by Robert Reed
By now it’s well-known that you’re a prolific writer, but I’ve heard you mention that when you were writing Blackbirds (2012), the first Miriam Black novel, you were unable to finish it for four years. What were some of the key things that you learned during that time?
I often refer to myself as a pantser by heart but a plotter by necessity, so when someone taught me how to outline—well, not really taught me so much as just forced me to sit down and do it—it was pretty amazing how suddenly I was able to get all the ducks that had previously been wandering akimbo in one neat little duck row.
I had this idea that the outline killed magic. And I understand the point, and people still say to me, “When I write the outline, it’s not fun. It doesn’t feel like I’m originating the story anymore. I’m not harnessing magic so much as I’m just writing details.” Which I understand, and I think some people can over-outline, and kill their own enthusiasm about a book by getting down to every beat. But I think if you hit the tent-pole pieces, the broad bases, the magic is still there. Planning a journey from point A to point B, whether you’re walking it, or doing in a car, or doing it in a story, you’re always free, upon execution of the journey, to make changes, and take exits you didn’t think you would normally take. And that’s where the magic still exists.
Part of it was also just about shedding some of the illusions I had about writing novels. I had already gotten rid of some of those illusions, because before that novel I was a freelance writer for the pen-and-paper game industry, so I was very good with discipline and deadlines, which are necessary for a writing career. But somehow I still held the novel as this artistic pinnacle, this thing that was very high up and required all these artful things. Losing that illusion was valuable to me.
Now that you do follow a more structured approach, do you find that your characters still surprise you?
It’s one of those things where I’m aware that I control the characters. I’m not under the illusion that they’re mysterious entities from beyond space and time who puppet me, and I’m just their machine. Sometimes we have this idea—and it’s a cool idea—that we’re like a conduit for the characters, a prophet for them in some way. But I think what happens is that you have to let your conscious and sub-conscious minds have a little field day.
The stuff in the outline is stuff you’ve thought about more completely in the front of your brain. But then there’s all the stuff that goes in the back of your brain, stuff that happens in the life you live, stuff you’ve seen, experienced, things that happen when you sleep. Your brain is like a slow cooker when you sleep, and all kinds of weird ideas bubble up.
So for a lot of that, you just have to have the opportunity for it to come out. You can’t be so married to an outline that you’re not willing to seize those moments of inspiration. But again, it’s important to see that those moments of inspiration are not externally driven. There’s not some little muse elf under my desk quietly feeding me Post-it notes when I’ve appeased him well. It’s all me. We’re our own gods in this world: we just have to listen to all the weird, secret, unconscious/sub-conscious language.
Given that your earlier works are horror- or crime-centric, what led you to YA science fiction with the Heartland trilogy?
It started with a joke. I was just kidding around on my blog. I do flash fiction challenges and talk a lot about writing and genre. I was talking about “-punk”, like cyber-punk, diesel-punk, steam-punk, and I wanted to create new types, so as an example I came up with “corn-punk.” It’s about a world taken over by corn, and the rich people control it, and the poor people tend to it.
And then I thought about it and said, “Dibs, you can’t have that” but I still put it in the post and waved everybody away, and made it clear it was mine by urinating on it or however it is you mark things. That was the seed of the idea. It wasn’t really a story or a book yet, but the core, or kernel—pun—of an idea. It was around that time I discovered that my wife was pregnant.
Talk about a kernel!
Right. Talk about a seedling. So I realized that my books up until this point had really put the “adult” in “adult fiction,” and since I wouldn’t want my son to read them until he was at least thirty-five or thirty-six years old, I thought, “Let’s get a little closer to his age and meet him halfway.” Now when he’s maybe fourteen or fifteen I’ll have a book for him.
Did you find that your approach had to change because it was science fiction?
Yes, because it requires a lot more worldbuilding. I spent a lot more time not just on worldbuilding but on the draft in general. Previous to that, while Blackbirds took four or five years of being lost in the wilderness like old people get lost in the mall, Mockingbird (2012) I wrote in thirty days, The Cormorant (2013) in forty-five. There wasn’t a ton of worldbuilding there. I was very comfortable and confident in what I was doing.
The first Heartland book took me about a year. I still wrote the first draft in about two months, and literally finished it the week my son was born, but it still took a year after that to draft and redraft. By the end of that probably half of the book was entirely rewritten. I was trying to make sure all the worldbuilding didn’t overwhelm the story. You still have to tell a story about people doing awesome things, you can’t be like, “Here’s a detail about corn.” So it was all about finding the balance and managing it.
You were setting out to write the Dune of corn.
Yes, corn-Dune! Actually, John Hornor Jacobs, who has written his own wonderful YA with The Twelve-Fingered Boy series, blurbed it as “Star Wars meets John Steinbeck.” That’s one of my favorite descriptions.
Can you share anything about what we can expect in volumes two and three of the Heartland trilogy?
Sure. I’m writing three now, so I won’t go too deep into that one. But Blightborn, the second book, which comes out in July, is almost twice the size of the first book. Not only is it more epic in scope, it takes us up into the skies, into the flotillas, and it focuses more heavily on Gwennie, in addition to Cael. About half the book is from Gwennie’s perspective and it shifts perspective a lot more. There’s more worldbuilding details in this one: more about the history of the Empyrean, the religion and so on. It’s much meatier. The third one will probably be slimmer again, more like the summation at the end of a standoff.
Given the book’s preoccupation with genetically-engineered corn, I’m interested in whether you watch documentaries like Food Inc. or Fed Up, and if you monitor your own consumption of corn/corn-derivatives in your diet?
Yep. King Corn is a good one. All of that stuff informs the book.
And yes, we do, not because I’m somehow heavily anti-GMO, but because I’m anti the power behind GMOs. I don’t like any one thing in concentrated corporate power. Specially now, having a son, we’re more aware of what goes into his mouth, as well as mine, so we try to keep to things that are not highly processed. I don’t worry too much about fats, and even to some degree sugars, as long as they’re natural and not over-wrought, but it’s tricky. It’s amazing how many things are made of corn.
Do you have a career plan for the next few years?
It’s very much about options for me. If I want to write X, Y, Z books and those books aren’t selling, what do I do? If for some reason a certain publisher or market falls apart, what do I do? I’m frequently telling people on my blog that you need to cleave to diversification in your work. You can’t just publish one way with one company with one genre and expect to be safe. You might be, by the grace of all of the gods and that little elf under your desk, but if for some reason that all breaks apart like a cookie under a foot, you have to wonder where you’re going to jump to next. If you have already diversified, you have ways to move that don’t feel artificial, to you or to your audience. That’s the key for me: being diversified.
What’s the worst writing advice (besides “Quit”) that you’ve ever been given?
I went to school and I focused on fiction writing in English. T
here were two schools of thought. My actual advisor and the teacher who I worked most with was literarily-minded but very genre-friendly. You could sit and talk with him about Fantastic Four or Hulk comic books. There was another teacher who was a poet laureate, and anytime you tried to write something for her class that was genre-based she would say, “Stay away from genre.” I don’t think all literary writers are like that, but certainly in academia you find a little of that.
Given that I make my money from writing genre fiction, and from what I understand she does not make money from writing, except teaching writing, I’m going to go with that genre writing was a pretty good choice for me.
Do you gleefully send her a signed copy of each new novel you publish, with a few dollar bills tucked inside the pages for good measure?
I should do that. Here’s a couple of bucks: enjoy your poems.
Wow, that would be such a jerk move. But so tempting.
Last question: Any chance that we’ll ever get to see a re-tooled version of the buddy-up adventure between Pac-Man and the Xenomorphs from Alien you thought up when you were a kid?
If I could get the rights to those stories, if someone were to allow me to write a licensed comic book featuring Pac-Man vs. the Xenomorphs, I would be on that like flies on a dead body.
About the Author
Alvaro is the co-author, with Robert Silverberg, of When the Blue Shift Comes, which received a starred review from Library Journal. Alvaro’s short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog, Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex and other venues, and Alvaro was nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Award. Alvaro’s reviews, critical essays and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, SF Signal, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, and other markets. Alvaro currently edits the blog for Locus.
Another Word:
Chasing the High
Daniel Abraham
When you start out wanting to be a writer, you’re screwed. You haven’t read enough to really understand what writing is. There are all sorts of different genres, and you may not know if you’re better at detective novels or literary vignettes or personal essays. You’re pretty impressed by some of the stuff you’ve done when you’re noodling around, but most of it’s not very good. (And you’re probably not actually sure which parts are impressive and which ones aren’t very good.) There’s a whole obscure mechanism between you and getting publishing that you’ve got no idea about, and you don’t want to look stupid. Plus, it seems like everyone you know wants to be a writer, and almost all of them fail, which is, let’s say, discouraging. The sheer volume of things you need to figure out is unmanageable and huge. You’re screwed.
When you start sending out stories, you’re screwed. There are only a few markets that publish the kind of stories you write, and the slush piles there are like broken faucets that won’t turn off. You want to stand out, but short of printing your story on bright blue paper or including a chocolate bar with the submission, you don’t know how to do that. No one knows your name.
Every rejection slip—and holy cow are there a lot of rejection slips—makes it a little easier to just not send out the next story. The idea of paying someone to publish your stuff just so it’s out there—just so you can see your words in print—starts to seem like maybe a pretty good idea even though part of you knows that’s the despair talking. The Holy Grail is a personal rejection letter, because at least that would mean someone cared enough to respond to you. You’re screwed.
When you start selling a few stories, you’re kind of screwed. You have a few things in print, and you’ve gotten checks for a couple hundred dollars to prove it! The people in your writer’s group threw you a little party after the first one, but when the third sale came through, the congratulations started getting kind of perfunctory.
Now that you don’t need the emotional support, you’re not getting as much of it. Except that you’re still basically unknown, and you’re still getting an awful lot of rejections that sting just as much as they did before. You’ve sent your novel out to a few agents and gotten polite “Not for me” answers. You’ve gone to a few conventions and actually been on panels, which on one hand was really cool, and on the other left you feeling kind of like an impostor. The world’s full of people who published a few short stories and then vanished without a literary trace, and you’re starting to think that you may be one of those.
When you sell your first novel, you’re screwed, but only a little. Yeah, there are still a lot of dangers and hurdles coming. The book may or may not get good reviews. You don’t know how it’s going to sell. You’re really jazzed by the cover art, even if there are maybe a couple little things you’d have done differently. Your friends and family are congratulating you. There’s the anxiety that maybe it will fail, but when you walk into the bookstore and see your book on the shelf for the first time, it’s like being in a dream. Yes, if the numbers aren’t good, the publisher may not pick up the next book. Yes, the advance you got for it was less than you’d have made working a minimum wage job for the same hours you spent writing. Yes, some of your unpublished friends seem a little resentful. But at least now you can say you’re really a writer. This is kind of the high-water mark. You should enjoy it.
When you’ve sold a few books, you’re screwed. Your first novel didn’t set the world on fire, but it did okay. It sold through maybe eighty percent of the copies that went out. Only then the bookstores ordered twenty percent fewer of the next title, and that one sold through about eighty percent. So when the third book hit, and they ordered eighty percent of eighty percent of your first book’s numbers, you started looking at a consistent pattern of lower sales, and the eBook sales haven’t been high enough to buck the trend.
Now your editor is talking about how the subgenre you write in is kind of oversaturated. And there was that one asshole reviewer on Goodreads who totally savaged you for no good reason. When you very politely pointed out that they’d misread the book, the Internet fell on your head for a week. You’re in the death spiral. The good reviews you get are easy to forget and the bad ones linger at the back of your head for days. You’re watching your career die, and the war stories from other writers about the times their careers were shot out from under them only help a little. You’re screwed.
When you hit the bestsellers list, you’re screwed, and no one believes it. You’re a success fercrissakes! This is what the brass ring looks like. Your series actually built, you’ve quit your day job. You’re supporting yourself on the writing alone. You don’t get to complain anymore. Ever. Because nobody has any sympathy.
Someone wrote a savage blog post that got passed around dissecting how exactly your books show you’re a vacuous, stupid, venal person who wants to degrade all that’s good in the world because you’re stupid. And then a hundred comments after it praised the blogger for being brave enough to speak the truth.
A reviewer at a major magazine uses your name as a synonym for bad writing? Suck it up. Or stay off the Internet. If you defend yourself, you’re only going to make it worse. And the sneaking suspicion that you’re only selling your story to the anthology so they can put your name on the cover (and not because the story is good) isn’t something anyone wants to hear. The way that your new book coming out has gone from a massive rush to “Yay, now get back to work” isn’t interesting. Your problems don’t count anymore. You won!
If that’s a little lonely, a little isolating, less fun than you thought it was going to be, if you still feel like an impostor, literally nobody wants to hear you whine about it. So shut up and live the dream. No one wants to hear how you’re screwed.
When you’re one of the handful that make it all the way to the top—recognition, awards, more money than you’ll ever be able to spend—weirdly, you’re screwed. You’re a celebrity now. When you go out in public, strangers come up to you constantly and it’s your job to be nice and polite no matter how awkward it is or how bad you feel.
If you make a bad joke on Twitter, it’s a headline on Slate and Gawker. The praise for your work seems almost unrelated to the actual words you put on the page, and the story about who you are feels like people are talking about someone else.
Whenever you meet new people, it feels like they can’t see past your persona. There are maybe three or four people in your life who aren’t asking for things from you. The money is great, and it solves a lot of problems, but not all of them. They won’t let you walk the floor at Comicon anymore because of the security risk. You don’t go out to the movies. You know that your writing is a commodity now just because it’s got your name on it.
The jokes about how you could blow your nose on a piece of paper and get a six-figure advance are funny because they speak to a real fear. Maybe you’re not good anymore, because you don’t have to be. The passion that started you down this path is still there, and so is the fear. You want to be good, but maybe you’re only successful. And with the story about you so much bigger than the story you’re writing, there may not be a way to judge anymore.
A writing career is a constantly shifting environment where there is no promised land. There’s only a changing, and hopefully improving, set of problems.
The constants—the pleasure of reading a really good story or paragraph or sentence or phrase (or, even better, writing it), the well-considered praise of a respected voice, the sense of having learned something new or relearned something old in a deeper way—have to be enough, because they’re what we have.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And the good. And the work.
About the Author
Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.
