A Chat w/ Rebecca Kuang & Evan Winter!

hello everybody and welcome to another author interview today i have the privilege to sit down with two of my favorites going on right now we have rebecca quang the author of the poppy war the burning god and the dragon republic i said those out of order but i'm dyslexic and then we have evan winter the author of the rage of dragons in the fire of fires of vengeance how are you guys doing today we're okay i think this will be i think this will go up after november 3rd so we're all just kind of like ah i think there'll be a collective sigh or not and then we'll continue from there um but thank you guys for uh setting up this dual interview it's really awesome to do and i'm really excited to get into a lot of questions we have here uh the first one i actually have i'm just going to pose to you directly rebecca and evan if you have any response i'd love to see it but specifically both you have written characters whose stories have pushed them into really dark parts of the human mind i would say both of you explored how to bend and shape someone through tragedy to an extreme extent what attracted you as a writer to finding such dark parts of the human mind like what made you want to tell that story yeah i get asked quite a lot like what is the attraction of grimdark and like why do you enjoy torturing your reader so much and i actually don't think that the appeal ever was like the sheer darkness of it or the sheer brutality like i think we've talked about before about how i don't really love brutality or violence purely a spectacle i don't like it when it's like purely for entertainment's sake like there has to be an argument behind it you have to be doing something with it and i think like the reason why i ended up writing things that were really dark is just because history is really dark and and the questions that i was interested in were well well primarily like the the rise of communist movements in a lot of countries around world war ii and post-world war ii as a response to western imperialism and the ethical questions that raised of you know these a lot of these regimes were were really bloody totalitarian authoritarian states and yet like part of their mission was we are finally liberating ourselves from the west so so what's the trade-off there right which becomes the question that the burning god tries to answer and you like can't really talk about that without talking about the darkness and like the the worst atrocities that um you know humans have ever seen um so like if you're gonna talk about this historical questions i just don't think you can run away from them and i actually i get really frustrated with books that do that are just like oh yeah no there there was a war over here and we were very heroic and we emerged victorious um thousands of people died but you know that's not the point and it's like but that seems like exactly the point yeah and you specifically uh not to get into spoilers but the burning god has quite a lot of uh page time devoted to i would say to avoid spoilers the ramifications of the people who are left in the wake of these events and things like this would that require a lot of research to try and get accurately on your part or was that something that you just kind of i don't know knew more about naturally like how did you find to represent people whoever or left in the wake of such difficult times um it was pretty convenient because that's just exactly what i studied so i was writing the burning god while i was taking a course on china in world war ii with um professor hans von deven at cambridge so that's like that's all we were thinking about and discussing and what you learn pretty quickly if you take like any sort of history class is that there like war is never a pretty story right it is never black or white like there are the good guys and the bad guys it's it's all so messy and it also doesn't end cleanly right it's not like somebody like prevails in a final big glorious battle and everybody just packs up and goes home like you have to deal with deserters you have to deal with the economic ramifications you have to deal with the fact that people were displaced which means that they couldn't plant crops which means that there's going to be famine in future years which means there's going to be banditry and raiding and all sorts of crime and disease right like we read books about like like the sheer process of displacement and what that does to you know the process and outlook for peace for for decades on end afterwards and i i think that is so lacking in so many fantasy novels where war just ties up so clearly and it's like and then like you know the land was at peace but i actually think like lord of the rings is really good about this where they have to go home at the end and like the shire is on fire and they have to like put out um the small scale conflicts that arise as a result of the larger scale conflicts and and i would love fantasy novels to deal with those more a great response and evan similar question to you i mean you have i think the reputation of writing uh one of the most in pain characters emotionally that the fantasy genre has seen in quite some time what specifically drew you to that and you have any response anything rebecca said as well or ms guam yeah um i loved what rebecca said and completely and wholeheartedly agree with all of that um and already have some things to think about in terms of the way i even approach my old work just from that answer i think that uh for me in terms of dealing with the character who is who appears to be and is in so much pain a lot of that comes from the fact that i was interested in cycles of violence i was interested in in sort of elements of oppression and what that does to people who are oppressed over time and over generations and um what happens when a person who has been put in that situation maybe finds an opportunity to either escape it or to sort of um reject it they have the power to sort of reject it what does that look like and so a lot of what i'm trying to do is ask questions um that i don't have the answers to but are sort of sit and burn in my own mind so i'm very interested in asking those questions and exploring them through the writing and so for tao um a lot of what's happening there is that you're seeing somebody for whom society has never had their best interests at heart for you're seeing somebody um that society has declared through its actions and inactions to be less human than other elements of society and i think that has a lot of sort of historical relevancy a lot of present day relevancy and it's sort of the story is my attempt to better understand and come to terms with some of what has happened historically what happens in current day uh but obviously in the sort of secondary world yeah i think that also really hits the nail on the head for why like rager dragon seems like such the obvious response whenever somebody asks me like what should i read next if i like the poppy war because like as i was listening to rage of dragons which was obviously wonderful and i adored like they're obviously very different books right with different like cultural inspirations different worlds building etc but there does seem to be this very strong common theme of not just like it's not just a coming of age story but a coming-of-age tale about an outsider with a huge chip on their shoulder who wants power who is angry who's been through unbelievable trauma and like is going to attain positions of unbelievable power but the question is like what are they going to do with it um so yeah i mean yeah i love ragi dragon so much um but yeah that's why it was like cool to see a lot of the same story beats like resonating and rage dragons as well because like our protagonists are not good people they they are not like naive little heroes who just want to do the right thing like they're they're where they are for a lot of the wrong reasons and they're impacted by their trauma and their anger and i think that creates like such such a fascinating protagonist thank you and i mean i i have to say it back in return very very sincerely that i absolutely adore the poppy war as well and in fact just yesterday my alpha one of my alpha readers uh his name is joey shout out joey and just yesterday he texted me he goes hey man have you read the poppy war it's amazing and i was like yeah i have i'm actually gonna be talking to the author tomorrow so here i am talking to to you and i get to tell joey i talk to the authors so yeah hi joey so i had another question here lined up and that is specifically about writing the characters you have and their response to the trauma they've been in and that's do you think specifically you know the the response they have is something that's within all of us do we all have the potential to go to the places these characters have or do you consider the character you're writing sort of an extraordinary outlier of course stripping away the fantasy elements the magic stuff like that the the psychological response to the trauma do you think that is something that we all have within us or do you consider your characters to be a bit of something that is an extreme i mean i definitely see a lot of imminent reactions to things as like wish fulfillment right like i if somebody insulted my professor in front of me i would not just punch them in the face because i have a rational mind and checks on my impulses but like rin just kind of gets to do whatever she wants and i think that actually is a reason why so many people like really enjoy her character and are like on her side even though like none of us should be condoning anything that rin does it's because we all have these like pent-up frustrations and grief and rage within us and like we all kind of wish we could just let it all go and like inflicted violently um and like create this backlash against the world and and we don't because we live in a society um but i think like another important like hallmark of the grim dark genre is that the line between good and evil is is really really thin right and like these are not extraordinary people like they're extraordinary people because they live in extraordinary circumstances and they have extraordinary power but they're not extraordinary people for the bad decisions they make and and the hurts they choose to inflict because i think we all do that and it's i think it's scary to realize how how easy it would be to be in that situation and also make the wrong choice and i think it like it like if you're in this position it would actually take like incredible moral constraint i think to make what we think would be virtuous or right um but yeah i think i like the only reason why you know i would not do those things is because like i'm more of a coward than rin is yeah and i i'm definitely more of a coward than tao would be uh i think um and i guess for me in terms of is would we all react the same way or is there sort of a i think that it depends somewhat on lived experience um because when people read the book the rage of dragons um a lot of people have difficulty with talent decisions that he makes and they seem rash and they seem uh unreasonable a lot of the time and so the hope is that even if someone can't connect directly with the decisions downtown makes they still can appreciate the story and enjoy it that's the hope but an interesting thing to me that i've seem to have noticed so far is that a lot of people who really do not understand what kai is doing um maybe haven't had a similar lived experience to the one that i have um when someone hasn't experienced uh some of the ramifications or effects of systemic racism when someone doesn't have that history in past like my father grew up when uh he is a black man could not marry a white woman it was against the law like that's my that's when my father grew up um so he was 20 when that 20-something i think when that law changed so when that is sort of your immediate family history there is a different reaction to um to i guess the constraints of society there's a different mentality i think that can sometimes exist for you uh a lot of my friends that have similar backgrounds to me very much we've read the book very much understand uh tal talon his and his and his reactions uh a silly example perhaps but i think it i think it works is when for example uh if you were a black man and you're stopped by a police officer and one of the common things is just stay calm just listen to what they say but it doesn't really work that way when oftentimes you feel very much that the reason that you were stopped is not a legitimate one it's hard to remain calm when even in and through calmness someone doesn't sort of react to you as if you are behaving rationally or reasonably and so when time and time again the way that the world seems to react and treat you is not proportional to the way that you are trying your hardest to react and behave within the world after a while you hold it you hold the negative energy inside of you that threatens to come out um and like rebecca was saying you can't as a reasonable person in in society let that come out because there will be consequences with tao though he is a person who's been driven so far to the edge that he lets it all come out and so perhaps that is some of that wish fulfillment to a certain uh you know extent is that what happens when you can finally let that out that sort of pressure that always sits there and then i wonder if you get the same sort of negative reviews i get sometimes that are like i can't connect with the main character because she's so dumb she makes such bad decisions she's so rash she's so impulsive and it's like okay yeah maybe like you know from your armchair theorizing perspective like you would not make the same dumb decisions that rin does but it's a narrative choice to demonstrate it like what she's been through and what she's been pushed through after all the trauma that she's experienced and if if you've like seen what she's seeing if you've suffered what she suffered then i like it seems like very reasonable to me that somebody would react in that way and i don't know i don't want to like on negative reviews but it does seem like some of those reviews like demonstrate a basic lack of empathy i i mean i feel the exact same way for good or ill and again that's someone's right to see and perceive it that way of course but sometimes i feel like perhaps you see and feel that way because you you don't have you haven't experienced the same type of experience that maybe i have some of the people in my family have uh or just that others have because if you see a situation where you're like what somebody terms rational and reasonable behavior depends on again their history their uh you know sometimes their culture their place in society right um a rational reason behavior for somebody who is from sort of a a low position in society can look very different from a rational behavior from someone whose father or mother works at a fortune 500 company in an executive position those can look like very different things because your options are different right so what i find extremely attractive about both your works uh from a different perspective kind of jumping to another angle here um is you guys have intense commitment to developing friendships yet letting those friendships clash there's a lot of budding of heads between people who genuinely like love each other's friends or sometimes they don't as much but they want to make things work and then they can be these horrendous pulling aparts you know you seem very uh both of you driven by that narratively to be catalysts to move your narrative forward and i was just wondering when you're planning these things out when you're in the moment trying to figure out how characters would react is that something evan i'm a bit sure on your answer here because i know you're the planning author but like is that something in the spur of the moment you're kind of deciding how do you figure out how your characters will react to each other's decisions with these very complex motivations coming off what we just talked about kind of driving what they're going to do that's me first well thing the plotter oh oh uh yeah i know i i do i outline very heavily it makes me come more comfortable because this uh the writing in general is just a hard and odd thing to do um and yeah in terms of sort of coming into conflict the characters coming into conflict and the concept among friends i think that a lot of it again is because my sort of overall view on a lot of the world is that so much of it is subjective and so much of it depends on your perspective um that is built over the entirety of the experiences of your life so even if you are even if you are friends or on the same side in general terms a lot of the conflict just comes from the differences that that sort of that are in the character so i try to put myself in the heads of everyone that's that's in the room and i try to understand what they want what they're after uh what their sub goals are what their needs are and sometimes they they do they conflict even when people are you know sort of more overtly on the same side um and i guess it's just i try to make all those moments as real as i can given all the different ways that i've interacted with people and i've seen them interact when i'm just sort of like you know in a coffee shop lurking and watching some two people talk or if it's me and my best friend and we're having a disagreement over something so it's just it's about trying very hard to understand what someone else's worldview might be and what their needs are in these moments and how they come into conflict we're in the writing process does that happen for you like do you know all of that before like when you're writing the outline no i no i think that uh i think i come to it as i'm writing the outline and i sort of i have general ideas of uh beginning middle and end um and then sort of the middle points in between those all of those and then as i'm sort of draft as i'm designing the outline i go deeper and deeper and deeper and and then i try to find the truth in each moment as best i'm able so i know that i want people to go a certain direction i know that i want the characters to go in a certain direction and then i tried to find the truth of how they would get there or sometimes obviously they fight back and they go i would not do that and i think that's i'm curious to hear about your approach rebecca but for me i think one of the big dangers of being an outliner is that i worry um that i can sometimes overplot and not give my characters enough of their own sort of agency enough of their own not narrative agency because i try very hard to do that but enough of their own sort of character agency um and that's always the struggle for me as a plotter is how do i let these people breathe and do what they would actually do uh given how real i can see them in my head and so what do you do do that are you more of a plot or more of a character person uh world builder so i'm the opposite of a plot um but i really like how you put it like you have to be able to find the truth in a scene or the truth and the moment before you're able to write it and that's why i can't plot like i can't write from an outline because it's very difficult for me to figure out from like a bird's-eye perspective exactly how the characters are going to interact and what dynamics the plot is going to take from the outset um because i need to know what the vibes are like i need to know why they're making those decisions and the emotional weight of those decisions um so i start with the characters well really i start with the ideas because i would call myself an ideas writer more than characters writer but since all the characters are kind of avatars for different political philosophies and and that's how i start building characters and then it becomes like a character story right so so interpersonal conflict matches precisely whatever political conflict i'm trying to write about and then once i've like vibed with them hard enough by which i mean i just like write like you know like a nonsense draft of just scenes and dialogue and interactions where they're arguing about something and it's nebulous and i don't know what and i don't know what's just happened or what's going to happen or even if the scene is going to make its way into the draft like that helps me figure out and sort through their minds and and learn like what might have happened in their past that put them at opposition or where they can find common ground or what exactly they disagree about and how that is going to influence their plant decisions um and then once i have that once i have the fives then i come up with the ending and then once i have the ending i keep writing like scenes that i'm feeling really hard and they're still out of order and i still don't really know the overall plot but since i know what it's all leading towards it's easy like that gives it sufficient structure right like i know the end point i just have to write stuff that gets me there um and then once i have about a hundred thousand words of that and i hit this point with book four a couple weeks ago which was so nice because it's at that point finally where i can then start building an outline over the beats i already have and figure out like is this a 3x structure is this a 5x structured story like what belongs in each act and then i write the outline and then i take the mess that i've just written and make it fit and outline um so it's really messy and i end up deleting a lot of scenes but again like that that lets me always write um feeling the truth in every scene or every moment and never feeling like you know i've constrained the scene too much that the characters don't get to do what i would like them to do you just got my heart rate going up by listening to that oh my goodness like first of all it sounds like that's an immense amount of exploratory work that you're doing and yeah i mean like i i totally can see that in in the poppy war and in the characters that they do feel completely like three-dimensional real people and that's always the thing that i worry about is how do i make sure that the people i see in my head are seen on the page as cleanly as what you're doing because yeah you're finding the realness of these individuals and then sort of finding the plot around that um i mean i always think of i know that i think not just not to compare the sort of the the way the development styles but i know that stephen king writes just he's exploratory as well in general he has an idea and then writes and i i always find his characters to be very leap off the page like they seem so real to me and and i think that that's maybe a a large benefit of that approach that i worry i lose sometimes because i am kind of like almost playing puppet master and then the last part of my of my style is that i have to then cut those strings as best i can so that they can go where they want but then there's still the structure and the story that's in the way sometimes and that's when i have to kind of try to find the real places that these people would go and the real things that they would do over top of what i think i want them to do but uh yeah so much of my approach is trying to reduce work and make sure i never have to like rewrite a scene or cut anything and i am astounded and amazed um at your approach is so exploratory in that way and to find the truth of i guess you're finding the truth from a completely opposite way that i i tried to find it as well and that's amazing well you wouldn't know that you felt constrained reading rage of dragons because tao is very vivid he definitely leaks off the page um so like then what do you do if you're not happy with your outline like halfway through how often do you end up changing the course of the story based on what you're feeling in a scene you know what not that much from my from my very first finished outline to the way that rage of dragons ended up it's almost exactly the same i think there was one sec one sort shorter section probably about 20 pages that i just cut out entirely but other than that it sort of flowed pretty much exactly the way i'd i'd imagined it because i guess i do the work that you're doing in the beginning with with sort of if you're finding the characters and you're exploring the scenes and having them sort of talk to each other and figure out what the conflicts are i guess i'm taking all that time but doing it in the outline stage um and that's me sort of going this scene happens and then this scene happens and this is where we go next and then trying to refine refine refine that and then once i have that so as dialed in as i know how to make it that's when i i start trying to write so i do encounter the issue where um i can kind of feel like a character wouldn't do something but that typically happens in the outline stage um and then but then i still sometimes run into a bit of trouble when i'm actually in the drafting because like you're saying once you're actually in the scene and you're actually sort of typing all the words around the scene to develop you know the descriptions the actions the moments sometimes then i go this person does not want to do this because in that actual full fleshed-out moment they resist um and that's always a tricky place to get to yeah characters also become different people near the end of um the drafting process than they are when we begin so i i put so many scenes because like that's just not their voice like that like that may have been their personality and their agenda when i started drafting but now they like i need something else from them and it's just like oh what do i do with you like i've got to kill this version of you um i also am curious how how many years have we spent with these characters by now um yeah i guess 2017 was when i started writing rage um so we're at three years now pretty much um yeah so i spent three years with them uh and yeah tao didn't tao was not i didn't meet tao until 2017. so before that i had ideas about the type of story i would like to tell but yeah i didn't meet him until 2017 and it's now so three years and what about you then how long have how long have the characters been in your head so i met written in 2015 right like when i was writing the burning god finally on this year it was it was just so easy to write dialogue and to know what the characters were going to do like i knew the whole cast so intimately like they lived in my mind for so long right like there's never any question like what should i do with this character in this scene so i think it definitely gets easier and easier over a series but then the hard part is when the series finishes and you have to like meet a new cast of characters it's like i'm struggling with that with book four now um because it's a totally different world it's like an 1830s oxford like there's absolutely nothing to do with the poppy war and it's like it's like breaking up with someone after a really long relationship and then meeting someone new because like just even writing dialogue is so hard because i don't really know you yet like and and the hardest part actually is echoes of of rain and katai and naja keep like threatening to pop out and like it the book keeps wanting to be the poppy war instead of the book that it actually is so so that's what i'm struggling with now but yeah back to your original question daniel like character work is is so easy like the longer you know these people um but the flip side is it's really hard to have to say goodbye has it been would you say it's easier to start the new series harder or just so different like there's some harder parts because that's kind of a scary thing to do from my perspective right now it's mostly felt liberating um and the big reason why is when you're finishing a trilogy or so how many books are planned in the range of darkness four and i'm currently uh doing three okay yeah right number three i want to scare you too much okay so so by the last book um you have to like you have less freedom in the sense that you have to deliver on the promises of the first book which means that you have a co-author and the co-author is your younger self um and oftentimes your younger self is a very frustrating co-author to work with because like there's a lot of foreshadowing for stuff in the poppy war that like by the time all this 23 24 i just like i did not want to deal with i was like no this is this is a stupid storyline like i don't want to like i don't want to carry out this plot to its conclusion like i want to change directions and do something else but like if you do that that feels like a letdown to the reader right um so like the coolest part of being able to start over with the oxford novel is to like not have any limitations or boundaries for what i could do with the characters in the world like i get to start completely over with the world building new rules new history new themes um and it's like it's so nice to finally return to like a blank slate um so even though i've like complained about you know having a hard time meeting the new characters and like so i think the hardest part actually is is the voice of the protagonist and i've seen this in like other series and it's disappointed me a little bit where like when i really love an author and i love their protagonists in particular um and they start with a new series their protagonist like often feels like a shade of the original protagonist like some personality traits are swapped out but oftentimes it's like no like you're you're a clone like you're not your own person um and um so i was expressing some of these doubts and and worries to v schwab and her advice was the best thing you can do for yourself when you start new projects is to change like something really big about it so like you're never tempted to write what you just did like the whole like you know it could be some you could switch from past tense to present tense or you could go from first person to third person or you know something structurally and and so i did a lot of those things but one of the big changes was the protagonist is like the complete opposite of written in every way possible like he's more like hiccup from how to train your dragon well he's a dude right like he doesn't have her anger management management issues he doesn't have the same sort of traumatic background he doesn't it's not out for revenge and that has made things a lot easier i'm just trying to write like so then i don't have the temptation to just write a story that's all about some version of her again um so it's mostly felt good but there are days when i just wish it could be easy again and i could just be writing a poppy war sequel again i actually that kind of goes nicely into the fan questions i had here for both you guys i asked my patrons what would you like to ask the two of you and we had a collection of for rebecca for evan for both um but i'd like to start with a for both one here that i thought uh both you would do such an excellent job but you're such different writers in your technical approach it'd be interesting to see how you contradict both you pull heavily from real world history and cultures and i'd love to know your process for how you decided to choose what to pull in where to pull from and you know how that developed throughout the drafts the outlining how to flesh out these tremendous aspects to your stories um yeah i think that uh i'm very interested to hear rebecca's answer because for me one of the main things i was i was doing is i am pulling from an idea of a culture i am pulling from um a little bit of history as well as a lot of my own personal experience growing up in zambia in africa but i'm not being particularly historical i'm not doing a super deep dive into cultural aspects i'm trying to draw out some of the feel of the culture and some of the feel of being sort of an equatorial africa a little bit towards the south of africa because i know what that feels like i didn't get to see it in the genre that i loved when i was growing up i couldn't find it very much so i was interested and excited to sort of tell a story that would speak to that part of my life uh because i think that the the land is beautiful the people are incredible the world there like i i absolutely adored my childhood my upbringing it was an incredible incredible time in my life uh that i'm very grateful for and i wanted to show some of the things that i appreciated about it in fiction um but at the same time i'm not doing a deep historical researched dive uh in the range of dragons um the world is loosely based on memory and research but it is not sort of a sort of at all historically accurate or deeply cultural uh culturally accurate i should say so yeah i guess that's one place where we differ a lot um because the poppy war is much more of like an active like project of historical interrogation and like the questions that it's trying to grab at are questions that bother a lot of us who study 20th century chinese history which um you know has like so many thorny ethical issues um and so i have a very systematic way of approaching it i knew that i wanted it to be like a more like ancient world um so i said it in like the 12th or 13th century um like a song dynasty setting um and like the motivations for that were so silly and i think i would have done things differently now but at the time i was really daunted by the idea of writing battle scenes that involves modern technologies and warfare like it just it seems like the you have to learn so much about tanks and fighter jets and machine guns etc in order to pull that off and and for some reason i thought it'd be easier to coordinate like large battles if they were just fighting with um spears and swords and arrows which is not true um but so that was like the the large motivation for studying in in the song dynasty instead um so like aesthetically culturally technologically everything is like most of the world's building elements are are pulled from those like big chunky cambridge edited histories of the song dynasty um in china uh but as for the plot elements themselves and the different factions and it's specifically how like the military campaigns shake out those are lifted directly from the 20th century uh so you know the conflict between the nationalists and the communists right like that becomes the conflict between rin's faction and not just faction by the burning god the chinese civil war the second sign of japanese war the continuation of the chinese civil war like the um early reign of the of the prc after the communist victory etc like all of that makes its way into the burning god in particular um so like the generative creative part was figuring out how to transpose those very modern very recent movements into such an ancient setting right so like obviously we don't have marks we don't have angles so you can't just say haha communism but there is a way to talk about class and like an old school like fantasy setting uh where do you just like demonstrate the material conditions of class and wealth accumulation in the capital for example um but yeah now i'm getting thorny into the issues but yeah i think we have really really different approaches when it comes to history and research one of the things i would love to ask about that is um the series feels so emotional and you're but at the same time you're trying to tell a narrative that has a large as a very sort of focused academic sort of uh perspective how did you inject the emotion into that like it seems like such a character study but there's so much sort of a meta narrative happening on top of that character study how did you manage to balance those was that was that a concern or a focus or that's actually yeah it's quite hard for me actually um because i have a tendency to let the writing get really academic and the reason that it doesn't feel that way is because my editor is very harsh with this um and i don't know if i told daniel about this last time but there was a scene there were many pages in the dragon republic which i i really loved um one was uh so most of that book happens on the water and it's like it's naval warfare and it happens on rivers right but our long the dragon province is finland so i had to explain like how they're getting their ships out onto those rivers and how these evil battles are happening so i went for a long time about the canal system and how beautiful it is and like who created it and for what purposes it's used and like exactly how wide and deep the canals are to allow these ships to go across my others like no one cares right like please just let us get to the action and i was like but but the people will have questions and he was like i promise you that people do not have questions um and i think this is going to get worse like this tendency of mine for the oxford novel um because it is about academia and it's about research and i like right now nobody else has read it and i'm a little bit worried that like the passages that seem really cool to me are not like good for the kind of pasting and immediate action you need from a fantasy novel that like readers are actually going to want to read and buy and enjoy um but the other thing i was going to say is if the popular feels emotional it's because like that process of academic discovery when when the reader is finding out about chinese history is also a mirror of my own process of coming to that history like i wasn't like doing history when i started writing it i was on a gap year from college and like talking to my grandparents in chinese for the first time learning all these things for the first time like i did not know of the nanjing massacre until a couple months before i wrote the poppy war um so the reader's like discovery right and and shock at this like mirrors my own and like i think that's why it comes off as personal and emotional as opposed to just just very dry and obtuse jargon so i'll have to figure out some way to make that stick with the next book too this next question i have is directed uh directly for you evan and it's uh after the release of the rage of dragons uh and the reception that led to it's pretty insane growth how did you feel that success uh came on to you as a writer do you feel you became more confident in your writing did you feel like you were less because there was more pressure and eyes how specifically did that hit you and then same thing for you rebecca i'd actually like both your perspectives on this yeah i thank you i think that uh thanks for the question uh i think that i kind of cheat a little bit with this because um maybe this is not true but it is my perspective and i very much believe that so much of this so much of a person's ability to appreciate a piece of writing is subjective so much of it depends entirely on who the reader is that um the way that i armor myself so to speak is that i write something that i personally would love and then i think that the the ideal job of either the publisher or since i started out self-publishing the job that i'd set myself when i was self-publishing was to find readers who would read like i do um and so you do that by sort of like in in traditional publishing they call them comparables well what are the comparables right um in self-publishing you said you could sort of say what am i also bots um for example um the puppy war is a very very tight also bought of of the rage of dragons even on amazon and it means that readers who read the puppy war might be inclined to enjoy the rage of dragons um so that was my whole approach is i'm going to write for me because i can't know anybody else and if i tell the story that i would enjoy that i'm always armored because i go i enjoy this and given my belief that reading and is subjective anyways then i just have to find the right readers for the work that i'm doing now the sort of the downside or the potential counter to this is someone saying oh well then you never have it you never have to improve if everything's subjective there's no reason to improve but i would disagree with that and say the the point is that you can always improve and you can always seek improvement because i write to please myself but at the same time i can do a better job of it i can try to figure out more and more of what works for me why it works for me i can break that down analyze it figure out the craft of it try to put it back together until i can even surprise myself and go oh my gosh this blew my whole mind i am in love with this and that's the goal for me right so there's still an opportunity for improvement even though i believe that the enjoyment of writing is almost completely subjective and that armors me against uh i guess worrying too much about what's happening on the outside yeah and if you're exactly the same way so what was that what you're playing i just i was gonna slightly reframe it for rebecca because you've actually had a one two now you've had your second book out as well and i was wondering if the experience actually changed from the first to the second book if there was any difference there for you i i don't think so actually i look at this um very similarly um to evan where uh well so first of all i think that your first book should be your worst book and um because you always want to be getting better at your own craft right again like you want to be telling stories in a way that satisfies you more and more with each subsequent novel um so that is actually what part part of what like um uh armors me against criticism like if people are criticizing the father word it's like uh yeah well i wrote that when i was a teenager and i'm not a teenager anymore so i bet you're gonna like what i put out next um and yeah it i just like it doesn't faze me anymore um but i mean it used to and it took me a while before i realized like reading or hearing about a very negative review where somebody just has a very adverse emotional reaction to the book is not an objective statement on the quality of the book like i think the book is good it i think all it means is that i probably don't want to get coffee with that person um but like you know if if we all like read books the same way and enjoyed the exact same kinds of books that would create a really sad book market where like only the same books got read all the time and it's good that people have such adverse reactions to certain books because it means like you know there's probably somebody else something else they enjoy a lot more and you know they should you know run off and go read that instead um but evan how long did it take you for you to reach like a lot of people call it like the zen stage about reviews and like i got there a couple months after the poppy award came out but i would have loved to have been there when it came out um because there's definitely like a period of like oh my god like what if everyone's right and this looks really bad um but now it's just like it doesn't even stick like i just don't care um you know was that a long process for you um i think i was eased into it because uh i directed music videos for around 20 years and on given the artist i had the opportunity to direct for uh the videos have been viewed about half a billion times and this is on youtube and daniel can probably attest to this the comments on youtube are awful it's an it's an awful place for comments and negativity sometimes it's an amazing community it can be but like just some of the people that come in and comment can be awful and so the the the nice thing about growing up in that sort of creative way was that it meant that people were critiquing critiquing not me directly but the artist because they don't consider the director but then i could still could would take them the critiques on a little bit personally because i'd created the visual and they'd be like oh the artist is doing this or whatever i don't love this this interpretation of whatever and so i'd kind of take a little bit of that on but then i'd also see the positive comments and so i had two decades of doing that work and seeing that happen over and over again where it wasn't directed primarily against me or i couldn't take it too personally but i still could sort of let it hit me a little bit and then it meant that i when i by the time i got to writing i i just felt more like so much of this is subjective uh so much of this depends on what you like or what you don't like what you're bringing to the book what you're not bringing to the book what you've read before right um you know somebody who's read a thousand fantasy books is going to read the rage of dragons differently than someone who's read one and and they'll think about the books differently based on all of that so and i can't control for that all i can control for is that if someone comes to the book exactly as as i would they would think it's pretty cool and so yeah and so when somebody says one star this is awful i absolutely hated it on the book and i i just think to myself hopefully you find something else that you would like much better because the book that that person would love is out there it's just it's probably not going to come from me ever that's okay yeah that's how i feel about one star reviews it's like that means that there's just nothing you could have written that that person would have liked they just like want something totally different from a book i will say sometimes i buy books based on one star reviews like if i see a one-stop review that's like hated it it was too violent too much politics so much cursing i'm like yeah that sounds like my thing i want it i love that uh that actually kind of nicely transitions into my next question for you rebecca which is one that i completely agree with and that is the person said for your future projects whether it's poppy first or not your love of history clearly like bleeds off of you as you write i mean you're someone who is very much so inspired by your passion for history is that something you feel will always be a part of your writing or do you ever see yourself kind of pulling veering away from that and writing something completely sci-fi dystopian no connection to history well i think that it's impossible to write anything that is not historically informed or doesn't engage in the real world in some way so i'm going to push back on the sci-fi dystopian like category because i think you'll engage in society but just in my particular case um like no absolutely not and that's because like writing's not even like my primary career or my first passion my first passion is like my research and so so i do like chinese literature and chinese literary history um and i just yeah i there are so many questions that i'm fascinated in and um fascinated by and the like the stories really only arise as a result of that research like i always end up writing novels based on whatever research problems are bothering me most at that moment so obviously like the whole popular trilogy was was based on questions of what do we do with collective grief what do we do with trauma that has been buried and not spoken of that has not found some sort of when we like as countries can't find healing processes like what does that do for for future violence and dehumanization etc um and with the new book now i'm really interested in the questions of student revolution translation theory um and the university is a site of both violence and violent knowledge production and especially recently um now this is getting meta but the questions that are bothering me most is what even is the point of academia what is the point of the humanities in the face of material struggle and suffering and is it indulgent just to be storytellers and to be people who research storytellers when like you know there's a pandemic going on right like the united states isn't the condition that it is and like what what do we do from behind our ivory towers to to affect that in some significant way like what does meaningful academic research actually look like um so yeah i i think that i'm just like i'm so young and i've also been so sheltered that if i tried to write books that were not based on my research they i would be drawing from a very small well of personal experience and emotions and ideas that the stories would just be kind of bland and uninspired so um the nice thing about academia and history is that it forces you to keep asking really difficult questions about the world you live in and and why people do what they do so yeah it's it's always going to be very closely tied to research for me um which is why i'm always going to be struggling with uh figuring out how to make my writing not boring well i i was a fantastic informative answer and veering a little more away from the dark territory we've been in i had a very sweet question from a fan what was your favorite childhood book for both of you first of all before i even answer the question i will say to rebecca you sold me on that book hardcore the idea of you know the value of storytelling in academia oh man you sold me hard but okay um in terms of um my favorite childhood book probably probably the bfg by roald dahl which is a tricky thing to say because of who i what i learned as i was growing older about um the author and some of their points of view and so it's a weird thing because i have such fond memories and i read through the entire like all of roald dahl's work um and roald dahl's work is probably largely responsible for me wanting to be a writer from when from since i was a child and yet the the points of view and perspectives that he held uh i think up until his death are very problematic for me uh so yeah it's it's such a difficult thing when you when so much of the so much of the work and so much of the work that we i was exposed to um comes from a perspective that would look at someone like me especially when it was written and then i was and i was growing up in zambia which is a colonized country um and so much of what was written viewed people who looked like me a very specific and certain way um but that's what i was exposed to still in the writing and that's what sort of drove a lot of my love for trying to tell stories myself so sort of conflicted but it was the bfg by roald dahl well i take royal doll and i raised you or some scotch and you know similarly conflicted attitudes towards you know the fact that he doesn't like queer people and i'm a queer writer so that's difficult but like i just i loved ender's game when i was a kid and i read it over and over again and like similarly that also sparked my love of writing because just like so because understanding felt so different from many like children's books that i've been exposed to up to that point like suddenly it was like it was still kids my age but and but they were really smart and they were in positions of such power they were making decisions that you know would alter the course of humanity and if you're 10 and ender's 10 and he's like i'm gonna like kill all the buggers and you know save humanity you're like whoa like 10 year olds can do so much the adults have been keeping us down um and you know i read all the sequels and i used to judge people based on whether they thought the shadow line of sequels was better or um the speaker for the dead line of sequels was better um and i think like a lot of horses got part is so apparent even in my storytelling bones like the way i do dialogue and like pacing and um and plotting and yeah it's just it's hard when your inspirations are are not great people i will i will raise you one and just say i'm not a fan of ender's game so you can judge me based off that what don't you like about it i had everything spoiled for me and i was like a teenager when i read it and so i was very bored uh i probably need to reread it as an adult okay so my issue with it is that i just like i didn't care when the twist at the end happened um because i just thought the battle school scenes were so cool so the parts of the book that i would re-read were all the parts up until like he actually goes to to command school or whatever it is and fights and buggers like up until like i thought that was the worst part of the book i was like i wish they would stay at that school forever um so i kind of see where you're at i will say you're the first ender's game fan i've ever heard say the ending is the worst part of the book that's extraordinary um yeah i'm very well i've i will probably agree because i don't like that twist that much but i'm a i'm an ender hater uh i have i was just gonna chime in here and say that the twist blew my mind i was like what for real so it totally it rocked my world and i also loved the battle scenes and they influenced me heavily so yeah so i had another question here from a fan who wanted to know any advice for future authors starting out now particularly authors of color and evan i'll throw this one to you first that's a tough one i think that i would say tell the story that's in your heart tell the story that you really really want to tell because that is the one that no one else will be able to tell it is uh i was talking about this just the other day but when i was first writing the range of dragons my first inclination was to write a story that would have been uh with rolling medals castles nights and probably around or square table or something because that's everything that i'd read and that's what i thought fantasy had to look like even in my adulthood i was like well that's just what it is um the only reason i did not do that was because um i had about a year to write the book uh between jobs and it was me doing it to get it off my bucket list it was me doing it because i'd always wanted to be a writer and i just wanted to write something so i could say i had done it um and then i would move on with my life and and carry on doing stuff that i had to do to make a living and so because it was because i was doing it just to get it out of my system i said well no i'm going to write what i really want to write as opposed to what might be commercially viable or what might be more likely to get me an agent and whatever and so i wrote something that meant something to me um and i would say do that and not because you necessarily have a higher chance of success but because you will always be happier with the result of that is what you do and if traditional publishing won't give you a shot and you can't get an agent you can't get a publishing contract go and try to self-publish definitely do that you can make a living doing that if you figure it out um it's not easy it is a job it is a business but the power of self-publishing is that what the online tools that we have nowadays primarily paid advertising granted but what the power of the online tools we have nowadays you can target deeply enough down to to find probably the type of reader who wants your book who's looking for your book who needs that story that only you can tell so tell the story this is in your heart yeah that's good advice um i think i would say uh don't let them tell you what kind of story you need to tell i think the problem we used to have um like maybe in the last decade was that uh by plc writers might have been afraid that publishing just didn't want their stories like full stop because there weren't any examples of writers who looked like them who had gotten like major book deals um and i know like when i was writing the poppy war i could think of like two examples of um you know the the kind of like chinese american writers who are doing what i wanted to do and one of them was ken liu right uh and now we're in a kind of different place where it's not like there are tons of successful novels out there by poc writers but they're like a couple in every category and i think the worry is that publishing really tries to or really likes to pigeonhole and stereotype and and create um categories of like what is like the best kind of asian story to tell or what is the best kind of west african inspired fantasy to tell and uh i've seen people get feedback from agents and editors that are like you know it doesn't seem quite asian enough for me or what that really means right is that oh this manuscript doesn't fit the stereotype of china or chinese fantasy that i've developed based on my very like limited sampling of what's out there um and that's a problem that we're gonna continue to push up against um and i think like this affects yes for writers as well who who get on for like you know either siding too exotic or or sounding too western when they are in fact western writers um and this um aligns the fact that there's like such a huge multiplicity of experiences and diversity in the stories that we grew up with like everybody has their own different version of like folk tales for example um so yeah i guess like i would buy for the answer first like don't tell them what kind of story you need to tell but second don't let them tell you that the story you want to tell has already been told because we've all seen the numbers and they straight up have not so just go again write the story that you want yeah no i i love that answer and i think all i 100 agree with everything there and i personally have seen a lot of the comments about uh race for example that say oh it's not african enough it's not african well africa is a massive continent it's one of the biggest continents on the planet and i'm actually already kind of again cheating a little bit by pulling from all parts of africa which can be a problematic thing to do as opposed to restricting yourself to a specific region um but it's so interesting to me to see that as a comment oh it's you know it's kind of like a western story dressed up in african sort of clothing it's like i when i grew up again it was uh in zambia it was a colonized nation um i had british teachers um the effects of world trade and everything else have been happening for hundreds and hundreds of years so how far back do you have to go before you get something that feels just uniquely distinctly african that has no influence from anywhere else like i don't know so it is i completely hear what you're saying rebecca and that definitely is is a bit of a problem in that people feel as if um sometimes it can be the people who end up you end up needing to get people traditionally published or just even sometimes it can be readers expecting something from a book that isn't really truly a fair expectation and would never be placed on say a european fantasy well then i'm just gonna go ahead and transition into the next question here which is a little more of a light-hearted one as we kind of come to the close here because i know both who are very busy and that is what hobbies slash interest did you have growing up that might have influenced your imaginations into developing your mind into the craving the desire the lust to be a storyteller is there anything that jumps out that you were like that was what led to this so i'm competitive and i did taekwondo for a while when i was young and i also fenced and i was very bad at fencing um just because i don't have any muscles and i'm not you know i just i'm not athletically gifted whatsoever but i think i at least had that well of like what's it like when you're staring an opponent in the eyes when you just want to beat someone like i think that that base emotion carries you very far when you're trying to write the kind of novels that everything lie right i think like the event that influenced me most was i did debate in high school and again it's it's down to competitiveness it's it's down to uh seeing somebody on the other side of the room and wanting to beat their faces and make them look like idiots and you know just like establish supremacy um and yeah like all the little things right like rivalries like alliances um you know really stressful important debates like all of those emotions i i put in the bank of emotions i need to draw from and be able to describe faithfully when when i'm writing so you know even though i was never in a situation like rin where she needed to like defeat nadja or literally die at the tournament like i've been to tournaments and i've known what it's like to to have like male opponents who are very rude to you um who like inspire rage and fury in me so it's the little emotions that become the big emotions in fantasy i love that i'm very competitive to it oh my goodness that's not that you've been pushing yourself to write through do you need to compete and defeat her i love that uh in terms of writing for me i think that um i i grew up again i feel like i've said this 50 times i'm going to say it 51 times i grew up in zambia at a time where there was one tv station it came out at five o'clock and went until seven o'clock or eight o'clock at night and then it turned off to static and that was it um and so what i would do is i played with toys primarily like gi joes and he-man toys or whatever and i would play for hours and hours telling stories and how hell had like whole elaborate things that would go on to the point where like it would stop for the next i have to go to bed and i would wake up and pick it right back up like it was a two be continued sort of next episode type of thing and i would just do this whole thing and i would yeah that was how i grew up like just playing with toys all day long when you know i didn't have to be doing school or something and then in high school i got into drama and acting and stuff and it was in a bunch of plays and uh wrote a play that was put on by the school and went to sort of a competition circuit and i just i guess i just always really loved the idea of telling stories and i very very much believe in its power i very very much believe in its transformative power and to me i think actually stories play a huge role in what we think of as being um either normal or reasonable uh in terms of behavior and action so i think the stories have a massive massive role to play well if you guys don't mind i'm going to go ahead and bring it to a close there because we're coming up on an hour if you you heard it here first the best way to inspire yourself to become a fantasy author is to play with toys as a kid and want to beat the hell out of people it's a phenomenal direction to go in thank you guys so much for tuning in like and subscribe if you have not already and have a good one peace

Channel: Daniel Greene

Views: 43,023

Rating: 4.9633026 out of 5

Keywords: rebecca kuang, evan winter, author interview, daniel greene, rage of dragons, fires of vengeance, the burning god, the poppy war, author tube, booktube

Id: 88VXaNq1zmo

Length: 61min 12sec (3672 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020