We’re pleased to bring you the second in a series of candid, in-depth interviews with this year’s Sirens Guests of Honor. We’ll cover a variety of topics relevant to Sirens with each author, from their inspirations, influences, and craft, to the role of women in fantasy literature and forms of resistance in both the craft and industry, as befits our 2015 focus on rebels and revolutionaries. We hope these conversations will be a prelude to the ones our attendees will be having in Denver this October. Today, Amy Tenbrink interviews Yoon Ha Lee.

 
AMY: Your published work is primarily short stories and even flash fiction. What draws you to these shorter forms? How do you think working with shorter forms differs from working with longer forms? I’m thinking especially of your skill in creating boundless secondary worlds in only a few pages and terrifically high stakes in only a few words.

YOON: My original thought writing short stories was due to the conventional wisdom (as far as I understood it when I was in 6th grade reading what were possibly dated how-to-write advice books out of the library) that you should start with the magazines and work your way up to eventually trying to sell novels. What I should have realized was that you learn how to do something by doing it, so that if I wanted to learn how to write a novel, I should have practiced writing novels. (Which, actually, I did, although they were terrible, as you might imagine of anything written by a typical high schooler.)

What I like about short stories is that they are very good if you want to focus on idea or concept. Orson Scott Card has a framework in some book of his on writing on how most stories are primarily about one of MICE—Milieu, Idea, Character, or Event (plot). (I have differences of opinion with Card, but I don’t see why that should prevent me from learning from him; his books on writing are quite good.) At short story length, it’s difficult to go into depth about a character, and there’s only so much plot you can cram in, but science fiction and fantasy especially are very good at allowing you to explore a single idea and its consequences. There might be examples of Milieu stories but I can’t think of them offhand.

You don’t have room to waste in a short story, and even less so in flash fiction, especially flash fiction of, say, 300 words. Part of this is market considerations. Over 7,500 words it rapidly becomes annoying to find homes for stories, so I try to stay below that length, which means efficiency becomes key. If you need to edit a short story down by 200 words, then you trim adverbs. If you need to edit it down by 2,000 words, you have to start killing subplots–editing the structure, not the small fry. (Although the small fry goes too.)

Mostly, the difference between shorter and longer forms also seems to be in the kinds of structures you can get away with. You have space at novel or novelette length for character development especially, which is something I’m keen on learning to do; you can braid together viewpoints in ways that are hard to pull off at shorter lengths. At the same time, it seems to me that it’s easier to sell more “experimental” forms at shorter length because they can be exhausting to read at longer lengths. My go-to example for this is second person. I love second person—my first sale was a second-person story—but I would not, personally, want to write a novel in it. Certainly it can be done! But I would hesitate to tackle it myself.

I attended Viable Paradise VIII and one of the valuable lessons I received there came from James Macdonald in a lecture on how to suggest a setting. He gave the example of a dollhouse with paths leading all the way up to the edge of the lawn. (Lawn? Garden? It was something like that.) Basically, the metaphor was that if you suggest something outside the actual dollhouse, people will fill it in with their imaginations. You don’t have to describe everything. Just sketch in the outlines and people will do the rest. The key is to pick a couple of vivid details so that the reader has a kind of template for the rest of the setting. For example, if I talk about a garden full of “snow-laced birds,” that’s going to give a different impression than a garden overshadowed by “white birds of cutting mien.” These are terrible examples, but you get the idea.

As for stakes, the weird thing about universe-destroying stakes (not to poke too much fun! I watch Avengers movies too) is that you have to humanize them. My background is in mathematics (BA) so I am familiar with some of the way that human beings just cannot conceptualize numbers in relation to each other without some kind of aid. We are better able to relate to the deaths of three people we know than 3,000 we don’t partly because of the thread of connection, but partly because our brains don’t handle even mildly large numbers. (And, I mean, compared to the kinds of numbers they throw around in cosmology, 3,000 doesn’t rate!) When I want the reader to connect to the stakes, I try to make sure that there’s an actual character involved so that they can see the effects.

 
AMY: In several interviews in the past few years, you’ve stated that you often build stories as theorems to be proven (A+B=C, so therefore, what is A?) or technical challenges to be overcome (first-person plural, if you please). As a reader with an especial penchant for logic, I’m both utterly fascinated and not a bit surprised: I tend to find that your work comes with a certain logic or even inevitability–even though I don’t usually see it until the end, after my mind has been well and truly blown. Would you talk a bit about how this approach works for you in practice?

YOON: Part of this came about as an unexpected side-effect of majoring in math! And I wasn’t originally a math major; I started out as a history major, then switched into computer science so I wouldn’t starve, then switched into math when I realized math was more fun and I sucked at debugging. History is also a good foundation for writing, but as I said, I wanted to eat. Anyway, many people are under the impression that math is primarily about calculation, but that’s only one small part of math, the application of things like arithmetic or calculus. I was more drawn to pure math, and pure math is about argumentation—proof—rather than sitting there computing things. Some of the other math majors and I would joke that the only numbers we ever saw in our courses were 0, 1, pi, and infinity. (This wasn’t entirely true, but…)

In any case, in a good proof you lay out your axioms, you argue from them, you come to a conclusion, and you try to do this in an elegant and convincing manner. I don’t think this is the lesson that my math professors intended me to take from their classes, but I thought of this as a framework for storytelling. Certainly it is not the only framework for storytelling. It is, in a sense, story as a didactic entity—essay with a thin dressing of narrative. I like reading things with this sort of structure because they’re easier for me to follow, although I should note that I also enjoy very disparate types of fiction, including dreamlike narratives like Patricia McKillip’s novels, or Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.

The other reason I came to this method of writing was that for years I did the headstrong and stupid thing of starting stories without knowing where I was going or what they were about, and then coming to a dead halt because I had no idea what I was doing. If the method had worked then that would have been fine, but it became clear that it wasn’t working. Once in a while I’d finish a story; more often I’d end up with another half-written digital corpse. So I switched methods. I decided to switch to a proof-like method of writing, where I wanted to know what the “theorem”—the conclusion or ending—was in advance, and then I would work out what I needed in order to get there.

Please don’t think, from this description, that my writing process itself is neat! I spent a brief period as a high school math teacher, and I think one of the disservices math teachers often do their students is that they don’t show that the process of problem-solving can be messy and involve dead-ends, so that students get discouraged when their efforts aren’t “perfect” from the get-go. Certainly when I was an undergraduate working on problem sets, I would write out pages and pages of dead ends and go around in circles and copy out lemmas until I finally got the key insight I needed. Then I would rewrite the results into something comprehensible to the T.A. For me, writing is much the same. When I am in the early stages of a project, I thrash around and I half-write a bunch of openings and throw them out and whine to my husband (my husband puts up with an awful lot of whining) and beg him to plot-doctor my incoherent notes based on a set of conflicting desiderata. And after all that, a story emerges. The end product sometimes looks neat, but the process by which I got there—anything but.

As for technical challenges, I have something of an adversarial mindset, which got me into trouble when I was a student. If you tell me that something should not be done in such-and-such a way, then I want to know why, and I am apt to try it for myself to find out why the hard way. I believe strongly that sometimes the only way to learn to fly is to throw yourself off some cliffs until you figure it out. This doesn’t work in real life (well, unless you’re a bird maybe, which I am not), but in writing, you have nothing to lose. You don’t die if the story fails to work. At worst, the story doesn’t work and you have learned something new about writing. If an idea appeals to me, even if it’s completely cracked out, I may as well try it. And this is how I end up writing in second person and first-person plural and other things besides.

 
AMY: Your inspirations range widely: music, linguistics, war, math. What attracts you to certain elements? What are some sources of inspiration for you that readers might find surprising?

YOON: The embarrassing truth is that I get bored easily, so I flit magpie-like from hobby to hobby, and all of this eventually funnels into the writing. The inspirations you mention above are ones that I keep returning to. I loved music before writing; I have perfect pitch and I like to compose as a hobbyist (chamber orchestra, piano, electronica). Every so often I get out my keyboard and fool around on it, but I miss the days when I played viola in my high school orchestra. I also triggered airport security back in the mid-‘90s once, as a kid, because I was carrying half a dozen harmonicas. I guess it was all that metal! (I don’t remember why the harmonicas couldn’t have gone into checked luggage.)

Linguistics fascinates me because I love languages, although I have given up on my long-ago ambition to learn all the languages; there’s not enough time and my brain is tired. My first language was Korean, which is not remotely similar to English, but I am no longer fluent in Korean, and I can only stumble through interactions in it, with vocabulary limited to household phrases like “Where are the chopsticks?” I took French in middle and high school, and German and Latin in college, and am currently struggling to pick up a bit of Japanese. Years back I used to play around with conlanging (constructed languages), which is where I learned most of the linguistics that I know at all. These days I don’t really use conlangs for writing because it’s just inefficient unless the whole point of the story is the conlang, but I do miss it.

I have been fascinated by war for a long time, although earlier on, when I thought I was going to focus on writing high fantasy, I concentrated on medieval European warfare. It’s only more recently that I’ve tried to learn more about war elsewhere. My father was an Army surgeon at one point and I attended two Department of Defense schools when I was a small child. Later on I grew interested in questions of military ethics alongside questions of strategy and tactics and logistics. I read probably more military history than any other single nonfiction genre, but a lot of this is the type of history that focuses on generals, or military food (I have a book with some very hair-raising recipes…), or technology. And alongside those books I keep a couple books that are about wartime atrocities and military ethics explicitly because they look at war from a completely different angle, and I feel it’s important to remind myself that numbers aren’t fighting each other, people are.

As for math, I’ve covered how it helped me structurally, but the other reason I switched into math was its sheer beauty. Math is the language the universe expresses itself in. And people have a window into it! It’s unbelievable. I regret sometimes that I didn’t pursue a doctorate, but it would have meant giving up writing for that period of time and in the end I couldn’t do it. In the meantime, I may not be a mathematician, but I try to show people a bit of what I glimpsed as a math major, the edifices of pure thought.

There are other inspirations I just flirt with. The reanimation system in “Bones of Giants” was based on my fascination with traditional 2D animation. I don’t draw well enough to attempt it myself, but I love reading about it, and I’m in awe of the skill involved. I also get inspiration from things like anime—the two characters in “Bones of Giants” are based on Heero Yuy and Duo Maxwell (gender-flipped to Sakera, female) from the anime show Gundam Wing—and video games like Planescape: Torment and Mechwarrior: Living Legends (a Crysis Wars mod). Tabletop roleplaying games too; “Combustion Hour” took some of its inspiration from John Tynes’ fascinating and disturbing fantasy/horror RPG Puppetland, and “Distinguishing Characteristics” was helped immensely by the example of Liam Liwanag Burke’s RPG Dog Eat Dog, which uses RPG mechanics to critique colonialism. I’m not sure it would be a fun game to play, but it’s certainly thought-provoking. “The Graphology of Hemorrhage” came out of a childhood fascination for those dreadful graphology books I used to find in libraries shelved next to the New Age stuff and which would claim to predict things like your bedroom predilections and whether you’re an introvert or extrovert from your handwriting slant. (Dreadful, but fun. I hunted down a bunch for my personal collection.)

Then there’s the jam in “The Contemporary Foxwife.” Strawberry jam was one of the two Western foods my maternal grandmother deigned to learn to make. (The other was spaghetti and meatballs.) It was extraordinary jam, and while I have had many lovely strawberry jams in the United States, I have never had one that matched hers for intensity and sweetness. When I was a child, whenever I slept over at the old family house, I was permitted to go into the kitchen and collect a little dish of strawberry jam, nothing but the jam, and eat it with a spoon for my breakfast. I don’t know if my grandmother’s household ever had bronze fox spoons, but my mother told me once that she’d heard a story that during the Japanese occupation, the Japanese came by and confiscated all the bronze spoons, not because they were dangerous but because the metal was needed for the war effort.

And the dolls in “Wine” came from a more recent hobby, ball-jointed dolls (BJDs), which I found out about because I follow the fairy/fantasy artist Amy Brown. At one point she was selling some used BJDs. I didn’t buy any of those, but I was struck by how beautiful (and, okay, expensive) they were. I did some research and eventually ended up buying four of my own. My husband thinks they’re creepy, which is a point in their favor. (My husband puts up with a lot.) I love how customizable BJDs are, and also how creative people get with them—you can change up the wigs, the eyes (I love that you can take out the eyes and put in new ones!), the clothes, make modifications to the dolls themselves (although if you’re doing this, please pay attention to the necessary safety precautions as resin dust is poisonous)…

On a more frivolous level, any time you see a lizard in one of my stories, that’s a nod toward my daughter, who is now eleven years old. Her nickname is “the lizard” so it’s my way of acknowledging who’s in charge of the household!

 
AMY: You write diverse characters, including many smart, powerful, world-changing female protagonists. How do you choose and create your characters?

YOON: It’s interesting that you mention the female protagonists. I can’t remember when I started doing this, but it was a definite decision—I sat down at some point after I’d started publishing stories, and started counting how many POV/protagonist characters were male and how many were female. And now, how many are nonbinary, but I didn’t know about that then. (I’m working on it now.)

The thing about counting is that numbers are not the enemy. (Of course, a math major would say that.) My reasoning then and now is that if there’s some terrible imbalance in how I’m generating characters, I’m unlikely to be consciously aware of it. But once the story has been written, I can count up whatever statistics and see if they’re trending in a direction I’m happy with, and work toward a goal.

I’m trans and I identify as male and I find it somewhat easier to write male characters because that’s how I myself identify, and for this reason I will continue to sometimes write male characters, because it’s something I can permit myself to have that I am denied in real life, and I am not going to erase myself from my own writing. But at the same time, I feel it’s critically important for more female characters to appear in fiction. I have an eleven-year-old daughter and I want her to have more reading options showing smart, interesting girls and women; I don’t even bother looking for biracial protagonists in YA fantasy (my husband is Caucasian, so my daughter is biracial) because it just narrows the field too damn much when it’s hard enough to find the kid additional things to read and she does things like blowing through all of Harry Potter in a week. (We let her read pretty much anything that she is interested in reading, but we sometimes supply supplemental material.)

In any case, every so often I go through and make an inventory and see if there’s a particular category that I want to work on. Do I expect that the count will be balanced in every category? Frankly, no; I don’t expect to present equal representation in my own work. But I want there to be some representation in some categories, as an earnest of good faith, even if it’s a work in progress.

Sometimes when writing multiple characters, I’ll pick genders (say) for logistical reasons. If I have five characters, it’s unlikely I’ll write all of them as the same gender because of pronoun collision. Sometimes I go through a short story, say, and I’ve originally written certain characters in various combinations of gender or whatever, and then I’ve had to delete a character so it unbalances everything else, and then I have to go through and fix things.

I will add that I have in fact changed the gender of characters in drafts to deal with imbalances that I personally was not happy with. This causes massive proofreading problems because once I decide that, say, Kel Khiruev is a man, my brain forever believes that “he” is a correct pronoun for Khiruev, and won’t flag it as wrong even if it’s no longer currently correct. If I’m going to do something like this I usually flag it in a note to my beta readers so they aren’t confused (and so they can help me catch the stray pronouns!).

As far as roles played, I suspect that I have too much liking for genocide and military plots, so my characters do slant that way (generals, captains, fighters of all sorts). I recently turned in an adventure story for an anthology and it was so unsettling because the anthology wanted a more lighter-hearted, heist-like plot, so I went in for a thief as the protagonist. I never write thieves! Really, it comes down to what best suits the logistics of the plot. On rare occasion the character comes first, but it’s more usually the plot or concept, and then figuring out a character that intersects that plot or concept in a useful fashion.

 
AMY: In interviews, you’ve spoken about both assassinating the reader and cornering the reader, leading me to guess that you consider the reader almost an opponent—which, as a negotiator by trade, I respect deeply, and as a reader, I find delightful. Would you expand on how you view readers, and how you think (or like to think) that they’ll interact with your work?

YOON: I feel odd admitting this, but part of my philosophy toward the reader comes from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, where I’m doing my best to control the “battlefield” by controlling what information the reader has. Of course, as the writer I have a certain advantage; especially since I tend to write secondary worlds, the reader only has the information about those worlds that I choose to give them, plus whatever they may deduce from those worlds’ similarity to our own. For example, if I give the general indication that the characters are human, then it’s unfair for me to suddenly spring on the reader that they actually reproduce by pollination two lines from the ending. (Unless it’s some kind of reproductive twist ending?)

In any case, I generally tend to withhold information unless there is some good reason to give it, although this is not always a great way of going about it, because I am aware that I’m not as good at making my work comprehensible as I could be. But the thing is, I see extremely dedicated readers sitting there nitpicking details in stories, or in Star Trek night skies, or the journey in Lord of the Rings, or whatever it is. I feel that this is unfruitful and it’s better simply not to provide that level of detail in the first place; then they can’t prove things are right or wrong one way or another. Give the amount of detail that the story needs for its existence, and leave out everything else. A proof would be written the same way. If you want to prove the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, you don’t additionally throw in a bunch of stuff from point-set topology into the proof. (I assume. I didn’t get to algebraic topology so I imagine there’s a connection somewhere for more advanced students of mathematics.)

On my end, I work off a model of the reader as opponent because I’m fundamentally adversarial in outlook. I find it easier to figure out how to do my job if I think of it in terms of outwitting an enemy. One of my friends back in college said that I liked to “punish bad assumptions”; I don’t know if I ever achieve that ideal, but it’s something of the feeling of what I try to do. And as a reader myself, or a viewer of narratives in TV and movies, I enjoy this kind of cat-and-mouse as well. I like playing what I call “plot chess” against the narrative by trying to figure out where the plot will go before it goes there. It’s a game only really suited to certain kinds of storytelling—it’d be fair game in something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, less suited to something that doesn’t give thematic or plot clues to future events.

As for how readers interact with my work, they can do so however they like. I’m keenly aware that not every story is for every reader, which is why it’s a good thing to have a lot of variety in what’s available. Some people will like what I write; some people will hate it; either way is fine. Obviously, I am vain and I would love it if people liked my writing, but I won’t take it personally if someone doesn’t. I will be sad for fifteen minutes and then, because I have no attention span, I will forget about it entirely. Sometimes having a terrible attention span is a decided advantage.

 
AMY: Lastly, tell us about a remarkable woman of fantasy literature—an author, reader, agent, editor, scholar, or someone else—who has changed your life.

YOON: I thought about this for a while, and I have to say it’s someone you almost certainly haven’t heard of, which is my kid sister. She’s read practically everything I’ve written since we were children, and she’s always encouraged me. We both got interested in fantasy and science fiction around the same time because she read everything I was reading despite being two and a half years younger. Even today we consider our book collections to be held in common, although our tastes in literature have diverged somewhat. I probably would still have persevered in writing without my sister’s presence, because I am stubborn, but it sure wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun. She’s the only person whose fiction recommendations I trust, not because other people are evil, but because my tastes are so idiosyncratic and she’s the only one who’s known me long enough to have a chance of figuring me out. I also still remember the time when we were kids in Korea and Amazon.com had just come into existence, and we somehow sweet-talked our dad into buying us the entirety of Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber. (It is as well I don’t know what the shipping cost.) When the books arrived, we stayed up all night reading them, all of them, straight through. Or, well, my sister did, because she went first. I got through the ninth one, fell asleep waiting for my sister to finish the tenth, and then read the tenth on the next day. Whenever I get rejection slips, acceptances, anything to do with writing—my sister is the first one to know.

We’re pleased to bring you the first in a series of candid, in-depth interviews with this year’s Sirens Guests of Honor. We’ll cover a variety of topics relevant to Sirens with each author, from their inspirations, influences, and craft, to the role of women in fantasy literature and forms of resistance in both the craft and industry, as befits our 2015 focus on rebels and revolutionaries. We hope these conversations will be a prelude to the ones our attendees will be having in Denver this October! First up, Faye Bi interviews Kate Elliott.

 
FAYE: Kate, you’ve been writing fantasy and science fiction since the 1980s. In recent years, epic fantasy in all forms has seen more mainstream and critical success, with Game of Thrones winning Emmys and Sad Puppies garnering the attention of Entertainment Weekly. How has the readership of fantasy changed or expanded? And what has been your experience as a woman writer of fantasy during this time?

KATE: From my perspective one of the most interesting changes over the last few decades has been the mainstreaming of science fiction and fantasy (“SFF”) in popular culture. Although some SFF novels have always made the bestseller lists, they were not (in my experience) mainstream, but always a niche market that just, on occasion, happened to briefly impinge on the bigger pop culture market. Few people I met had heard of Dune; a few more might have heard of The Lord of the Rings but many fewer read it. SFF remained a corner inhabited by those of us who liked “that kind of thing” while meanwhile most people didn’t know it existed or (commonly) they thought of SFF as something childish.

The incredible success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series beginning in 1997 became hugely influential in the explosion of young adult (“YA”) and middle grade (“MG”) fantasy/fantasy-tinged fiction that happened in the decade of the aughts and which is still with us today. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Laurel K. Hamilton were both precursors to the rise of urban fantasy and paranormal romance as a major publishing phenomenon as readers got to see and expect women main characters who both kicked ass and enjoyed hot romantic encounters in worlds filled with unpredictable encounters.

The arrival of the Peter Jackson-directed The Lord of the Rings on the big screen from 2001-2003 began a breakthrough for widespread visibility for fantasy in popular culture but even so fantasy qua fantasy—what I would call the hardcore epic fantasy—didn’t hit the big time until HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones, which is now, of course, a worldwide phenomenon. How great is it that Bollywood is doing its own version now? Pretty great.

Science fiction is mainstream now, and the big summer blockbusters feature superheroes. The genre has taken over.

But I don’t even think this is new or particularly unexpected. “Realism” or modernism or whatever you want to call it (and it’s a fine thing) feels more like a detour than a foundation. Historically the epics with their driven heroes, strange supernatural creatures, magical encounters, and fantastic adventures are the rice porridge (or meat and potatoes) of human storytelling. I think the rise of SFF as staples of 21st century popular culture can be seen more as a return to the kinds of stories people have always told and enjoyed, since before the written word.

But what does that mean for the “genre”? Genres are marketing categories created by the needs of businesses to make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Has the explosion of SFF into pop culture floated all the boats in the SFF genre? I don’t know. Lots is being published, more than ever before and exponentially so when we include all the self published works now available due to the miracle of digital publishing.

I do think that I see more fantastical and speculative elements all over everywhere in works that might have lacked them before, or more properly I guess I would say that books and TV and film are being made now that mash up categories in ways that might not have happened twenty years ago. I can’t help but think this is a good thing, although it does not help every writer.

My experience as a woman writer has been complicated. In the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s many women entered the SFF field and changed it in important ways, often with innovative works that, alas, have rarely been defined as innovative. Writers like Melanie Rawn, Anne McCaffrey, and Laurell K. Hamilton were bestsellers, and there was a push to find and market “Women in Fantasy.” Male writers have always been the biggest sellers in the epic fantasy market but there were always a fair number of women writing successfully in the sub-genre of fantasy as well.

This is just my observation, and I don’t have statistics to back up my statements, but it does seem to me as if about ten or 15 years ago a split started to happen with the rise of urban fantasy and YA/MG as strong genres in their own right (not that children’s literature hasn’t always been strong in its own right, but YA has become a real phenomenon in the publishing field in the last 10 years). It seems as if “epic fantasy” (however we are defining that) has become more identified with and highlighted by new male authors, while women have debuted into urban fantasy, paranormal, and YA. To some extent this reminds me of how, when my children were young in the 1990s, the toy aisles in stores were toy aisles and how, in the last ten years, retailers actually began to code aisles in stores with pink or blue as if boys must be dissuaded from ever walking down a “pink” aisle and girls from every glimpsing the mysteries that lies along the “blue” aisle. I admit it: I don’t like this. It not only commodifies gender but doubles down on the idea that gender and gender presentation and interests are unbreakable wires burned into our DNA when actually the pink and blue toy aisles in USA retail stores represent nothing more than an eye blink of cultural history as represented by a very narrow band of USA media/mainstream “values” built on an extremely rigid and narrowly based foundation.

I do think it is harder now for a woman (and especially women of color) to break into writing epic fantasy than it was twenty years ago when I started writing the first draft of what became King’s Dragon, the first volume of my massive seven volume epic fantasy series. I know of at least one case in which a woman writing a fantasy featuring a young princess’s coming of age that twenty years ago would have easily been published in the adult fantasy genre was told, basically, that no one would be interested; fortunately she eventually found a home for the project in YA (where, I’m glad to say, it became a bestseller) even though everything about the trilogy fits fantasy parameters as well as any epic fantasy novel that centers around a young prince’s coming of age.

Will that change? Is it changing? It’s too early to tell but I do know there is a lot of discussion about it online. The next generation is going to make its own rules (as always) so it will be interesting to see how this unfolds as we watch more and more women-led films and TV shows (once considered box office poison) lead the earnings numbers.

In many ways we are in a golden age of fantasy fiction. I suspect that as the lines between genres continue to blur and as other media continue to interact with print we’ll see major changes that we can’t yet predict.

 
FAYE: The summer before my freshman year of high school, I read the first five volumes of your Crown of Stars septology (those were all that were out!). I’d always been a fan of fantasy, but yours were some of the first adult books of fantasy I’d read. After that—I’d found Terry Brooks, David Eddings, and other dude fantasy authors in the library’s genre section. At that age, it never occurred to me to seek out female authors and creators. What epic fantasy works by women would you recommend?

KATE: This is the hardest question because any time I start listing recommendations I know I will leave out writers, and it is my considered opinion that one of the obstacles women writers (and writers along other diverse vectors) face is invisibility. Even in 2015 people still say, “but women don’t write epic fantasy.” I’ll be honest. Every time I hear that statement I may roll my eyes, because it’s so absurd, but it also hurts a little because by any possible definition I write epic fantasy and have been doing so for (as you point out) years. (In fact, now I feel old. OLD, I tell you.)

First, how are we defining epic fantasy? Massively long multi-part series set in historical-type settings, but with the addition of magic, fantastical creatures, and an empire- or earth-shattering conflict? Or any long fantasy, maybe in parts but maybe not.

I don’t have a definitive definition and I don’t think anyone does or ever could. I would urge every reader to seek out new worlds . . . and writers new to them. Exploration is half the fun.

Strangely enough, this thread from 2014 over on Reddit mentions a LOT of names. With great trepidation I’m going to mention five names only with the understanding that there are many, many, many works I love out there, and far more I haven’t (yet) read. I’m choosing these as examples to branch off from and it actually pains me not to make a comprehensive list of 100 or 150 writers because I want to salute all the people. Please understand that I bitterly regret each writer who isn’t mentioned here. Please seek them out. They are fabulous.

    

Barbara Hambly’s The Time of the Dark trilogy from the 1980s. Grimdark before the term was being used to describe male-written gritty fantasy. This is a portal fantasy about two people from our world pulled into a very dark and grim world indeed. A classic.

Katharine Kerr’s 1986-2009 Deverry series (start with Daggerspell but make sure it is the revised version). A complete series of 15 books with a story highlighting how actions have consequences that unfold across lifetimes (it used reincarnation as a theme before Robert Jordan did). A fully detailed world, memorable characters . . . just read it.

Michelle Sagara West’s The Sun Sword (1997-2004) six-book series. Empires at war, demons invading from another dimension, and one of the most intense examinations of how duty and loyalty bind people together and tear them apart. This is dense and often slow moving, and rich in characterization and setting. There are also both prequel and sequel series to The Sun Sword, but I’m starting you out slow. For “lighter” fare by the same author, try her “Cast In” (Chronicles of Elantra) series.

N. K. Jemisin: Some might argue that her books aren’t long enough in word count to qualify as epic but her Inheritance Trilogy is about a war among the gods, for goodness sakes. How can that not be epic? Jemisin is a consistently vivid and smart writer, and I loved the Inheritance Trilogy and her The Killing Moon duology, so naturally I also look forward to her new series which launches in August and is about cataclysmic events that shatter civilizations, The Fifth Season.

Marie Lu is one of many newer writers who have made their careers in YA when, twenty years ago, they might well have debuted in adult SFF. Her The Young Elites is a strong fantasy with chaotic magic, rival factions, and a girl who may become the villain we should all fear.

I’m only here listing series originally published in the commercial US/UK publishing market. Epic in its largest sense exists as a storytelling medium worldwide.

 
FAYE: Speaking of writing for adults vs. YA, you have your first YA novel, Court of Fives, coming out on August 18. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan! What makes Court of Fives YA, though Jessamy is not that much younger than Cat and Bee of The Spiritwalker Trilogy? Tell us more about working with a YA editor for the first time. Did you have to significantly alter your writing/revision process?

KATE: Thank you! I’m just so thrilled that people are enjoying Court of Fives.

A) When, in 2008, I sent a partial of Cold Magic to my agent to let him know what I was working on next, I asked him if he thought the story was YA or adult. He said it was adult because (in his words, and I paraphrase) the story is about the world as much as it is about Cat and that in his opinion YA had to be focused on the main character(s) with the world secondary. Is he correct? I can’t really say. I do know that Spiritwalker falls in a gray area and has had crossover between fantasy and YA as well as romance.

Because Spiritwalker is very much a bildungsroman, a story of Cat becoming an adult and understanding both herself and the roles she can play in the world she lives in, it feels more like a “college age” story than a teen story to me. The world and the events going on around Cat do play a huge role in the novel’s epic scope. It’s not that YA/teen stories don’t have epic scope—many do—but perhaps it is an issue of how tightly the story wraps around the main character(s). I’m honestly not sure.

Jessamy in Court of Fives is also trying to figure out how she fits into the world around her, but I think the story revolves more tightly around her immediate struggles and how she views them.

B) I knew when I sold a YA novel that I would be revising to a somewhat different aesthetic, so I was prepared to do a lot of work. Here are three differences I have found (there are more but for space reasons I’ll just mention these):

• I’m used to long and detailed edit letters from my fabulous Orbit Books editor and her assistant but usually she just dives in with a single sentence of “this is great, now here is what you need to fix.” My fabulous YA editors (I work with a senior editor and an associate editor) include a lot more encouragement than I’m used to! Of course, the encouragement always prefaces a major revision need, so it is entertaining to read “we really loved [4 sentences explaining what and why they loved it]” followed by “AND NOW [4 paragraphs detailing all the things that need to be fixed].” 

  I will note that one reason they do this is to identify the things they think are working that they want to make sure aren’t lost in the revision, as well as to clarify what they understand which helps me understand what I need to do to make sure I’m getting across to readers the story/description/emotions I want to be part of the story. Clarity is hard. Doing this work has really helped me in writing adult fiction as well because it forces me to think very, very hard about how well the images and emotions in my head are coming across on the page.

• Pacing is a paramount concern in all fiction these days. Books with a leisurely pace or plot still get published but they are increasingly rare in genre just because tastes and attention spans are what they are right now. So I do have to be very focused on pacing, very conscious of not bogging down, and I make a greater effort to find ways to end chapters on a page-turning line.
   
• Another way this difference between YA and adult manifests is in worldbuilding. In adult SFF the writer has more room, even in a fast-paced story, to pause and drop in an interesting tidbit of world building. In YA, I have been continually encouraged to pull out extraneous description or weave it directly into the plot, so Court of Fives has given me a challenge in delineating a world with fewer words than I normally use to create the setting. This kind of exercise is really good practice for a writer like me who has been writing for a long time. It’s all too easy to fall into a rut or just coast along with the skills I have, and there is a genuine thrill in feeling pushed to gain new ways of working and new perspectives on how to unfold story. Best of all, everything I learn in whatever I write carries over into everything else I write, so all my work benefits.

C) I haven’t really had to alter my revision process except that with the YA I am doing more of the process with the editors instead of alone, and I like that. This is my basic process although I should mention there is a lot of variety between books:

1. Write first draft.
2. Do a major revision to sort out structural and character issues. Turn this draft in.
3. Do a second major revision to editorial comments (and some beta reader comments). Send this version to beta readers.
4. Do a revision for minor (nuance) changes and consistency/fixing straggler plot items. This revision includes line edits, polishing, and cuts. This revision goes to copy editor.
5. Get copy edits and, besides dealing with copyediting queries, do a second line edit and final cuts (I often find things to cut at this point that were lost in the thicket of verbiage and revisions earlier).

With YA I turn in the first draft so I do all stages of revision with the editors.

I should note that every book I write has a slightly different process. Both Cold Steel and Black Wolves went through an arduous process in which steps 1 and 2 were basically conflated, and so they took a very long time to get to a finished “first” draft, which were really several major partials with backtracking and rewriting and multiple false starts and dead ends. I call these two, like The Law of Becoming, “Beethoven” books in honor of Beethoven who (according to the myth) labored laboriously over his composition. The two part An Earthly Crown/His Conquering Sword (Jaran series) and Traitors’ Gate (book 3 of Crossroads) were both “Mozart” books: They were so clear in my head that I wrote them extremely quickly and straightforwardly, and the revisions process for both of those books mostly consisted of nuance plot revisions, line editing, and cutting.

 
FAYE: What fascinates me most about epic fantasy—as someone who majored in anthropology in college and loves learning about new cultures—is the worldbuilding process. You’re essentially constructing a new world, and with that, new countries and histories and customs. What is your research process like? What comes first, the details or the big idea? More importantly, since we’d all love to see more diversity in our fantasy, what is your advice for portraying cultures inspired by non-Western nations?

KATE: What comes first for me is an image of a character in a landscape, like a brief clip from a film. Often the landscape or backdrop seen in the image is based on material I’ve been reading about at some point in the last few years that has wormed its way into my subconscious. Other times the backdrop might initially be fairly generic and the most I immediately know about it is what technology level the story world will have.

Based on that image I may choose to push further into a research area I’ve already started or I may consciously think about where I want to go for the story in terms of the geographies and cultures I want to explore. I have world built “analog” cultures, which I define as “X country/history only with different names and some altered history.” I’ve also created cultures complete in themselves, unique to their space just as every culture on Earth has a unique cultural space, however small or large that space may be.

At this point in my process I will do a certain amount of reading and researching. This stage comes before the writing starts, and usually it happens while I am writing another novel. The appeal of a “side project” is strong; it’s like an illicit escape from the project you’re supposed to be working on, and the Crossroads Trilogy, the Spiritwalker Trilogy, and Court of Fives all started life as me sneaking away from a deadline to begin creating a new world. In fact, at the time of writing this answer (June 2015) I have three secret projects tugging at my skirts, one contemporary SFF and two space opera/SFs. The SF focus of these projects probably isn’t surprising considering I am currently writing two fantasy trilogies (Court of Fives and Black Wolves).

As I continue to do bits and pieces of research I will also poke at an opening scene and start some very discreet and sketchy outlining of plot. Bear in mind that no one writes exactly the same way. For me, the intersection between setting and character has always been the most important element of developing a story because the two unfold at the same time.

I do not create a setting and then place characters in it. A story kernel doesn’t come alive for me unless I have a human story to hang my hat on. That is, I have to imagine a character in a situation that has an inherent emotion or urgency or conflict that engages my passion to explore it further.

Contrariwise, I do not come up with characters and then create a setting for them.

As a brief aside: I know writers who “discover the world as they write” and those who start with a notebook already full of details. There is nothing wrong with either of these methods or any other: Writers need to figure out what works for them.

In my case, because of the way I personally integrate culture and character in my mind, I can’t create a character and story first and then figure out where it is set.

For me, people exist within a cultural space. They have beliefs, expectations, habits, and knowledge based on the micro- and macro-culture(s) they live in, and in my opinion a character is never truly created without some kind of context. A character developed before a setting has what I’ll call “invisible context,” one the writer may not be aware inhabits the character. With each choice we make about a character we invoke context even if we don’t intend to.

Let’s say I want to write a story about a young woman who is unexpectedly and against her will required to marry a man who is a stranger to her. Some may recognize the seeds of Cold Magic in this description. But look at a few of the assumptions embedded just in that unremarkable and trope-ridden sentence: That marriage exists in this culture, that a person may be forced into marriage, that people don’t need to know each other which means someone besides the two people involved are arranging the marriage. A few things we don’t yet know are whether marriage, in the culture, is exclusively between men and women, whether the male partner can likewise be required to acquiesce to a marriage he may or may not wish for, what group or individual has the power to enforce their will in this matter, and what it gains them to do so.

All of these are part of the culture that gets built around characters and an action.

As for details versus big idea, I suppose that at the deepest level the big idea comes first but for me it is discovering the details that makes a culture come alive and feel real, because it is the details of our own lives that we take most for granted which immerse us in our day to day existence.

In Cold Magic, for example, the extended greeting between people comes from my research into the culture of Mali, where acknowledging others is more important than (for example) getting somewhere “on time.” In Court of Fives a small detail like whose carriages are curtained and whose aren’t is an important detail: women from the highborn Patron class travel through the city “veiled” by light curtains on their carriages while Patron men go about visible to all, as do all Commoners regardless of gender since their concept of privacy is different from the people in the Patron class. A detail like this reveals a great deal about class, gender, and social mores, and the readers learn something about the main character Jes’s father by noticing which rules he adheres to even though he is not himself of highborn Patron birth.

For that matter, back in the day every time I read an SF novel set in the future in which women changed their names to that of their husbands I knew the writer probably wasn’t really thinking through societal change but just tacking a very specific set of cultural expectations onto their stage-set. It’s not that it might not happen (I think C.J. Cherryh deals with this in a thoughtful way in her Union/Alliance universe books in terms of alliances between spacer families), but that in these cases “custom” isn’t actually being examined; it’s just an unthought-through assumption that the whole world and history now and forever hews to the fictional universe depicted in Leave it to Beaver.

From there on out (returning to my research process) I do as much research as I have time for. I seek out general works to familiarize myself with a general knowledge base, then branch into academic work and, where possible, what people actually from that culture say about themselves and, in historical cases, wrote (usually filtered through translations). When I’m creating a world like Crossroads or Court of Fives I focus on an amalgamation of elements to create a foundation, usually people’s understood relationship to their cosmos, and build outward from there. Once I start writing the rough draft I continue to read (and possibly read even more heavily) because I discover and make up world elements as part of the writing. I often figure out fairly major world building elements in the course of writing the first draft because oftentimes characters’ actions, or the choices forced upon them, reveal the most interesting details and challenges of their world.

The process of creation is the creation, if you see what I mean.

As for advice for people seeking to write outside the culture(s) they know, I guess I would cautiously say a couple of things.

1. I’m not an expert and I have made and will continue to make mistakes. Own your mistakes. Learn from them. Listen to others more than you talk yourself.
2. Make room for and try not to take space from people whose voices are more marginalized than your own. Listen.
3. Be humble. Be respectful. If you are going to research a culture that is not your own, listen to the voices from that culture, don’t just seek out outside views of the culture whose analysis is more comfortable for you. Ask politely, and if people don’t have time for your questions, then retreat gracefully. If they do have time, thank them and really, truly listen to what they have to say.
4. No culture is monolithic. Individuals within a culture do not hold the same views and beliefs. People can have multiple ways of understanding themselves, measured against and lived within different aspects of their lives. As in rhythm, the gaps between beats are as important as the beats. Listen.
5. Ask yourself why you want to do this.
6. Be aware that you will be hauling your own expectations and stereotypes down this path. I don’t think we can fully rid ourselves of this baggage but we can try to be aware of where and what some of those assumptions are and try to build around them.
7. Pay attention to the details, to the elements of daily life that are often derided as trivial or too unimportant for “important” fiction. I often find the best windows into other ways of living to be the day to day experiences of the world, and the habits, interactions, languages, and rhythms that characterize people’s lives. These spaces are, after all, where most life is lived.

Diversity is realism. Furthermore, speculative fiction gives us the vastest canvas imaginable, measured only against the limits of each artist’s mind. Why build a fence when we can explore the stars?

 
FAYE: Absolutely. Going back to women authors of epic fantasy, one major thing I’ve noticed (and now actively look for) is portrayals of romance, love and sex compared to men authors—and beyond that, queer authors. Do you also sense a difference? What was the last headdesk moment in an epic fantasy you’d read? The last fist-pump moment?

KATE: To me the most striking difference between portrayals of romance, love, and sex by men and women lies in how those aspects of the plot are reviewed and analyzed by critics and readers.

If I read an epic fantasy novel written by a man that includes a love story in a narrative that otherwise hews to clear genre conventions, I rarely see the book discussed as “a love story” or “a romance” or otherwise held at arm’s length as if slightly displeasing to the scent. A similar tale written by a woman often may be described as if the romance is the main thing the potential reader needs to take into account. Thus we get epic fantasy series described as romance-oriented and “girly” even if they are filled with political intrigue, strife, and battles, versus manly books that may have romance and love stories but are described in terms of war, conflict, and heroics.

I find this to be particularly true of stories about personal growth and change. A love story in a young man’s coming of age story, especially a story in which the female love interest acts as a reward or a life-changing lesson for him, is seen as an integral part of his maturation. But if a girl has a love interest or romantic entanglement as part of her coming of age, then often her story is labeled as a romance even if there are other elements to her journey.

Furthermore, a story about a male main character’s growth and change, or his coming of age, is often treated as a universal story that everyone can read because its lessons are applicable to all of us. But a similar story with a female lead (or a queer lead) will often be seen as a niche story applicable only to some. It’s a refreshing change to see a series like The Hunger Games marketed as a story for everyone, and while the love triangle between her, Peeta, and Gale is central to the story, the story still remains primarily about Katniss’s journey. She is positioned as someone we can all identify with.

In terms of how love stories are written, I’m not sure. I can’t speak knowledgeably about the history of the novel. I do know that for decades the romance genre has been disparaged as poorly-written and shallow wish-fulfillment, while a strong counter-argument can be made that romance novels are feminist in showing women as beings who can express female sexual desire when for so long in the Victorian and post-Victorian era women weren’t supposed to feel or display sexual desire. Romance novels set in patriarchal cultures can also be feminist in showing women making what choices are available to them.

I’m cautious about ascribing any kind of gender essentialist difference to men’s writing versus women’s writing because I think it is currently still difficult to disentangle cultural constructs of gender from whatever biological sex may or may not mean. Do fewer men write love stories from the point of view of women than women do from the point of view of men? Possibly, but I haven’t done the work to see if this is statistically the case. Are (or were) men less likely to depict women’s sexual desire in nuanced and positive and affirming ways? I don’t know. Nicola Griffith recently showed that awards more often go to works about male main characters, and that in itself may suggest that a love story written from the male point of view will be viewed differently (as more important) than that from the female point of view.

This is one reason I think stories with queer protagonists and, for that matter, all stories less bound by the male/female binary, are so important. Such stories break down what gender means to create stories in which the binary of gender isn’t the first space along which we organize our understanding of who we are.

As for recent head-desks, any story in which the male protagonist’s lover or young wife is introduced and then killed by the end of the first chapter so he can be driven to heroic levels to take revenge. That is an instant head-desk for me, and these days, more often than not, results in me immediately closing the book.

I haven’t read as much epic fantasy in the last couple of years although I’ve read a lot of great fantasy novels. I’m defining epic fantasy as cast of thousands, multiple point of view, big ticket high stakes epic vista fantasy, so I’m going to limit myself to that. The most recent epic fantasy I finished is Ken Liu’s excellent The Grace of Kings, with influences as far ranging as Homer and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It’s set in a patriarchal society and deals with high stakes indeed—who will rule the empire—and for quite a lot of the book women are barely visible. This is frustrating at times (and some readers have been more frustrated by it than I was, so your mileage may vary), but it’s also careful preparation for the subversion Liu has prepared in the last third of the book. There’s a great scene in which the patriarchal prejudices of one character are literally used to defeat him. Fist-pump!

Is a shift happening? Am I seeing fewer “male journey centered” type of stories now—pausing to note that I have nothing against the male journey story; some of my favorite novels are male journey stories—and more well rounded characters from all the spaces of life? I don’t know. I hope so, and the success of YA as a genre has certainly made a huge difference even if I’m not seeing quite the same strides in adult epic fantasy (I should note there is a lot of strong writing out there now regardless of whether it fits my tastes).

Fantasy and science fiction are, after all, the literature of the imagination, and imagination is meant to be vast, not confined. I think we live in an exciting age of narrative.

 
FAYE: Lastly, tell us about a remarkable woman of fantasy literature—an author, reader, agent, editor, scholar, or someone else—who has changed your life.

KATE: I want to mention two women who personally helped me, in two different ways.

Before I was published, when I first got an agent interested in my writing, said agent sent a partial of my manuscript (an early version of A Passage of Stars) to one of her published clients, Judith Tarr (author of SF, fantasy, and historical fantasy), who graciously read and critiqued the first few chapters. First of all, critiquing is very time consuming, especially for a new writer who has an exceedingly imperfect grasp of the basics. So that alone is a generous act. But the critique was also brutal and absolutely compassionate because it went like this (I paraphrase): “This writer shows promise. Now here is everything wrong she needs to work on if she wants to get published.” The critique hit like ice water to the face, and I remain eternally grateful that Judy took the time to read and comment and, more than that, that she had enough respect for me as a writer to not mince words and get straight to the heart of the matter, which is that writing is hard work. It helped that she absolutely nailed my worst flaws, all of which I have improved on but which still dog me all these years later. I can’t thank her enough.

The other writer I need to mention is Katharine Kerr (best known for her Deverry series) who befriended me when I first entered the field as a newly published writer with tiny children. At that time my husband was working as a police officer with lots of overtime, and she invited me to her house every week so she could help baby wrangle the infant twins and toddler big sister. I survived their early years in large part because she became and remains family, and her encouragement and help made it possible for me to push through the toughest times. Without her I doubt I would have the career I have managed to build.

The connections we make are often what sustain us. I can’t emphasize that enough both for myself and, honestly, as a way to think about story, because story itself is a connection that forms between the storytelling and the audience. That’s what we aim for: That through an intangible magic we connect through words on a page. What an amazing thing that is.