Alicia Upano: Restraint Is My Most Useful Tool
In this interview, author Alicia Upano discusses borrowing characters from a different story for her debut novel, Everything to the Sea.
Alicia Upano was born and raised in Hawai’i. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award Hawai’i, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholarship. Her short fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, The Best Peace Fiction: A Social Justice Anthology, and more. After years in Asia and both U.S. continental coasts, she now resides on O’ahu with her family.
In this interview, Alicia discusses borrowing characters from a different story for her debut novel, Everything to the Sea, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Alicia Upano
Literary agent: Lisa Grubka, UTA
Book title: Everything to the Sea
Publisher: William Morrow (North America) and Bloomsbury (U.K.)
Release date: July 14, 2026
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Elevator pitch: Everything to the Sea follows two young people who fall in love the summer before a tsunami levels their hometown on the island of Hawaiʻi. For nearly a decade, Jane and Kenji try to find their way back to each other as they grapple with grief, rebuild their lives, and forge new families.
What prompted you to write this book?
Jane and Kenji began as two characters from another novel I was supposedly writing. That novel was concerned with the toll of climate change set in the near future, when natural disasters will become even more commonplace. But I kept writing pages exclusively about these minor characters who had lost their families in a tsunami in Hilo, Hawaiʻi, home to several historic tsunamis.
What Jane and Kenji revealed to me was that I wasn’t actually interested in an intellectual exploration of the environment. Instead, their hearty-human mess, relevant just as much to the present as the future, captured my imagination. Even in their earliest iterations, these characters were coming of age, falling in love, grappling with grief, and seeking home. So, the old novel was scrapped, and Jane and Kenji ascended into protagonists, and Everything to the Sea took shape.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Jane and Kenji’s story came into focus in 2020, just as the pandemic hit. The first drafts, written with virtual accountability and writing groups, were slow going, then I began to finalize the draft for submission with my agent Lisa Grubka in 2023, and she sold the book to Jessica Williams at William Morrow in 2024. Sue Armstrong also sold the book to Allegra Le Fanu at Bloomsbury U.K. shortly after. In total, about six years.
Many things changed through the drafting process! Most notably, the initial draft featured Jane and Kenji as childhood friends who become lovers after the tsunami. Early feedback suggested that childhood friendship was an unlikely place for authentic desire to bloom, so now they are strangers from the same town. Readers follow them as they discover intimacy, and soon they must navigate their newness under the worst imaginable circumstances.
Because the tsunami occurs early in the narrative, I grappled with how to depict a couple—and larger community—in the aftermath of loss. Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasterdirectly inspired the introduction of Kenji’s point-of-view and return to their hometown. His ground zero experience now steers the rest of the book.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
What surprised me is, despite a year of edits, how little the story changed. Which is to say, the story is the same, but it’s much, much stronger.
What did not surprise me, however, was how much I enjoyed the editorial process. I began my career in journalism, where I thrived under strong editors, and I’d long wanted to work at the same, intense level in my fiction. There’s something both clarifying and motivating about the demands of publication—the looming deadline, the industry considerations, and the collaboration.
Novel edits focused on characterization, scene-level mechanics, and most importantly in the first quarter of the book, sequencing. Often, I was too close to the pages and couldn’t assess whether the changes were helping or hurting. During one round, I introduced bloat that needed to be trimmed down. My editors guided me through. No matter what I write after this, I hope to bring that same rigor to the page.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
My writing process for this book differed from previous attempts, and its fruitfulness was a welcome surprise. For years, I wanted to write intuitively; plotting stunk of formulaic fiction (or so I was taught). Problem was, without a plan, my stories sprawled without sufficient drive. After a failed novel, I turned to studying narrative structure and design in craft books, and I also reverse-outlined novels I loved to surface how they were built. Turns out, I’m a plotter!
Restraint is my most useful tool in structure—compressing POVs to deepen character, as well as duration to ensure events keep progressing. Process-wise, this meant moving story-level decisions to non-drafting hours, while enjoying a sense of direction (and shot of confidence) thanks to the plan while writing. It’s worth mentioning that the plan only gets me so far, and I adapt freely and frequently.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Reading made me a writer, so I long to offer readers what I seek in my favorite novels: to be moved with delight and wonder and comfort. The jacket copy features a story about natural disaster and young love, but I hope readers also find a deeply human and hopeful story about loss and rebuilding.
I also hope that this book provides another perspective of Hawaiʻi—not as tourist destination, but as a place whose beauty and complexity lie partly in the people who love it and the families who call it home.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Honor, shamelessly, your own taste and process. Identify the books you love and why you love them. Identify how you work best. Then deploy your skills—habits, intellect, quirks—to write the book of your heart.
