Creativity & Survival with Charlie Jane Anders – WNP 134

Sarah Werner:

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner.

Sarah Werner:

Hello, friends. I am back again this week, and I have with me a very, very special guest. I’m super excited to introduce you to Charlie Jane Anders, who is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, as she likes to say on her podcast, which is the first book in a new young adult trilogy coming, well, that’s already come out in April 2021, along with the forthcoming story collection, Even Greater Mistakes. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky, which is the first of her books that I had read.

Sarah Werner:

Her fiction and journalism have appeared in, get ready for this list, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, which please read that if you don’t already, Mother Jones, The Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Yes, other places exist in addition to that 1000 that I just listed. She also has a TED Talk which you should listen to called, Go Ahead, Dream About the Future, and, well, two more things. She has a podcast called Our Opinions Are Correct, which is about sci-fi and which I have been enjoying greatly as of late.

Sarah Werner:

And then, finally, maybe not finally, it will never be finally. There is a wonderful new book, Never Say You Can’t Survive: How To Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. I’m holding this book up to the camera even though we’re not recording this, and so I’m going to put the book back down. I would love to welcome Charlie Jane to the show. Hello. Hi.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Hi. Oh my God. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such an honor to be here. I really appreciate it. I love your podcast.

Sarah Werner:

Oh gosh. Thank you. The honor is all mine. I love your podcast. I was just listening to your episode about hive minds this morning, which is one of my favorite things. But that’s not what we’re going to talk about right now. The first thing I would just love to talk to you about, Ms. Charlie Jane, is what is your favorite thing about creating? You’ve been creating for a long time. You’ve made so many amazing things. Tell me a little bit about what creativity means to you.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. I mean I think that what I really love about creativity is basically it’s two related things. First of all, it’s that thing where you just kind of get into … I don’t know. You get into a kind of trance or you get into a head space and things just kind of start coming out that you’re like, “Oh, where did that come from? Didn’t see that coming.” That’s the other thing that I really love. The thing that I really love is when I surprise myself or my work surprises me, when I’m just like, “Okay, this is what’s going to happen and this and this and this and this.”

Charlie Jane Anders:

And then a feeling just comes out of left field that completely changes everything. You’re like, “Well, we’re doing that now because that is way more awesome.” I feel like those two things are related because I often get the most interesting surprises when I go the most into a kind of state of not really … My usual executive-function brain is not just being like … Instead, it’s the part of my brain that’s a little bit more wild and loopy is coming out with stuff that just kind of happens.

Sarah Werner:

I appreciate you saying that. I feel like we’re just very much on the same wavelength there.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yay.

Sarah Werner:

One of my favorite things about writing is how you can surprise yourself and how you can just mine your brain for that magic you didn’t even know was there. It’s beautiful. It’s just pure magic, and I love that. So I appreciate you saying that so much.

Charlie Jane Anders:

It really is. I feel like it’s one of the things I’ve had to train myself to do. It’s not something that I just was like, “Okay.” I mean I always got lost in my own head and had my own stories just kind of bubbling up in my brain, from a very young age. But that thing of going into a … I keep wanting to use the word, trance. Going into kind of a state and coming out with something that I didn’t expect, that’s like I trained myself to do. I feel like that’s actually a thing that people … Well, that should come naturally because we all zone out or whatever.

Charlie Jane Anders:

But I feel like, no, you have to actually train yourself to listen. You have to train yourself to pay attention, and letting yourself do that and not beating yourself up for … Especially writing, I’m just zoning out.

Sarah Werner:

Tell me more about how you trained yourself to get into this state. You call it a trance. It’s, I think, also known as state of flow. How did you train yourself to maybe not only get in there, but to stay in there and not judge yourself or scold yourself for doing that?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Man, I think it’s definitely one part of it is accepting that that’s part of writing and getting out of your own way and understanding that it’s not just about putting words on the page. That’s definitely part of it. I think also I think it does connect up with intentionality, and just part of my writing practice is that I’m constantly asking myself questions about the work and constantly just being like, “Okay, what is this? Who are these people? What’s this story about? Why am I writing this story? What am I trying to get at here?”

Charlie Jane Anders:

I feel like constantly poking at myself and asking these questions does kind of shake something loose sometimes. I also think it’s one of those things that, like meditation, I think it is a thing that the more you do it, the better you get at it. So I don’t know if train is the right word, but I think that the more you allow yourself to kind of zone out and come back and purposely zone out … It’s weird because I don’t always think I’m going to zone out and then I’m going to come up with an answer to this thing.

Charlie Jane Anders:

It’s more like I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I’m thinking, and I just get lost in my own thoughts. And then eventually, something comes out of it. I think that the more I do that, the more it becomes second nature to do that. So it’s almost just like getting used to doing that all the time and accepting it, but also just being in the habit. I think a lot of stuff to do with writing is just about being in the habit of doing stuff and paying extra attention or doing a certain amount of work at a certain time in a certain way, just habits. I think habits are important.

Sarah Werner:

I think that’s so interesting. I always find a very interesting split there between organization and chaos. So we talk about creating habits. We talk about setting the space. But we also talk about I like there to be surprise. I think what I want to ask you next is are you familiar … I’m sure you’re familiar with the term, pantser, so a writer who writes by the seat of their pants, versus a plotter. Can you tell me a little bit about your method there and where you lean on the scale of organization and chaos?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. It’s funny. I mean, first of all, I hate dichotomies. So one of the things I should … In Never Say You Can’t Survive, I do. I shared some points like, we’re all a little bit pantser. We’ll all a little bit plotter. Some people go more to one extreme than the other, but everybody does both. I feel like this idea that there’s two groups and they’re mutually exclusive, I don’t like it. But I feel like, in general, in my writing, I am definitely kind of a discovery writer. I’m definitely a very like, “Let’s see where this goes. Oh okay. This thing happened. I’m going to follow up on this later maybe, or else I’ll have to go back and take it out later, one of those two things.”

Charlie Jane Anders:

I just sort of leave little breadcrumbs for myself to find. What I have done with a lot of my adult novels is I will just write a ton and try to see where it’s going, but I’ll also stop. Again, this is the thing I was talking about before. I’ll stop and be like, “Okay. Where is this story going? What do I think is going to happen next? Where do I see this heading towards?” I’ll have an idea in my head of what I want the ending to be, usually. So I’ve traditionally been more of a make-it-up-as-you-along kind of person.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I’ve also been kind of a [inaudible 00:07:48] sort of person where I … For example, for All the Birds in the Sky, I would just write. I think I’ve done this for a bunch of my books. I would just write 10,000 words of the characters hanging out to see if I could get one or two scenes out of that that could end up in the final book, but also just to get to know the characters better. So then I’ll combine five different scenes that I wrote into one scene, and I’ll just find a way to stitch them together, which … But, I’ve been experimenting more with being a little bit more …

Charlie Jane Anders:

The other thing I always have done, by the way, is I’ll write a story and I’ll maybe revise it a couple times. I’ll just keep outlining it. I’ll outline it once I’ve got a second draft. I’ll be like, “Okay. I’ve written it already, but what are the main things that happened in this story? Are they in the right order? Is there enough space between these different story beats? What’s happening? What are these characters thinking in every point in the story?” Just to kind of get it stronger in my head for the revision process.

Charlie Jane Anders:

But lately, I’ve been outlining more intensely before I write. Two things I think brought that on. One is that I’ve been writing these young adult books, which are very plot-heavy, especially the third one. The third one I think I finally … I wrote outlines for the first and second books and then ended up deviating somewhat. But, for the third one, I think I’m very much like, “No, we have to hit all these points. There’s all these dominoes I set up and they have to fall in this order or it’s not going to work.”

Charlie Jane Anders:

I know what the dominoes are. I know how they have to fall. So it’s not so much like, “Let’s see what happens.” It’s like, “No, I wrote a check. I got to cash it.” So there’s that, being much more intense about seriously outlining the third book of the trilogy before I read it. I’ve already written about a third of it, but I’m working through a really serious outline. The other thing is I’ve been dabbling a little bit in TV writing. I’ve been in a TV writers’ room a couple of times, which is a dream come true. It’s something I never, ever thought would happen for me.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I thought they don’t just let random people off the street into these writers’ rooms. There’s got to be some kind of security. I don’t know. So I’ve been in a couple TV writers’ rooms. There, it’s very much like you plan out … Everything is planned out to an insane degree. You plan out the season. Then you plan out each episode. Then you plan out each act of the episode. Then you plan out each scene. You do it for each character. You do it character by character. What is this character’s arc from episode to episode? What are they doing in each episode? What are they doing in this scene?

Charlie Jane Anders:

It’s very detailed. It’s very much like the room collectively comes up with this very granular outline with a million note cards. We killed a forest of note cards, I think. Whoever’s episode it is to write gets [inaudible 00:10:26] to write it, but they’re writing from this incredibly granular, detailed outline.

Sarah Werner:

Am I allowed to ask what show you’re working on?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Well, I’m done with it for now. I mean I’m done with it for the time being for the foreseeable future, but Y: The Last Man. It’s on FX, on Hulu in September. I wrote episode seven. I think I’m allowed to say that. Yeah. It was a trip. It was a total trip.

Sarah Werner:

Because that’s Brian K. Vaughan, right?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. It’s based on a comic by Brian K. Vaughan. He came and talked to the writers’ room. He was delightful. I really love the cast. The cast is amazing. We got fricking Diane Lane. I know, I know. I wrote words that were spoken by Diane Lane.

Sarah Werner:

Oh my God.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I don’t know. That’s crazy.

Sarah Werner:

Are you going to have a watch party when your episode comes out?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Oh, man. I hadn’t even thought about that. I should think about that. I don’t know. Maybe.

Sarah Werner:

Oh my gosh. I love that. I love this so much. Oh my gosh. You’ve been saying so many good and beautiful and amazing things about making that transition from more discovery writing and now implementing the things that you’ve learned in the writers’ room into the third book and the necessity of structure. I like that you said cashing the checks that you wrote and making sure that you’re coming full circle with that. I appreciate all of this. Gosh, I have 90,000 questions in my head.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yay.

Sarah Werner:

This is the problem. One day I’m going to do a six-hour interview, and it’s going to be really, really fun and exhausting. But I want to be respectful of your time. So I want to ask. You’ve written so much fiction and also so much nonfiction. What is the difference there? I know you don’t like dichotomies, so I’m interested in your thoughts on writing fiction, writing nonfiction. And then what drove you to write your newest book?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. Okay. So fiction versus nonfiction, I mean I feel like there is a big thing of people coming from journalism into fiction writing. I kind of approached it. It’s funny. I think people think of me as a journalist who turned into a fiction writer, and that’s not entirely how I think of myself. I think of myself as someone who always was a fiction writer, but I got work in journalism early on. I worked in journalism for a long time, but I was always like, “Okay, fiction writing is my career. It’s what I’m going to do with my life.”

Charlie Jane Anders:

I was always just hoping that one of these days I would get to do that as more of a career, career. But I feel like the thing about journalism is it’s kind of a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, good journalism is about, obviously, sticking to the facts, which is the thing. But also, especially the last 20 or 30 years, the trend in journalism has been towards more … I don’t know. I don’t want to say human interest, but you have to find a relatable person. You have to find someone who has an anecdote that can kind of anchor a piece.

Charlie Jane Anders:

You start out with So-and-so says that someone ran over their dog. And then it turns into a longer discussion of car safety or what happens when your dog dies or something. But you find one person who has an anecdote that’s compelling, that you can massage into being the opening of your piece and keep coming back to. There’s a lot of creative writing tricks in journalism. But the thing about journalism is it’s kind of a double-edged sword for if you’re going into fiction. Because, on the one hand, journalism teaches you to be very concise and get to the point and also to be disciplined and just produce a lot of words in a hurry sometimes.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Like when I was blogging, it was like, “Okay, you have to just write six to eight pieces a day. Some of them are going to be kind of short, but some of them are hopefully not going to be that short. They’re all going to have a certain attitude. They’re not going to be just I wrote down some stuff. They’re going to have zing or whatever.” That was good training for just producing a lot of words. I feel like it’s funny. The longer I’ve been away from journalism and also I think other things, like the pandemic, have something to do with it, the more my word count per day, it’s sliding down because I just am losing that journalistic feeling. But whatever.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Like I said, I don’t think of word count as the measure of productivity in fiction. The downside of coming from journalism into fiction is that it can make your fiction a little bit dry, a little bit too much like you’re reporting the facts or whatever. In journalism, you don’t necessarily want to tell the reader what to think because that’s not always, unless it’s an opinion piece, you want to leave them with questions. But you do want to say, “Okay, this is what this is about.” In journalism, we talk about the nut graph, which do you know what the nut graph is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The nut graph is-

Sarah Werner:

I do, but my listeners might not.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Okay. Yeah. The nut graph, God, so many funny terms for journalism that I still use all the time. The nut graph is basically it’s graph means paragraph, and nut means it’s the article in a nutshell. It could be the first paragraph. It’s usually the second or third paragraph of the article. The nut graph is where you just say, “Here’s what this article is going to be about. Here’s the point of it. Here’s why you should care.” You summarize the whole thing in two or three sentences. You just kind of set up the readers’ expectations of what the piece is going to be.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I think that’s a big part of what journalism is is just being able to boil things down and be like, “Okay, there’s a conflict going on over water rights. Here are the opposing sides.” Maybe this article won’t tell you who’s right, but it’ll tell you why they’re arguing and what each side is saying. It’ll give you a very cut-and-dried sense of what the issue is versus, in fiction, I feel like I was actually worried that too much blogging was going to really hurt my fiction because of the snarky tone that you have to do as a blogger, the kind of like, “I’m being super snarky and I’m dunking on everything.”

Charlie Jane Anders:

But actually, I think, in the end, it was the opposite. I think blogging helped cure me of that a little bit. I think my fiction has gotten a lot less snarky since I had to spend eight years being snarky all day. I felt like, “Okay, I got this out of my system.” I think of that as my blogging voice now, so I don’t use it in my fiction as much.

Sarah Werner:

Interesting.

Charlie Jane Anders:

So I don’t know. I don’t know. That was a very long answer.

Sarah Werner:

No, I love that. I’m here for the long answers. Oh my gosh. I want to ask you so many things. I love that you just went through those differences between nonfiction and fiction. It seems like there’s some similarities there too. It’s interesting, expectation-wise, what you thought would happen and then what actually happened and how your voice emerged from all of that and how it’s changed between the two mediums. Sorry. This is just a little recap for myself here, so I can ask you a meaningful, hopefully, question after this.

Sarah Werner:

You started off in journalism. What helped you make the leap into fiction? What was it that said, “You know what? I’m going to write my novel. I’m going to just do this?”

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah. The thing that helped me make the leap into fiction, I mean I had been writing fiction the whole time. I had a novel that was published at a small press in 2005, and I wrote four more novels that never saw the light of day after that, before All the Birds in the Sky. Actually, one of those four novels I eventually turned into a novella, and it was published as a little tiny standalone book. But I cut two-thirds of the book out of it or three-quarters of the book out of it in order to turn it into a novella.

Charlie Jane Anders:

But yeah. I think that it was just like I was just trying to break in. The whole time I was doing journalism, I was trying to break in as a fiction writer. I got hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of rejections for my short fiction. I got I don’t know how many rejections from agents. I think I, at some point in the new book, Never Say You Can’t Survive, which I guess you asked me about before and I forgot to talk about that. But I think in that book I talk about I counted up the number of rejections. But I got a ton of rejections.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Honestly, it was just I was just plugging away until finally I just randomly saw that Tor.com, which is this website that’s affiliated with my publisher but also publishes a lot of short fiction on their site, I saw that they were having an open submission period. I was like, “This is not going to work out, but I’ll just try them with a story.” I tried them, and I got … Basically, I got a note back almost immediately, randomly. Patrick Nielsen, he had wrote back to me and was like, “I really like this story. I think you need to tweak the ending slightly but, otherwise, I want it.” I was like, “What?” My head exploded.

Charlie Jane Anders:

And then the second piece that I published with Tor.com, which was, by far, I want to say it was the highest profile place that I’d been published before then. I’d been in some pretty high-profile anthologies, but this was definitely the highest profile, I think. My second piece with them was the story, Six Months, Three Days. That won a Hugo Award. At that point, I was launched after that. And then eventually, I did sell All the Birds in the Sky. So that was really the process.

Charlie Jane Anders:

It was one of those things where people were coming up to me and being like, “I didn’t know you wrote fiction.” I’d be like, “That’s the main thing I do.” It’s just that nobody had noticed until that point. I had published over 100 short stories before I got that one that won a Hugo, but nobody had seen the other 100.

Sarah Werner:

Wow. This blows my mind. I don’t know if you enjoy talking about success or what that even means to you, but it’s so fascinating, from someone who I’ve been reading io9, gosh, since I graduated college. It’s just been this huge pillar of sci-fi news for me. I don’t know. When your novel came out, All the Birds in the Sky, I now know that that was not your first novel, it just blows my mind that you had difficulty finding an agent. I’m like, “She’s famous. Have you not read io9? This is a huge deal.”

Sarah Werner:

It’s just so interesting from someone from the outside who sees you as this huge deal. It’s like, “How? How is this hard for you?” So gosh, I’m interested. What does it mean for you to be successful now?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think that the agent thing, I always say it’s not just about … You know this. It’s not about finding an agent, it’s finding the right agent. There were agents who were definitely interested in me, especially after io9 became a big deal, after I won a Hugo. There were definitely agents who were like, “Oh yeah. Send me stuff.” And then I would send them stuff and they’d be like, “Yeah, not this. This isn’t …” I feel like that’s good. It’s good that they didn’t just say, “Well, I can probably sell this because you’ve got a platform.”

Charlie Jane Anders:

You want agents to be honest and be like, “Okay, I’m not connecting to this. This book is not connecting to me.” I think I tend to be kind of a silly writer sometimes and a funny writer. I think that there is a certain amount of well-documented resistance in some parts of the book world, particularly among agents and some editors towards things that are really silly and funny because I think it’s such a crap shoot. I mean I know from going to a million comedy shows that it’s really hard. Sometimes a comedian will just bomb.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Humor’s so subjective. Some people might be like, “This is the funniest comedian ever,” and everybody else might be like, “I don’t get it.” I feel like there’s a reason why it’s hard to sell humor, because humor is super subjective versus romance or … Romance is also really hard, but I think that you can kind of tell, are these characters clicking? People understand romance. I’m going to get in trouble for saying that maybe. But I don’t know. I think humor is just hard.

Charlie Jane Anders:

But yeah, I define success, I mean there’s obviously I get sucked into the same stuff everybody else gets sucked into about all these artificial measures of success, all these artificial metrics that we all … markers that we all kind of get stuck on. But I think that when I’m happiest, and I do talk about this in Never Say You Can’t Survive, when I’m happiest is when I stick to the definition of success I came up with early on, which is it’s twofold. One is that I get to be associated with people that I really like and admire who I think they’re awesome.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I’m just glad that they want to hang out with me or collaborate with me or whatever. The quality of the people that I get to be associated with is a measure of success for me. But the other thing is just I get to keep doing this. I get to keep writing and getting published and having people read my stuff. So those are the definitions I try to stick to versus you have to get 20 widgets or you have to get on this particular list. I don’t know. I feel like it gets really toxic.

Sarah Werner:

I love to hear you say that. I love to hear that, oh gosh, not every success metric is necessarily healthy. Boy, do I appreciate you saying that. It is really hard to get sucked into that stuff. Gosh, I’m so torn. I want to ask more about vanity metrics and then what’s actually meaningful. But I also want to ask about your beautiful new book, Never Say You Can’t Survive. Okay. Tell me about what compelled you or drew you or led you or what have you to creating this book.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. As you probably know, when I was working at io9 back in the day, I used to do these writing advice columns on io9, which were called-

Sarah Werner:

Yes. I learned so much from you.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Oh my God. Thank you. Dang. That is insane. I used to do these writing advice columns that were called Free Advice. I think they were all under the Free Advice tags. You might find them there. That was really fun. I always wanted to do a book of writing advice. But what I found after I left io9, even though I kind of had a handshake agreement with some of the folks from what had previously been Gawker Media about allowing me to use bits and pieces of stuff of my stuff, writing columns that I’d written for io9 in a book, what I found was when I left io9 and was like, “Maybe I’ll try to do a book of writing advice now,” what I found was that the market for writing advice is actually really crowded, especially in science fiction writing advice.

Charlie Jane Anders:

There’s a lot. There’s a ton of books out there. Orson Scott Card wrote one. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote one. Tobias Buckell, I think, wrote one. There’s a bunch that are published by Writer’s Digest and stuff, and they’re all really great. There’s a lot of really great advice out there for writers, including in speculative fiction. So my first idea for a book which was basically Sci-Fi Writing 101, more or less. That wasn’t going to be the title, but that was what it was going to be. It became obvious once we talked to people and my agent kind of put some feelers out, that that was not going to work.

Charlie Jane Anders:

That was not going to have a big enough audience. So I kind of put that aside and was like, “Well, maybe I’ll do a writing advice book one of these days.” And then in the meantime, sometime around 2017, I think, or yeah, around 2017, I was talking at a writers conference and they asked me to give a keynote, which was extremely flattering. So I wrote this talk called Never Say You Can’t Survive. It was an early version of the opening essay from this book. So I gave that talk at this writers conference. And then I kept giving it at other conferences here and there at other writing events.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I kept refining it and adding to it and poking at it. It was during that era, during the era that started 2017-ish. It felt like a lot of us were really struggling, and it felt like a lot of us were really having a hard time. So I was having all these conversations about how can writing help us get through this, but also how can we keep creating through this? It felt like there was a way to talk about that in a book while also talking about the other stuff that I really felt was important to me about writing that I hadn’t necessarily seen in quite so many words elsewhere.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I felt like I could use that as a framework to talk about my philosophy of writing a little bit. That was what I did. So I went to the folks at Tor.com in early 2020 and was like, “Look, I want to write these essays for your website, but I want to publish them as a book afterwards. If you all want to publish them as a book afterwards, that’s amazing. Otherwise, can we work out a thing where maybe I can shop it around elsewhere?” They were all in, and they were super excited.

Charlie Jane Anders:

They were pretty much committed right away to publishing the book version, which was awesome. During 2020, which was probably the hardest year of my life, personally, it was actually kind of therapeutic to be writing these essays. It was like, okay, I had a weekly deadline. I kind of knew what the essays were. I had a very detailed document that was every single essay with a million thoughts that I’d written down for it. So I had very rough, scribbly drafts of all the essays. But having that weekly deadline was really good for me and just forcing myself to, while I was struggling with a really tough year, forcing myself to think about, “Okay, here’s all the ways that writing can help you get through this.”

Charlie Jane Anders:

I was helping myself as much as anybody else, I feel like. It turned out to be a really good thing to do. I think it helped me get through 2020 in one piece.

Sarah Werner:

I love that. I would love to ask, just for folks who haven’t read your book, and can you tell us real quick when it comes out?

Charlie Jane Anders:

It comes out August 17th, so pretty soon, actually.

Sarah Werner:

Oh my gosh. Okay. So pretty soon, August 17, 2021. We’re in 2021 now. So I’ll have a link in the show notes for that. But can you just tell us a little bit about this premise about … I love hearing about writing as a survival mechanism. Can you tell us a little bit about the link between creativity and survival?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. I mean I think that there is a huge link. I think you put your finger on it, which is that we need to be creative in order to survive. We’re going to need creative solutions to a lot of these problems we’re facing. Part of what I talk about in the book is, at its most basic level, it’s this thing of the real world really sucks. Part of how I deal with that is I’ll sit down and just marathon … I’ll binge watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Ted Lasso or some other show that’s nice and fun and not going to remind me of the sheer horror outside of my windows where we’re just starting wildfire season here. So it’s super, extra exciting.

Charlie Jane Anders:

But yeah. So the real world really sucks. One way you can deal with the real world is just by losing yourself in a story that someone else created, like reading a book, watching a movie, just getting lost in the narrative. But what I feel like, and this gets back to the thing I was talking about before with the zoning out and the trance and the flow and stuff, is that when you really get into writing, it’s like that. It’s like binge watching a TV show, only more because it’s coming out of you, and you’re both lost in it and controlling it to some extent.

Charlie Jane Anders:

So you get to actually have that thing of being like, “Okay, I am shutting out the world and just living with these fictional people in their world. They’re the people I’m dealing with now.” But you also have that thing of it’s very therapeutic to feel like, okay, I can actually shape how this is going and I can understand this on a deeper level. I talk about it as the characters are almost like your imaginary friends. I think that you can spend time with these imaginary friends. I get into ways to do this in the book. You also get to maybe deal with some of the stuff that’s bothering you obliquely by writing about it without writing about it.

Charlie Jane Anders:

You can be like, “Well, what I would like to do is be able to tell the story of what I’m dealing with right now, but also have something that’s happening 500 years ago that connects up with it so that I can be like, ‘Well, it’s not just this one moment. There’s other moments that affect the moment we’re having right now. Having those two moments alongside each other helps me to get some perspective or to eliminate some stuff that’s not obvious if you’re just living in this moment right now.'”

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I get into that and techniques for doing that. The other thing that I think is really important, and then I’m going to shut up, is I talk a lot about being okay with uncertainty and having mental flexibility. Because I think part of what happens when you’re in the middle of a crisis and there’s a really contested election and a plague and a bunch of other stuff going on, part of what happens when you’re in the middle of a crisis is that you have to keep changing in response to new information.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Nobody’s allowed to wear masks. We all have to wear masks. Okay. Now it’s the opposite. I think that when you’re writing a story, you have stuff where things in the story are shifting around as you’re writing it. You’re surprising yourself. Maybe something you write didn’t make sense. You have to go back and change it. Your beta readers are like, “Okay, this part just came out of nowhere. You have to explain why this happened.” I think that writing helps you to deal with uncertainty in the real world because you’re trying to figure out the story, and that is a certain realm of uncertainty, even if you outline, even if you had a great outline.

Sarah Werner:

And understanding your own role and how your own agency can play out in both the real world and the world you’re creating.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah, exactly. I love that. I love that so much. Yeah.

Sarah Werner:

I love this. I love this. Well, let’s just keep going with this, and let me ask you. Can you give us a quick plug for where people can find you and where they can purchase all of your books and connect with you and all of that good stuff and also listen to your podcast? Because you have a lot of cool stuff out there.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Well, thank you. Yeah. My website is charliejane.com and Charlie Jane on Twitter. If you go to charliejane.com, it’s got links to all my books. And then the podcast is ouropinionsarecorrect.com. We also have a Twitter handle, @ooacpod. So yeah. Thank you so much.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah. Okay, good. I wanted to make sure we got that in here. Now we can kind of go off the rails again with some more questions about creativity just real quick. And then we’ll wrap up. Just FYI, all of the links to the places and platforms that Charlie Jane just mentioned are in the show notes for today’s episode, so please go check those out. Click those links. Listen to Our Opinions Are Correct. Been, again, really enjoying that, kind of a deep dive into sci-fi and what makes it work and maybe not work.

Sarah Werner:

Oh gosh. I want to go back to talking about you wanted to write a book about writing advice. Is there a piece of truly terrible writing advice that you’ve ever received?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Oh man. I mean I feel like I’ve gotten a bunch of writing advice that I personally didn’t find helpful, like that you have to always introduce the main character of your story in the first paragraph, which I find is not always … It sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. I feel like that was a piece of writing advice I got early on. I don’t know. I mean I feel like I mean I dunk on Heinlein’s famous writing advice sometimes. Robert A. Heinlein, who was writing at a really different time, part of it is that he was writing during a time when people were very prolific and often it showed, let’s just say.

Charlie Jane Anders:

So Heinlein has these rules for writing which people will still sometimes quote, where it’s like basically it boils down to never edit or revise your work. Just send it out. I think what he meant is maybe once you’re reasonably happy with it, just send it out. I don’t know if he meant never make any changes at all once you’ve made a first draft. But people quote it as basically like once you’ve written a thing, just send it to an editor. Don’t bother to revise it. Don’t kick the tires. Don’t have beta readers. Don’t show it to anybody. Just send it to an editor.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I think that was probably good advice for 1950 or whatever. But it’s not great advice for now because I think, in speculative fiction at least, it’s gotten very competitive. There’s a certain kind of polished standard of writing that people expect. I think that people sending out their first drafts is not going to end well for anybody, I don’t think.

Sarah Werner:

I don’t either. Sort of along those lines then, do you have a favorite piece of writing advice either that you’ve received or that you’ve created that you love most to share? Is that grammatically correct, that you love most to share with other aspiring writers?

Charlie Jane Anders:

Yeah. That is actually. That is actually grammatically correct. Yeah. Early on in my writing career, I got a story to this literary magazine called ZYZZYVA, which is if you live in the Bay Area, it’s a big deal. Otherwise, I don’t know if it is or not. But-

Sarah Werner:

I’ve heard of it.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Okay, yay. Okay, cool. The editor of ZYZZYVA at the time spent an hour on the phone with me, which is kind of amazing to me even now that he just did that. He talked through my story with me. He could be a lot, that guy. He could be a lot. But he did actually give me really good advice about getting to the emotional core of the story. He introduced me to the idea of the emotional core of the story and how you have to get to that and find it and really tap into it in order to make the story work.

Charlie Jane Anders:

In this story, as with so many of my stories, it was about the emotional core was a particular relationship. I feel like the emotional core is the thing that kind of drives the story to a certain extent or that the characters care about the most or that the reader is going to hopefully care about the most or that’s the thing that we’re all caring about that’s making things happen in the story. It’s the more emotional that emotional core is the more the story’s going to feel alive and on fire and all that stuff.

Charlie Jane Anders:

So he really talked me through, “Okay, you have this relationship that feels like it’s the heart of the story, but I need to feel more of this character’s longing for this other character. I need to feel more of their emotional connection. It was actually incredibly good advice. It really kind of changed how I thought about writing. It really drove me to try harder to get to that emotional core. It took a long time for me to get better at that. I don’t know if I’m good at it, but get better at it. I still struggle with that to this day.

Sarah Werner:

Boy, I really appreciate that. I feel like we don’t talk about that enough. I feel like there’s so much talking about logic and roles and all that stuff. We don’t talk enough about emotion and feelings and really what’s at the most powerful heart of what it is we create and why we create and why we love to lose ourself in these stories. Going surfing on someone else’s feelings is just so powerful.

Charlie Jane Anders:

It really is, and it’s so hard to do. It’s really hard to do. I’m editing the second book of the YA trilogy right now. I’ll like, “Okay, I have another scene where characters are upset about something. How do I say that in a way that I didn’t already say that before? What’s a way that I could talk about this that feels really powerful and fresh, that’s really connected to this person’s emotions?” Often, it’s a mixture of how you describe what they’re feeling or how you describe the sensations, but also just how they act and what’s going through their head, their internal monologue, all of it.

Charlie Jane Anders:

I find it just so challenging. All the Birds in the Sky, there were some parts of that book where my editor, Miriam, who’s a fricking powerhouse, really had to point out parts where it’s like, “Okay, this should be a really emotional moment and it’s not. It needs to have more emotion to it.” For example, there’s a part where I don’t want to get to spoiler-y, but there’s a part where Laurence and Patricia have been estranged for a while and Patricia shows up at Laurence’s house to give him something. The draft of that scene, this was not my first draft. It was my fourth or fifth draft.

Charlie Jane Anders:

The first I handed into my editor, she came back and was like, “Yeah, I don’t feel this at all. The emotion is not coming out. You need to take a beat or two longer with this and just really kind of live in this moment.” It took a day of just poking at that scene and trying to just squeeze a little bit more emotion out of it.

Sarah Werner:

Wow. Oh my gosh. I was in website design for years. The number one criticism you hear is, “This needs to pop more.” It’s like, “Okay. What does that mean?” So what does it mean to infuse that emotion? I know we’re creeping up on our time limit. But poking at the scene, prodding at it, did you have to get more empathetic with your characters or what did that look like for you?

Charlie Jane Anders:

It’s a mixture. It’s a mixture of getting into my character’s heads more and acting out the scene almost in their voices sometimes. Oftentimes, I get to that point where I’m like, “Okay, this scene, it’s as good as I can make it in my head, but if I can get more into their heads I can just give them a little bit more of a realistic reaction because, oftentimes, the first three or four drafts of a scene is just the characters being robots a little bit. And then it’s like, “Okay, I have to get in the shower or whatever and act this scene out in the different voices almost.”

Charlie Jane Anders:

I just do like, “Okay, what is this person really thinking in this scene? What are they really feeling?” It’s also just trying to, I mean making things pop is a thing I think about a lot in terms of fiction. Often, a scene pops when it feels just charged and it feels … But also, it feels like we’re not just going through the motions and having the scene that you’ve seen 100 times before in other things. I think that you just have to find the emotional truth of that scene. It’s something I talk a lot about in Never Say You Can’t Survive is this notion that writing is acting, that when you’re a writer you’re kind of an actor.

Charlie Jane Anders:

You have to get into character. You have to submerge yourself a little bit in your character’s head. But I find that often that happens in revision. I think in revision, I get to a place where I’m finally like, “Okay, what’s the real emotional truth here and how can I convey that in a way that I haven’t maybe done a million times before?” It’s just finding something dramatic and different, kind of. I don’t know. It’s always a struggle. It’s never easy. It never gets easier.

Charlie Jane Anders:

It’s not something where you’re like, “Okay, now I know how to do this and I’m just going to do it over and over again.” It’s like every time, you have to just keep reinventing it.

Sarah Werner:

I appreciate you saying that so much, saying that it never gets easier, because it doesn’t. I keep waiting for things to get easier, and it doesn’t. Thank you for saying that. I appreciate-

Charlie Jane Anders:

My pleasure.

Sarah Werner:

I appreciate those truths. Ms. Charlie Jane, you are beautiful, wonderful, invigorating. Your energy is fantastic. I wish that everyone listening could see your beautiful pink hair right now. It’s just so alive and so wonderful. Thank you so much for gracing us with your presence here today.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Thank you.

Sarah Werner:

I’m just so happy to have you here. Thank you.

Charlie Jane Anders:

It was absolutely my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I love your podcast. This was just such a wonderful conversation. Have a great rest of your week.

Sarah Werner:

Thank you. Bye for now.

Charlie Jane Anders:

Bye.