>>: All right everyone. Thanks so much for coming. It is my great pleasure to introduce Charlie
Jane Anders, who is introducing her very first book, All the Birds in the Sky as part of the
Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. I've had the great pleasure of knowing Charlie for
over a decade now as part of her work on a reading series called Writers with Drinks which
happens every month in the Bay Area and brings the best people for writing and the best
people for reading and Charlie's fantastic narration, which completely twists the fabric of reality
every single time I see it. This series is so good that everyone should buy a plane ticket today,
right now, to go to the Make out Room on February 13. And if you can't make it you should
hire someone to go to it and Skype you in. I have. So Charlie is here today to tell us about what
she has learned combining fantasy and fiction. Charlie is also the recipient of numerous
awards, most notably the 2012 Hugo award for her novelette Six Months Three Days, which has
been optioned as a possible series by NBC. And this is just a fantastic opportunity here from an
emerging master of this craft. I am so happy to bring her here, Charlie, thank you.
>> Charlie Jane Anders: Thank you. Thank you so much. I was so glad you could make it, Dave.
It's great to see you and it's so great to see all of you guys. This is such a great event and I am
really thrilled and honored to be here. Basically, the title of my talk Is How to Avoid Creating a
Genre Mashup at All Costs because I just did a genre mashup called All the Birds in the Sky so I
am here to tell you why genre mash ups are terrible. You should never do them. They're awful,
just avoid at all costs. Basically, why do I think that? Backing up a little bit, genre mash ups are
basically everywhere in public culture right now. You have Adventure Time which is postapocalyptic fairytale with aliens and robots and wizards and candy people and just all sorts of
other stuff, and it is just like every genre smooshed together. Then you have Firefly, which is
just like a Western that takes place in outer space with all of these Western tropes, but also lots
of space stuff and spaceship action and stuff and it wears the Western thing on its sleeve with
the music and the kind of, the way they talk and everything. And then there is a Western in
space with like samurai and wizards and fairytales and World War II battles and a million other
things all just smooshed into one giant lump. And actually, if you look at it like that, genre mash
ups are everywhere, but sometimes what doesn't work is if you have a genre mashup that is
like too in your face about being a genre mashup and where that is kind of the point. Case in
point, here was something where people just could not quite wrap their minds around Cowboys
and Aliens. It sounded really goofy. It was trying to be a really serious Western with aliens and
it was trying to like really combine these genre was in a really kind of in your face way, and the
general consensus was that it didn't quite hold water or hold whatever you want to hold in a
Western, sand, I guess. I don't know. That can be embarrassing when a genre mashup doesn't
work. I personally, long before All the Birds in the Sky came out, I started getting kind of
identified or pigeonholed as someone who does genre mash ups because, for example, this
story was in the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction. It's called it's called Palm Strike's Last
Case and it's a story about a superhero who decides to go and help colonize another planet.
He's like a dark, urban, gritty vigilante superhero who strikes fear into the hearts of criminals
and then he goes off to another planet to help them colonize and they're having issues of food
scarcity and their farms are failing and he has to help them out as an agriculture expert. So it's
kind of like your standard superhero agriculture expert story, like you do. That was sort of a
genre mashup, and he also fights crime on the other planets, so he keeps doing the superhero
too. And I did this one which was As Good As New which basically takes place in a apocalyptic
world where the human race has been pretty much wiped out, but then the main character
finds a genie in a bottle which I thought was just logic. If you think about it, you know, if a
genie is in a bottle, the bottle is going to probably be indestructible, like nothing will damage
that model no matter what, even the apocalypse. And if it's hidden somewhere it's hiding place
is going to be reduced to rubble by whatever causes the apocalypse. Therefore, your chances
of finding a genie in a bottle actually increase massively after the apocalypse. It's just logic. I
didn't even think of it as a genre mashup, but a kind of is. And so people were describing me as
someone who does genre mash ups. Then I was already doing this book which is basically, it's
about combining science fiction and fantasy and it's basically about a mad scientist and a witch
who meet up as children in junior high school and they survived the hell of junior high school
together and kind of get through some really awful, hairy stuff. And then it jumps ahead and
they're adults and they're living in San Francisco. And they're having adventures as grown-ups
and it's very much about magic meets science and about like some of the kind of basic stuff of
fantasy and science fiction, like the kind of mystery of magic and the kind of like the technology
and science and discovery of science. And so it's about those two things coming together, but
writing that book was what made me think that doing a genre mashup was not a great idea. So
I started out with this idea that I was just going to take all of the genre tropes and just smoosh
them together. And so like there were going to be dragons. I guess this is Narnia. There were
going to be dragons and elves and spell books and ruins. For my witch character there is going
to be every fantasy you can think of. There is going to be an evil wizard who is going to be
basically Voldemort, kind of. There was basically going to be all this kind of stuff. There was
going to be gnomes and goblins and just every fantasy thing all just kind of popping up all over
the place and kind of playing with all the expectations of the genre. You have your science
fiction character and you've got giant robots. You've got aliens. You've got monsters,
dinosaurs, spaceships, everything you can possibly think of, like every single sci-fi trope popping
up and all the sci-fi expectations kind of manifesting themselves. There are a few problems
with doing that, with just putting all the tropes together. One of the problems you run into is
things start to kind of blur together. Like you put an elf and an alien next to each other and
unless you are really careful the elf is kind of an alien, kind of. This is cast from a Star Trek
Voyager. She's an elf. She's an alien. She's both, kind of. I don't know. Elves are kind of aliens.
Dragons are kind of dinosaurs, like a little bit. So unless you are really careful to differentiate
them and explain and really get into why they are not the same thing, functionally they are
often the same thing in genre fiction. They fulfill the same function. They have a lot of the
same attributes. Dragons can sometimes talk and I guess of dinosaurs can occasionally talk too,
but we won't get into that. So once you just start blowing things out and just throwing in all of
the tropes, it doesn't have lots of sparkly contrast and so it actually becomes just like mush. It
just kind of doesn't differentiate at all. This is Hardware Wars. I should have gotten a picture of
Space Balls because there were probably more high res pictures in space balls. This is hardware
wars which is a Star Wars spoof. And so the other problem with playing with all the genre
tropes and consciously remixing, I guess is what I'm really talking about, remixing the genre
stuff so that it is all like smooshed together and happening all at the same time and you are
playing with all of the different things that people expect from the two different genres, you
end up saying it is a spoof. You end up that it's kind of making fun of it and playing to your
expectations but maybe subverting them or kind of poking fun at them and just and it's more of
a pastiche, I guess. It's more of a self mocking thing. With my novel, originally, I had thought of
it as being sort of mad scientist versus witch. I apologize. I made these slides late at night and I
suck at making slides, so I apologize for the ugly slides. But mad scientist versus witch and they
were going to be enemies or something. They were going to be rivals. Maybe they would both
want something and only one of them can have it and so they are just constantly fighting each
other and one upping each other. Like the witch casts a spell and the mad scientist fires a ray
gun and they are like having a duel on like a flying carpet for a flying car. I don't know. Or
maybe just the rocket car, I don't know. Just like have them be rivals and have it be like zany.
That was my original idea was that they were going to be rivals and it was going to be them
kind of at odds, kind of like trying to defeat each other. That was a cute idea and it would be
really funny and you can't get into a lot of like zany ideas. But I got more interested in the
characters of my mad scientist and my witch and developing their relationship and what it is
that brings them together rather than just having them in conflict the entire time. Meanwhile, I
started to think about, so you have these characters that are kind of like a science fiction
archetype and a fantasy archetype and they are connected to huge massive stuff like starships
and galaxies and huge magic like traditions and spell books and dragons and everything. But
what's more interesting than the huge horizons that you can connect to them is actually their
limitations. And this is a picture of Dumbledore because that's what I thought of when I
thought of limitations because there is a log that Dumbledore actually cannot do for various
reasons. He is like Harry, go do everything. I can't do anything. But what's more interesting is
almost always the limitations and like what can't the witch do? What can't the mad scientist
do? What are they unable to access? What's not available to them is much more interesting
than they can have everything. That is just boring after a while. It's much more interesting to
explore what can the witch not do that the mad scientist maybe can? Or vice versa or what can
either of them do? Or what can they both do in different ways but neither of them can do it
quite the way they want to be able to do it? It's like limitations are always more interesting
than just unlimited vistas and the more you start being like I'm just going to explore every genre
trope and we mix them and play with them. I'm always amazed with Adventure Time because
that show has like everything in it but it doesn't ever feel like things are just ridiculously easy
even though they could just like call up Ice King every week and be like Ice King come solve this
for us but that would be like, he would probably screw things up in some other way. So
basically another thing about that is that when you have characters from different worlds
meeting, and here is a representation of fantasy and science fiction meeting, I guess. It's the
Star Trek episode Catspaw where Kirk and Spock meet some witches, classic episode. I'm sure
you have all seen it many times. Anyway, when you have characters meeting from different
worlds who represent different viewpoints or different ideas, you know, what's interesting is
seeing their different ideas about the world and their different opinions and their different
ways of looking at stuff kind of coming together. And, you know, having them actually have a
dialogue or seeing how they see the world in different ways versus just like either they fight or
whatever. And so I get interested in, that's what kind of drew me into the relationship story
originally is that it's actually more interesting to see them like their worldview is coming
together and I like a relationship story about people who come from different worlds or
different cultures or different backgrounds or different ideologies. Their interaction is kind of,
you know, part of the story. While I was working on all of this, I did this story that David
mentioned when he introduced me. Six Months Three Days is another thing that got me
thinking about what is really interesting is bringing together people from different viewpoints
or different ways of seeing things. Six Months Three Days is about two different clairvoyants
who see the future. They both see the future but they see it differently. He sees a fixed
unchangeable future which anything he sees absolutely will happen and there is no changing it.
There is nothing you can do. The future is set in stone for him. She sees many possible
different futures and she can actually try to choose which ones she wants to have. She can be
like if I go over here I know this will happen. If I go over there… She can choose different
possible futures. And so it's about fate versus free will and predestination and whether we can
actually influence our own future. But it's also a relationship story and part of what was like my
kind of Eureka moment when writing that was that it was like thinking of it more like a
relationship story and less of a philosophical conundrum. I like a relationship story where there
are two radically incompatible viewpoints. So I wrote this and then I started thinking of All the
Birds in the Sky the same way. It became much less about I can take the fantasy trips and the
sci-fi tropes and I can subvert and we mix and whatever, and much more about how are these
two different ways of seeing things and two different ways of thinking about the world. This
brings me to my next point which is that no matter how, and this is just like a JIF that they made
for me that is like a quote from the book. No matter how many different genres you are
drawing from, no matter how many different ideas you are pulling into your story, it's still one
story. It's not like multiple stories. Unless you are doing something really fancy and literary
where it's like things don't intersect or whatever, but usually it's one story, one world, one
central axis that everything has to revolve around and one sort of emotional core and you have
to know what that is. What is the core thing that you are dealing with in your story? And for
me that was the relationship between those two characters. But the world, even though you
have mad science that is totally out there in its own way and then magic that is just completely
unreal and doesn't exist in our world, they still have to feel like they could actually exist in the
same world together and coexist in the same reality. The thing about having an emotional core
to the store like is super key to me. Like having the stuff that makes you cry or gets you super
emotionally invested, and here is my standard representation for things that make you cry,
David Tennant in the rain or David Tennant dying or whatever. Of course now people think
David Tennant dying and they are like yes. Sorry, because of Jessica Jones, you know. A month
ago people would, or a couple of months ago people would have been oh no, David Tennant
dying. And now it is like thank God. David Tennant is dead. But whatever. The point is -- I'm
rat holing. This thing that makes you get emotionally invested in the characters and the thing
that pulls you in and makes you actually care about what's going on, because honestly, there
are two kinds of stories. There are stories where you care about the characters and what's
going to happen to them and stories where you just don't. The stories where you don't can be
fun if there are enough explosions and funny bits, but ideally, you want to care about the
characters and be invested in their well-being and them finding happiness together or
separately, working out whatever they are trying to work out. And I got fancy and sort of
thought about things in terms of genres and commenting on other stuff, the less easy it was to
just kind of home in on that emotional center with the characters. Often it was like getting
distracted by the shiny thing. It is like oh, shiny thing, versus staying focused on what you are
actually trying to talk about. You can have a story about a levitating eggplant. It's a levitating
eggplant. The other eggplants don't understand why this eggplant is levitating and it's a funny
story or whatever, but you have to care about the eggplant. You have to feel like in some sense
this is real even though it's this zany weird thing, it's real to this eggplant. This eggplant cares
about the fact that it is levitating. This eggplant has feelings. This eggplant has a life and has
expectations and has a history and has friends that maybe are judging it for levitating. This
eggplant has had a life that was normal or whatever for it before it started levitating. So that is
like you have to have that emotional core and you have to have that sense that this is real. This
is real for the people. This is really happening to them. They do not know they are in a story
and they are not just funnily commenting on everything that is happening. When you think
about a genre mashup, you think about like your standard image is like the Hollywood person
being it's great. It's like x meets y. It's like aliens meet the Smurf. It's like Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Terminator. It's just like Cowboys and Aliens is the perfect example. We just take
these two things and we smoosh them together and it's awesome and we are going to make it
work somehow. It can feel really calculated. If you don't find a way to invest in that reality of
what you're dealing with, it can just feel calculated and you are just like trying to find two
successful things and just smoosh them together and you've got an even more successful thing
because it's twice as successful. That's why I am like don't do a genre mashup. Instead, here is
Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula, which I just love that that exists. Don't do a genre mashup.
Instead find a way to pull from different genres and make one-story that pulls from whatever
stuff you need from the genre's you are pulling from if it makes sense for the story you're
telling. That's sort of a semantic distinction, but to me it's super meaningful. It's a super
meaningful distinction because you don't start with your starting point as I'm just going to
smoosh these things together and that's going to be the point. The point is the story and the
point is finding a story about characters and what's interesting about getting things from
different genres. I think we all like to pull from different genres. Star Wars is the perfect
example of that. That sounds easy, but it's tricky in practice to just pull out of genres and use
them in your story for whatever you want. Part of why genres are so successful is because they
come with expectations. You kind of know what to expect. If you go see a spy action movie,
there's going to be a fight on a plane, possibly on the outside of a plane, possibly on the inside
of a plane, but they will fight on a plane in midair at some point during the movie. There will
probably be a ticking time bomb at some time in the movie. If you go see a Star Trek movie, the
Enterprise will crash into a planet at some point during the movie. That is just a guarantee. The
Star Trek guarantee. We will crash the Enterprise in every movie. You either have to fulfill
those expectations in a meaningful way or you have to consciously not just get sucked into
what everybody expects. Part of why we want to break up and we mix and combine genres is
to play with expectations and subvert them. This is a picture of The Invisibles in this comic
written by Grant Morrison and drawn by a bunch of amazing artists. I think that is Brian Boland
art. The Invisibles is like this incredible comic that is like every genre but it's just unpredictable
and completely all over the place and fascinating. At this point it is worth pointing out that
superheroes, basically, are like the most successful example in the universe of just pulling every
genre ever and just smooshing them all together and offing turning it into something that
would be unrecognizable to people who were fans of a particular genre. Think of how many
genres there are in this one picture. There is like Norse mythology; there is Greek mythology.
There is aliens. There is nuclear mutations. There is Westerns. There is dark, urban vigilantes
from like the 1920s. There is like every possible genre you can think of in this one picture, and
yet none of these feel like representatives of genre other than superheroes. It's like oh, it's
superheroes. That's kind of the gold standard in a way for just stripping away all of the original
stuff from a genre and just being like bloop kind of, in a sense. And when it works superheroes
are amazing. The other thing is in addition to the emotional core and having like a feeling of
this is real and I am connecting to it and I care about it, we need playfulness and I chose them
Moomins for a playfulness, just because I love the Moomins. We need playfulness. We need a
sense of like I am having fun with this. I'm creating stuff and I'm having a good time and it's
unpredictable. That's like what I said about the Invisibles. Unpredictability is really important
to me and like a feeling of like we are not just following this path that we have been let down or
whatever. So I'm a big fan of intentionality, and here is another gift that they made of a quote
from my book. This one is a sticker too, so if you want stickers, I've got stickers. Intentionality,
like people will tell you that the author cannot understand the meaning of their homework and
that authors just should shut up and not even try to understand their own work. I hate those
people. Those people suck. Authors absolutely can understand the meaning of their own work.
They can't necessarily know what it's going to mean to everybody else, but they can know what
it means to them and they can know what they wanted it to mean. I think that actually authors
have kind of a responsibility to know what they think they are saying or to know what their
work means to them before they put it out in the world. There is this whole postmodern thing
of oh no. Don't try to understand what you're writing. Just whatever. And I think it's actually
really important to ask why am I writing this? What does this mean to me? And it's even more
important to do that when you are pulling different genre elements together and being like I'm
just throwing in all of this different stuff. Why are you using those elements? What do they
mean to you? What do they represent in your story and in your own mind and what are they
about? What is the point of them? Why do you feel the need to have them? This is Fantasia.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to represent. I think this is the part of like what do they
mean to you. Instead of adding every trope, think about what you absolutely have to have for
your story. Don't be like I'm having fantasy stuff so I'm going to throw in elves and gnomes and
dragons. This is a picture from V. E. Schwab's amazing, amazing Darker Shade of Magic series.
I've only read the first book. This is the cover of the second book which I haven't read yet, but I
hear it is also great. And her book came to mind as one who is very, very careful about picking
just a few magic things that she absolutely needs to have him her story. There is basically a
nearly extinct race of magical people who can travel two different alternate universes and it's
such a beautiful story because she is so surgical about picking just the right elements. So think
about what you actually need to have. You don't need an ancient curse. You don't need an evil
castle, necessarily. And once you've figured out the stuff you must have, like my novel had
aliens in it for a while, actually, until pretty late in the process. And I had to kill my aliens. I had
to take them out back and shoot them and I am still sad about it. They were great, but it was
just one thing too many. So once you think about what you absolutely need to have from
different genres or from the genres you are playing with, then you have to kind of backfill. Here
is a map of Fillory from The Magicians which is a great example of a fantasy series, Lev
Grossman's The Magicians, where he has such a great sense of history and such a great sense of
everything having like a lot of back story and weight to it. You've got magicians or you've got
witches who can use magic. What do you absolutely have to have? You don't have to have
spell books or wands. You do have to have a world where people have known about magic for
a certain amount of time and how has that affected the world? You have to have some sense
of how they use magic, how they have used magic in the past, what the rules are, maybe with a
history of magic is. What are the things, everything has to be connected to something. And
then ideally at the end it's all connected to the real world. So if there is a gap between your
thing in the real world or if there is just a painted backdrop and people are standing around
talking in front of it, then you've got to fill that in. It has to feel lived in. It has to feel like this is
a place where people actually live. Case in point, in my novel my witch goes off to a magical
high school. And I was like can't it be just freaking Hogwarts? Can I just take Hogwarts and
paint over it with pig feet or whatever? I don't know. I spent hours and hours thinking about
what is my magical high school like? Not just how is it different from Hogwarts, because that is
kind of a dead-end to, but what makes sense for it to be like? And how is the way that this
school is organized connect to all of the other stuff I'm coming up with about how magic has
worked in my world? And giving it a history that actually was logical in the world so it felt built
out from reality. It was something that I basically sweated bullets over and kept my fingers
crossed, but at least I can say with confidence that it's not Hogwarts or Break Bills. It's not any
of those things. It's its own thing. And you know the more real all of this stuff feels, the more
connected to something with a history and with real world stuff this feels, the more your
characters feel real and the less they feel like ciphers. Something I wrote in my notes here is
world building equals character building. If you have a convincing world your characters will
automatically be much more convincing as a result. I was talking about my witch character. My
mad scientist character, you know, originally, he was a mad scientist, goggles, giant white lab
coat, ray gun. He can have a lair with things that go bzzt or whatever, a giant lever and all of
that, whatever. And I am like no. You are a super genius science geek in 2016. By the time he
is a grown up it's like some years into the future. It's the 2020s. You are going to be in a loft in
Soma with a pinball machine wearing jeans, hanging out with other super geeks. You are not
going to be in a lair. You are going to be in a loft. For a lot of what I do with the mad scientist
character, I just completely tossed out all of the mad scientist tropes completely because it just
didn't feel real at all and the more kind of conventional that was, the more I could go nuts in
other ways. He goes to MIT. That leads me to the next point which is that you get a certain
bang for your buck by combining two genres or playing with two different genres because it
throws you off balance. It's unexpected, but you get maybe even more of a bang for your buck
when genre elements are the recognizable real world. This is Border Town, I think, the
anthology series that Terry Wendling and some other folks did of urban fantasy. If you have
magicians and like a lot of my novel takes place in San Francisco and it's very much the real San
Francisco because I live there and I know stuff and it says recognizable and as down to earth
and as real as I could possibly make it. So you get a certain bang for your buck from having just
genre elements in a recognizable setting in the real world and that's just as powerful as wizards
and aliens or whatever. It's about the friction between the fantastical and the real versus like
the friction between two different kinds of the fantastical. Part of the process is finding, as you
are writing the book or as you are creating the world or whatever, where do you get the
friction? Where do things like actually generate sparks when you put them together as
opposed to just being like they are sitting next to each other and nothing is happening? I'm
basically Rae Dawn Chong, sort of. When writing I'm looking for fire. I'm looking for whatever
creates sparks and whatever makes things kind of burst into flames. Sometimes it's surprising.
Sometimes the things that you expect to cause a lot of excitement, like I'm going to put these
two things together and it's going to be really cool, and that's going to make lots of excitement,
and then you put them together and it's like eh. And other things that you didn't think were
going to cause a lot of excitement, you bring them together and all of a sudden they are having
this interesting dialogue and there is an argument or something interesting going on. You just
never know. You have to kind of experiment with it and play with it and see where things come
together in an interesting way. The thing about world building, I want to come back to world
building really fast, is the real question is what is real to your characters and, to some extent,
what is the thing that they can't just ignore? There is a giant freaking wall that they can't just
go around or tunnel under it or whatever. There is a giant freaking wall and they have to figure
out how to go over the wall or go through the wall and it's like, you probably all know what wall
this is. There is a giant freaking wall and they can't just ignore it, then that is real to them and
it's important. Stuff that they can ignore is stuff that isn't important in your story, basically. By
the time I got to my tenth completed draft of All the Birds in the Sky, I was really obsessing
about what I call connective tissue. This is like something I randomly made while I was writing
the novel. In longhand I made an emotional map of it. I have no idea what this means now, but
it meant something to me at the time. Connective tissue, which is something that I almost
made this entire talk about, but I feel like I can sum it up in a couple of minutes. It's, you know,
making sure that the big emotional moments are supported by lots and lots of little moments
that lead up to each one of them. And that every single step feels like it's coming from
someplace. If you are going from, don't just jump from A to C to D or whatever. If it's
something that your characters are going through that is important you have to see every single
bit of it from their perspective that is important to them. And I found out the more I put in little
tiny moments that you don't even notice in between the big moments, where they are just
having kind of little emotional interactions and little moments of feeling or noticing or talking to
each other about stuff, the more that big moments felt supported. And that was something in
coming back to the whole genre mashup idea. I felt like when I started pulling out some of the
stuff like we will have funny genre stuff happening, like now there's an alien and all this other
stuff, when I cut all of that stuff out there were holes in the book and those holes were where I
was shortchanging the characters and cheating and not really showing how they get from here
to there. So a lot of what really makes it work for me is just making sure that you are really
showing every step of their journey. Finally, genres are toolkits. Since I wrote this talk a few
weeks ago I kind of stopped thinking of genres as toolkits a little bit. It is still a metaphor that
works for me. Genres are toolkits. You pull out the tools that you need. If you are trying to put
in a screw you don't need a hammer, right? Genres are toolkits. You use whatever you need
from them and you don't use whatever you don't need. Genres work for you. You don't work
for them. They are not your boss. And they don't get to tell you what to do. They don't have
any say in how they are used at all. They can't get their feelings hurt. You can beat them up
horribly and they will still be your friend tomorrow. I have been in incredibly sadistic mean
horrible relationships with several genres for years and they are still completely nice to me. So
just abuse the heck out of them is what I'm saying. As long as you are good to your characters
you can be incredibly horrible to genres. Thank you so much. [applause]. How are we doing
for time? I could read for a bit. I could do Q&A. I could do, I don't know. Do you guys have
questions? Hi.
>>: I'm curious. For genre mashup or not, do you think they actually help a story or do they
restrict how the story is being told?
>> Charlie Jane Anders: I'm not sure I understand the question. You mean like combining
genres is like causing more restrictions?
>>: You have certain genre and so you expect certain things to happen. Do you think that they
actually help the story or restrict the story?
>> Charlie Jane Anders: I mean, it can do both. It really depends on first of all how much you
get sucked into trying to fulfill for subvert those expectations, which takes up a lot of time
either way. Also, how much you really interrogated how much those genres are about for you.
If you are like I know exactly how I want to use this and you can use it just really surgically, then
I think it really gives you a lot of freedom because you've got this element that you can just play
with. But if you have this thing that there is all of this stuff attached and I have to use all of it
somehow, then it is much more restrictive. And that is kind of like what I'm getting at is you
have to be surgical about it and not get sucked into using stuff that you don't actually want
because it comes with the package or whatever. Hi?
>>: I am curious about your writing process. Do you have a routine? You mentioned ten
drafts. Is that typical?
>> Charlie Jane Anders: The ten drafts was kind of an extreme case because basically I just
kept, I think I first tried to sell it after like the seventh or eighth draft and it came back. And
then I went back and revised it again and I finally got an agent, but then he wanted me to revise
it and then the publisher wanted me to revise it and so there was a lot of that. I do try to do a
ton of incremental drafts where I am just tossing out a lot of stuff and reworking and rethinking
as I go. Like you saw the thing I scribbled in the notebook, I write longhand. For novels,
especially, I will write a novel in longhand first and then come back and type it into the
computer. You are revising a little bit when you do that and then once I've done that then I
tear it up and put it back together like a whole bunch of times just to see what I can make work.
>>: Are you possessive over your work? I haven't read Six Months Three Days or this one, but
hearing that there is going to be a show around it, how are you feeling? Are you feeling
nervous?
>> Charlie Jane Anders: With the Six Months Three Days TV show, and I don't really know how
much I'm allowed to say about that at this point, but with the TV show it was a thing where
they were really awesome smart people and Christian Ritter, who just starred in Jessica Jones
was one of the producers and was like going into meetings with these Hollywood people and
acting out the female main character of my store in the pitch meetings. I wish I could have
seen, but I just heard about it afterwards. Anyway, that was super exciting, but I had a lot of
conversations on the phone with Eric who was writing the pilot. Here's what I think is going on
in the story and here's how I think it should work. My feeling was once he and I had had a lot of
those conversations I was like okay. Let's do it. Then after that, I was just basically done. I was
like you can call me and ask me a question anytime you want. I am never going to bug you
again, because A, my sanity is super important to me, and trying to micromanage what people
are doing hundreds of miles away when they know their job better than I do, it might turn out
great. It might not turn out great, but either way me trying to micromanage it from San
Francisco is automatically not going to turn out great for my sanity. And also you have to at
some point let go and just recognize that it's not the thing that you wrote. It's somebody
making something out of the thing that you wrote and that can be really awesome. If I was a
musician and I wrote a song and someone covered it, I would just be so excited that someone
was covering my song. I would just be like if someone is making something out of a thing that I
made then that is super cool. And so I am not possessive in that sense. Supposedly Elmore
Leonard had this thing where he talked about Hollywood. He had like this wall where you just
walk up to it and you just throw your book over it and they throw money back and then you
walk away, and that's how it works. I think that's a really good way of looking at it. The only
thing I would say is the one rule that I kind of came up with is either have total control over
what you're doing, which I can if I am writing a book, or have zero control. Don't have like half
control because then it is just going to make you crazy. That was my thought. Hi, Amy.
>> Amy Draves: There is an online comment. She wanted to say that she reads io9 everyday
and she appreciates all your team does for the sci-fi fantasy community.
>> Charlie Jane Anders: Yay, thank you so much, yay. Milwaukee, let's go to you.
>>: Actually this was just brought up. You obviously help write io9. You do tons of basically
media analysis and criticism of other people's work. You talking especially in this case where
you kind of started with this kind of all of the kitchen sync, all the sci-fi, all the fantasy. As you
go through and consume media and especially analyze it, how do you keep yourself from going
wow. That's really cool. I want to start putting that into my book. Obviously, part of that is just
what writing is. But how do you build up that filter where you start to understand -- I guess my
question is, especially when you're writing genre fiction, how do you keep yourself grounded
instead of just saying I want to do thing X that work Y didn't even know by definition you can't
do thing X that work Y did because you are not running work Y.
>> Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. The question is about like
whether consuming so much science fiction and fantasy for io9 and just constantly obsessing
about it and analyzing it and writing ill-informed rants about it and stuff means that I am just
tempted to suck it all, devour it all and then regurgitate it all. I guess part of that is, you know,
one of the things that people talk about a lot is that ideas are easy and execution is hard. And
it's easy to come up with ideas, like that's a really fun idea and I really love that idea. And then
you try to write it and it's just dead. I felt like, you know, you have stuff that you write or you
try to write is derivative or whatever and that's often the stuff that it's DOA kind of. In fact, I
was blogging about this recently. Right before I finished All the Birds in the Sky I had another
novel that I was shopping around that was like an urban fantasy book that was very much in the
wheelhouse of Sandman Slim and the Jim Butcher kind of books. I really loved that book but in
the end it was getting kind of -- some people were interested in it, but I ended up feeling like it
wasn't as much mine as All the Birds in the Sky. It wasn't something that only I could've
written, maybe, and this felt like something that only I could have written for better or worse.
Maybe I'd be better off with something that someone else could have written because that
might have been better. But I don't know. So that was something that I actually thought a lot
about. But I think it's partly just that it's not just the writing it's the revision and the revision is
where you just have to look at this thing that you threw together and be like okay. What the
hell is this? And that's kind of the part where you have to ask yourself some really tough
questions and stuff. Hi?
>>: You mentioned during your talk that your view of genres as being a toolbox has changed
since you started to deliver the talk a few weeks ago. How has your thinking on that evolved?
>> Charlie Jane Anders: Okay. Cool. I actually blogged about this on my tumbler the other day.
I have a tumbler now for All the Birds in the Sky. Basically, I have been doing a ton of interviews
for All the Birds in the Sky the last couple of weeks. I was kind of nervous about whether I was
going to, I have been blathering a lot, but in doing those interviews I have been finding that I
have some really interesting conversations and end up with different ways of thinking about
stuff than I had before. And one of those things was I stopped thinking of genres as toolboxes
and started to think of them or of like skin. And like the story is like the bones and muscles and
blood vessels and the skin is like just what's on the surface to some extent. Because you can
have a Western where someone is best friends with somebody and then they betrayed their
best friend and then they get captured by some group of Native Americans or cowboys or
whoever and then escape and they end up having to team up with the best friend that they
betrayed. That could be a Western. That could just as easily be a space epic. It could just as
easily be a medieval fantasy. Like that story doesn't change radically in a lot of ways if you
change the setting and what they are wearing and all of that outer stuff. Sometimes you do
have things where do they have guns? If they have guns they can just shoot everybody. If they
are in a medieval epic they can't unless it's like King Arthur's court or whatever, unless someone
has come back in time. Anyway, the point is genres do influence the shape of the stories
sometimes in terms of what's available to you, but often the bones of the story are not actually
coming out of the genre. They are coming out of what is actually the story that you are trying
to tell. In real life I had a best friend and they were a jerk and so I am writing about that in a
medieval epic. Nobody will ever know. So I started thinking about it less as a toolkit because I
don't actually think that you approach writing a story that way and go like I have a story, but I
need a lug wrench. No. It's more like you have the story that you are trying to tell which is like
the skeleton and the outer layer is kind of the thing that shapes how it looks and how it feels,
but it's not the bones, kind of. Hi, Amy again, hi.
>> Amy Draves: There is something in your bio about being the basis of a couple of characters
in [indiscernible] book. Is it Star Trek? I would love to know more about that.
>> Charlie Jane Anders: I hope I am not getting anybody into trouble by putting that in my bio,
but Armistead Maupin came and read at Writers for Drinks, my series in San Francisco and I
guess he really liked it or something because a year or two later he put out one of his Tales of
the City books and one of his characters was I wanted to go see Anna Madrigal but I had to rush
over to see my friend Charlie's Writers for Drinks show, and so it's like wow. Now I am officially
friends the characters in his book. You know, that's kind of cool. And then one of the super
amazingly nice Star Trek authors, David Mack, did a thing a few years ago where Lieutenant
Anders and Lieutenant Newitts were helping Ensign Syriac Lamarr who was writing for io9 at
the time to analyze some spectrographic whatevers. So now I am like a Lieutenant on a
starship as well, so it's like yay, achievement unlocked.
>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much for coming.
>> Charlie Jane Anders: Yay. This was so much fun. Thank you for having me. [applause].