The Lines Between Fact and Fiction, Writer and Author: A Conversation With Jason Mott

The Lines Between Fact and Fiction, Writer and Author: A Conversation With Jason Mott https://ift.tt/YQA7Pqb

Jason Mott’s newest book, People Like Us is a sequel to his National Book Award-winning novel, Hell of a Book. It features two Black writers grappling with a world mired in gun violence, one on a global book tour and the other speaking at a school after a shooting. Their paths cross and “truths and antics abound in equal measure.” It’s funny and sad and very real.

Even though I often visit Jason’s office hours during the school year in the MFA program at UNCW and have taken two of his classes so far, including a year-long course on Writing Longform Narrative, I still found myself nervous for our conversation. Perhaps because it was a reminder of how lucky I am to learn from someone whose words remind us of the power of fiction. We may be in the wild house in the neighborhood like Jason mentions here, but through daring literature like Hell of a Book and People Like Us, we can confront the absurdity of chaos around us head-on in order to make the house, and maybe even the neighborhood, better.

Jason Mott has published four novels. His first novel, The Returned, was a New York Times bestseller and was turned into a TV series that ran for two seasons. He has a BFA in fiction and an MFA in poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary journals, and his most recent novel, Hell of a Book, was named the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 2021.

I spoke with Jason over Zoom about his writing process, inspirations, and life as an author on an international book tour. (Also, sea monsters.)  

Did you know Hell of a Book would have a sequel when you were writing it? 

I wasn’t writing it with the intention of creating a follow up, it was just a case where I kind of had a hint of maybe there was more of that framework I could use to explore certain themes and ideas. I thought I could do more with that, and it would move forward with another book. 

Did you feel any pressure after winning the National Book Award, or did it not change how you write?

No, for me there was no pressure at all; I understand the idea that people feel like there should be all this pressure cause you just won this big award, so what do you do next? There’s all these eyes watching you. But I think for me it was the exact opposite reaction where I felt as though I had somehow won this really huge award, so I actually felt more liberated, I felt more free. I felt like I’ve done the biggest thing that I felt that I could do, so from here on out, I get to kind of just have fun and not worry about people’s opinions, not worry about pressure, just kind of do what I wanna do. I’ve achieved the goal that I’ve never even dared to think I could actually achieve, so why not just take that as a positive and enjoy that? 

Is it true that there are sea monsters in this one? 

Um, yeah. Yes. I’ll say yes to that. Very coy, yes. 

What inspired the sea monsters? 

I mean all of my books are in the high concept magical realism vein. I try to approach my writing from more of an expressionism approach, where I’m not trying to be true to the exact real world, but very similar to it [though that isn’t the main] goal. My goal is capturing the feeling of a thing. And so there’s very often a feeling of sea monsters, I think, a feeling that these things are out there, kind of coming for us, and that’s what I try to capture, so that’s how sea monsters show up in this one.

How do you know when writing People Like Us when to separate fact from fiction, since it does lean into memoir aspects of your life? 

For me at this point I think it’s more of a gut feeling kind of thing. I mean there’s a lot of different factors that go into it. You have to be certain that if you are doing something that’s a very real, very true event that happened, you have to be sure that you’re okay with talking about it and sharing that, especially with other people, because that’s what happens when you publish. 

But then the other side of it is you have to be able to vet which real-world events actually propel the narrative that you’re building forward. People often get focused on facts, they wanna see a chain of events that quote-unquote factually happened, and the way that a thing factually happens oftentimes is not the way that you want to tell the story. Just because they are factually the chain events, doesn’t mean that they create a narrative momentum, an emotional momentum to kind of propel readers and to reach readers. So you have to learn to vet which parts of the real worlds you want to take and leave behind, and for me, where I want to bring in fiction to kind of cover the gaps, to fill in the gaps. 

Has your experience of being on a book tour changed since your first tour with The Returned? Do you see it differently than you did that first time? 

Yes, very much so. I always try to tell people that being a writer and being an author are two very different things. And that’s not a discussion about skill or development or anything like that, but being a writer is you and the page interacting together, that’s what being a writer is. Being an author is you and people who have read your work, whether they be critics or fans or people who hate your work; it’s you and the rest of the world engaging with that. 

So, being a writer is very much this singular, intimate act. Being an author, whether that be full-length works or short stories that are published or poems that are published, the moment that you share it with someone else, it becomes a public type of dynamic. And so I learned that a lot touring. My first tour, I you know, you have to learn what readers and people expect from an author. It is a “people like engagement” business, I hate to say “business,” but that’s what it is. You have to learn how to engage with people. You can’t really be the introvert, and maybe you are naturally, but you have to give them something, you have to really want to engage with people. That took a long time to learn. 

Do European readers tend to engage with your work differently than American readers on tour? 

Yes. Yeah, in a very very stark fashion. European readers approach, well in my experience, European readers approach my work from a much more academic standpoint. They’re much more interested in the literary concepts, the literary themes, how does this story relate to the work of other authors. It’s almost like a graduate-level literature class where they very much are dissecting it in terms of the literary landscape, where mostly Americans are more interested in the personal component. They want to know about the author, they want to know where the author grew up, they want to know how place in particular and circumstances influence their work. So yes, American audiences in my opinion, American readers, are much more on the interpersonal kind of level whereas European readers are much more on the academic kind of approach to it.

Do you identify as a Southern writer, or does the South shape your writing in any way?

Yeah, the South shapes my writing very much. I do identify as a Southern writer. I think most people don’t identify me as a Southern writer, though. I mean all of my books are set in the South. But I think if you say Southern writer, people often envision some farm, a character on the farm, his family living in a bayou, whatever that thing is, the character is in that rural place, the plot is about some rural issue, usually economic or social, that is what Southern writing is typically known for. And while my stories all have that, I don’t frontload that. That is oftentimes in the background. And so I’ve found out a lot of people struggle to classify me as a Southern writer just because I’m not doing the farm story, the characters aren’t living in a hovel just trying to make ends meet, trying to bring in the crop this year. Even though that is present, it’s in all of my stories, it’s not how I frontload my stories and how I present my stories, and people oftentimes struggle with that.

I also saw that one of the characters in the book struggles with whether to leave America or not. Is that something that you’ve ever grappled with? 

Very much so. That’s definitely something I’ve had, for most of my life that question has kind of been in the back of my head. And when I was touring for People Like Us, that question came up because I spent a few weeks in Europe and I got to hang out with people who were ex-patriots, you know, former Americans living in Europe, a lot of them African Americans, and we had a lot of discussions about what life is like. What does it feel like to leave America and stay away and build a life there? And so a lot of those discussions were very eye-opening. I think I learned how conditioned to our environment Americans are. 

When you step outside of America, you see the chaos that kind of is America. But when you’re in it, when you live in it, you’re just kind of like, oh yeah man, it’s just what we do, this is America, you just kind of rock with it. But I’ve definitely learned more and more like, no, we’re the house in the neighborhood that’s always fighting, there’s always something wild going on, music’s blaring, the cops are being called every week — that is America. 

We are that house in the neighborhood, but because we live here, we just feel like this is what normal is. And I think touring outside of America has taught me that; it has raised that question very much so about maybe there is a better option outside of all this chaos. 

Jason Mott will be on tour after the release of his novel on August 5, and will have a book launch for People Like Us at Pomegranate Books in Wilmington, North Carolina, on August 9.

FICTION
People Like Us
By Jason Mott
Dutton
Published August 5, 2025