Vietnam-born Australian writer Nam Le’s debut short story collection, The Boat, maps the dangerous terrain of the human heart. The book has earned the Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and current Harvard Review fiction editor the £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize and the United States National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award. From an artist residency in Italy, he tells Doretta Lau about his writing process

When you write a story, do you begin with a character?
Every story seems to come in its own way and at its own pace. Some stories start with an image and others might start with an idea. Some stories grant access via the characters whereas for others plot seems to be the natural [starting point].

Do you do a lot of research for your stories?
I’m always trying to immerse myself in particular details or a particular history of any place or situation that I’m writing about and then I try to set those to one side and keep primary attention on what the story wants me to do.

After you’ve started a story does the research sometimes fall away and the character or plot take over?
Sure, that’s exactly right. I think almost by definition research is something that has to fall away in order for a story to take shape.

Does your law background have anything to do with that research-based writing?
I wouldn’t call my writing research based any more than I would call it character based or idea based. I would hope various elements of the story work together intrinsically and organically. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure how my background as a lawyer has any bearing on the scope or substance of my stories but it probably has some bearing on the temperament of my discipline.

Sometimes in Master of Fine Arts programmes there’s pressure to write a novel. What made you decide to stick with the story form?
I never thought these stories would make it into a book. I never thought of the stories as being in a collection, so it was very easy for me to write them because each one was completely self-contained.

How does it feel knowing the stories now have permanence and you can no longer edit them?
That’s a perennial problem. A teacher of mine used to say writing a book was like painting a bridge. By the time you’ve finished painting one end you have to start again at the other end. You can never really reach a point in time where you’re satisfied that what you’ve created reflects exactly who you are and how you want to be. But that’s just the nature of it. You try to ensure the work is as true to its own aspirations as possible, so you kind of remove yourself from that equation.

Is it harder to write stories that are close to your own experience than those that seem to come completely from research or imagination?
It depends what mood I’m in. Sometimes it’s bloody hard to write outside your experience and other times I feel the path of least resistance takes you in that direction and it’s harder to write from your experience. Every one of the characters outside my experience is obviously still constituted from me in many ways, just as the character who shares my name and circumstances in the first story [Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice] is just as fictionally constructed as any of the other characters. There’s a very complex interplay between life and art that a writer is subject to and tries to exploit at the same time. It’s much more difficult to understand that interaction than to slot it into boxes.

Nam Le will appear at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival on Sunday 15.