Audrey Murray is a redhead from Boston who moved to China and became a standup comedian. The co-founder of Kung Fu Komedy, Audrey was named the funniest person in Shanghai by City Weekend magazine. Audrey is a staff writer for Reductress.com and a regular contributor at Medium.com; her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s,LitHub, LARB, The Gothamist, Paste Magazine, Narratively, China Economic Review, Nowness, Architizer, and on the wall of her dad’s office. Audrey has appeared on NPR and The Comedy Center: Live from the Table; the Lost in America, Listen to This!, and Shanghai Comedy Corner podcasts; and on CNN, RTN, and ICS. She recently published her first memoir, Open Mic Night in Moscow. Follow her on Twitter at @ACMwrites.

EB: How did you start writing in general and nonfiction in particular?

AM: I actually started writing before I could read. I would dictate stories to my grandmother when she came to visit, and they are so fucked up to go back and read now. They are very weird. But writing, to me, had always been fiction. I’m trying to remember if we wrote fiction in classes in high school?

EB: Not really? [Editor’s Note: E.B. and Audrey went to high school together.] I don’t remember getting to do a ton of creative writing in regular English class, though I did take Vicky Seelen’s creative writing elective senior year.

AM: I did that too. So, I guess it was in college that I really started creative writing. I studied short fiction, because I thought if you were a writer you had to write novels and short stories. But then the summer after my freshman year of college I came home to work—that was the summer I worked for an insurance company, I did technical writing—and I was just so bored. Someone mentioned Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and that was how I discovered creative nonfiction was a thing. So that summer I just read nonstop—I read every creative nonfiction book that had an interesting title.

So I got back to Hopkins for my sophomore year and realized, oh, I don’t actually like writing fiction… But there wasn’t a lot of creative nonfiction in the writing department there. I took an opinion writing class, but kept taking fiction classes, because that was what was offered. I also think I was a little bit afraid of writing nonfiction.

EB: That makes sense. Taking material from your own life is scary.

AM: But that’s what all standup is—taking material from your own life. I guess I didn’t think of that as nonfiction.

EB: Actually, I wanted to ask about that—your background in standup. In a way, I feel like writing jokes for a show is another form of nonfiction, but how is your writing process different when you are writing something you know you are going to perform versus writing something you know will be read?

AM: Amazing question!

EB: Oh my gosh, stop.

AM: I never wrote out jokes word for word. Not really—only if something was wrong and I was trying to figure out what wasn’t working. But when doing standup, you never want something to be too stiff or memorized, so I wrote things out in outlines and short hand.

I think the biggest shift for me—the hardest thing—in transitioning into writing something that was going to be read, is not thinking in terms of punchlines. In a standup joke, you have certain words that are going to subvert expectations and make people laugh, and you’re always trying to phrase the joke so that those words come at the end of a sentence. If you don’t do that, you kill the momentum—the audience hears something funny and wants to laugh, but it has to wait for you to finish your joke. But that structure creates sentences that can look awkward on the page. When I started to write humorous nonfiction, I was trying to structure everything like a standup joke. It took me a while to realize a reader doesn’t need a designated pause to laugh, and a rigid structure obviously isn’t always great for narrative flow. So it helpful to break out of that.

Though, I actually like to watch people while they read my written work to figure out if my jokes are landing or not. Because in standup you get spoiled because you are always getting instant feedback. You get off stage and you know if each joke hit or fell flat—in writing, you don’t have that. You go so long without that positive or negative reinforcement.

EB: Right. You can feel right away if something is working or not when you are telling a joke or a story.

AM: Not even if the specific joke is working or not, but if people are generally on board with the premise and if they are interested in the subject. But you don’t have that with writing! You say, I want to write a book about Russia. But you have no idea if anyone wants to read that.

EB: Yeah, and when you’re writing you’re so alone!

AM: Definitely.

EB: I don’t know if you felt this, but when I sold my book this winter, it felt very validating. At least this one editoralso wants to read this. Up until that point I thought, oh, it’s just me and my mom who want to read this.

AM: Yeah, but still, it takes so long to get that validation! So much of writing is stressful and lonely. It can make you feel crazy, in a way that never happens in comedy because you are always getting instant feedback.

EB: Can you go back and explain a little bit more your process of getting feedback when writing? You said you’d watch people read your work?

AM: I made people read it and I would watch for when they would laugh and then ask them why. Or—and this was when I was being really crazy, and I only really did this to my mom, my dad, and my sister—I would send something to them, call them, and then sit on the phone with them while they read it, listening for when they laughed, and then asked what part it was. I would not recommend doing that with anyone you don’t have a familial relationship with. I’m sure it was extremely annoying, but it was very helpful for me.

EB: That does sound helpful. So often when I am writing I crack myself up, but then later no one laughs at the things I think are funny.

AM: That’s another thing you learn quickly in standup—things that you find funny aren’t always what most people find funny. In some ways it makes you a little less self-interested, because you learn that the things you think are funny or strange to you, aren’t necessarily funny or strange to others. You have to start to pay attention to what other people laugh at.

EB: That makes sense. It also must help to have an audience of strangers when you do standup—I sometimes feel like it’s hard to have readers who know you super well, because they often share your sense of humor, or they can hear your voice telling the story, and so they get why it is funny because they get you. In a way, strangers are the best readers because they don’t know you and aren’t invested in your success.

AM: Yes. Someone who doesn’t know you well is the best reader. And that’s what you get in standup all the time, plus you get a bigger sample size. You can notice if all the men laughed or all the women laughed, or if the young people thought it was funny but the older people missed it.

EB: Did you steal any of your standup material for this book?

AM: A little bit. I was performing standup the whole time I was writing the book, and after the trip, I had certain jokes I would do about Russia or the former Soviet Union. Some of those things made it into the book, but just the punchlines—you can’t write out a whole standup set in a way that makes sense to a reader, but you can drop in a punchline.

EB: So, how did Open Mic Night in Moscow come about? I know you had a blog while you were traveling through the former Soviet Union because I totally creeped on it.

AM: I am so flattered!

EB: Yes! [Friend from high school] and I would send links back and forth to each other and say, look at all the cool places Audrey is!

AM: Oh, wow, thank you!

EB: Was that blog your first attempt at writing nonfiction prose?

AM: No, actually. Open Mic Night in Moscow is actually my second book. It came about because I failed at writing my first book.

EB: Oh, really? What was it about?

AM: I had been living in China, doing standup, and I moved back to the States, and I knew I wanted to write about living in China and I was interested in writing comedic nonfiction. So I tried to write about my life in China, which is a terrible idea, to just sit down and think: I am going to write about everything about my life in China. I was trying to write down every single thing that happened to me, but I didn’t remember things that well, and I was including things that weren’t that interesting. It was a disaster from the start, but I continued to work on it for a year. It was so long, I had so many documents, and then I remember having this moment where I thought, oh, this is never going to be anything.

So then I decided to go on this trip [across the former Soviet Union] and I knew two things going into it. I knew that, one, I had to take really detailed notes, and, two, I needed some kind of feedback, which had been missing with the China book, because I never got the material into enough of a form to share with someone to get feedback. That’s why I started the blog. At first I thought I was going to write a blog post a day, but I quickly realized that was not going to happen unless I wanted to spend the whole trip holed up writing. But I published things as I went, and it was so helpful to see what people were interested in. I’d get comments and messages on one post, and then nothing on another. That was so helpful—to have that, and to have the notes, which then turned into my book proposal. I ended up adapting a lot of the blog posts into chapters for the book.

EB: In terms of the publishing business, were you already working with an agent on the China book? Or were you doing that on your own?

AM: Kind of. My agent is actually one of my closest friends from college. And my editor is another close friend from college, and then another friend is doing my movie/television rights. We were all in the writing program together at Hopkins. So when my friend was first promoted from assistant to agent, she suggested I write a book about China, but we didn’t sign an agreement until I came back from the Russia trip.

EB: So, you knew going into your trip that you were going to write about it?

AM: Yeah, pretty much.

EB: I know this is going to come across as sort of sociopathic, but I often find that as a nonfiction writer I talk myself into doing things because I think, “This might make for a good story later.” Do you ever find yourself doing things just because you think you might want to write about them?

AM: Oh, totally. Don’t all writers do that?

EB: [laughter]

AM: I also wanted to write about the trip because it was contained. My time in China was so tied up with my personal life, my friends, work—I didn’t have the distance from it to write about it yet. And I had wanted to go to Russia anyway. Wanting to write about it seemed like a good excuse to go.

EB: That’s awesome.

AM: But I should be clear that no one told me that was a good idea.

EB: Oh, yeah, people love to tell you going to Russia is a bad idea. [Editor’s Note: E.B. lived in St. Petersburg from 2008 to 2009.]Even now, when I tell people about being in Russia ten years ago, they tell me how dangerous it was and what a bad idea it was, and it’s like, okay, that was a decade ago, I am here, I survived, I am fine.

AM: People always tell you that you are going to get murdered.

EB: Yup.

AM: It’s funny, I actually felt a lot safer than I expected to. Before I left, I read this great post by a travel writer about how her experiences traveling alone as a woman through the former Soviet Union, and it made me feel so much better. It made me feel like it was not a reckless thing to do.

EB: It’s weird, in some ways I feel like the extreme misogyny in Russia protected me? Like, oh, I don’t need to bother with her, she is just a woman, who cares.

AM: Yeah. Obviously there were very different responses in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. I remember getting to Ukraine and seeing female border guards and thinking wow, this is a bastion of feminism.

EB: [laughter]

AM: Though I realized later I had seen one female border guard in Uzbekistan.

EB: So I’d love to know a little bit more about how you chose to structure the book. After all this traveling and gathering all this material, how did you decide what to write about and what not to write about? I feel like you could have written a whole book about each of the countries you visited. How did you choose what to edit out and what to keep in? And how did you decide on the ratio of how long to spend on each place?

AM: I wish I had an answer that was smarter and showed more advanced planning.

EB: [laughter]

AM: The truth is that my editor helped me make a lot of cuts, especially at the beginning. My first draft was way too long. I felt like I had a good sense of the structure for each chapter, but when I tried to zoom out and think about which chapters were adding to the narrative, and which weren’t, I wasn’t as certain. My editor’s input helped me work that stuff out.The other thing that was helpful was having a fixed amount of time to work on the book, and then running out of that time. That forced me to think about what I absolutely had to include, and then I focused on writing that, instead of trying to write about everything.

Some of the structure I think just reflects what I found most interesting. There’s way more in the book about Central Asia, because it was so fascinating and I had a lot of really cool experiences. When I got to Europe, it was a bit more familiar territory. So there weren’t as many stories that stood out to me.

I think I only really started to figure that out after I’d started writing the first draft. I had so much material that I wanted to write about, and I was in love with all of it. I also had this paper outline my editor and I had written out at our first book meeting, and I felt like that was my instruction manual. I had to follow that. Especially in the beginning, I felt like I knew how to write the chapters, how to structure the stories that would make up the book, but I didn’t know how you were supposed to put it all together into a book.

The structure started to make more sense to me as I started editing. Writing a book gave me more of an appreciation for the editing process. There was something about sending something off to my editor, not thinking about it for a few weeks, and getting it back and being able to look at it with fresh eyes and notes that made it so obvious what needed to be fixed and what needed to go. In the end, I think what I included in the book versus what I didn’t were the stories that I felt were working best on the page.

EB: I really loved how your writing reflected the way your mind wanders while traveling.

AM: Thank you!

EB: It’s funny, traveling sounds like this big, wild adventure, but so much of traveling is sitting very still—on trains, on planes, waiting in the airport—and your mind can suddenly jump back ten years out of nowhere.

AM: Yeah, it’s strange how so much of traveling is reflecting back on things.

EB: How did you decide what to include and not include in terms of your personal life? I loved how you wove so much of your life in China into this book, even though it was a travelogue about this one very specific trip.

AM: Whew, well, I did not want to write about myself. I only wanted to write about myself only as I existed as a character in these stories. And it was my editor who encouraged me to include more of myself and my relationships in the book.

EB: I felt like your whole book was about your relationships to different people and places and your identity with or without them—you trying to figure out who you are in China versus who you are in Central Asia and Eastern Europe versus who you are in the States, who you are dating one person and who you are dating another person and then who you are without either of them.

AM: Wow, thank you, that’s such a smart way to think about my book.

EB: [laughter]

AM: I mean, it was hard to write about that stuff. It was hard to include. But without it… There is something about living abroad, especially in your early-to-mid-twenties, that is wild. There are a lot of opportunities, and everything seems perfect and amazing, and when you try to move past that adolescent stage, it can be a very harsh wake-up call.

That has nothing to do with the question you asked.

EB: But it does! I feel like that was the point you were making. Going on this big trip to Central Asia was you coping with your wake-up call and trying to figure out what was next.

AM: The main relationship that I write about in the book, the one I had with Anton, was such this central thing while it was happening—even after it was over. It was intense and all-consuming and hard to avoid. I had to write about it. Admitting that was both embarrassing and painful, but it also added structure to the travel story. When I set out to write the book, I didn’t want to put myself out there to the world as this person hung up on this past relationship. But once I realized that I had to write about it, it provided a good through-line for the story.

EB: Yeah, I mean, there wouldn’t be so many books with that narrative arc if it wasn’t a compelling story. In Wild, Cheryl Strayed hikes the Pacific Crest Trail to grieve her mother. In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert travels around the world to recover from her divorce. It’s a very human story. Also, usually the thing you don’t want to write about is where the story really is.

AM: Yes! The heart of the story is the thing you want to put off the most.

EB: My friend Meghan wrote this book, Tango Lessons, which was originally supposed to be this historical, academic book about tango, with only a tiny bit of her in it, and then as she wrote more and more, she realized that it really was a memoir, and the book was about all these relationships and friendships she formed through doing tango.

AM: So cool. I feel like the same thing happened to me. Also, it helped that my editor is a friend. She knew all the stuff about my life that I was avoiding. We were both going through bad breakups at the same time and getting drinks in Greenpoint, so she knew everything that was going on with me—and so she knew what details to push for.

I also think it’s hard to write a nonfiction book about something you witnessed directly without putting yourself in the story, even for journalists.

EB: And the best nonfiction is about human relationships, so it makes sense the writer is in there too.

AM: Especially when you are writing humor. With humor you have to put yourself into the story, you have to be willing to be the butt of the joke, otherwise you don’t have the license to direct humor at other things or other people. You have to make fun of yourself, too.

EB: In general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?

AM: It’s funny, I don’t think of nonfiction as my practice. I think of it as humor or comedic writing first. But the hardest part of writing this book, for me, was writing about real people and real things. See, I have this pet peeve when it comes to nonfiction, when the writer gets in the head of a subject, especially a subject that they don’t know or who has been dead a long time and I just want to know how do they know that. I mean, they don’t! How can they know for certain what a subject felt? I understand wanting to make your characters real and get their thoughts and feelings, but that is a hard line to walk. So, I struggled with writing about other people in that way. And also I worried that when I told people I was writing a book and that they might be in it, that they didn’t really understand what that meant?

EB: Oh, yeah, I get that. Sometimes people are so casual about when I ask them if it’s okay for me to quote them. If someone asked me to say something that would appear in a book, I’d probably have a meltdown. But maybe because I know what that involves?

AM: I think people get it if they’ve ever been misquoted and they know how awful that feels.

EB: I will never forget senior year of high school, the new admissions view book misquoted me saying something about the school’s new arts center. I don’t even remember what I said now—something like “Wow, this new theatre is out-of-control awesome!” and they said I said something like, “Wow, this new theatre is super totally awesome!”—and I remember thinking the misquote just sounded so dumb and vapid and I was really embarrassed, even though in retrospect, I think both of those quotes sound dumb now.

AM: Right. Sometimes it’s so not a big deal, and to me as an outsider, both of those quotes sound totally fine. But it doesn’t feel good! Wait, what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? Am I allowed to ask you that?

EB: [laughter] Sure. I think I’d have to agree with you. I get so nervous writing about other people. I don’t want to get anything wrong.

AM: Yup.

EB: So, what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

AM: What do you find most rewarding?

EB: [laughter] I love being able to connect with people through nonfiction. I like writing something about my own life and then having other people reach out to me and tell me they had a similar experience or feeling. All of us just exist in these little bubbles of our own lives, and it feels good when you realize you aren’t the only one having these thoughts or emotions that you think are crazy.

AM: I always just thought of that as a reward of writing in general, not specific to nonfiction. But I guess you are right—with nonfiction you know it is something true, that really happened.

EB: Though you can totally have those same connections with people through reading fiction, too. You just can’t assume necessarily the author has had the same experience as their characters.

AM: True. Yeah, I agree, I think for me the most rewarding is when people reach out to me after I share something I’ve written. With this book, I like how many people have been reaching out to me and telling me that they didn’t know anything about Central Asia, but now they want to go there. It feels good that people are learning from something I wrote.

EB: That’s so cool! I hope people learn something from reading my book. That’s the dream. So, actually, and this is a rather self-serving question, but what advice do you have for someone writing a book? How do you not lose your mind?

AM: I recommend talking to other people who have gone through the process of writing a book. I joined a writer’s co-working space, and there was one author who kept telling me, “At a certain point, you have to just turn it in and be done.” He told me that when he was writing his first book, he kept feeling that if he just had a little more time, the book would be perfect! But of course, if he had that time, he’d still want more. You can keep editing indefinitely. At a certain point, deadlines become a blessing.

Also: back it up. Back everything up. My computer died right before my book went to print and, yeah, I didn’t lose my final manuscript, but I lost all my notes, my old drafts, all this stuff I had taken out of the book that I thought I might save and use for other pieces.

EB: Wow. That’s awful.

AM: I recommend this software called Backblaze. [Editor’s Note: This interview is not sponsored by Backblaze.] It sounds like some stoner thing, but it is actually great––it automatically backs up your whole computer to the cloud.

EB: What about external hard drives?

AM: Hard drives will fail!

EB: Got it.

AM: You also can’t be a perfectionist when writing a whole book. In the beginning, I wanted my drafts to be perfect before I showed them to my editor. It was liberating to realize that I could get stuff in front of my editor in less-than-perfect shape, because she was looking for the big picture story more than line-by-line details, and you can always, always go back and polish every sentence later.

EB: Right, because nothing hurts more than spending hours and hours obsessing over one paragraph, only to have your editor cut the whole paragraph from the final draft.

AM: You have to have no vanity in getting your stuff out there.

EB: So… are you going to write another book?

AM: It’s funny, while I was writing Open Mic Night in Moscow, I was like, writing a book is horrible, why am I doing this, I am never going through this again. And then as soon as I finished it and I thought, oh, I need to write another one. So, yeah. If they’ll let me.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?

AM: From Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang:

Almost everyone I knew in Dongguan was a striver. To some extent, this was self-selecting: A person with ambition was more likely to be open to new things, and that included talking to me… But their lives and struggles were emblematic of their country today–and of the China of my family, too, who strived to make up for everything they had lost or left behind. In the end, across time and class, this is the story of China: leaving home, enduring hardship, and making a new life.