Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn’t think we could be a fairly competent novelist, if we just bothered to take the time? But storytelling is a craft like any other, with its own secret techniques and best practices. Charlie Jane Anders is a multiple-award-winning novelist and story writer, but also someone who has thought carefully about all the ingredients of a good story, from plot and conflict to characters and relationships. This will be a useful conversation for anyone who tells stories, reads books, or watches movies. Maybe you’ll be inspired to finally write that novel.
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Charlie Jane Anders studied English and Asian literature at Cambridge University. She is the author of over 100 published works of short fiction and several novels, including the new Young Adult book Victories Greater Than Death. She was co-founder of the website io9, a blog about science and science fiction. She is a frequent event organizer, including the monthly Writers With Drinks. Among her accolades are Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Crawford awards. She is the co-host, with Annalee Newitz, of the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast. Later this year she will publish Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories.
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0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. I know I love the story I’m about to tell, so some of you may have heard it before, but it fits in so well with today’s podcast. Several years ago, my wife, Jennifer, was the Writer-in-Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. Jennifer is a science writer, a journalist, and so her job was to put on weekly talks or seminars or whatever, workshops to help the physicists at KITP in Santa Barbara think about communication, writing, different ways of telling their stories to the outside world. And for the most part, the physicists went along with this, bemused but tolerant.
0:00:41.9 SC: At one week, she brought up a friend of ours who is a TV writer whose job is to write TV shows, network dramas, write hour-long TV shows. And again, this is not something that most of the physicists had as an ambition, that some day, they would be writing for TV. But what lit them up at some point as they were listening to our friend talk was he explained the idea that there is a theory of writing an hour-long TV drama. There is structure there. There are certain pre-existing beats that you’re supposed to hit, especially when you have commercials built in at certain time points, certain kind of action events need to happen at the right time, certain kinds of character development, certain twists, etcetera.
0:01:24.5 SC: It’s not just it goes on this and this and this and this; there’s an overarching structure. Of course, everyone who’s done a little bit of work in writing novels or screenplays knows about this, the three-act structure, very famous in Hollywood dramas and so forth. But the idea that there was a theory suddenly lit up all the physicists in the room like, “Oh, okay, so let’s think about how we can use this and how we can tweak the theory,” and so forth.
0:01:48.9 SC: So I think that this idea of there being a theory of storytelling is useful, not only if you want to write stories. And who amongst us hasn’t either taken a hand at trying to write fiction or imagined that some day, we would write our big novel, but any one of us who consumes stories also, which is basically all of us. You get a little bit more out of what’s going on behind the scenes, whether it’s watching TV or reading a novel, if you have some theoretical understanding of what is going on along the way. So today’s guest, Charlie Jane Anders, is the perfect person to talk about this stuff.
0:02:23.2 SC: Charlie Jane is a very successful novelist in science fiction and fantasy. She’s won all the awards, the Nebula, the Hugo, the Theodore Sturgeon award, Locus award, Lambda Literary award and so forth. But more importantly, for today’s purposes, she’s extremely interested in the craft of storytelling. Charlie Jane was one of the original co-founders of io9, the website, and she did a wonderful series of blog posts on how to construct a story you’re telling. And she’s been doing a similar set of helpful blog posts for tour.com more recently that will be turned into a book. So she has a book coming out, it’s not till August, but you can still think about it, a book coming out called Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making up Stories. Again, very useful if you’re actually writing stories; even fascinating, if you’re not going to do it. And Charlie Jane also has, this week, coming out, an actual work of fiction, Victories Greater Than Death. It’s a young adult novel, the first in a trilogy.
0:03:23.8 SC: So we talk about all the usual questions one has when one talks to artists, like: Where do you come up with the ideas? Is it characters first? Is it plot first? And of course, the answers are intricate and different for every little piece of writing. So I think this is going to be useful whether or not you’re a storyteller yourself because in some sense, aren’t we all storytellers, really? And with that philosophy in mind, let’s go.
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0:04:04.0 SC: Charlie Jane Anders, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:04:06.3 Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, it’s so great to be here, thanks for having me.
0:04:09.0 SC: So the first question, we’re going to talk about stories, the power of stories. I want to give the audience members a little bit of inspiration and guidance if they want to become writers themselves, right? But let’s start with a softball question: What was your pandemic binging? What were the stories that you turned to in our time of lockdown for this last year or so?
0:04:29.4 CA: Oh, wow! I mean, for the most part during the pandemic, I’ve been kinda gravitating towards lighter entertainment, things that didn’t upset me or depress me, with a few exceptions. So I’ve been watching a lot of things like Summer Camp Island and the second season of Hilda that came out a while ago.
0:04:47.0 SC: I have no idea what these are. What is Summer Camp Island?
0:04:49.5 CA: Summer Camp Island is an amazing animated show. You can watch it on HBO Max. It’s also, it was on Cartoon Network, I guess. And it’s about an island that’s like just a perpetual summer camp, which is full of witches and Yeti and aliens and you know, monsters and ogre, and it’s got everything. And there’s these two kids, Oscar and Hedgehog, and they’re best friends. And Hedgehog, spoiler alert, Hedgehog eventually becomes a hedgehog, sorry, she eventually becomes a werewolf. She becomes a hedgehog-werewolf hybrid. And also, she becomes a hedgewolf, I guess, and a were… Or I don’t know, she becomes a werewolf, and she also becomes a witch. So she’s got a lot… And she’s a science geek. She actually runs a podcast on the show. She has a special radio show that she hosts on Summer Camp Island that’s all about science, and it’s called Science Talk, and it’s her answering science questions. So that’s like a running thing.
0:05:44.0 CA: And so I actually love the fact that there’s this character who is a hardcore science geek who is obsessed with astronomy, and there’s episodes about her trying to witness astronomical phenomena, and study science, but she also becomes a witch and is super into learning how to cast spells and stuff. I think it’s so great to have that representation.
0:06:03.2 SC: So you kind of go for the uplifting version of your stories in the pandemic, yeah?
0:06:09.0 CA: Yeah, I think, I mean, you know?
0:06:09.9 SC: Yeah.
0:06:10.2 CA: And I’ve been reading a lot of YA because I’m writing YA and I wanted to kind of…
0:06:14.3 SC: YA is young adult?
0:06:15.0 CA: You know, put YA in my brain while I was writing it, so I had, kinda had… I kinda was maintaining a kinda YA tone or a voice or whatever.
0:06:24.0 SC: Sorry, so YA stands for young adult?
0:06:27.0 CA: That’s right, that’s correct.
0:06:27.5 SC: Okay, good. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. You want to be thinking and listening in the voice that you’re speaking and writing in, right?
0:06:36.0 CA: Mm-hmm.
0:06:37.2 SC: So okay, so for those of us… I mean, so the reason why I started with that question is because it illustrates the fact that is perfectly obvious, a cliche, that these stories play a role. They mean something to us. Not to get too deep, ’cause I do want to be hands-on and constructive here for most of the podcast, but what’s the big deal about these imaginary stories that we make up? Do you have a theory about why we care so much about stories? You could read uplifting real-life things, but why do we make up fiction instead?
0:07:08.5 CA: Yeah, whatever happened to upworthy.com? I feel like reading Upworthy right now. Yeah, I think that stories are part of how humans deal with stress and how we deal with epistemic crises and challenges and you know? I think that we tell stories in order to figure out the way the world works and to figure out kind of a schematic of life, if you want. And it’s basically like storytelling is kind of an engine of… It’s a way of modeling reality. It’s a way of modeling reality and it’s a way of kind of showing like if you do this, this will happen, basically.
0:07:50.5 CA: And you know, there was actually a great… Nobody remembers this, but so I was obsessed with Doctor Who as a kid. And after Tom Baker stopped being the star of Doctor Who, in the early ’80s, he went on to host a program about books, a children’s program where each week, they would… I’m not sure if they were… I’ve never actually seen it, now that I think about it. I’m not sure if they were dramatizing the books or if they were just reading from the books or what, but it was a program to introduce kids to books. And I never watched that program because I wasn’t in the UK at the time, but I was obsessively reading any… Like I would go… My parents were college professors, and I would go to the university library and any kind of… I would go on through the microfiche and look for anything that mentioned Doctor Who.
0:08:36.7 CA: I was like a hardcore Doctor Who nut when I was like yay tall. And my parents would just let me use the university library to just obsessively read everything there was to know about Doctor Who. And so I read this article that really stuck in my head where Tom Baker talks about this program that he’s doing to introduce kids to books. And he said this amazing quote: “Books are wonderful because they save you from the tiresome process of learning from experience.”
0:09:05.7 SC: That’s good, I like that.
0:09:05.8 CA: You know? Because you don’t need to go fight a dragon if you could read a book about someone fighting a dragon. Or you don’t need to go do… You can experience things vicariously in a book, and then you know, “Well, gosh! If I go and do this, this and this, it’s not going to turn out great for me. But if I do this, maybe it’ll be okay.” And you can kind of imaginatively live through a lot of stuff that you maybe wouldn’t be able to live through in real life either ’cause it couldn’t happen in real life or because you would be dead if you tried to do it in real life.
0:09:38.0 SC: No, I’m 100% convinced that I will be excellent in solving crimes ’cause I have watched so many procedurals and mystery novels and things like that. I know everything there is to know. [chuckle] I’ve had those experiences. [chuckle]
0:09:43.9 CA: Oh, sure, of course, yeah, you just need zoom and enhance. You just need zoom and enhance all the time, and then that would, you’d get it that way.
0:09:51.3 SC: No, I like that answer, that it’s a, not a substitute, but an extra bit of an experience that we can get by imagining these scenarios. And presumably, what that says about science fiction or fantasy or things like that is that it just enhances the kinds of experiences we can imagine beyond those we could actually plausibly do ourselves.
0:10:12.4 CA: Yeah, and you know, it’s a cliche to say this, but people had not yet been into space when we started to write stories about, “Here’s what it would be like to go into space.” And you know, I think, I say this all the time, but you have to imagine something before you can do it. You have to imagine something before you can do it. And also, I don’t want to understate the importance of escapism. I think escapism is a really healthy impulse, especially when things are really bad, but even when things are good, escapism makes us bigger, makes our minds bigger. It makes ourselves bigger, it makes… And it makes us able to imagine ourselves in all these different situations that we couldn’t be in, in real life.
0:10:52.9 CA: And that just, it’s fulfilling, in a way, that real life often really isn’t. And so the ability to escape into a story gives us strength and gives us inspiration to do awesome things in the real world. I think that people sometimes think that you can either have escapism or you can go out and effect great change in the real world. And I think that it actually, no, it’s more like the two things go hand-in hand. Being able to have escapism and be able to escape into stories when you need to will give you the emotional resilience to go out and make the world a better place in reality.
0:11:28.9 SC: But as you said recently on your own podcast, you and Annalee Newitz have a wonderful podcast called Our Opinions Are Correct.
0:11:34.8 CA: Oh, thank you.
0:11:35.8 SC: And you, as you made the point that science fiction did a terrible job at preparing us for the pandemic, right? [chuckle]
0:11:43.2 CA: Yeah, I feel like we’re going to look back at most of our sort of pandemic fiction, and especially movies and TV, and kinda roll our eyes after having actually lived through a pandemic.
0:11:57.7 SC: That’s very different.
0:11:57.8 CA: I’m not saying that The Last Ship isn’t going to hold up, because that’s a classic, but I think that in general, maybe apart from that one Steven Soderbergh movie, did I say his name right. I don’t know. Anyway, you can edit me out saying, “Did I say his name right?” But anyways, so apart from that one Soderbergh movie, I think that most pandemic fiction cuts corners and kinda dramatizes and takes some… And I think even the Soderbergh movie has some issues that people have pointed to.
0:12:28.0 CA: But I think that it’s a mistake to think of science fiction as a purely didactic medium or purely didactic genre that nobody who watched Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon had a really good understanding of the actual process of traveling to the moon. Nobody was like, “Okay, well, now, that we’ve watched Georges Méliès and we’ve seen the little rocket hit the man in the moon in the eye, that NASA can just go build that and we can do it, and this is an exact realistic simulation that we’ve run here.” It’s more like it’s just seeing that makes people think, “Oh, maybe I could go to the moon and maybe I could… ” Maybe there wouldn’t be people in adorable weird costumes dancing around on the moon once you get there. But maybe this thing that is kind of dramatized in this very silly, unrealistic way, it just puts a bug in your ear or whatever, it puts a thing in your head that like, “Oh, what if we could do that in real life?” It’s the more the “What if,” than the like “It would be exactly like this,” kind of.
0:13:34.3 SC: So I think this is… Yeah, I think that I completely agree with that analysis, and it is a universal impulse to think of these stories and share them, so much so that there’s a bunch of people… Most people in the world, I don’t know, who think that they really could write some novels if they wanted to, that they have a novel in them in a way that most people don’t think that they have a theory of dark matter in them. And it must rub you the wrong way as a writer, but do you think that most people, because that…
0:14:01.4 CA: No, it doesn’t. It makes me happy.
0:14:03.0 SC: That was my question. Do you think that most people do have a novel in them, if only they had some wherewithal about shaping it and making it come to life?
0:14:10.8 CA: Yeah, I think we, human beings, this sounds cheesy, but human beings, we are literally made out of stories, and some of them are true stories about things that have happened to us, but a lot of them are stories that we’ve imagined or that we’ve dreamed or that have kinda formed part of this kinda fabric of our psyches. And so yeah, I think everybody has got many novels inside of us. And I think that the thing is I have to break that apart a little bit, which is that I think, as with most things, I don’t think I could ever be a professional basketball player, even though I’m tall and maybe meet other criteria for being a basketball player. There’s certain… I don’t have the coordination, I don’t have the kind of… I actually literally was diagnosed with spatial integration issues when I was a kid, so I literally… I’m actually officially not good at throwing and catching and doing other stuff like that.
0:15:06.0 CA: So but I think that most things that are mental that involve concentration, that involve thinking, anybody can learn to do, and it’s maybe some people have an easier time than others, and maybe some people are good at one aspect and not other aspects and have to work on the aspects they’re not good at. But I think that anybody could, if they really worked at it, be good at math, anybody who really worked at it could be good at writing. I think that it just takes a lot of work. I think that people who don’t, haven’t tried to write a novel or who haven’t written, spent years like me writing novels that never went anywhere or that never got published before finally getting a novel out into the world… People think All the Birds in the Sky was my first novel, when it’s actually the sixth novel that I completed and revised and submitted for publication, and really tried to get published. People who haven’t gone through that process sometimes overrate the idea part of it, and underrate the turning the idea into a working piece of fiction part.
0:16:11.6 SC: The crafts.
0:16:11.8 CA: Whereas, I think that those who’ve, those of us who’ve done it a lot will always say, “Oh, the idea is the easy part,” which I think is true. And there’s the story idea, and then there’s the premise, and then there’s the premise as expressed as a series of conflicts and questions and incidents and emotional catharses and all that stuff. And those are, each of those is kind of an order of magnitude more difficult than the first, kind of, than the previous one.
0:16:43.2 SC: Where do you personally start with? I know some people start with characters, you can start with a setting, you could start with a plot, a dilemma. Is there, do you have a process there? Or is it sort of whatever comes?
0:16:56.8 CA: It really varies, and I think I would be a little bored if all of my stories started the same way or kind of came out, came about through the same kinda genesis or whatever. You know, most of the time for me, I think I start out with a fun “What if,” and I have a bunch of Word documents on my computer where I’ve written down, “Oh, here’s a cool idea. What if this happened?” And you know, if I don’t write those down, I forget them within a day or so, usually, and I have some… I swear, there was one a week or so ago where I was like, “Oh, this is a really cool idea,” and I didn’t write it down, and I, it’s just gone, I’ve forgotten it, I’m, it’s probably never. I was like, “Maybe it’ll come back to me,” and it, now, it’s been long enough that I think it’s just never coming back to me. And so it’s just it’s gone, like tears and rain.
0:17:40.0 CA: But so sometimes, you’ll have a “What if.” And you’ll just, you know, that’s not a story, that’s just a cool “What if.” And then you have to kinda think about like, “How does this become an emotional thing that’s about people, and about personal experience, and about like… How do you turn this into a thing with a plot and with characters and with something that I feel invested in enough that I can devote weeks or months or years of my life to it?” And the classy example that is, is All the Birds in the Sky, I was like, “Okay, what if there was a mad scientist and a witch, and they were in the same story together?” And at first, I was like, “What if they were enemies?” But then I was like, “Okay, what if they were friends?”
0:18:20.1 CA: And that was the thing where that got in my head and just wouldn’t let go and I just… I was actually working on a different novel, and I had to kinda pause working on that other novel. And so, I wrote down a bunch of stuff about this idea because I had to get it out of my head, and I just knew that that was going some place. And at first, I thought of it as primarily a genre exercise and eventually, it turned into something more personal and more kind of emotional, which I think is how it has to happen for it to be any good in the end.
0:18:47.2 CA: But then, you know, there are stories where I start out with a character and I’m just like, “Okay, who is this person? Why am I thinking about them? And where is this going to go?” And then, sometimes, I start out with a science idea or a science thing and there’s not really a “What if,” like a “What if” in the sense of like, “What if we all walked on our hands instead of our feet or whatever?” Or, “What if everybody, one day, started talking backwards?” Or those are just things that I’m throwing out there. Those aren’t real story ideas that I’ve come up with.
0:19:18.0 CA: But the big example that I have is my second tour book, The City in the Middle of the Night, which basically, that started from I had gotten really obsessed with tidally-locked planets, which we had written about a lot on io9. And during the time that we have been doing io9, I started working on io9 in mid 2007, summer or fall 2007. And by the time I left io9 in the spring of 2016, we had gone from tidally-locked planets, we’d always kinda known that they were a thing, but we had learned so much more about them in that time, and there had been so many pieces of news that were exciting, and we were finally learning more about actual exoplanets in a way that we, I feel like we hadn’t been previously, or at least there was a lot of news about them. And so I was just like, “Holy crap! These are so fascinating.” And they’re the most common habitable planets that are within our potential reach outside of the Solar System and you know…
0:20:20.3 SC: So just to be super-duper explicit here, a tidally-locked planet, we’re thinking of an exoplanet where one side of the planet faces its star all the time, so it’s a hot side and cold side.
0:20:31.0 CA: Yeah, and I apologize, I was about to… I was sort of meandering my way around to giving a definition, but I think I was probably never going to get there, so I appreciate that. But yeah, tidally-locked planets, it’s like there’s a dark side and a light side, and it appeals to all these things that I’m obsessed with about these really stark divisions and dichotomies and about just like it felt… The more I thought about it, the more I felt like it was like a fairytale setting, that you have eternal darkness and eternal light. And it felt like a fairytale realm in a weird way, being on one of these tidally-locked planets.
0:21:05.8 CA: And so I spent… So I started out with basically a setting and I was like, “Okay, I want to write a novel that takes place on a tidally-locked planet. Humans have been living there for a long time already. We’re not going to see humans arrive on the planet. We’re not going to see the space voyage to get there. We’re just going to be living on this tidally-locked planet.” And my original kind of spark was like, “Okay, what kind of creatures are native to this planet? And how do we interact with them?” And that was all I had, and I didn’t have any characters. I didn’t have any plot. I didn’t even have like a “What if,” other than, “What if we were living on one of these planets? And there was a native, an indigenous lifeform living there?”
0:21:45.8 CA: So I had to… It took me two years, basically, to turn that setting into a story. And it was really kind of agonizing, it was really kind of excruciating. And I probably should’ve just given up and been like, “I’m going to just go write something that takes place in Oakland,” because that’s so much easier to write, a story set in Oakland than a story set on another planet a thousand years from now. But I was just really obsessed with that setting and I just kept reading about it and kinda talked to people about it. And finally, I did find the story that I wanted to tell, and then it all fell into place, but that was an example of me really coming at it from a very different direction. So I think it varies. That was a very long-winded answer, I apologize.
0:22:27.0 SC: No, but actually… No, that was the perfect length because both of those examples, so in one example is you had two characters, a magician and a science person. And the other one, you had the setting of this dramatically different planet and… But in both cases, your job is to turn it into a story, in neither case do you have a story. So in neither case did the plot come first, right? But yeah, we think at the very simplistic level, we almost conflate the idea of a story with the idea of a plot. And maybe what I’m saying is talk about plots a little bit, and then we’ll circle back to how you extract a plot from your initial starting point, which is very different.
0:23:08.7 CA: Yeah, so the way I think about it is the way I think… I think that you have the premise, which is like there’s a witch and a mad scientist or whatever, people are walking on their hands instead of their feet. And that’s, or that’s not even the premise. That’s the kind of like the spark or whatever. And then it becomes more of a premise when there’s… I guess it becomes more of a story once there’s a character involved and once it’s like, “So whose story is this?” Say we’re telling you story about one day, everybody starts walking on their hands, instead of their feet. Is your story about the one person who keeps walking on their feet, and everybody else is walking on their hands? And you’re like… They’re the one person who’s like, “I don’t know what’s going on, and this is confusing to me because I’m still walking on my feet.” Is your story about the first person to start walking on their hands and everybody else starts copying them? Is your story about somebody who is just a random person, but starting to walk on their hands messes up their life in all these ways that’s interesting? There’s like all…
0:24:06.0 SC: Or somebody who, someone who doesn’t have any legs who is now liberated by the fact that everyone’s walking on their hands.
0:24:10.4 CA: Right, someone who’s an amputee or who’s been, I don’t know, who’s… Yeah, so I think that… And obviously, there’s… This is their… That premise or that idea opens up all sorts of questions around ableism that we should… That you’d want to unpack if you were going to really investigate this seriously. But so basically, you try to find a way in and you try to find a character who is affected by it in a way that seems interesting or that seems like they’re kind of an interesting vantage point beyond just like an everyperson who is affected by this same way as everybody else. Or somebody who this is going to be… They’re going to be interesting in some unique way. And meanwhile, you have to kind of think about the larger implications and the second order effects of like, “If this happened, how would everything else be different? How would 20 million other things that we do in the world be transformed by this?”
0:25:08.0 CA: And I think that… And you have to kind of build that out into more of like a story where like okay, everybody’s walking on their hands instead of their feet, or like everybody starts speaking… Let’s go with everybody starts talking backwards ’cause that’s… It brings to mind all those old Led Zeppelin albums or whatever. Everybody starts talking backwards, and it’s like everybody’s doing background masking all the time or something. Everybody starts talking backwards and it’s like satanic or something. And that’s not a story because that’s just, “Okay, this thing happened.” The story is everybody starts talking backwards, and a person has been separated from their child, and they can’t find their child because their child is… Because all the ways that they would try to find their child would require them to talk forwards instead of backwards. Maybe their phone can’t understand them.
0:25:58.1 CA: So the story is not everybody starts talking backwards. The story is, “I’m trying to get to my child who is on the other side of the world, and my phone doesn’t work because it doesn’t understand me talking backwards, and all these other things are… The fact that everybody’s talking backwards is making it harder for me to do this thing I need to do.” It has to be about a thing that’s a specific, like somebody has a thing that they’re trying to do or somebody has a thing that’s their story that they’re trying to deal with, and the global kind of premise is just kind of shaping that or informing that. Otherwise, it’s not really a story; it’s just a… There’s a phrase that we used to use in science fiction writing circles back when I started out that people referred to a HAITE story, which doesn’t mean hate as in, “I hate this story.” HAITE is spelled H-A-I-T-E, and it stands for, “Here’s An Idea; The End.” And you can… There are actually professionally-published stories that are HAITE stories.
0:26:57.6 SC: Especially in sci-fi, yeah.
0:26:57.9 CA: You can do it and get that published if you are skillful enough and if you can make the ideas seem cool enough. And I think I’ve honestly published one or two stories where I would classify them as HAITE stories because I was basically just exploring an idea. And then once I finished exploring the idea, I was like, “That’s it. That’s all I got. See you later.” But most of the time, you don’t want to write a HAITE story. You want to write a story where it’s like, “Here’s an idea and here’s how it shapes someone’s life, and here’s… ” The actual story is about someone who is on their own journey and so, especially when it’s a big idea like that, you can’t really make that a story. You have to make that kind of the kind of spark that leads to other stuff that becomes the story.
0:27:43.0 SC: Well, it’s an interesting sort of implication here that in some sense, we can use characters as the bridge between a premise and a plot, right? Because I think for people like me, sciencey folks, maybe, I would love to write a novel someday. I have other things in the way, so who knows if it’ll ever happen, but plots are the hardest. Like I can even imagine writing characters. But it’s bizarre to me that plots are hard because I guess sort of the puzzle-solving part of my brain thinks that if I already know what the solution is, then it’s not that interesting. And I can’t even imagine being one of those writers who just starts writing without knowing where the end is going to be. But maybe if you have both this premise, magic and science or talking backwards or whatever, and then there’s a person with a desire, right, with some obstacles in their way, then it becomes easier to sort of fill in how that becomes a plot? Or am I going too far?
0:28:40.0 CA: No, I think that you’re exactly right. I think that once there’s a person who has wants and needs and things that they’re trying to work out for themselves, and it could be anything from a kind of identity crisis around like, “Who am I? Who do I want to be?” Anything from that to, “I want to get this thing and these obstacles are in my way.” That’s when you’re usually cooking and that’s often… That is kind of the hardest part, in a way, because you have to really believe in this person and their goals or their desires or their kind of questions that they’re struggling with because that’s the engine of your story. And to some extent, you have to feel the urgency of this person’s needs in order to be able to be invested in the story as a writer or as a reader, and I think that… Okay, so you know, I do kinda think of plots in terms of like you have a problem and then there’s a solution. And oftentimes, when I start out, I don’t know what the solution to the problem of the story is going to be. And the part of the fun for me is being right there with this person as they’re struggling, or people as they’re struggling to kind of find a solution to the problem that they’re dealing with.
0:29:53.7 CA: And I like it when I’m surprised by things. I feel like if I’m surprising myself, that means that the story is kinda cooking. If there’s no… If I’m not being surprised by what’s happening, usually, that means I’m on auto-pilot, and that I’m just kinda regurgitating stories I’ve read before, or that I’m just kinda chugging along in a linear fashion without kind of like… There’s not a lot of sparks flying, kind of, if I’m not being surprised by stuff that happens or by solutions or by issues that arise. And you want complications and you don’t want… Part of why you have complications is so that when you get to the end and you find the solution, it feels a little bit like a magic trick where there’s been all these hands moving around and stuff.
0:30:34.5 CA: But I think that usually, the problem does contain the seeds of its own solution a little bit, and it’s not like a murder mystery. I think if I was writing a murder mystery, you can always tell if someone has really kind of thought it through when they wrote a murder mystery or if they just kinda got to the end and they were like threw a dart at a dartboard and were like, “This person’s the murderer, and we come up with a specious explanation as to how they’re the murderer.”
0:30:53.7 SC: Right, anyone could have done it. [chuckle]
0:31:00.9 CA: I think if it’s a murder mystery, if I ever did really try to write one of those, I would really try hard to work that stuff out in advance before I wrote the dead body falling on the floor with the knife between the shoulder blades, I would already know who did it and kind of have an idea of why. And I wrote, actually, one of my own published novels had a little bit of an element of a murder mystery. And I did end up kind of diagramming the whole thing from the point of view of the murderer just to understand the logic of, from their perspective, what they thought they were accomplishing, what… And because it drives me nuts when the antagonist or the kind of… When everything is revealed in the end and the antagonist behaved in a kind of random arbitrary fashion just to make all the dots connect up. It’s like, “Nope, they had to be thinking rationally from their perspective the entire time, and this situation arises, so they did this.” And so I actually was really invested in that.
0:32:01.0 CA: But I think that yeah, I think that if you’re not writing a murder mystery, there is going to be a certain amount of the solution having to come out of the problem, having to be like something that feels plausible and earned. But the other great thing about writing, of course, is when you get to the end of your first draft and you’re like, “Well, actually, the solution was this thing that I should have introduced 200 pages ago,” you know what? You can go back in revisions and introduce that thing 200 pages earlier, and the audience will never know that you didn’t have that in your first draft. They’ll never be like, “Well, but… ” And I think that oftentimes, the thing that you think is going to be like the biggest problem for your characters turns out to actually be the thing that helps them to solve the main problem in the end because they can turn it to their advantage in some way. That’s always a fun way to go, I think.
0:32:53.1 SC: Well, I think that you make this point in one of the podcast conversations that there are some plots that are just like it’s a quest. There’s a thing you want that gets the characters moving and it’s all about some combination of the adventure and the witty banter along the way. But then there are other plots where somehow it’s related to the characters. Somehow the characters, it means something to the characters along the way, and that’s a more fulfilling kind of plot.
0:33:19.0 CA: Yeah, and you know, I always like characters to maybe have a, be a little bit selfish. I get bored if a character doesn’t ever have their own agenda that’s kind of separate from or orthogonal to the main action. If all the character wants is to get the widget that’s going to do the thing, you know, I’m like, “Okay, sure, I get the widget is important, the thing is important.” But at the same time, this is something I struggle with a lot because I find you have to find different ways of doing this depending on the story. I always want the characters to have their own concerns and their own agendas that are kind of their, that are personal because then, I care more and if… Ironically or counterintuitively, I care more about the widget, if in addition to or separate from the widget, they also want a pony or whatever, you know? [chuckle]
0:34:14.7 SC: Yeah, yeah.
0:34:16.3 CA: And this is a thing, I don’t want to give too many spoilers for the sequel to Victory is Greater Than Death, my young adult book that comes out in April, but in the sequel to Victory is Greater Than Death, there is a certain amount of… There’s one character who is on a quest, and their quest is of importance to basically every living thing in the galaxy, but they have a side quest or they have their own personal quest that they are more personally invested in because it is meaningful to them personally. And I kind of lean into that, the personal quest, because it’s just more compelling and interesting than the thing that is of equal importance to everybody in the entire freaking galaxy.
0:34:57.2 SC: Maybe could we just talk a little bit about the role of conflict in plots, generally? I remember being struck years ago by a quote from David Mamet that every character in every scene should want something and not necessarily the same thing; ideally, different things, sometimes they’re working together. And that’s sort of one pole on the spectrum, but I was struck equally well by a comment on Twitter, and I’m sorry, I forget who it was by. They really wish that more movies would not have conflict in them. [chuckle] And I’ve never heard that point of view expressed before. But so on the one hand, why is conflict such a driver? Especially when you and I are probably on the side of people who… We want our characters to basically be competent and trying to basically do good things, not like cartoonishly villainous. So you have to sort of gin up some conflict there. And do we overrate conflict? Is it just the easy way to make a story exciting? Or are there more subtle ways we should be taking advantage of?
0:35:56.1 CA: Yeah, I think that people often have a very narrow idea of what conflict means. And when I was starting out as a writer, like my first attempts at writing fiction, I thought that conflict meant specifically that people had to be enemies or that they had to be screaming at each other or that they had to be really unpleasant to each other. And you know, actually, Cecilia Tan, who’s this amazing writer of… Often, she writes science fiction erotica. Right now, she’s working on an urban fantasy trilogy that is kind of has erotic elements, but is just kind of straight urban fantasy, I think in the sort of Anita Blake mode. And she also, I think she still runs it, although I think she’s sold it, but she has this publishing company, Circlet Press, that does erotic science fiction anthologies.
0:36:50.6 CA: And she had it… So when I was starting out writing back at the dawn of time, she was doing an anthology of erotic science fiction, and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to try and write something for this.” And she had something in the guidelines about wanting the stories to be, to have a positive view of sexuality and to not have like, depict sexuality in a kind of negative or to make sure that it’s consensual, but also just depicts sexuality in a healthy positive way. And somehow, my neophyte raging brain turned that into nobody in this story can disagree about anything. Even unrelated to the sex, everybody has to be completely like blandly… There can be no conflict and no kind of… No disagreement of any kind of this story, and it was I think… I mean, this is a… This is a tough… This is a high bar to get over ’cause I wrote so many terrible stories back then, but I think this might be the worst story I ever wrote. [chuckle]
0:37:53.7 CA: I mean, it’s… That’s saying a lot, ’cause I wrote a lot of really terrible stories, but I think it might be one of the worst stories I ever wrote. And it took me a long time to realize that conflict is not just people being nasty to each other, it’s not just people having deep-seated hatred or only one of us… It’s not even a thing of like you want this sandwich, I want this sandwich. Only one of us can have this sandwich and for some reason, we can’t just split it, like it doesn’t have to be that. It can be very… Conflict comes in many different forms, and a lot of times, conflict is subtle. A lot of times conflict is between people who like and appreciate and respect and admire each other, and they just have a difference of opinion about something.
0:38:45.2 CA: And I feel like in real life, we have conflict in a lot of situations where we wouldn’t necessarily classify it as, “I was at odds with this person.” It’s more just like, “We had a debate about this thing, and this person thought that this thing should go in the recycling bin and I thought it should go in the trash.” And so we discussed it for 30 seconds and that… We don’t register that as like we had a conflict.
0:39:07.1 SC: But that counts.
0:39:08.1 CA: But that is a conflict. And if you think about, for example, Becky Chambers is… I think that they’re called… It’s the Wayfarer tetralogy, the series that begins with a Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Those books are very gentle and very kind and very sweet, and they were a huge inspiration to me in writing Victories Greater Than Death and some of the other stuff I’ve written recently. And those books are full of conflict, but it’s not conflict on the sort of like, “We are now fighting.” It’s more like… Off the top of my head, it’s been a few years since I read a Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, but there’s one character who is keeping a secret. There’s one character who is slowly dying of a thing that could be prevented, but their religion says it shouldn’t be prevented, and other people want to prevent them from dying because they love this person.
0:39:57.5 CA: At one point, there is a thing where they’re, I think, attacked by interlopers. But for the most part, the conflict is not of the kind of shouty we’re throwing things at each other conflict. It’s much more gentle and subtle, and I think that we need to broaden our idea of what conflict is and how it can be done. I think that people who say that they wish they had movies with less conflict, what they really are… I don’t want to put words in someone else’s mouth, but I feel like when someone says that, what they’re really saying is, “I wish that the conflict was gentler and less kind of antagonistic and more kind of… ” Because I think that there’s one very specific type of conflict that people think of when they hear that word.
0:40:40.4 SC: Yeah, I think that’s a great attitude or perspective on conflict because it is… Especially if you don’t want the cartoonish super villain, or even in many of the modern superhero team-up movies, they seem to just feel the need to have the super heroes punch each other at some point for no especially good reason. And yes. Alright, let’s get over that. We know they’re going to team up, okay, but yeah. But no, conflict happens at a million different levels in our everyday lives, and so there is a cliche, but is it a truism? Is it obviously true or is it worth thinking about that conflict is interesting, that this is what grabs the reader’s attention, that the fact of that there are different possible ways to go and different characters want different things?
0:41:22.3 CA: I think that… You know, what’s interesting is when someone has to struggle and the struggle could… Again, the struggle could be very gentle. It could be very kind of… It could be a cheerful struggle, it could be a happy struggle, it could be a joyful struggle, it could be a struggle that is kind of a slow boil. It doesn’t have to be like, “Urgh.” It doesn’t have to be like, “We are now wrestling,” or whatever. But I think that… There’s that quote that Faulkner, that often-cited Faulkner quote that all storytelling is about the human heart in conflict with itself, and I think that characters who never have to make choices or have to kind of question themselves or never have to kind of work for their goals are not… We can think of probably a hundred exceptions to what I’m saying. But as a general rule, characters who don’t have to kind of grapple with things in some way are not usually interesting characters.
0:42:26.1 SC: Right. Okay.
0:42:27.2 CA: A character who is sure of everything, a character who never has to second guess anything, a character to whom everything comes very easily is not usually the most interesting character. And you could definitely have a story where it’s like, “I want to get into the space academy, and all my friends want me to get into the space academy, and my parents want me to get in, and everybody in the story wants me to get in, but I still have to pass this exam to get in and I’m stressing out about it. And in the end, I do get in and it’s a happy ending.” But I’m still like, “Oh, my gosh, am I going to get in?” [chuckle] That could be a story. Nobody in that story has to be saying, “I don’t want you to get in or I think you shouldn’t go or… ” You could have a story where… And you could have a story where it’s like about someone who is struggling with a personal decision where they have two options, which are both good options that are both… Neither of them is like a bad or destructive thing to do necessarily. They just have down… They have drawbacks.
0:43:26.5 CA: They each have… You can’t do both things. You have to do one thing. It’s like, “Am I going to go to Germany or am I going to go to France?” And they’re really trying to figure out which awesome country they want to go to, and in the end they make a choice or they decide they don’t want to go to either country, they want to go to New Zealand, but conflict… I guess what I’m saying is conflict doesn’t have to be nasty.
0:43:49.8 SC: No, I like the word struggle better ’cause you can struggle against the universe, not necessarily against other people, right?
0:43:55.2 CA: Yeah, exactly, and… And the other thing is, part of what Becky Chambers does so wonderfully in her books… I’m just going to keep kinda… Now, that I’ve kinda hit on her as an example, I’m just going to keep bringing it back to her. But part of what Becky Chambers does so wonderfully in her books is that when bad things do happen or when people are struggling with things, it’s an opportunity to show everybody else supporting that person and being kind to that person and being there for that person, and if nothing scary or taxing or troublesome ever happens, then you don’t have that opportunity to show how we support each other and how we help each other and how we hold each other up.
0:44:36.0 SC: Right.
0:44:37.7 CA: And so that’s the other side of it.
0:44:41.2 SC: Okay, good, I like that. I like that expanded conception of what conflict is. We do want… It can’t be easy. It’s not that interesting if everything just happens automatically, then that’s not really a very fascinating story. So let’s go back into the nitty-gritty. We have our premise. People are talking backwards. We have some characters. I mean, at what point do you make decisions like is it a first person narration versus third person? Is it a novel or a short story? Are we going to break it into a million scenes? Like all these nitty-gritty things, is this… Is that easy and natural at this point in your expert life or is that the hard part?
0:45:18.1 CA: No, I mean, I will change my mind about that stuff a lot at various points. Victories Greater Than Death, my newest book, was third person, it was the first person, it was present tense, it was past tense, it was…
0:45:32.1 SC: Oh, wow.
0:45:32.8 CA: And it had different structures, and I feel like that stuff… It is annoying if you are going through and changing first person to third person or vice versa because you’re always going to miss a bunch of…
0:45:47.3 SC: Some pronouns, yeah.
0:45:48.8 CA: Pronouns or whatever. The first five times you go through it, there’s always going to be the stray thing where you forgot to change something and it’s really confusing for the reader, but hopefully you catch it before it gets published. But it’s not that hard to go and change first person to the third person or vice versa. And you often get a certain way in and you’re like, “The way I’m telling this isn’t the way this needs to be told, and I’m going to go take a step back and change it or I’m just going to keep moving forward, but pretend that I always did it this other way and later I’ll go back and change the first chunk.”
0:46:22.0 CA: But I think that those kinds of decisions, you want to make them at the start, but sometimes you end up kinda changing your mind. And really, the main thing that you need to think about that is harder to change once you have a first draft is kind of just the sense of tone and vague sense of genre and sense of the kind of tag cloud or Venn diagram or whatever of what kind of things can happen in this story? And if you’re going to have going for a light whimsical tone, having people getting maimed and beheaded on every other page is going to… Unless you’re really going for very over the top high comedy kinda splatter comedy, it’s going to be really hard to be light and funny and whimsical with beheadings on every other page and blood splattering everywhere.
0:47:14.0 SC: People do try, but yeah.
0:47:14.0 CA: You can do it. You can do the Peter Jackson Dead Alive thing where there’s a guy with a lawn mower basically just shredding people’s bodies all over the place.
0:47:26.8 SC: Well, Quentin Tarantino goes for that quite a bit, right?
0:47:29.6 CA: I guess so, yeah. There’s like splatstick is like a whole sub-genre of horror.
0:47:33.2 SC: But it’s hard to pull off.
0:47:35.2 CA: But for the most part, you need to make these kinda tonal decisions because they do influence the kinds of things that can be allowed to happen in the story. And so once you change your mind about tone, you have to go around and kind of maybe cut out stuff that doesn’t fit the tone you’ve decided on.
0:47:53.1 SC: And then how nitty-gritty do you outline the entire plot from start to finish before you start writing, if at all? Do you just have like, “I’m going to get there to the end eventually,” which I suspect is GRR Martin’s way of doing things, but there’s other people who just write out the whole beat sheet so they know everything that’s going to happen, and then it’s just filling in some details to actually get it written.
0:48:13.4 CA: Yeah. I mean, I… As with most things, it varies depending on the different projects. In the past, I’ve mostly not been a big outliner before I start writing. With the young adult books, Victories Greater Than Death and the sequels, I definitely did a lot more outlining because those books are much more plot heavy and there was a lot of stuff where I was like, “Okay, I’m setting up this thing here and it has to pay off here.” And I have to really have an idea in my head of how this thing works or else it’s going to really bite me in the butt later. So there was a lot more of that with Victories Greater Than Death, but I generally… I try to leave a lot of room for surprises because like I said earlier, if I’m not surprising myself, it usually means that I’m kind of sleepwalking through the story a little bit, like surprises are how I keep excited about the story and how I keep invested in what’s going on.
0:49:05.4 CA: And definitely in the case of Victories Greater Than Death, there were a few things that happened where I was like, “This was definitely not what I planned on, but it’s way better than what I had planned on, and so I’m going to run with it, and it’s going to change the ending a lot, but I’m going to just… I know how to get around that.” But I…
0:49:22.4 SC: But sorry, let me… I need to sort of dig into that a little bit without… Hopefully without spoiling the book, but how exactly does that happen? I mean, you sort of have a vague idea of what the scene is you’re writing, and then you start writing it and you just feel it going somewhere else. I’m trying to get a tangible feeling for what is happening in your fingers as you’re typing here.
0:49:42.8 CA: Yeah. So I’ll give you an example from Victories Greater Than Death, which is like a little bit of a spoiler, but I’ve actually mentioned it a couple of other times recently in interviews. And I feel good about spoiling this part of the book because it’s something I’m actually kind of proud of and it’s… I don’t think it’s… It’s not a major spoiler. So in Victories Greater Than Death, the main character is Tina, and she’s very invested in kind of living up to this legacy that she’s been given of being this legendary space hero, and that’s her whole jam is that she wants to live up to this heroic legacy that she has inherited. And she wants to save the galaxy, and she’s on the path to do that.
0:50:24.9 CA: And so in my outline, I had basically the middle of the book there was going to be… She’s on this alien starship with a bunch of other kids from Earth. They’re having adventures. The adventures are kinda getting them closer to finding this thing that will help them to unravel the central mystery of the book, keeping it a little bit vague, but that’s kind of the general thing. So that was, the outline had that and it was like, “Okay, so here is just… There’s going to be an adventure here and it’s going to be just like some stuff happens,” and that was basically what was in the outline. And then I sort of write this scene where it… Tina and some of the other characters are trapped on a thousand-year-old starship, which was a fun setting to begin with, ’cause I love ancient starships. Who doesn’t?
0:51:09.5 CA: So Tina and the other characters are trapped on this thousand-year-old starship in the middle of nowhere, and they’re under attack. And as I was writing it, I just had this thing where I was like, “Okay, so because everybody else is incapacitated or doesn’t know how to fight, Tina is the only one who can get them out of this, and the only way she can get them out of this is by killing the people who are trying to kill them.” This space gun she’s got is a… It’s basically a gun. It kills. It doesn’t have a stun setting because that’s not a thing in my world, because it’s not Star Trek. So the gun, it’s a gun that kills. That’s all it does, and so… And Tina is like, “Okay, I’m following the footsteps of this space hero. Killing people is part of the job. I’m going to do it.”
0:51:57.0 CA: And so she does it. And afterwards, she’s like, “I’m fine. That was not a big deal. It’s all good.” And then a little while later, she just has an emotional breakdown.
0:52:06.9 SC: It hits, yeah.
0:52:08.4 CA: And just completely falls apart, because killing people is actually really scary and intense, and this thing of someone was alive a minute ago and now they’re not alive anymore. And even if they were trying to kill you and they maybe were not a good person, they had thoughts and dreams and a favorite food and a favorite kind of music, and they were a person. They had an inner life and you have put an end to that permanently, and that’s huge and… And as I was writing this, I was like, “This should be a big deal.” This should not be a thing that we just like, “Oh, okay, another adventure, moving on to the next thing.” It should be a thing that we… To go back to what I said earlier, that we struggle with. Tina should struggle with this. Everybody should struggle with this. It should be a thing that we actually really think about.
0:52:57.1 CA: And once I had that part of the book, it didn’t just feel like a one-off episode in the middle of the book that kind of was getting us closer to the plot thing. It felt like a turning point and it felt like the rest of the book had to kind of be about that on some level, because Tina’s going to keep being in situations where she has to kill or be killed, and what’s she going to do? And is she going to just keep on killing people because that’s the easiest way out of every situation? And so that ended up being a major part of the second half of the book and I actually changed the ending of the book in ways that I won’t get into because that is more of a spoiler. And it changed the rest of the trilogy a lot because Tina made some choices that changes her trajectory for the rest of the series and so… And I felt in the end really good about that.
0:53:48.1 CA: And after I had made that decision but while I was still in the middle of writing and revising the book, I went to this panel where these… It was like a panel at the Nebulas, I think in 2018, 2019, I don’t know. At the Nebula Awards where they had actual teenagers talking about young adult fiction. It was like everybody on the panel was either a teenager or maybe 20, and they were talking about what they liked and what they didn’t like in young adult fiction, and one thing that they kept coming back to is, “I want to see a violence and the consequences of violence dealt with in a realistic way. I don’t just want to see killing, killing, killing with no thought to the consequences.”
0:54:24.2 CA: And I was literally sitting there in the back row, in the audience of this panel, wiping the sweat off my brow because I was like, “I dodged a freaking bullet there.” I probably, if I hadn’t thought about this… If I hadn’t just written that scene and kind of gotten into the moment, I probably would’ve written a book where she goes around killing people and there’s never… We never deal with it. And I would just be like, “Yep, she’s a hero. She kills all these people. That’s great.” But because I had randomly written that scene and it just kinda hit me this certain way, I ended up with this thing that I think if those teens ever get around reading to that book, they’ll hopefully feel like I did the thing that they were saying they wanted to see more of.
0:55:01.9 CA: But I feel like… And I thought about it and not to get all on my high horse, but the more I thought about it, the more I was like being a teen in America today with all this insane violence and school shootings and drills and not knowing if somebody’s going to come into your school with an assault weapon, it’s actually probably really important to think about this stuff.
0:55:26.5 SC: Yeah, and…
0:55:29.0 CA: And to not treat it casually.
0:55:31.2 SC: Well, it’s a great answer to the original question because it does help illuminate how you can plot out what you think is going to happen, but then when you’re writing, you have to get into your characters’ heads, right? And you might realize… I mean, this is the great challenge of a fiction writer who has multiple characters, which is almost all of them, that it’s hard to imagine the full inner life of many different people who presumably have different goals and different ideas about things and you might… On the one hand, you might come to realize that they would feel a certain different way in a situation, but on the other hand, is that for you one of the challenges of just writing fiction at all or is that again, the easy part? I mean, for me, that would be hard. I think that if I did try, all of my characters would end up sounding like me, and that would be terrible, and you don’t want that.
0:56:17.0 CA: Yeah. That’s actually two separate things, I think. One is, how do you create a larger cast or a bunch of supporting characters who feel like people are not like just like non-player characters or whatever, NPCs. And then the other question is a question of dialogue and how to make people sound different, and those are related but separate questions, and I think that… I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I put myself in a situation where this young adult book has, or the trilogy, has a very large cast who I feel like I need to… Everybody needs to have an inner life to some extent, needs to have character growth over the course of the series, and there’s times when I’m like, I wish I hadn’t done that because there’s a lot of characters to track here, especially in the second and third books, because it just gets bigger and bigger.
0:57:09.1 CA: And I do read other books sometimes, both young adult and adult, where I’m like, “Okay, so basically there’s two characters in this book who feel like they have a real,” and I don’t want call out any specific books, but I read books sometimes where I’m like, “Okay, these two characters I feel like have a real interiority, everybody else is a little bit of an NPC, and a little bit of everything that they say or do relates back to the main character, and there’s never a sense of like this person really wishes that they were off doing this other thing,” like I want to be a golf pro, but I’m going to help you with your thing for now, but the moment an opportunity to be a golf pro arises, I’m going to be out of here.
0:57:48.4 CA: I think it’s really… So that thing of having everybody have an inner life among the supporting cast is tricky, and requires just like… Like with All the Birds in the Sky, one thing I did was I sat down and wrote a detailed origin story for 20 different characters in the book, because I was like if I know where they come from and how they got here and what motivated them before the story started, then I can at least kinda have a sense of where they’re going and what they’re pushing towards. So that was one thing. The other thing I think is something I learned from journalism, actually, that has been really helpful in writing fiction, is I feel like in journalism there’s kind of an unspoken rule, and I’m probably going to get hate mail from journalists for saying this, but in journalism, there’s an unspoken rule that if something happens three times it’s a trend.
0:58:37.9 SC: Yeah, no, that’s true, of course.
0:58:39.7 CA: Like you’re writing a trend piece for a newspaper or a magazine, and you’re like, here’s three examples of a thing happening, therefore it’s a trend, and maybe that’s the only three times that’s ever happened, but if there’s three times it’s clearly happening a lot, like…
0:58:58.4 SC: In the social media era, this has become too much because you can always find three people on Twitter to say absolutely anything, right, and so you, “The people on Twitter are saying… “
0:59:10.0 CA: Sometimes I wish tweets weren’t embeddable, because I feel like if tweets were not embeddable, journalists would have to actually do a little bit more leg work to find people saying stuff. Anyway, but that’s a whole other… Anyway, so once you know that something happening three times is a trend, this is so helpful because if you see a character do something three times, then you feel like you’re constantly seeing the character do that thing and it’s just three times and it could be a glimpse like, oh, this character is once again obsessing about this thing or… And you can use that to your advantage of like, okay, the first two times you saw them do it this way, but the third time they did it this way, so clearly they’ve gone through some change, and we don’t really have to spend a lot of time on that because the reader will pick up on it and be like, okay.
0:59:58.1 CA: And I think that… I’ve noticed this in my own, this is actually helpful, that rule if it happens three times it’s the trend is really helpful in general, because often when I’m revising my fiction in general, I’ll have something happen 10 times because I really want to kind of get across, this thing is happening a lot, and when I revise, I often will be like, “You know what, I can cut it down to this happening two or three times, and the reader will still think it’s happening a lot,” because the reader will notice… Like people pick up on things more than you think they will, even if they’re only subconsciously picking up on them, so that’s a really helpful rule to remember, and that’s one of the ways that journalism has helped me as the fiction writer is knowing that rule of the three times, which again, I apologize to all the journalists listening to this.
1:00:38.1 SC: Some of our best friends are journalists.
1:00:40.6 CA: So but the dialogue thing, the dialogue thing is really hard, and part of it is just getting outside of your standard own voice of the way you talk. And I do listen to the way people talk in real life, I eavesdrop sometimes, in a hopefully non-creepy way, I’m out on the street, I’ll hear people, snatches of their conversations, I will… I’ll just kind of be trying to consciously pick up on how people say things, to try to write naturalistic dialogue, but also I will… With characters, I’ll try to just be like, well, this character talks more kind of shorter, punchy sentences, this character talks in long run-on sentences that are just like no no no no no no no no no ’cause they’re so excited. This character will have like… Sometimes I’ll give a character a couple of catch phrases and I’ll try not to overuse it, but I’ll just be like, this character says this thing, and I’ll just try to let that seep in and I’ll… You read stuff out loud in general, the longer I do this, the more I feel like I have to read my stuff out loud in order to catch stuff because I’m so used to my own writing style and my own kind of writing voice that I don’t pick up on stuff, and sometimes unless I’m kind of reading it out loud and just… That kind of stuff jumps out at me more.
1:01:57.2 SC: Do you base characters on real people? Do you base characters on real people or aspects of characters on real people?
1:02:04.5 CA: No, no, not anymore, I think I did when I started out, but I definitely have stopped doing that because I feel like at this point I’ve created so many characters that I kind of ran out of real people, but also I just… I feel like basing characters on real people just gets you into trouble sometimes, not in the sense of like people will be like, “Oh, this character was based on me,” because I don’t feel like that really happens. By the time it’s a fictional character in a full-fledged story, they’ve kind of gone in a different direction, but it just… It’s kind of a limiting thing and it kind of keeps you from really knowing them as a fictional character, I think. So I will really try to… I’ll just try to come up with an interesting kind of like, like that “what if” thing that I talked about at the start, the what if of like, oh, what if there was a person who really wanted to be a doctor but they were afraid of needles, and so they became this other thing. And I just, I’ll try to come up with an interesting kind of spark that gets me kind of to start imagining this person, and then I’ll just try to run with that.
1:03:07.8 SC: I should have asked this before when you were talking about the character who shot someone and had to deal with it, but there is a sense, which I honestly don’t think I understand, but a sense in which stories have a moral point of view, not that the good people are necessarily rewarded and the bad people are punished, that obviously doesn’t always happen in stories, but we have the feeling that the story knows what is good and what is bad, and we get a little annoyed. Like some people were annoyed with WandaVision, for example, because they felt that the main character did some terrible things that she kinda just got away with without really suffering for. Is that a guiding principle to how you structure your story? Should there be kind of a moral point of view, and how does the story even have a moral point of view, it’s just a bunch of things happening over and over again.
1:03:56.8 CA: Yeah, I mean, that’s a huge question that we could talk about for a whole hour by itself, but you know, I guess two things about that. One is back when I was writing for io9 a lot, I think that I was one of the people who was really pushing the idea that stories have a meaning, and stories have a meaning that is political and personal and social, and that if you show a character doing a thing, there are ways that you indicate kind of a point of view about that and that you have to kind of acknowledge that, and if you show someone going around killing people all the time, you are kind of saying something about violence in a way.
1:04:35.9 CA: And I love action movies, I love James Bond movies, I love the John Wick movies, I love… I love movies that have a high body count, don’t get me wrong at all, but I feel like there is a way in which you kind of walk away from a movie like that with a certain feeling about violence and, you know, I remember being a teenager and walking out of a James Bond movie and just like having this weird flash my head of like, “Yeah, I’m going to go get in a fight with somebody,” not because I wanted to get in a fight because I… But I was just still so amped up from watching James Bond just kill basically a small army of people by himself. And I just like… It wasn’t even an intention, it was just like a flash in my head of like, “Ooh, fighting,” and then it was… By the time I had walked out and thrown my soda in the trash, that was already gone, but it was just… It was like a brief spark in my head.
1:05:29.5 CA: Don’t go telling your listeners that I’m like, that I’m going to get in a brawl with them or that I’m like a mass murderer or whatever.
1:05:38.5 SC: They will draw their own conclusions.
1:05:40.6 CA: So I think that stories do have a point of view, but I think that, more to the point, whenever you are creating a piece of fiction or a piece of storytelling, you have in your head an ideal reader or a person you were telling the story to. And I think that a lot of times we don’t really think about that, and part of where we get into trouble is that, as someone who is white and has a certain end of class privilege and stuff, my default is to assume or to kind of picture in my head that the person who’s reading my story or consuming the thing I’m creating is going to share certain characteristics with me, and of course, that’s not going to be true in every case, in many cases.
1:06:16.6 CA: And so there’s a certain amount of imaginative labor that you have to do to kind of project yourself to a reader who is not you, who is not someone who shares your viewpoint. And I think that having an ideal reader in your head is a really valuable thing, because it allows you to be like, anticipate somebody is going to think this is happening, and I have to either play to that or play against that, and like you have to know what the audience is expecting. If you want to confound their expectations, you have to know how to meet your audience. But I think that at the same time, it’s really good to kind of… And this is part of why I hire sensitivity readers, it’s part of why I try to read fiction written by people who are not from my same community or my same culture or my same background. I think it’s really good to project yourself beyond your own experience in terms of imagining your own ideal reader. And I think that’s a lot of where people fall down.
1:07:14.1 CA: I don’t think… I don’t ever think stories need to be morality tales or that they need to be didactic. Again, we talked about didactic fiction at the start, I don’t think stories have to be just so stories or where… Like, if you do this, this will happen. If you kill someone, you’re going to like your head’s going to explode or whatever. But I think that you should at least understand the model of the world that you’re creating for your reader and the kind of reader that you think you’re creating that novel for, and maybe try to think beyond just like, you know, yourself and your three friends.
1:07:51.4 SC: Well, yeah, and as the writer, you do have control over not just the events of the story, but how they are commented on or what their repercussions are. I think that the problem with WandaVision was that Wanda does some terrible things, and then one of the other characters, instead of saying, “Wow, those are some terrible things,” says to her, “Well, they don’t understand that you’ve gone through a lot too.” And so that just goes into the point of view of the story in some sense, and I guess one way or the other, your story is going to be judgy of itself. I mean, your story is going to render certain things that happen in the plot as, well, it’s terrible that that happened, but it happened, or yay, this happened.
1:08:34.6 CA: Yeah, I think that, like I said, every story has a point of view and every story is communicating to someone and is kind of building a model of the world in a way and… Yeah, sorry, I’m just repeating myself now, but… Yeah.
1:08:47.6 SC: Good, I’m glad we’re on the same wavelength. Okay, speaking of building a model of the world, again, you said a whole bunch of things earlier on that I don’t want to let completely slip by. Part of the process for any fiction writer, but for science fiction fantasy especially, is the world-building process, right, and I guess that would be another topic that I’m sure we could go on for many hours and podcasting about, probably you have, we should put that in the links in the show notes. But let me ask a single question, it seems that in the real world, if we just imagine what the future is going to be like 500 years from now, it’ll probably be different than now in a million different ways, so many ways that it’s almost unrecognizable, but it seems that what a lot of stories do is to pick a few ways to highlight that things are different and then keep other things more or less recognizable to people in our current circumstances.
1:09:41.6 SC: Is that… I guess my question is, is that once again a fair characterization, is that a smart thing to do, or would it be even better to try to really imagine how wonderfully different things are going to be in some very different circumstances?
1:09:53.6 CA: Yeah, I think that it’s really hard to imagine a future and account for a million different kinds of technological change and social progress, and the ways in which, like I sometimes think about how different the world was 100 years ago or 200 years ago, and how foreign our time would seem to someone from the early 20th, early 19th century, and I think that we kinda under-rate how drastic these changes sometimes often are and how complex and multi-layered they are. And you can kinda go at it from the direction of trying to start from now and forecast your way forward, like Years and Year, that TV show that Russell T Davies created a year or two ago, which starts in the present and works its way forward, I think… I forget, like 20 years, I can’t remember exactly how far forward it gets.
1:10:48.2 CA: But… And there’s been other things that do that. I think Samuel Delany wrote a book that does that, Doris Lessing did that in her Martha Quest books, and it’s really hard because it’s kind of fractal or whatever, and you know, there’s like every single change has a million unintended consequences and second order effects, and so it’s like it just becomes like this really complicated thing. Or you can come at it from the opposite point of view and do kind of like a Philip K Dick style thing, and just be like, we’re going to pick 100 years from now and just make it really weird in a bunch of ways, and not really sure how we got from here to there, and just have it be kind of bizarre.
1:11:30.9 CA: And I’ve definitely done that. Like I have a story called… I’ve written a story called I’ll Have You Know, which was actually adapted into an audio dramatization that I really encourage people to hunt down, and I’ll Have You Know takes place at some point in the medium-term future, probably 100, 200 years from now, and it’s just a weird… Everything is kind of augmented reality, everything is… People are learning in their sleep, people are living to be 130-140 years old routinely. Everything is just like bizarre and off-kilter, and it has a little bit of a cartoony feel to it, because I’m not trying to plausibly say, well, this is exactly how I think technological and social change will play out, it’s just more, here’s a bunch of wacky stuff happening, and it’s kind of a vaguely coherent and a self-evident view of the future.
1:12:37.6 CA: And I think that that’s often safer ground. I think that it’s never really possible to predict even five years from now in a way that’s holistic. I think that you’re going to end up with… You’re going to end up missing a lot of stuff, and you know, someone five years ago trying to predict now probably would have missed a lot of what we’re dealing with right now. Like if someone in March 2016 was trying to predict March 2021, there’s some stuff that they would not have seen coming, let’s just say.
1:13:04.5 SC: I think so. But you’re… Maybe to land the plane here a little bit, your most recent novel just coming out now is a young adult novel, which is a departure for you, but it’s still a science fiction, yes? It’s still a galactic empire, kind of things, saving the galaxy. So what pushed you in that direction? Is this a long-standing ambition that you’ve had to write a young adult novel, or did you think it’d just be fun or is that where the real money is? What’s going on here?
1:13:35.4 CA: So I’ve always loved young adult fiction, like young adult fiction is… There’s actually a Washington Post article from 2011 where I’m just like going on about how much I feel like young adult fiction is the most exciting writing happening. So at least 10 years, I’ve been really just a huge fan of YA, and… But I always thought about writing YA. And you know, I had been noticing that YA had taken a turn, like maybe five years ago, I was starting to notice that YA was really taking a turn from being more kind of dystopian, like The Hunger Games, divergent, uglies, like there was a lot of dystopian YA for a long time that was kind of like a dark future where everything is terrible.
1:14:18.0 CA: And there was… YA seemed like it kinda took a turn away from that towards kinda fun action adventure storytelling, that was more kind of like the kind of stuff that I grew up loving, and more kind of like a space in which you could do your own version of something like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy, or Doctor Who. And I was reading books like Warcross by Marie Lu, and just a ton of other YA books that were coming out around the time that were just super fun and super exciting and just like had some, had angst and had kind of emotional stuff in them, but also were just like fast-paced adventures, and like Leigh Bardugo does all these books that are just super exciting and fun, and they’re keepers, kind of, and they’re just like… And they’re in a world that’s just really fun and exciting and there’s darkness, but there’s also just like swashbuckling adventures and fights, and were just…
1:15:15.7 CA: That was something that really appealed to me greatly, and I’d always wanted to find a way to do my own kind of like just zippy action adventure thing where I could be like, “Here’s my version of Star Trek, Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy, She-Ra.” You know, She-Ra wasn’t out yet, but that became a thing that I aspired to. As I was working on this, and Steven Universe also, I hadn’t yet really gotten into Steven Universe, but… So stuff like that. And so I was like, okay, maybe it’s time for me to really think about doing a YA, now that YA has taken this turn in a direction that’s exciting to me. And I just thought a lot about when I was a teenager, what was the thing that I was really obsessed with and what was the story that I would have wanted to read, and what’s the wish fulfilment that I would have wanted when I was a teenager, kind of, because I love wish fulfilment storytelling, I think it’s an underrated thing, along with escapism, and I really thought about when I was a teenager, I desperately wanted a space ship to just come down and land in front of me and have aliens come out and be like, “Hey, you actually belong with us, you don’t belong on this cruddy planet, come with us. We’re your real people.”
1:16:28.8 CA: And I still kinda wish that would happen, and just like take me away from Earth forever, kind of. And so I was just waiting for that to happen when I was a teenager, and so I was like, okay, what if that actually happened? And what if there was a teenager who actually did kind of belong in space and was actually really secretly an alien and had this awesome destiny and this awesome kind of adventure waiting for her in space. And that was my starting point. And then of course, because I always want to make things more complicated and more… And it’s not… The thing about wish fulfilment is there have to be complications and problems or else it’s just boring. I was like, okay, so, what goes wrong with this or what are the issues that she’s going to deal with. And that kind of… That kind of got into some stuff that felt really juicy to me about like what it means to be a hero, and I talked before about when she has to kill people for the first time and how hard that is.
1:17:22.5 CA: And so that kind of… It became a way for me to kind of think about a lot of these stories that I’d loved growing up, and kind of examine them from this other vantage point, and that felt just really fun and juicy and interesting to me, and that was kind of the rabbit hole I went down.
1:17:41.3 SC: A final… This is going to be a very down-to-earth question, but it’s not just a book, it’s the first book of a trilogy, right? I mean, how does that work? Do you, again, plot out the whole trilogy ahead of time, how does it change the writing of the first book to know that there’s going to be two books after it?
1:18:00.5 CA: How it works is that I bang my head against the wall over and over and over again until I’m seeing stars. I don’t know, it’s like this is my first time writing a trilogy, and I keep saying, next time maybe I’ll just write one book and break it into three, because I just thought, well, write like a really long thing and then figure out how to break it as a three things, because gosh, it’s so hard. And I think that… I mean, when I sold it, I had a big chunk of the first book, but I also had an outline of the second and third books, and then I made a lot of choices in the course of writing the first book that drastically changed the second and third books, so I had to go back and outline them again.
1:18:38.6 CA: And at this point, the second book is basically done, and I have a really good outline of the third book, so it’s coming along, but there was a lot of trial and error. For me, there’s always a lot of trial and error, unfortunately, there’s a lot of stumbling in the dark before I find the light switch or the path forward or whatever. But yeah, trilogies are really hard, and middle parts of trilogies are especially hard because you can’t resolve everything, you have to kinda just move things forward, but not resolve everything.
1:19:10.0 CA: And in this trilogy in particular, the first book, I kind of… In the first book, Tina is mostly on this alien starship with a group of other kids from Earth and a bunch of alien characters and they’re… This isn’t really a spoiler, and they’re dealing with this quest that they’re on, and there’s a bunch of stuff where I’m like, well, I’ll explain that in the second book. We can see that in the second book. Well, there’s all this bigger galactic politics stuff, and we’ll explore that in the second book. And then it was like time to write second book, and it was like, yeah, why did I do that? Why did I leave all this stuff for myself to deal with in the second book?
1:19:48.0 CA: And the good news is there’s nothing that I set up in the second book that is going to be hard to pay-off. Well, it’s going to be hard in the sense that writing is always hard, but by the time the second book is over, I’ve already pretty much shown you everything I need to show you, and the third book is just going to be like action because everything’s been established, so I’m actually dying to get back to the third book once I hand in the revision of the second book, because I think that’s going to be pure candy.
1:20:14.2 CA: The second book is a lot of… A lot of world-building, because there’s a lot of stuff where I’m like, well, there’s a galactic society, we only kind of glimpse it in the first book, and we really see it in the second book, and then the third book is just like fun, fun, fun, fun fun.
1:20:29.2 SC: That’s good. It’s pay-off, yeah.
1:20:30.8 CA: Not that the second book isn’t fun, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to… I don’t want you to tell…
1:20:34.9 SC: So much fun.
1:20:35.6 CA: I don’t want anybody to come away from this with the idea that the second book is going to be a slog. In fact, I’m really grateful that people who’ve read the second book so far are like, “You managed to keep the pace and excitement of the first book going,” which I’m like, “Thank you. That’s really… I was worried, so I’m really glad to hear that.”
1:20:53.2 SC: Some of us like the world-building.
1:20:53.3 CA: But the second book, there’s just more world-building that I had to really work… And there was a lot of trial and error with that.
1:20:58.8 SC: I’m re-reading some of Iain Banks’ Culture novels, which are classics, of course, but I had forgotten how much of them are just him describing the galaxy and the culture and all the different things, like the plot could be… Literally half the book, you could have the same exact plot, but it’s great, it’s delicious, you eat it up, so I don’t think that’s something to be worrying about. What do you think for the audience members who as a final thought are ready to write their first novels, what are the words of encouragement or inspiration or education you want to leave them with? I mean, how should they start going down…
1:21:31.2 CA: Run away, save yourselves! No, no, no, I’m just kidding. Writing is fun, and you know, the thing is, I feel like, I mean, writing is incredibly hard and painful and stressful, and there’s all this anxiety, especially if you start thinking of the publishing part of it, which is, it’s a whole other thing, because it’s business, and business is always more kind of stressful in its own way. But the thing is, writing should be fun, and there are ways to make it fun. And you know, just remember to have fun and play, I think, be playful and like revel in it, at least some of the time, revel in the like I’m a god in my own private universe, anything I say goes, I can have everybody be like nine feet tall and bright pink if I want, and nobody can tell me that that’s not okay.
1:22:21.5 CA: And just, you know, have fun with it, and there will be horrible, painful, awful parts, but there should also be parts where you’re just having fun playing and inventing stuff. And the other piece of advice I always give to beginning writers is find ways to make it communal, find a writing group, find people to read your work to, share your work online, go on Instagram Live and read your stuff that you’ve just written, go on YouTube and post YouTube videos, go on Wattpad or on Scribd… I’m not sure if it’s Srib-D or Scribe-D, but you know, go online, share your stuff with people. If we ever start gathering in the real world, gather in the real world and share your stuff with people, go to open mic nights, go to writing workshops, have a group of peers that you talk to and you commiserate with, find community, because writing doesn’t have to be this terrible solitary lonesome thing, it can be a thing that is a shared experience, and that’s often a much better way to go about it.
1:23:19.7 SC: Just so you know, all the advice you just gave to writers works equally well for theoretical physicists, so it might be much more general than you expected, so…
1:23:28.2 CA: Wait, theoretical physicists are a god in their own private universe?
1:23:32.0 SC: Oh, yes, of course, you’re inventing the laws of physics, come on, what do you mean? Should be the most fun thing you could possibly do. Alright, Charlie Jane Anders, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast. I was a lot of fun.
1:23:43.7 CA: Yay, thanks for having me. This was a blast.
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