September Bonus Episode

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

This bonus episode features deep-dive interviews with acclaimed authors Emily St. John Mandel and Chloe Benjamin. The first segment explores

Key takeaways

• Emily St. John Mandel utilizes a 'Mandelverse' technique to link characters and settings across different books like Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel.
• Mandel treats her first drafts as 'raw material' or a 'block of wood,' relying on meticulous, obsessive revision to find the story.

Main topics

• The Mandelverse interconnectedness
• Writing without a plan (pantsing)

Notable quotes

The first draft is something like raw material. Like the way we see it if you and I were sculptors, the first draft is just a block of wood.

Conclusion

A masterclass in literary craft for writers interested in how personal

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:06) Hi there and welcome to our show, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. I'm best-selling author Bianca Murray and I'm joined by Cece Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Speaker 3 (0:19) Literary. Hi Speaker 1 (0:22) everyone, I am so excited about today's author interview. Our guest is the author of six previous novels, most recently Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2022. Her other novels include The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama's list, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and has been translated into 26 languages, and Station Eleven, which was a Speaker 1 (1:12) Thank Speaker 3 (1:12) you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Speaker 1 (1:15) I am so excited about this interview. I'm a super fan. I've read Station Eleven so many times. I've taught it. All your other books I'm now having to reread multiple times and we'll get into that shortly why. For those of you who are not watching on YouTube, I'm holding up the book we're discussing today, Exit Party. And I just want to tell you I'm wearing my book drunkard t-shirt. I love that. Yeah, it's so cool because on the 19th of October, I'll be interviewing Emily at Blue Heron Books as part of their Book Drunkard Festival. So anyone who's near Ontario on the 19th of October, please come out to that event. It's one of my favorite Canadian indies and we're super excited for that. Okay, I'm quickly going to read the flap copy and then we're diving in. Emily, we've got so much ground to cover. So Los Angeles 2031. The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommates pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silver Lake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment. People drink and dance. A woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then a shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger, stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party's host, vanishes into thin air. As Ari unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealer hide in an elegant resort and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety and the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world. not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the fate of cataclysmic change. So much to unpack there, so much to love. Right, so first off, Emily, the Glass Hotel acts as a parallel universe to Station Eleven. An exit party has significant character overlaps with the Singer's Gun and the Glass Hotel. So fans call it the Mandelverse. an interconnected literary multiverse where you recycle through locations, plotlines, characters across all the different books and altering how events unfold. I mean, it's mind blowing. These books are in constant conversation with each other. Can you speak about the Mandelverse and how it inspires your work? Speaker 3 (3:57) Absolutely. I'm going to be honest with you. Writing a book is hard. Honestly, creating these little links between books, it kind of just makes it more fun. It's sometimes a matter of just becoming particularly attached to a given character. You know, for example, in Station Eleven, I really liked the character Miranda. And then when I wrote The Glass Hotel, I thought it would be interesting to bring her back and perhaps get a different vision of who she is or see a slightly different facet of her life where... You know, in Station Eleven, you really know her as a graphic novelist, as an artist, and her job in shipping is a little bit incidental. And then it was interesting to me to flip that in The Glass Hotel and to think, well, what if we knew this person as a shipping executive? And, you know, there's just a glimpse that perhaps she has this whole other life. And that was partly the reason why I had to make The Glass Hotel a parallel universe to Station Eleven, because... I feel strongly this isn't a spoiler. Station Eleven was published 12 years ago, but she does die in that book. So, you know, the only way to bring her back was to make it a slightly different world. So sometimes it's just that, a desire to spend more time with a particular character. Sometimes there's just a feeling of order in it. This idea that perhaps all of these stories might kind of overlap a little bit, like little, you know, little glancing Venn diagrams. I find that to be kind of interesting, just to imagine that they're in a way all part of the same story. And I love finding opportunities to do that. And sometimes it's quite small. Like a very long time ago, I want to say it was the Lola Quartet, my third novel. There were these references to a band. I think it was vaguely electronica called Baltica. And then when I was writing The Glass Hotel and I needed a group of musicians, it was kind of fun to think, oh, well, I've already done this. What if I were to just link these things together and have that, you know, as a little through line through the work? So, yeah, I really enjoyed creating the Mandelverse. There is no plan. You know, there's no kind of serial killer-esque billboard with the red string between the photos and the diagrams. I'm just kind of winging it and making it up as I go. And I've really been enjoying it. Speaker 1 (6:20) I love the Easter eggs that you drop for the super fans because there was a part where Miranda's sketching something. And, you know, people who knew, who are big fans of Station Eleven were like, is she busy sketching Station Eleven at that moment? And throughout, there are all these little Easter eggs that make me want to reread the books multiple times so that I can do the detective thing and map everything out. Good. Yeah. Okay, so. Bits of your own life are also worked into the books. I mean, I had a real giggle when I was reading Sea of Tranquility, when Olive, you know, tours the moon colonies during the pandemic, and she gets asked in these, you know, book events, these really annoying, stupid questions. And a lot of people come about the prophets in the pandemic book. And having, you know, been on tour multiple times myself, I know the kind of... insane questions that you will sometimes be asked. Sometimes they're not questions, they're a speech. Speaker 3 (7:19) This is more of a comment than a question, says the guy in the front row. Speaker 1 (7:23) Yeah, and you brace yourself. I Speaker 3 (7:24) know. 100 % of the time. When I'm at my very best, when I'm my best self, I find it inspiring. How can I channel that kind of confidence? But you are 100 % correct. Speaker 1 (7:39) Yeah. And so I was just like, you were having fun with that. It was like a playful, I feel like it was a really playful take. I mean, it obviously added to the story, but it was a bit of an insider view on the kind of things that authors do have to deal with on these tours. Speaker 3 (7:54) It was really fun to write, I have to say, and kind of cathartic. I want to be very clear about something, which is that 99 % of... The interactions that I have on tour are absolutely lovely, and it's the reason why I love going out on the road. I'm doing a 42-city tour for Exit Party. It's kind of epic, and I really do enjoy it, but that's 99 % of interactions. The Speaker 2 (8:18) Station Eleven tour was 127 events Speaker 3 (8:22) in seven countries. It was kind of outrageous, and it just wouldn't stop. Speaker 3 (8:27) you know, that 1 % adds up over time. And I, yeah, I regret to say that all of the interactions that Olive and Sea of Tranquility has on stage were completely autobiographical, including the question about the handcuffs. So yeah, it's, I do absolutely use elements of my life in these books. I think probably maybe I'd venture to say all novelists do just, you know, you're, you're, you're trying to create a believable world and believable characters and you do inevitably draw from your own life. I think, you know, the most satisfying instance of that in my work, years and years ago, I did an event in, it was in Manhattan. It was a private club off Gramercy Park that I'd never been to. And then they invited me and another author to do a reading. And I honestly just wanted to see inside the building. I was like, absolutely, yes. I went into this club. Like a lot of private clubs, they struggle to attract younger members. So at the time I was under 40 and they kept telling me over and over again throughout the evening that they have a special membership deal for people under 40. By the end of the evening, I was thinking, but then I would have to spend time with you guys. There was this moment before the reading where there was this incredibly tense dinner. Like they'd set up this catered meal in the middle of the space. And it quickly became clear that all the members of the literary committee hated each other. It was pretty intense. There was all this petty sniping happening across the table. And then these were... the kind of desperately insecure people where they felt the need to signal their wealth at every conceivable opportunity. So, you know, questions were prefaced by statements like, as I was driving in the French Riviera two weeks ago toward my villa, and I, you know, the questions followed from there. And then this insufferable guy was sitting next to me. He said, I just returned from the Czech Republic, from Praha. And... look, I'm Canadian and I was well-raised and I was very polite. And I, you know, he went on with this thing and I said, oh, you know, that's interesting. And then later I was just so irritated and I was thinking, I wish that what I'd said was, oh, when you're speaking English, you can actually just say Prague. Prague. That dialogue exists verbatim in Station Eleven and then it made it all the way to the TV series. And it was such a joy, you know, to see the thing that I wish I'd said. On the page and then on the screen. So anyway, this is a very long-winded way of saying that if you are a writer and you're watching this or listening to this, if you think of the thing you should have said three months too late, I'm here to tell you it's not too late. You can put that into your fiction. Speaker 1 (11:15) And this is part of the parallel universes that you love writing about because there is a part of us that hopefully in that moment, according to quantum physics, shifts and we give the perfect retort. Speaker 3 (11:27) God, I dream of that universe. Wouldn't that be amazing? Speaker 1 (11:30) That's a Mandel universe. Speaker 3 (11:32) Yeah, yeah. That's where I would like to live. Speaker 1 (11:34) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so there is such intricate plotting in all of your books. Exit Party is one of those books. There are so many timelines and their settings. There's different versions of the same characters. How do you plot and keep track of it all? Like you must have like a Bible binder full of... the whole world so you can keep track of it? Or is your memory just insanely good? Speaker 3 (12:00) Neither. My copy editors get quite frustrated. No, there really is no plan. Speaker 3 (12:08) Something I always like to emphasize, because I know that a portion of the audience in any book event or in any podcast audience will be a writer who's fairly new at this. And I think that there can be a lot of anxiety around getting the formula right. Like, what are the steps that I should take to finish the novel? Or what's the right way to approach this? And I like to emphasize, I don't think that there is one right way. I have friends who are novelists who would not dream of sitting down to write that first chapter until they knew exactly how the book was going to end. I'm kind of the opposite. I really like to just start writing and see what happens. And, you know, there's some pretty obvious downsides to that. Like I do often write myself into these kind of plot cul-de-sacs and then I have to backtrack and figure out what I'm doing. What it gives me, I think, is the possibility of surprise. And I think that that makes my books weirder, which is something that's important to me because I kind of feel like weird equals more interesting, or at least that's kind of how I think about my own work. It takes me not having a plan. means I end up going to these really unexpected places and getting these really unexpected combinations of elements and characters and genres and ideas. So I really am just winging it. But what that means is that the first draft is pretty messy. And there is often a point where I'm maybe about halfway through the first draft where I do start to have to start planning, you know, and like writing out. okay, how old is Kareem in this year? How old is Samir in this year? You know, just like figuring out where the characters are in time, how old they are, trying to think ahead a little bit to how this is going to wrap up. So, you know, it's interesting. What I've realized in going back and reading old notes, because I do often start on paper and then start typing into the computer or do it in batches. You know, you write 10 pages longhand and then type it in. What I've started to realize is that the prose doesn't actually change that much, but the plot will somehow shift. You know, even though phrases might remain exactly the same from the first time I wrote it down with a pen to the final draft. Yeah, the plot shifts, the characters change. I give different sections of the book to different characters. Like I was just tidying up my office and I came across notes from Exit Party where I recognize the scene. It's an interrogation, but every player is different. So yeah, it's interesting to see the way it shifts over time. But no, there's no real plan. I'm just trying to get it down on the page because my feeling is that the first draft is something like raw material. Like the way I see it is if you and I were sculptors, the first draft is just a block of wood. And then for me, I find the book in that raw material. So I'm just trying to get a first draft and then anything that's good in the novels, you know, any cohesion or elegance or plot that actually makes sense or well-developed characters, for me that comes about in round upon round upon round of really obsessive, meticulous revision. Speaker 1 (15:29) Right. There's so much to unpack there and we're Speaker 3 (15:31) going Speaker 1 (15:31) to come back to some of that. But I want to say for our listeners, you know that I am a dedicated pantser and I pantsed a closed room murder mystery and you all thought I was insane. And so I can say Emily and I's processes are very, very similar. Do you know how many times in this book I was so surprised? Like I didn't know where you were going and then suddenly you went there and I was like, holy shit. We've gone from there to here and it's genius. And I love that it was like an organic way of doing it. Do you ever stop to like reverse engineer? Like say you figure something out, you know, a third of the way through the book, do you come back and then plant those seeds so that that makes complete sense? Speaker 3 (16:12) A hundred percent. Absolutely. Yeah. I do that all the time. With Station Eleven, for example, the comic book barely existed in the novel. I found upon reading the first draft that. I really liked it and I felt like I could use it to say something important that related to the overall story. So I went back and put it in much more strongly and obviously than it had been before. Yeah, I'm always going back and changing things to make, you know, my final third of the book or to make my ending make sense. Speaker 1 (16:41) Yeah, the reverse engineering is so helpful. It does mean that you keep coming back to the beginning. So, I mean, I know that there's writers like Stephen King will say, write the whole first draft. You don't stop. You don't come back. But for me, I've got to make sure that Act 1 is as good as I can make it so that it's a strong foundation for Act 2. And certainly it'll change once the book's done and I come back and revise it again. But I do like that reverse engineering process. Okay. Before we move on, I've got a million more questions and I'm going to be firing them at poor Emily. First, a message from our sponsors. Your time is precious and I'm not going to waste it. Even if you aren't currently writing fantasy, shouldn't you know more about a genre that has made such a massive impact? on the market. From seven-figure deals and self-published sensations to book talk, the book market has been radically transformed by the huge sales and demand for fantasy and its sub-genres. You don't know what you don't know, so come and find out in my six-week All About Fantasy virtual retreat. Also, my next beta reader match-up is now open. It's the last one for the year. You know what to do. Go to biancamaray.ca and find the relevant tabs. Speaker 1 (17:56) Okay, so we begin with Ari after she's come out of prison. And we're in part one. And we get like little hints of her life before. And later in part two, we go back to like when she was six years old. We see her when she was 12 years old. We know at the beginning that she put a hit out on her cousin Anton. We don't know why. We find that out much, much later. So I was wondering, did you write... Ari's story linearly so that you could understand the flow of all the events or was it as we see the book? Speaker 3 (18:31) So Ari is actually an example of the Mendelverse you know that we started with at the beginning. I wrote a novel that was published in 2010 called The Singer's Gun which very few people have read because at the time it was published by a very small press. I don't even think it was published in Canada at first. Yeah, it was a very small press situation. And then it was only fairly recently reissued by larger publishing houses. It's more widely available. But anyways, in that book, the protagonist is Ari's cousin, Anton Waker. And the book is almost entirely from his perspective. And Ari, or she's Aria in that book, is unambiguously the villain of that story. So that gave me this incredibly rich backstory to draw on for Exit Party. And that was actually a big part of the starting point for the book is, you know, way back in 2010, I'd published this novel. My villainous Ari is, I don't remember if she goes to prison in that book or if she's about to go to prison in that book at the ending. But either way, you know, she's headed for prison. Speaker 2 (19:40) She was such a compelling character to me, Speaker 3 (19:42) and I just couldn't stop thinking about her, you know, and then thinking, well, who would that person be if 18 years later she was released from prison into a totally different world? So that gave me kind of an interesting experience in writing Exit Party, where I already had this very deep, rich backstory that I didn't need to invent. And to be clear, you don't have to have read The Singer's Gun to appreciate Exit Party. You know, they definitely stand on their own. I would even argue they're not particularly the same genre of book. But yeah, that was what I was drawing on. And it was kind of cool in Exit Party, like as a character building exercise to think, well, what do I need to tell readers from this backstory that I know very intimately for this book to make sense? And for me, it's always, you know, what can I get away with in terms of conveying the minimal amount of exposition? exposition slows you down. It's really hard to do that speedily and elegantly. Speaker 1 (20:39) Yeah, just on the exposition. So there was a line throughout the book. So for those of you... you must read it. You must read all the books. You don't have to read one to understand the other. They're in conversation. Reading one makes you appreciate the other one even more, but you can read them all independently. Like there will be a line, for example, a throwaway line about somebody who's got their blood type tattooed on their arm. And she thinks, yes, of course. And that's it. Just yes, of course. She knows, you know, and you're like, Ooh, what's, what's this? You know, you're immediately intrigued. And then later you find out, Oh, because he was. in the army or the military. And that's why he needed his blood type tattooed on his arm. So it just goes to show how little exposition you actually need and how you can leverage it for curiosity seeds so that when the reader gets there,