It is easy to assume that a writer’s debut novel will take an at least partially autobiographical form. We imagine authors living their stories before putting them onto paper; their voices emerge once they manage to organize their thoughts and observations into a narrative. Only then, with their distinct selves discovered, structured, and shared, are they actually ready to create stories rather than pull solely from their own experiences.

Other hopeful novelists, however, might seek to preempt this expected correlation of first fiction and autobiography by crafting stories that are unmistakably outside of themselves. Genre, historical era, fabulist content, and other methods become tools of disassociation for authors seeking to tell meaningful stories that have no superficial links to their own lives.

The four debut novelists who participated in the Bryant Park Reading Room’s latest Word For Word event seem to exemplify the tension between these two literary ambitions. Despite their diverse backgrounds and styles, Teju Cole, Kamala Nair, Amor Towles, and Rebecca Wolff all spoke to last Wednesday’s New York City audience about their personal distance from and identification with the fiction they write.

Born in Nigeria, Teju Cole moved to the United States as a young adult. His novel Open City explores the psyche of a fellow Nigerian immigrant as he roams New York City, but during the Word For Word Q&A Cole was quick to point out that his protagonist is not a stand-in for the author, even as readers have urged otherwise. Fellini’s 8 1/2, Cole explained, was more influential on his writing process than were personal anecdotes. Similarly, Kamala Nair, whose The Girl in the Garden was inspired by childhood visits to her ancestral village in India, also made a point to distinguish herself from her central character. This blurred line between author and narrative content is certainly nothing new; but with Cole and Nair, it is specifically a shared ethnic background that has rendered each writer inseparable from his or her character.

Amor Towles, the American-born author of Rules of Civility, explained in response that he ran no risk of identification with his central character. Towles’ debut is a jazz-scored story of social navigation through class differences––––not unlike the work of Evelyn Waugh or even Whit Stillman, albeit set in 1938 New York City. He noted humorously that no readers have mistaken his protagonist, a young woman, as a surrogate for the author. Wolff, meanwhile, described her debut, The Beginners, as “a coming-of-age, psychosexual, supernatural, genre convention-defying novel.” The plot concerns a bookish New England girl and her encounters with a newly arrived couple intent on researching the witch trials of the town’s colonial era. Wolff, it seems, couldn’t easily be accused of re-labeling strict autobiography as fiction––––yet the author stated in an interview with Jonathan Lethem that research for the novel began with her own ancestors, victims themselves of early American witch-burnings.

In each of these novels, it seems, character is not merely a carrier of memory but rather the embodiment of the author’s ideas about culture, whether native or adopted. In our globalized world, the writer becomes more than a reader’s confidante––––he is a reporter, with access to sensory data and personal experience, yes, but also to his own unique perspective on the ways in which once-separate world cultures are gradually bleeding through to one another. This process is far from linear or defined. New ideas about the heterogeneity of modern society are emerging all the time, in different forms and speaking to readers in different ways. Open City is only one of these.

During the panel discussion, Cole delivered two fantastic metaphors for the writing process––––one illuminating of the struggle itself, the other more indicative of today’s global audience. First, he compared writing to the game of basketball. Players see the net but must practice to sink a shot. For any writer who has ever acknowledged the difficulty of translating an ideal vision of a story into actual, painstaking words, Cole is speaking true. Then, when asked if he wrote more for the gratification of his readers or for his own satisfaction, Cole noted that fiction is much like stand-up comedy: some listeners will laugh and find common ground with the humor while others simply won’t connect. Any shared experience, in other words, will matter to some but not to everyone––––or as Bob Dylan sang, “All the people can’t be all right all of the time.”

The schedule for Bryant Park’s Word For Word series can be found at www.bryantpark.org/plan-your-visit/wordforword.html. All events are free.