The View Was Exhausting
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6. The View Was Exhausting is delightfully escapist, while still being thoughtful and raising important issues. What drew you to write this kind of fiction?
It’s something that happened along the way, rather than being a deciding factor as we set out. Probably it’s mostly just because we take love stories and rom-coms very seriously, and we think they’re often boxed off as being unimportant or not dealing with significant issues, which seems ridiculous. Falling in love is certainly one of the most significant things that’s happened to us, at least, and we’re definitely not alone in that.
We followed what we found interesting, which meant that there were a lot of fun glam romantic moments, and also questions around identity. We’re the same age as Win and Leo—while we live very different lives, it feels kind of inevitable that some of our own insecurities, thoughts, struggles, fears, and hopes would make their way into the narrative.
Probably also important is that at the time we began writing the novel, both of us were working several different jobs with insane hours, and we had very little free time, and we felt constantly frayed, and we were so tired. We wanted to write something giddy and escapist and gleeful, gilded in golden light, the holiday we wished we were having…but clearly, some of that exhaustion seeped in.
7. Writing is such a personal endeavor and writing with your partner must be a very unique experience. What did you learn about yourselves and each other during this process?
We didn’t have so much to learn in writing The View Was Exhausting, because we’ve been writing together for nearly ten years, before we were even a couple. Even when we write individually, the other person is always still heavily involved.
In The View Was Exhausting specifically—we learned that we have very different opinions about the use of commas! Thank god a copy editor could step in and referee our brawls there. Mostly writing together was just a lot of fun, a source of support and joy. One very clear memory is right at the end of the drafting process, when our editors asked if we could give, on the first page, a quick visual description of Leo. This was a grievous task: at this point, he was so clear in our heads that it felt impossible to write it down. He looks like Leo!
We wanted a tennis ball to throw back and forth while we brainstormed but we are sadly unsporty people, and so we settled for an onion. We looked like mad women, rolling an onion back and forth on the floor and saying, agonized, “He…has…a nice face?????”
8. What was your approach in portraying a mixed-race relationship so that it didn’t feel tokenistic but rather grappled with the reality of that experience?
We came up with Win and Leo and their history together and characteristics and fighting styles and the dynamic of their relationship before we began thinking about the fact that it was a mixed-race relationship, which in hindsight was very useful. The foundations were there and they were real people; it wasn’t like we sat down and thought “we want to write about a mixed-race relationship,” so we were able to tease out aspects of their characters that already existed.
It also felt very important to think about Leo’s whiteness just as much as Win’s British Asian heritage. We didn’t want Win to be on a journey and Leo not—it had to be something they were navigating together. A lot of media about mixed-race relationships feels like it’s asking “what’s it like to be Black/Asian/Indigenous/a Person of Color,” taking whiteness as the assumed default.
9. Who are some of your favorite writers and did they influence the way you wrote The View Was Exhausting?
Our rom-com queen Jane Austen was with us every step of the way. There’s an echo of Mr. Darcy’s declaration “I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun” when Leo thinks “he’d spent most of the last decade teetering on the edge of falling in love with her…But he felt suddenly as though he’d looked up and found the edge, long tripped over, far above him.”
There are also some very established formulas for rom-coms, in both literature and film/TV, that we were happy to follow—in that way, The View Was Exhausting is an homage to every rom-com writer we’ve ever loved. At the same time, we wanted it to feel different. We were more influenced by the genre than by any particular writer.
10. What do you find to be the elements that make for a powerful love story?
There’s no real formula for a great love story, although there’s plenty of fun, tried-and-true ways to get there. We’re big fans of tropes, and the early days of writing The View Was Exhausting involved a lot of us shouting them aloud at each other: They should have to FAKE KISS! They should share a BED! They should HATE each other for a while! They should DESPERATELY WANT to touch each other but not be ALLOWED!
But a lot of the grand romance surprised us by coming just from us falling in love with the characters: Leo’s quiet devotion, Win toying with his fingers, their bedrock friendship. Imagining them eyeing each other and waiting, and then waiting a little longer.