Chapter Sixty-Four
Khaled Hosseini
Moving Mountains
In peaceful Kabul, Afghanistan, many years ago, there was a young boy who, like most young boys, loved his family, loved his country, and loved great stories. He was taken by his culture’s tradition of oral storytelling and soon discovered a deep love for reading fiction, and writing it, too. When his father’s work took the family to France, it was meant to be temporary. But then, a war began back home. They lost their belongings, their land, their way of life.
When the boy was fifteen, his family came to the United States as political refugees. He saw his educated, affluent parents resort to paying for groceries with food stamps. He spoke only Farsi and French on his first day in a California high school. And as he watched his family struggle to rebuild, his dream of writing now seemed “outlandish.” He learned English by immersion and, determined to “make something” of himself—and make his parents proud—went on to study medicine. He became Khaled Hosseini, M.D.
But the boy who became a doctor never let go of writing as a hobby. In fact, he began writing in English, his third language. Then one of his short stories, a tale of boyhood friends in Afghanistan that was inspired by a real-life Taliban ban on kite flying, seemed as if it held the potential to become something more. Now a husband and father, he began getting up at 5 A.M. to write every day before work. But as he neared the end of the manuscript, the attacks of September 11 occurred. He almost abandoned the novel, in doubt that there was now a market for such a story, and not wanting to seem “opportunistic.” His wife insisted he keep writing.
In 2003, that novel, The Kite Runner, was published. At first, sales were slow. Then word of mouth began to spread. The unknown writer’s book went on to spend a staggering 103 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and eventually became a major motion picture.
Hosseini soon left his career in medicine. In 2007, he followed with A Thousand Splendid Suns, a tragic story of women in war-torn Kabul. The two novels combined have sold more than 38 million copies in more than seventy countries.
The next time you’re having one of those days when your writing dreams seem out of reach, you might try opening up a book by Khaled Hosseini.
And if you’ve ever wondered if good writing still has the power to make a difference, take heart. The literary career that has brought compassion to his native country’s plight has opened other doors for Hosseini, now a goodwill envoy for the United Nations Refugee Agency and founder of his own humanitarian aid foundation for Afghanistan.
In May 2014, Hosseini ended worldwide readers’ six-year wait for more from the novelist with the release of And the Mountains Echoed, the story of an Afghan family devastated by circumstance but bound forever by love. Here, he discusses his inspiration, the writing craft, and hope.
When you wrote The Kite Runner, you hadn’t yet been back to Afghanistan since your childhood. But your subsequent novels clearly have been influenced by the humanitarian trips you’ve since taken. Why use fiction as a vehicle to tell these stories? I’d imagine you could have written nonfiction accounts drawing on similar themes.
Well, I think that presupposes that I wanted to write about Afghanistan and that I thought the best way to do it was to go through fiction, where it’s really the reverse: I always wanted to write fiction, and the story I was interested in telling was set in Afghanistan. … I’ve loved writing fiction my whole life, it’s been a lifelong passion, and I’ve never really been all that interested in writing nonfiction.
Are there any specific experiences that inspired the story behind And the Mountains Echoed?
In the winter of 2008, I read in the newspaper stories about impoverished Afghans selling their children so they could give the kid that they were selling a chance at a better life—an education, a roof over their head—and also so they could take care of the remainder of their families. It struck me as unbelievably sad. And at the time I thought it was another consequence of living in a country where the economy is so battered—that it was a legacy of thirty years of conflict and displacement. But then I showed the story to my father, who grew up in Afghanistan, and he told me, “Oh, that used to happen, back in the forties and fifties.” Woah.
So that kind of sat in the back of my head for a long time, and I began thinking of a family to whom this would happen, and what would be the consequences of that. As a writer, the draw of a story like this, of having a parent who has to give away a part of themselves to save another part of themselves, was irresistible.
The story spans multiple generations, with a large cast of characters. How did you go about crafting a novel of this magnitude?
The structure is very complex. I wanted something that would have the arc and the heft of a novel, but I had so many characters in mind, and so many different storylines, that I just couldn’t see how I could get it done through a traditional linear structure. So I decided that each character would get his moment in the sun, and that I would find the links between them, and allow each character to step up and tell their part of the story, and then the next and the next—like listening to a choir, except one voice at a time, and then cumulatively they would erupt to a chorus of big songs.
I wanted each chapter to answer questions that came before, and raise additional questions. I wanted each chapter to reveal an epiphany, whether it be minor or major, and illuminate a part of a much bigger story. But I also wanted each chapter to be structurally more or less complete, freestanding, and yet still be part of the scaffolding for this much bigger story.
It’s so intricately woven. Did you write it chronologically?
No, it was really hopping from character to character rather than proceeding chronologically. For instance, in the second story, we have what appears to be kind of a tough, unpleasant, embittered woman in the stepmother character. And I was interested in trying to find out where she came from and what gave her this disposition. What’s her backstory?
So what would happen is I’d write a chapter and a particular character would pique my interest. Then I’d follow that character and see where it went and see how their story overlapped or coincided with some of the other characters’ stories, and find connections. It wasn’t until much later, when all the stories were done, that I decided to arrange them in a chronological way. [Now] the book progresses from the fifties to the present day, and it also expands from the small to the much bigger—it starts in a village, then to Kabul, then to Greece and France and the United States.
So it was really just following the scent of one character to the next—which made it difficult, because it was easy to lose track of time, lose track of space, lose track of where was I with that character, where was I with this one? It became an act of spinning a bunch of plates simultaneously.
Even your minor characters are very well developed. What are some techniques you use to make them seem so real? It sounds like you’re a very organic writer.
I don’t plan anything out. I wish that I was a more organized writer and I would plot everything out, and then it would be a matter of simply writing it. It just doesn’t work for me. I lose patience with it, number one. And two, I always feel boxed in; I feel confined by the parameters of my outline.
One of the things I really love about writing is all the spontaneous moments, all the surprises, all the unforeseen developments that pop up and give you an insight into how different things might be connected or how differently things might be arranged than you originally thought, which would make for much more interesting storytelling.
So I don’t plot out. And my characters … I try to remove myself from them. My first book was probably the most autobiographical, the second less so, and then the third even less so—I try to let the characters just kind of get away from me and have their own voice, and have their own life. And at some point, it happens. It rarely happens in the first draft—my characters in the first drafts, particularly my central character, tend to be flat—but it really is through reviewing the story and writing a second, and then a third, and a fourth, and often a fifth or sixth draft, that slowly that working over finally stirs a character to life, and those unexpected things happen, and I begin to see how small changes here and there make a big difference.
I’ve found that for me, revising a character is sometimes even more about removing rather than adding—deleting things that you just don’t need, that are weighing the character down. So I just work my way through it, and eventually I hope that at some point the character will start having their own voice, and I won’t hear myself and there won’t be a mouthpiece for my voice.
I saw an interview where you said you love to revise …
Yeah.
A lot of writers hate to revise. Can you explain a bit about your process and what makes it so enjoyable?
It’s kind of like moving into a house. For me the first draft is all about carrying all the furniture, and the bed, and the armoire, and the cabinets, and all the mattresses, and shoving it in the house, you know, everything that you have, all these belongings—and it’s just hard, laborious work.
But for me the revising process is like, okay, now you’ve got all the stuff that you need in here, pretty much—you’re going to throw some of it away—but now it’s a matter of arranging things in such a way that makes it feel like a home, that makes sense and is pleasing. This painting looks better on that wall, let’s move the bed over here, and this couch looks really good here. That’s sort of the way I work through it.
I love having written something, to come back to it two, three, four months down the road, and so clearly see what works and what doesn’t. And come back at it with a fresh idea of how it can be improved, what can be added, what can be taken away, so that it becomes much more alive. I really love doing that, because it’s during the revising that suddenly I begin to see characters come to life. And for obvious reasons I find that very enjoyable, very rewarding.
Critics have said that your work just keeps getting better. What are some ways you think you’ve grown as a writer, and what are some lessons you could share?
I hope I’ve grown—that’s really up to others—but I think one way in which I’ve grown is … [with my themes,] I’ve moved away from archetypal notions of good and bad. The epigraph at the beginning of [And the Mountains Echoed] is by Rumi, and it says, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” As I’ve written more and I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more interested not so much in What’s a good person and what’s a bad person?, which is quite obvious in The Kite Runner, but whether that kind of question can even be answered. So the new book is, I think, much more full of ambiguity—I think the characters, their motivations, stand for more nuanced, more complex, more surprising, more contradictory, and in the end hopefully more interesting places. It’s less black-and-white.
And part of it is trusting. There’s something that the novice writer does: worry that the reader won’t get what she’s trying to say. It’s just [learning to] trust the reader and resist the urge to nail things down too much.
What do you still find most challenging about writing?
Oh, there are so many things. But, ultimately, the most difficult thing about writing is outlasting the beast [laughs]—lack of stamina, really. Because writing a novel is a very demanding task. And there are, in the course of writing it, multiple, multiple times when it threatens to take you over and basically just beat you down.
There are going to be many times where you’re going to be frustrated, where you’re pretty sure that you’ve just wasted the last four months of your life, where you think that this is something that somebody in junior high would write [laughs]. There are multiple crises of confidence and episodes of self-doubt. And what I’ve learned is that you just have to weather those. You really have to fight through them, no matter how unpleasant it is. Just be kind of blue-collar about it: Come in, do work, check in every day, check out at the end of the day, do what you have to do, trust in the process, and hope that something miraculous will happen down the line, and it will all be worth it.
I think one of the other difficult things is to accept that you actually have wasted the last four months of your life [laughs], at least in terms of what fits into the manuscript. What you’ve written may be fine, or it may not be, but it’s just not going to work in this particular book you’re writing. And so, do not be afraid to start over. Do not be afraid to just take that and put it in the trash pile, and move on.
That’s extremely unpleasant—and I’ve done that multiple times with this book, and with all the previous books as well. But the bright side is there’s no writing that you do from which you can’t learn something. Even if it’s a “mistake,” even if it’s not very good, there’s always something you can draw even from your “failures.” Sometimes I’ve had entire, you know, 150 pages of work that I’ve stashed away and [later] I’ve found some of it salvageable, just in a different context. So I always save them, because I never know.
Your stories have a lasting quality about them, where they stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. What do you think it is about them that gives them that longevity? Is that something you consciously strive for?
The only thing I consciously try to do is write as well as I can. … Everything that happens after that [is] a by-product of that. It’s not something that I set out to do.
It happens that I’m interested in things that are universally human regardless of race, culture, ethnicity, religion, language, and so on. … The things that have always appealed to me about books are all the ways in which people seem to falter, and the ways in which they’re weak, and the ways in which they’re good, regardless of where they’re from. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so interested in the theme of family. There’s an inherent push and pull between people within a family that I find fascinating. All the great themes of literature, in fact the great experiences of being human—you know, love and loyalty and duty and sacrifice and conflict and all those things—are very much alive within families. And so I write about families a lot—in fact, you could say all three of my books really are family stories. And that’s something that’s very universal and enduring and appeals to people regardless of where they’re from.
It does seem the success of your work shows that a powerful piece of fiction can actually be one of the best ways to humanize stories from within a region or culture that is often misunderstood. But you say that’s just a happy side effect?
It is, and I’ll say that I don’t think it would be particularly effective if I consciously set out to do that, because occasionally I’ve tried to do that—I’ve had an idea that I want to write about, that I feel is an important idea, and then I try to find a story around it—and those stories always turn out too political and agenda driven. I much prefer telling a simple story, or sometimes not so simple, but focused on character and inner thoughts and the interaction between different people, and how something emerged from that may be telling a bigger story than what’s actually going on on the page.
[For example,] the interaction [in And the Mountains Echoed] between two boys, one the son of a warlord, the other the son of a refugee: It’s a story that revolves around their encounter and the ways in which they’re basically boys, both of them, but also how different their lives are and what different experiences they’ve had. You know, if through that there’s a statement that comes through about where Afghanistan is today, how the rebuilding process has gone, what the legacy of the Soviet war has been, the class structures that seem to have formed almost overnight in Afghanistan, the incredible wealth some people are enjoying and the abject poverty other people are living in, partly as a result of what happened after September 11, then fine. But that wasn’t my intention. My intention was about the awakening of this insulated and kind of innocent, to some extent, boy, who worships his father and is slowly awakened by this incident to who his father really is, and who he really is, and how you make peace with the unpleasant and sinister sides of not only the people you love but of yourself.
Do you think of your writing career as linked to your humanitarian efforts in any way?
I’d be very hesitant to say that my writing has any kind of humanitarian [link]—but my [humanitarian] travels and conversations and the things I’ve seen and heard certainly have informed my writing. As you pointed out earlier, particularly in my last two books my encounters in Afghanistan have made their way onto the pages and have helped provide backstory, or sometimes much more than that, to my characters. So my travels have certainly informed my writing. But the writing also gave life to an opportunity for me to work with the U.N., and the opportunity for me to start my own foundation, and the success of my books and the wide readership that I’ve been lucky to enjoy has opened this door for me and allowed me to do something that I strongly believe in, something that makes me very happy, and something I hope makes a difference.
What do you think is the most valuable thing you’ve learned that you could pass along to writers who are hoping to enjoy the kind of success you have?
The temptation to give up, to surrender, is very, very strong. And you have to have faith in the work that you’re doing. You have to have faith that as dark and unlikely and as dreary as things may seem, that it’s worth pursuing, and that there’s a good chance you’ll be glad you did. Writing a novel—this is a cliché—is like a marriage. There are ups and downs, there are times when you just want to leave and close the door, you just want to be alone, you don’t want to hear that voice, and so on and so forth, but it’s well worth it, and I’ve learned that—to stick with it.
You know, I came close to abandoning all three of my books—very, very close, multiple times—where life seemed so much more pleasant if I just didn’t have to try to work my way through the impasse. But I kept working, and I’m thankful every day that I did.