Page 47 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

[CMY] Lately I've been thinking a lot about stories in the context of a long literary conversation, and how individual stories play off of earlier ones in different ways. I think writers can take the conversation in interesting new directions by doing the sorts of things Ken described above–looking beyond what is popular in the moment and seeing flaws as strengths.

[GdM] People often talk about worldbuilding as building places. I wonder if both of you build systems first. Does that feel true?

[KYL] I think worldbuilding is more art than science, and systems thinking has to be balanced by attention to subjectivities. I teach a workshop on character-driven worldbuilding, and one of my key ideas is that there is no single “world” in a work of fiction, only competing conceptions of the world; the pleasure of reading fantasy isn’t so much understanding the world as understanding the characters’ perceptions of the world.

[CMY] Every story brings together a lot of elements–setting, plot, character, themes, etc–but I don't think it matters what you put in early and what you add later, as long as all the pieces fit together in the end. So while I absolutely agree with Ken about filtering the world through the understanding and perceptions of the characters... developing the characters is something I do fairly late. (I've written entire drafts with the protagonist simply denoted as and gone back to in later passes to reverse engineer what kind of person they'd need to be in order to do the things I needed them to do in the story.)

What I generally start from is not usually a place or a system: I almost always start from an abstract idea: What are the limits of human attention? What does it mean for something to be unfinished vs. finished? Can you trust your perceptions of the world?

Then I develop the world and write scenes that let me explore different facets of the core idea I'm interested in, and populate those scenes with characters that I think would have interesting or emotionally engaging perspectives.

[GdM] Both of you write with extraordinary precision. How do you know a sentence has become inevitable rather than merely good?

[CMY] I spend a lot of time tinkering with sentences, adjusting the wording until the story flows the way I want it to, and the words say what I need them to say. It's a bit like an oyster turning a grain of sand into a pearl, adding nacre until it is smooth. When a sentence isn't working, I find it jarring to read, so I guess the answer is that I know a sentence is done when I'm no longer irritated by it?

[KYL] I do something similar. There is a moment, after much rewriting, when a sentence clicks into place and feels smooth. It’s the same thing with paragraphs, scenes, etc. I also want to note that part of the craft of fiction is weaving in very dense connections—phrases recur; earlier sentences are mirrored by later ones; repetition with variation builds meaning. Thus, revisions for me are almost never entirely local affairs; changing a single sentence often requires changing many other affected strands.

[GdM] Is empathy something stories create, or do stories simply reveal empathy that was already there?

[KYL] Maybe a little bit of both? I think we construct our identities through storytelling, and so it makes sense that we construct other subjectivities (or understand and incorporate them into our subjectivity) through storytelling.

[CMY] I really like the idea of stories as a framework for understanding the world around us (and, as Ken mentioned, within us). Empathy, at its core, is about recognizing the connection between ourselves and other people. How would it feel to be in someone else's shoes? To some degree, stories are built on empathy: As I write, I'm thinking about what a character might think in this situation and how it would make them feel–and my hope is to create stories in such a way that the reader, in turn, can later connect to the characters I've created.

[GdM] I'm fascinated by stories about people trying to do the right thing inside systems they didn't build. Why do you think we're drawn to them?

[CMY] We live our lives in a universe we didn't build, how can it help but be relatable?

[KYL] All of us are born into systems we played no part in constructing, and we have to make sense of such systems and try to live as well as we can inside them. Most of the time, we feel powerless; indeed, I think a big part of a happy life is deciding what aspects of systems we don’t like and actually devoting energy to changing the aspects that we can change. Fiction taps into that deep-seated desire.

[CMY] I agree with all of that. Fiction, both for writers and for readers, can be a way to explore and compare different possible choices when faced with flawed systems we didn’t choose and don’t control. And as I mentioned earlier, speculative fiction stories have the added advantage of being a little bit removed from our real-world experiences, letting us engage in hypothetical reasoning about difficult situations in a novel context.

[GdM] Can you each remember a story that surprised you? Not because the plot changed, but because you discovered you believed something different by the time you reached the end.

[KYL] A story that comes to mind has to do with Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Frost said that he wrote it as a joke about/for his friend, Edward Thomas, who had a habit of being wishy-washy on their walks together, always lamenting not taking the other road when they always ended up in the same place anyway. The joke wasn’t appreciated by Thomas, who initially took it as a serious poem about the need for decisiveness, and then was hurt after Frost explained it was a joke, because he thought Frost was mocking of his indecisiveness. Frost also complained that college students took the poem too seriously, reading all kinds of metaphors into it, when he meant it to be playful. And yet, Frost also claimed that he was “never more serious than when joking.”

The story sticks with me because it encapsulates the complexities of how we make sense of art. Should we take Frost’s intention in writing the poem into account? If so, how? Should we assume that Frost never changed his mind about his own work? Should we assume that Frost’s statements about his own intention weren’t also a kind of art, subject to interpretation as well? Did the college students who took Frost seriously (as have generations of readers since) misinterpret the work? Should an artist’s own life or statements control how we understand his work? Was Frost even trying to control how readers interpreted his work? …

I find this story endlessly fascinating, and I’m always looking for more details. Every time I think about it, I change my mind about just what kind of (mis)understanding is relevant in the creation and interpretation of art.

[CMY] I love the example Ken gave (and will likely continue thinking about it after the interview is done), and his response has also helped me frame my answer for this question a little differently–I initially interpreted "believed something different by the end" as a story that completely flipped my opinion about something when I read it, and while there might be something that has slipped my mind that fits that description, I wasn't able to think of a clear cut example. But I can think of a lot of stories that set me on a path of questioning various beliefs. Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling," for instance, raised a lot of questions about the reliability (or lack thereof) of memory, and I continue to refine my thoughts about it over time.

[GdM] I'm struck by how often your stories hinge on one small decision instead of one enormous event. What draws you to that?

[CMY] When I started writing, my default length was flash fiction. Given the length, having the story hinge on a small decision often (though not always) made sense. But as I expand into longer lengths I do sometimes try to capture an enormous event, often by showing smaller glimpses of it: "Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War," tells the story of a war that spans from present-day to the heat death of the universe... and even on that scale I tend to focus on small decisions within the bigger event. Bringing down the scale while a giant event is happening in the background can often have more impact: saying twenty thousand people were killed is too abstract for people to really grasp and sometimes makes less of an impact than showing them a parent mourning at a fallen soldier's grave.

[KYL] Like Caroline, I started my fiction career with very short stories. I learned early on that the power of very short stories comes from concreteness: I had to be very specific, rely on tiny details and actions, and trust the reader to fill in the blanks. As I wrote longer and longer works, plot and architecture became more important, but I never abandoned the technique of relying on tiny details, like a single dragon scale, to evoke the shape of something far grander. What the reader imagines based on my hints will always be much grander and better than what I can describe exhaustively.

[GdM] Is there an opinion you've changed your mind about because of something you wrote?

[KYL] Writing is fundamentally a way of thinking for me, so I’d say that my opinion on the subject of every story has changed as a result of writing that story (and continues to change after). I’m very baffled by the idea that “not changing your mind” is often considered a virtue. How can that possibly be the case? I would hope that everyone’s mind is constantly changing on every subject as they receive more information or consider the matter more deeply.

[CMY] I also find clarity through writing. For me the distinction between 'learning something' and 'changing your mind' is one that feels artificial, even though I understand the reasoning behind it, based on the psychology involved.

I agree with Ken that being able to change your mind based on new information is a good thing, but I do think one of the challenges we face is knowing how much weight to give new information.

[GdM] Has your relationship with hope changed as you've gotten older? Has that changed the stories you write?

[KYL] I think I’ve gotten more optimistic and hopeful as I’ve grown older—or maybe I just need more copium—hard to know the difference … I think the overall trajectory for humanity has been an increase in our capacity to alter the world, and I think whether this is a net benefit or not comes down to a matter of will. I’m hopeful because again and again I see individual humans choose to do the unexpected thing, to make decisions that benefit others and wield power for good, despite all the cynical assumptions that we’re selfish, amoral creatures driven by base instincts. I don’t know exactly how that has altered my stories, but I’d like to think my fiction is not cynical.