with it at a macro level. And to also trust that no matter what you decide to do, you will develop your stories and that they will come out at the right time.