Corinna Chong on battling perfectionism and making sense of things through writing
Daphné Santos-Vieira | CBC Books | Posted: October 23, 2023 3:26 PM | Last Updated: October 23, 2023
2021 CBC Short Story Prize winner on writing her short story collection The Whole Animal
Corinna Chong knows what it takes to craft an amazing short story. She won the CBC Short Story Prize in 2021 for Kids in Kindergarten. And now that story is featured in her collection The Whole Animal.
The Whole Animal is a collection of short stories that examines the power, strangeness and attributes of human and animal bodies. Chong exposes themes of loneliness, loss and self-discovery through stories like that of a child fixating on the hair growing out of her mother's eyelid or a linguist's attempts to connect with a boy who cannot speak.
Originally from Calgary, Chong lives in Kelowna, B.C. and teaches English and fine arts at Okanagan College. She published her first novel Belinda's Rings in 2013. Her short fiction has been published in magazines across Canada, including The Malahat Review, Room, Grain and The Humber Literary Review.
The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open. The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and have their work published on CBC Books.
Chong spoke to CBC Books about how she wrote The Whole Animal.
Conflicts and connection
"I think the title story, The Whole Animal, works as a good kind of overarching image or metaphor for the collection in that not only do a lot of animals appear, they tend to appear throughout the stories, but I think they become reflections of the characters and sometimes the conflicts that they're struggling to come to terms with.
"There's also maybe a little bit of irony in the title in that the word 'whole' is kind of contrary to what the characters are experiencing. They tend to be not whole at all and very fragmented and very lost in the way that they're groping for connection. So that's what I would say the collection is about."
LISTEN | Corinna Chong talks about winning the CBC Short Story Prize:
The power of short stories
"The reason I love short stories and they're my preferred mode of writing, is because they're more of an exploration for me. When I'm writing a story, it's more about the ideas and experimenting, and exploring those ideas and kind of seeing where it takes me.
A lot of the time with short story writing, I'm thinking about teasing out the layers of the single idea and just exploring it. - Corinna Chong
"I often start with a kernel, like a sentence or an image, and build the story from there. It's very little to do with plot, a lot of the considerations that I'm putting into that initial building phase. I'm thinking about voice, I'm thinking about metaphor. A lot of the time with short story writing, I'm thinking about teasing out the layers of the single idea and just exploring it.
"One of the things that is most rewarding for me when I'm reading, particularly short stories, I come away with a sense that things are actually more complicated than I thought they were. So rather than answering questions for me, when a story raises questions and gets me to see something new, but also something that feels very true, something that I hadn't known was true until I read that story."
Working through complicated feelings
"For me, every story represents a kind of moment in my life. Like those were the things that were top of mind for me like the worries, the complicated ideas that were spinning around in my head at the time.
"Kids in Kindergarten I wrote that after having had my daughter and hearing stories about people with fertility problems and just feeling really empathetic towards that struggle. I guess it's a way of working through how I feel about those things.
"Writing for me is kind of therapeutic in that way. So it's those things that I can't quite wrap my mind around and it just keeps spinning around in my head. Writing becomes a way of making sense of it."
The writing process
"There's something about writing on paper that frees me a little bit to just put down anything and worry about fixing it later. So I just end up scribbling on my paper and I cross things out and I move things around and when the page gets too messy for me to even understand what's going on anymore, then I put it onto the Word document.
There's something about that pristine white page that makes me feel like I have to write a perfect sentence. - Corinna Chong
"I found it was a strategy for battling that perfectionist instinct that I have because sometimes when I look at a screen, there's something about that pristine white page that makes me feel like I have to write a perfect sentence. My procrastination kicks in and I find it really hard to get moving.
"I think that's sort of a contradiction because it's the joy, but also the frustration of writing is that I have to battle with my perfectionism a lot and I just work away at sentences and at the same time I just love language. I love fine tuning every single little word and every single little phrase.
"So I had my stories, and then I put them on these little sticky notes. And then I had these like numbers and then I kind of moved them around and I used blue and pink for the point of view. So the blue ones are first person and the pink ones are third person. I wanted to mix that up a little bit. So all the titles are on there and I just moved it around."
The importance of revision
"Probably maybe 80 per cent of the time that I spent on this story is the revision. Most of what I'm doing is revising because usually what comes out initially is not is not great. I don't necessarily know what I'm doing with the story until I start to go back and revise it. I used to hate revision because of my perfectionism. It made me feel like I was wasting my time and that made me so frustrated that I thought it was a failing on my part, that I couldn't make everything right the first time.
"Now it's actually my favourite part. The revision is my favourite part because I just love seeing the results of that work and see the difference when you really change something dramatically and when you just allow yourself to make those mistakes at the beginning and then improve upon them and to see the difference, it's just so rewarding. I think any kind of writing we're doing, that revision process is so necessary."
Corinna Chong's comments have been edited for length and clarity.