Transcript
Speaker: Hi everyone, a quick heads up ahead of the episode. Unfortunately, it's been brought to my attention that there is a scammer impersonating me. They've been emailing people from a faked account, posing as me, and offering paid packages to come on the podcast. To be clear, there is no payment involved for guests. I do not charge guests to come on the podcast, and obviously that means there are no packages for guests and the like.
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Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast. With me today is a Hugo Award winning New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and fiction.
Speaker: It's Alexi Harrow. Hello. Hello, Jamie, and thank you so much for having me on. It's such a pleasure. Thank you for for making the time to come and chat with me. Let's start, as we always do, with the latest publication. And your latest publication, ah which won Best Novel at the Hugo Awards last year, the Everlasting, um is out in paperback in the UK on October 8th, so very soon. Tell us a little bit about your Hugo Award-winning novel, The Everlasting.
Speaker: That sounds weird. I don't know if I've introduced it that way yet. I this is the first interview I'm doing post Hugo's. So it is, i think my publisher has a smarter sounding pitch, but mine is essentially that there's a big sad lady night stuck in a time loop.
Speaker: Okay. And it is kind of what you get when you are a girl who grows up in kind of the Lady Knight girl power era of YA fiction. I would say Tamora Pierce is in there, Robin McKinley, Garth Nix a little bit.
Speaker: um So you love a girl with a sword and then you grow up and you go to grad school and you have to encounter the sort of harsher realities of what knighthood is and what medievalism is and why we keep these things alive as Western cultures and who it serves to tell stories about good kings and kings.
Speaker: justified wars and loyal knights and all of these these things that are essentially bummers. So it's sort of this childlike wonder combined with the bummer of coming of age that we all have to go through and you get a book that is trying to be both at once. Okay.
Speaker: Okay, so it's sort of like the the the the the romanticized kind of stories that that are written not fully bleeding into the reality of life.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Essentially, like why do we romanticize The Lone Knight? Why is that our central concept of heroism? What have things like the Arthurian cycle served in the past? Why did I, a kid in rural Kentucky in the 90s, grow up loving King Arthur? What does that even mean? you know like Culturally, what how have we done that and why? um And sort of why do we get stuck retelling these same stories over and over again?
Speaker: Okay, that's so interesting. Yeah. So it's it's almost like a sociological exploration for you to be like, what why are these things? and I'm going to make it into like a, you know, fictionalized story.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I guess i I tend to when I go big picture, I make it sound much more highbrow than it is. It is also I think, you know, it's a romance. It's also deeply horny. It also has like the tropes that I love of knighthood. Like I am trying to embrace the genre that I'm critiquing at the same time.
Speaker: Okay, yeah. Which is important, I think. you know Whether it's a satire whatever it is a genre, you have to fully understand that genre to be able to do it justice, even if you are making fun of it. And I hope love it a little bit. I think that my favorite retellings are always one that you can tell that person has been in deep.
Speaker: You know, it's so much more fun and warm feeling than someone who is from the outside thinking they're going to deconstruct a genre that they have never been seduced by fully.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand that. And this is your fourth novel. um Yes. Yes, that sounds right. Yes. Well, the internet says that. So if if it's not right, then I'm not to blame.
Speaker: the According to the internet, this is your fourth novel. um All of your previous novels have been ah nominated for various awards, won some awards, found critical acclaim.
Speaker: When when you when you have that kind of success, because you've had you've had an incredibly successful run of of novels you know from the get-go, does it add to the the challenges of writing a new novel or do you kind of not pay much attention to that?
Speaker: Like in an ideal world, if I was a better person than I am, i would be writing in like a you know um a mental vacuum would be the dream where none of those things affect what you're doing now because the horrific truth is that they actually don't.
Speaker: It doesn't really matter what you managed to pull off in the last book. You sit down to write and it is still just you and this empty Word document. And it's quite bad when you first start Your first draft is not good ever. um And so it would be better not to have this idea in your head that like, will this one be as good? Will people like it? Will it be received in the ways that I want it to be received? Because all of those things are completely out of your control.
Speaker: um But obviously, i think I'm by nature a fairly anxious person already. And so instead of publishing and it going fairly well for me so far and therefore feeling like, oh, I can relax a little bit, it does just sort of wind some internal screwed a little bit tighter every time. Yeah. ah I wish that weren't true, but i I don't seem to be getting faster at writing novels. is well Okay. But I think what you know when you've had like four novels, all very well received, they've all done very well, I think you're you're allowed to slow down a bit and take your time a bit more. you know You don't have that same rush to like, I'm new in the industry. I need to i need to prove to everyone that I can do this. you know You've proved it, I think.
Speaker: Oh, there's a very real privilege just in like material terms. The advances are larger. And so that is kind of the only string. i feel like my editor is about to break into my house right now. um That is kind of the only string that a publisher has to pull. It's like, this is the advance. This is the deadline. This is how seriously we take your work. We need you to put out a book of a year, that kind of a thing. And that string is less powerful on me now. So I do get it is a privilege, a very material privilege to get to slow down.
Speaker: Yeah. But I think it's, you know, you you said that you think of yourself as quite an anxious person anyway. I think i think it's a common trait from authors that I've spoken to that they are that. Oh, you do this as your job and you're like, oh, none of you are well adjusted. That's why, you know, that's why we all decided to sit at home and make up stories. Yeah, right. As opposed to living in the real world. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I do think it's always very funny when you take then this group of people and you're like, now go on tour sell your novel. yeah We're clearly inside cats. Yeah. I mean, some people, some people are very good at it. Some people learn on the job how to do that. I've spoken to, it's in the authors that I've spoken to a lot who have found great success in self-publishing that they, you know, I've spoken to them and they've said things like, I wasn't very good at doing all of that stuff, but I had to learn because I understand it's part of the, part of the industry. It's part of how this all works. You have to learn to kind of put yourself out there and like go and talk to people and go to events and things like that.
Speaker: Well, indie authors are God's strongest soldiers. I've always known that. they're they're much There's level of endurance and tolerance and skill and like the the multiple skills they have to have rather than just handing over a Word document to a team is so impressive to me.
Speaker: Yeah, sure. So going back to, you know, this screw that that is getting slightly tighter with each successful book that you put out. um When do you feel, is there like a level of nervousness nervousness or anxiety when you do show like the first draft of your kind of the new thing that you're writing to that to your editorial or agent or whoever it might be for the first time? Or have you kind of got enough experience with this now that you kind of say, you know this this is just part of the process, I always do this? Yeah, I mean i would say the the lowest lows are always before anyone has seen it. And that's because it is genuinely bad at that point.
Speaker: ah i but That's because I'm right and I have good judgment. By the time I am willing to hand it over to anyone in general, It is at a place where i I know that it has at least achieved some of the things that I wanted it to do. Does that mean it will be commercially or critically successful? No, but there was a thing that I wanted to do and I have at least gotten towards that.
Speaker: And I have enough confidence in my agent and my editors that that they will help kind of refine it more towards that point. But I feel like it is at least a viable project at that point. The worst times are when it's just me and I'm drafting.
Speaker: And, you know, like with The Everlasting, I feel like I was probably two thirds through and I just like walked into the kitchen at night and told my husband that like he has to find a career and I can't support this anymore. Like this is over. this has been a good run but like this is the last one. and I was like very sincere and he was like pulling out his phone and I was like, can you pay attention? This is like a ah real breakdown that I'm going through right now. And he was like, was just going to record it so I can play it for next time.
Speaker: Okay. So it does seem that this is a pattern. um But that is the point where, like, what's funny about that is in some ways, I know that's dramatic.
Speaker: But I also did have to rewrite and rework big chunks because there were fundamental problems. problem. like It wasn't working. It wasn't being the thing that I wanted it to be. um And so I don't want to recommend anxiety as a strategy, but but it will keep you... In some ways, it is a writing skill to constantly be asking yourself, is this doing what I want? Is this good enough? like You're like listening all the time and you do have to have a pretty harsh internal ear, I think.
Speaker: Yes, I was going to say, I mean, that's, that is shows like a level of understanding of not just the craft, but your own ah storytelling and and knowing that there is, there is obviously an issue with the thing that I'm writing and I need to fix that. And, you know, perhaps you don't need to go downstairs and and talk to your husband and say, perhaps you don't have to lay on the floor and cry about it. But yeah. You know, at least it's it's showing you that you are aware that there is an issue that you you're going to have to probably spend twice as much time ah that you that you've just spent writing that fixing the issue before you can finish it. Yeah. Am I a good writer or am I actually just a good editor? i kind of tend towards the second one. Yes. Well, you you can't edit a blank page, as they say. so i keep Some would say it's one in the same.
Speaker: um when When it comes to the writing itself then, are you you said you're about 60% of the way through, and but you knew what what you wanted it to do. Can I infer from that then that you are someone that sort of plans out a novel before you start writing it?
Speaker: Oh, yeah. I'm not one of those insane people. No, many of my friends are are truly just people who write by the seat of their pants. And I i love them and I think of them as like divine mysteries. ah Obviously, I plan everything out. I have ah kind of a series of...
Speaker: longer and longer outlines until I feel like I have enough of a security blanket to actually start drafting. And then I i do kind of continuously re-outline because unfortunately I'm often wrong the first time I imagine the shape of the book structurally. um And as I kind of discover things or realize what needs to happen, the rest of the outline has to shift.
Speaker: And then even then, even with all of that planning, um about one third of the way through and about two thirds of the way through, i usually kind of, not a rewrite, but I go back to the beginning and have to rework some things because I'm writing in general towards this like, um,
Speaker: I guess climax, but like the final couple of scenes are the things that I'm the most sure about. They're like, they feel like they are making the argument that I want them to make. They are my thesis, right? And so if I am writing the draft and it is not heading towards that point, or it feels like that point would not have the payoff that I want it to, then I've gone astray somewhere.
Speaker: Okay. Do you, so those, those kind of final chapters, those kinds of concluding bits, ah do you write them in advance or do you, do you write chronologically? I write chronologically. i feel like I would, I should try it. Maybe it would suddenly unlock something. i feel like I'm saying all these things that I'm like, I don't know if this is best practices. It's just what I do. It's your practices. It's my practices. Uh-oh. But yeah, I do. I feel like I constantly want there to be this sense of um both in a larger sense and almost on a
Speaker: line to line sense, a sense of building and of calling back and of kind of circling through itself is is just sort of how I conceive of um stories that I like that feel resonant to me. And so I don't know how to write that out of order.
Speaker: Okay, sure. Yeah, I find the authors that I speak to write out of order, comes very naturally to them. Like, it wouldn't be normal for them to write chronologically. Yeah, they would feel trapped by that. Which blows mind. Which is crazy. It doesn't seem right to me, but they seem very happy with it and it makes sense for them.
Speaker: um You've done a lot of writing in, and then continue to do a lot of writing in short fiction and novellas. In terms of process, is that, is it quite a different process for you when you move between writing short fiction and long fiction?
Speaker: I think it's kind of similar, ah except that that final scene or image or moment is more of the story, right? like right i don't have to work so hard to imagine the buildup to what gets me to this moment. In fact, a short story is often I feel like I know an idea is a short story because whatever this little moment is or this choice or this turn, it sort of feels like it encapsulates everything, right? So if you can pull off all of your themes and emotions that you wanted to explore in a single exchange or in a person making a certain choice, then that's a short story. You don't have to do a novel.
Speaker: I think that is the great freedom of short fiction is that like it would be convenient, but also not likely if every idea or so vision that you had happened to fit in 100,000 to 120,000 words. But that's, I don't think, the nature of ideas. um And I love the freedom that genre has. i feel like much more so than other genres, sci-fi and fantasy really make space for differently sized things. There's there's still paying attention. short fiction magazines. There's increasingly a novella market with Tor.com and others. There's standalones, there's trilogies, you know, so like you can scale the idea appropriately rather than stretching or shrinking it.
Speaker: Yes. Yeah. and I think you're right. Especially with, so I would say even more than fantasy is sci-fi. sci-fi And sci-fi has a rich history of short stories and novellas. Have any of your novels started out as ideas for short fiction or any of your short fictions started out with the intention of being long form?
Speaker: um They have a funny relationship ah where ah so a couple of my short stories are I'm starting a novel or I have this idea for one or I have it outlined and I get cold feet or I want to experiment with like tone. um And I decide to try and like pull out a piece of that novel and make it a short story as a little like a road test. and I've done that a couple of times. Okay.
Speaker: yeah um the most recent one was when i started the everlasting i had never done anything in a secondary world or anything with like a medieval feeling to it um and i'd never done anything with like time loops or time travel so i tried to do all of those things in a short story called the six deaths of the saint okay that's really yeah that's a great way of like preparing to to try something which is slightly outside of your comfort zone i think i've i can't remember which author it was. I think there's a fantasy author who writes, um, when he's working on characters before he starts a novel, he writes a short story for each of the characters.
Speaker: Oh, that's very cool. To just kind figure them out and figure out how they, you know, what their voice is and how they talk and things like that. Yeah, because I think you actually end up doing that as you're writing a novel. You kind of meet these people and they are strangers to you, no matter how much you've imagined them. Suddenly they're in a scene on the ground interacting with other people and you have 1 billion questions to answer as soon as they appear on the page. like, where are you from? What what dialect do you have? Like, why? yeah What is your and you think you've, you know, you're like, well, their motivation is going to be this. But that is so 30,000 feet that you don't know these people. And I often find that part of the rewriting and the reworking is just like, oh, i I've come to know you by now. And I've got you wrong in these first three scenes. My bad. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's a really, that's a really great way of preparing for a novel. It's like, yeah, writing short fiction about whether it's an idea or a character or like ah a time loop kind of thing. Like you just to kind of figure out how you're going to present that in your voice, in your style.
Speaker: Yeah. So in some ways, and and the next thing I have coming out is a short story collection, and it'll be the only thing for a while. And there's a lot of, if if readers are people who have read my novels, you will see the training wheels. You will see the drafts. Okay.
Speaker: Um, that's always fun though. I like to, it feels like you're peeking behind the curtain. It's like when you, uh, you discover an author who's been writing for a long time and you, you, you probably, most people will discover an author through like their, their often their most recent release or something like that. And then you go back to the early one and you're like, this is, this is great, but, but I can see how far you've come from this one that you wrote like 20 years ago to the where you are now.
Speaker: And often you will see though, oh, you're these weren't just the themes of this one book. This is just what you're concerned with. Like this is the fundamental thing you've been chasing down for these last 15 years. And I love that. Yes.
Speaker: um I just have one more question before we ah take a trip down to the snowy cabin. And that is, um, so you, you've been writing for quite a long time now, your stories have ah found and delighted so many people.
Speaker: Do you think that your idea of success as an author has changed, um, from when you, first when you were first kind of looking to, to get into the industry, maybe when you were first publishing your, your novel or your early short stories?
Speaker: Oh, that's an interesting question. I think also I just fail to understand how long i have been writing. It still seems new to me. But I'm like, oh, these are short stories. You know, the collection from the last 10 years. i've I've been writing for a while. I've been publishing for a while. ah That's surprising.
Speaker: I feel the same way. Weirdly, my first stories came out as my first kid was born. So my oldest is now 10. And I just feel like that time... It collapses in my mind. It's very hard for me to understand that I've been a parent for 10 years and an author for 10 years. But my idea has changed in that obviously I had very... Your goalposts move in pretty obvious material ways.
Speaker: I wrote my first book and like the biggest dream that I had for it was that... you know it would be on the shelf. It would be a real book. It's very hard to go from imagining this thing that you are you haven't told anyone about that you are doing at four zero in the morning alone to imagine that that could be on a bookshelf somewhere in a library is sort of the wildest dream that you have. And I didn't know anything about all these other metrics of success. I didn't really even know about having an agent. I didn't know about if you'd said the big five to me, i wouldn't have known what that was. you know so like
Speaker: In some ways that ambition was, i didn't know how many barriers there are between me and it. Yeah. um And I didn't know really like, you know, if you told me that 5,000 copies would be successful,
Speaker: I would have believed that. If you told me that you know every author sells a million, I would have believed that too. I didn't know anything, so the goals were not specific. I just wanted to have a book out. um And then the first one did well enough that i I just couldn't have imagined that I would get to quit my day job, but I did. i wouldn't have imagined that my husband got to stay home with the kids, but he did. um And so it just became kind of a like, i as long as I can keep getting away with this, I want to. And that's still sort of, it does feel like we're making it you know we're running out of the bank with something right now. um And I just want to keep in the getaway car as long as I can.
Speaker: Okay. Yeah. I think you're being very modest. The the first novel, the 10,000 doors of January was nominated for Hugo award and Nebula award and a world fantasy award. I think it did it did better than okay. Just to be clear. Well, and as my agent told me at the time, she was like, Oh, those don't sell books. Oh, okay. Wow. Which I was like, oh, right. Okay. So there's also, that was the first time I truly understood that there is a bifurcation there in your ambition. Do you want to be commercially successful successful or critically successful or both? And also you don't get to choose either of those things. So, you know, I think the best ambition that I still have is that feeling of like, I don't know, obviously we're book people. Books shaped me like Yeah.
Speaker: That is how I make sense of my world is through other people's fiction. And so really the best ambition to have is that you get to join those books on the shelf, right? Like if my work gets to keep being on the shelves with other people's, I think that's ballgame.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. That's great. that's great and and and And a lovely sentiment as we move into the point in the episode where I ask you, Alex, if you were snowed in at a cozy woodland cabin in the middle of nowhere, which book would you hope to have with you?
Speaker: I think snowed in implies to me a certain amount of time. So I think you have to go for page count here. um And there's not very many books that are around a thousand pages that are good.
Speaker: And that is not, that is not specifically a dig at the expanded edition of Stephen King's The Stand, but it sort of is. Okay. Yeah. So I think it's Jonathan Strange for me. That's one I reread about once a year anyway. um think it is one too that feels like it rewards your undivided attention the most. If you can really just fully sink into that world, it feels like leaving ours. And I think that's very difficult to do and what much of fantasy is trying to achieve.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely. And Jonathan Strange, did that won the Hugo when it came out, didn't it? I think it maybe won like all of them. thought about Everything. Everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the yeah, that's that's a great that's a great one. and And I am too scared to agree with you and say that every book of that length is not good. Yeah. It's just, it's a difficult swing. I would also say Nicola Griffith's Hild and Meanwood are two that I would put in the like, you justify your length category. Okay.
Speaker: yeah okay um yeah but I mean, obviously, Jonathan Strange is isn't great a wonderful, wonderful piece of literature and a wonderful addition to the to the cabin.
Speaker: um Next up, we are going to dial things back a bit and talk about when Alex first started writing, how she found her way into her first book deal, signing with an agent, all of that fun stuff that will be available in the extended episode, which you can find at patreon.com forward slash right and wrong.
Speaker: Yeah, put your best foot forward. Make all the writing as could possibly be. We sound like telling people to get job interviews. You know, you have to just get out there some. Sure. Yeah. And I guess publishing is kind of like that. It's like, oh yeah, just you're sending a bunch of unsolicited emails to agents. this fine Just send them a CV. It'd be great. Exactly. um Awesome. Well, that brings us to the end of the episode. Thank you so much, Alex, for coming on and chatting with me, telling me all about your kind of incredible writing adventures with with short stories and as well as long form stuff. And for anyone listening, the award winning, Hugo award winning, uh, latest book is out on paperback now, The Everlasting, you can, oh, out now? October 8th.
Speaker: I can't remember when this is coming out. It will be out very soon, if not now, when this airs. Uh, you can get it in all the usual places. Um, but thank you so much, Alex. Yeah, it's been so fun and interesting chatting with you. Thank you so much. This was a real pleasure.
Speaker: And for anyone listening, if you want to keep up with what Alex is doing, you can find her on Instagram at alex.e.harrow. That's Alex with an I. Or her website, alexeharrow.wixsite.com. To support this podcast, like, follow, and subscribe. Join the Patreon for ad-free extended episodes. And check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Our Tropes. Thanks again to Alex and thanks to everyone listening. We will catch you on the next episode.
