Fiction: Ken Liu

[00:00:09] Welcome to Ten Thousand. I'm your host Ben Scofield, and this is a podcast about expertise.

[00:00:13] It isn't about experts though, it's about the journey. My goal with Ten Thousand is to talk to

[00:00:18] people at all stages from absolute novices to world-class performers to find out how they

[00:00:21] think about what they do and what it means to excel and especially how what they think changes

[00:00:24] as they get more experience. With that said, let's get into it. I am incredibly excited this week to

[00:00:36] be talking to Ken Liu, who has won basically all of the biggest awards you can win in genre fiction.

[00:00:43] Most of them with a single short story, which was I think the first work to win the Hugo,

[00:00:47] the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. His short story, The Paper Menagerie, which is phenomenal.

[00:00:51] He's also won awards for The Grace of Kings and other solo works. And so I'm particularly excited

[00:00:59] to talk to Ken about excellence in writing fiction. But that said, Ken, welcome to Ten Thousand.

[00:01:07] Ken Liu, Thank you, Ben. It's a real pleasure to be here.

[00:01:10] Yeah. So let's dive in as I do on almost every episode. What does good mean in the context of

[00:01:18] writing fiction?

[00:01:19] This is a great question. And I think the way we think about it explains why fiction,

[00:01:26] unlike a lot of other arts and crafts, is particularly hard to sort of pin down. I think there are basically

[00:01:33] two ways to look at it, right? So there are some who say that the way you judge fiction is to focus

[00:01:39] on the reader. Meaning if a piece of work engages a lot of readers, a lot of readers give it praise,

[00:01:46] a lot of readers buy it, and so on and so forth, then that's an objective measure of the quality of

[00:01:52] writing. So good things win awards. Good stories are loved by a lot of people. But that's not the only

[00:02:00] way to think about it. The other way to think about fiction is to say good writing, good fiction

[00:02:06] opens up interpretive spaces. Good fiction will allow people to engage with it in an aesthetically

[00:02:16] sophisticated, interesting way. So it doesn't necessarily have to be the best-selling piece

[00:02:22] of work or the most award-winning work or the most beloved piece of work or the most popular piece of

[00:02:28] work. And yet it is good simply because it does something that other pieces of fiction don't do.

[00:02:35] So these are two very different ways of judging writing, and they're both good. And I think depending

[00:02:40] on which one you focus on, you come up with very different ways of practicing, very different ways

[00:02:46] of thinking about what is good and very different ways of practicing the craft.

[00:02:52] Yeah, interesting. So I would love to dive into both. I think the more common approach is good

[00:02:59] is what connects most deeply to the audience or what have you. So can you say a little bit more about

[00:03:05] that? Right? So my naive sense is that I think it can be agreed pretty widely that the mere fact of

[00:03:17] connecting to the audience is not sufficient for being good or great fiction, right? So Shakespeare, we acknowledge

[00:03:23] to be great fiction, even though today for our high schoolers, maybe they don't connect to it in the same way

[00:03:28] that the audiences did at his time. But maybe that gets into the second sense of good where it's opening these.

[00:03:35] Okay, anyway, I will quit babbling and get your thoughts.

[00:03:39] No, you're not babbling at all. I love your reaction, because you're engaged with this question in this very deep way.

[00:03:47] You know, this is an interesting question, because how we judge art is really at the heart of what we're trying to decide here, right?

[00:03:55] How do you practice your craft when your definition of how people engage with art is so open?

[00:04:00] Here's how I would think about it. I would say that when we're talking about fiction in particular,

[00:04:06] we have to realize that fiction is not a communicative act in the way we normally perceive it.

[00:04:13] So let me try to explain to you why. A typical communicative act would be something like giving directions.

[00:04:19] A gives directions to a place, to B. If B follows the directions and arrives at that place,

[00:04:26] then we say that the communication has succeeded, and B fails to arrive at that place, and it's failed.

[00:04:31] There's a very easy, objective way to measure whether the communication succeeded or not.

[00:04:36] In writing, however, especially in fiction writing, that is not how we measure it.

[00:04:41] So let me give you an example. Let's talk about the Iliad as a piece of literature.

[00:04:46] One reader will read it and say, this is an amazing poem that glorifies war.

[00:04:52] Now, having read it, I understand why war is such a core human endeavor, and why war truly is the highest human endeavor.

[00:05:01] It's something that we engage in with our entirety. I really get it.

[00:05:06] A second reader will read it and say, this is the most anti-war poem I have ever read.

[00:05:11] Having read it, now I understand why war is such a terrible thing, and I do not wish any society would engage in it.

[00:05:16] But both are perfectly valid interpretations, and you might ask, has Homer succeeded in communicating what he meant to communicate or not?

[00:05:24] And the question to us will strike us as somewhat strange and silly and irrelevant, because we don't actually care what Homer was trying to communicate.

[00:05:32] We care only about what truth we read from it.

[00:05:36] And I would argue that it's true of all art.

[00:05:39] That truth is a little bit obscure when the authors are alive, because we can ask them what they meant to communicate.

[00:05:45] And so sometimes we will go at the author, what did you mean to say?

[00:05:48] What do you want readers to take away from it?

[00:05:50] Which I think is a useless question for most of it, because what the writer meant to communicate is irrelevant.

[00:06:00] Now, this goes back to the two separate theories of art and how to judge whether a piece of fiction is good or not.

[00:06:07] If you follow the first theory, then you sort of say, the author must intend to engage with the audience in some way.

[00:06:14] The author intended to communicate a certain kind of emotional journey for the reader, and the author successfully takes the reader on that journey.

[00:06:22] So, so far as the author is able to successfully convey that vision, that journey, and grab the reader to go on that reader journey, the more they're able to do so, the better an author they are.

[00:06:37] That's certainly one way of looking.

[00:06:38] I tend to reject that view, period, because I don't think a piece of art ultimately succeeds in that way.

[00:06:44] I think ultimately, the more open, the more enduring a piece of art is, the more readers can come up with different interpretations.

[00:06:53] The more a piece of art can allow different readers to see themselves in it, if you will, the better it is.

[00:07:03] And oftentimes that means the author does not even know how they will connect with readers thousands of years in the future.

[00:07:10] So, I think that's a different way of thinking about what makes art great, what makes a piece of writing great, what makes fiction great.

[00:07:17] And I think if that is what you're trying to practice for, then your aim will be a little bit different.

[00:07:23] However, having said all that, I would say that regardless of how you think about whether a piece of writing or fiction is communicative or not,

[00:07:33] I think fundamentally what you really have to do, there is some commonality, regardless of how you judge a piece of art.

[00:07:40] There is some commonality here in the sense that I think if I were to reduce the way you judge art down to one criterion that you have to sort of rely on,

[00:07:51] it's to what extent does the author successfully invent a language with which to convey a vision of the universe only that author can see?

[00:08:03] That, to me, is the sole criterion that is worth striving for in your practice.

[00:08:10] And the sole criterion that is worth judging when you're evaluating a piece of art.

[00:08:16] Interesting. Okay.

[00:08:17] So, I think one of the driving themes I'm finding as I talk across domains and to authors and to software developers and whoever else

[00:08:26] is that you can't talk about something being good without finishing that sentence.

[00:08:32] Good for what?

[00:08:33] Right.

[00:08:33] So, I think by the definition you just proposed that fiction is good if it is uniquely suited for carrying across the view of the world that only the author can provide.

[00:08:52] Good for what?

[00:08:52] Let's see.

[00:08:53] So, some authors clearly don't care about that.

[00:08:56] Like, that's not their goal.

[00:08:57] Right.

[00:08:57] And so, for them, good would mean something else.

[00:09:01] You mentioned dead authors before.

[00:09:03] We can't know what their goal was necessary.

[00:09:05] Like, sometimes we can because they might have written it down or whatever.

[00:09:08] But there is, and you pointed this out earlier as well, that to some extent the author's intent doesn't matter.

[00:09:14] Right.

[00:09:15] So, the success or failure of a work is dependent upon the audience's reaction to it and the message they take away from it.

[00:09:23] And then we can apply my meta definition of good to that.

[00:09:27] Right.

[00:09:27] So, if I am teaching the Iliad to a high school class, I can mean it.

[00:09:32] I can be teaching it at a military academy where it is all about the glorification of violence and war.

[00:09:37] Or I can teach it at the New College of Florida before it was restructured and it is an anti-war fable.

[00:09:46] Yeah.

[00:09:47] So, I think this leads me at least to there is no objective good.

[00:09:52] There's always only purpose relative goodness.

[00:09:57] And so, I'm wondering if that changes, if that is an argument against the view that you just put where it's the author's singular vision of the world.

[00:10:08] I understand.

[00:10:09] But I understand your point.

[00:10:11] But let me try to see if I can convey to you what I mean here in a more elaborate way, if you will, and see if I can clarify my point a little bit.

[00:10:23] So, here's where it gets tricky.

[00:10:29] What is language?

[00:10:30] Language is obviously a medium and a tool for communication.

[00:10:35] And language is a way for us to basically convey our mental patterns and states to other humans.

[00:10:42] And what's interesting here is to what extent language succeeds in doing that and to what extent we deliberately not allow language to do that.

[00:10:53] So, let me give you some examples.

[00:10:55] Language is not the only code that humans have invented to convey mental states to each other.

[00:11:01] Mathematics is one of them too.

[00:11:03] Now, I would say mathematics is actually much better than language in terms of conveying mental states to each other.

[00:11:09] A person who wrote down a proof hundreds of years ago.

[00:11:14] When I read that proof and understand it, I can be assured that I have literally recreated in my brain the exact same mental states that the person doing the communicating wish to do so.

[00:11:27] Mathematics is uniquely precise as a human convention in conveying mental states.

[00:11:33] A human language does something entirely different.

[00:11:35] And I find that really fascinating.

[00:11:39] So, I would say that the most kind of clear communications that humans engage in are really cliches.

[00:11:47] Clichés are clichés precisely because we have agreed upon a set of subtle definitions.

[00:11:53] So, the more cliches that you use, the more you can avoid misunderstanding and the fewer open interpretive possibilities there are.

[00:12:01] But that is exactly what art doesn't want.

[00:12:04] That's what artists don't want.

[00:12:05] And that's what readers don't want.

[00:12:06] Readers do not wish to read a bunch of clichés.

[00:12:08] And writers don't wish to speak in a bunch of clichés.

[00:12:12] So, the pressures on artists to constantly push towards the reinvention of language, which means that the possibility of misunderstanding and the potentiality for communication being a success goes down.

[00:12:25] The more you push towards that new language, the more you risk being misunderstood.

[00:12:32] But you also, when you hit, you really hit.

[00:12:34] That's kind of what happens in fiction.

[00:12:37] So, I would argue that good writing means writing that endures, writing that ends up opening up possibilities of interpretation.

[00:12:46] So, we're talking about people like, say, Emily Dickinson.

[00:12:49] We're talking about Jane Austen.

[00:12:51] I mention them because these are not people who wrote in a generic cliché written language.

[00:12:57] They literally invented entire new genres and entire new ways of writing.

[00:13:03] Emily Dickinson is so unique that when you read four lines of Emily, you can identify her right away because she just uses language in a way that's not like anybody else.

[00:13:13] And thereby conveyed a world that only she could do so.

[00:13:16] She could see and then she could do so.

[00:13:18] Melville, same way.

[00:13:20] There's no one else in the 19th century who wrote like Melville.

[00:13:23] And that is why his fiction is so unique.

[00:13:27] The reason Jane Austen is so interesting, again, as an author is because today her stories read like clichés.

[00:13:34] That's only because she literally invented them.

[00:13:38] She is – she's inherently invented what we would now identify as the romance novel.

[00:13:43] And Sir Walter Scott famously described her as someone who invented a new kind of novel in which the characters are drawn from life.

[00:13:52] She – he doesn't mean that literally, but we know what he means.

[00:13:56] So I would argue that good writing basically has to achieve that, the sense of having invented an entirely new language to convey a thing that did not – could not be conveyed before.

[00:14:10] Ursula K. Le Guin has a really great way of explaining it.

[00:14:12] She says that artists are always interested in mythology, not mere symbols.

[00:14:20] Mythologies are alive, whereas symbols are sort of this dead kind of mythology.

[00:14:26] They're sort of like cheap versions of mythologies.

[00:14:30] You just map something, you know.

[00:14:32] It's the allegorical reading of fiction where you read a piece of fiction and you say, oh, this is a Christ figure and this is the devil.

[00:14:40] So the whole thing is just a very simple, cheap, one-to-one translation.

[00:14:44] That kind of thing is not interesting.

[00:14:46] Real interesting fiction opens up interpretive possibilities and becomes more like a dream.

[00:14:52] Everybody will go into it and come out with something different.

[00:14:55] And Le Guin says art is interesting precisely because we're trying to engage with something that cannot be easily communicated and pinned down in words.

[00:15:04] So artists who actually work in words are trying to say with words what cannot be said in words.

[00:15:11] I think that is the most beautiful definition for what art and fiction is really trying to do.

[00:15:16] We're trying to say with words what cannot be said in words.

[00:15:20] And so that requires us to invent new words, new ways of putting words together, new languages, as I mentioned, to say something that cannot yet be said.

[00:15:32] Okay.

[00:15:33] So that is slightly mind-blowing.

[00:15:35] And so the best fiction, I guess, because this is – it feels like a pretty high bar to meet that.

[00:15:40] The best fiction is doing that but for much more complicated ideas than a single tiny concept.

[00:15:47] Right.

[00:15:47] And again, like Le Guin says, right, she says that the highest has to be the standard in art.

[00:15:53] Her point is that, yes, of course, you know, when you're talking about what is good fiction, yes, it's true that 99% of what people write or publish in any given year is garbage.

[00:16:03] But you can't aim for garbage.

[00:16:05] You must aim at the highest.

[00:16:07] You may fall short of it.

[00:16:08] But that has to be where you aim.

[00:16:10] So I think that is the way I would define it.

[00:16:12] I would say that what is good in fiction is that invention of a new language to convey a new view of the universe, a new mythology of the universe, if you will.

[00:16:25] You may fall short of it, but you have to aim at it.

[00:16:28] Yeah.

[00:16:29] So I mean, there are about seven different paths I think we could take from here.

[00:16:33] I want to go down one briefly.

[00:16:35] So I think this is actually one of the values in having less commonly represented voices creating fiction now than 20 years ago, for instance.

[00:16:48] Right.

[00:16:48] So it might not be that writers of color or outside the gender boundary or whatever it happens to be are exposing a wider audience to realities that didn't exist before, but that the mainstream didn't have the concepts for.

[00:17:07] And so they are more or less successful based on getting people to understand that these things existed, these systems existed and these practices existed long before you read this novel or what it happens to be.

[00:17:22] Or I would put it slightly differently, which is I think we exist in a wonderful time where because we have such a large population and we have more freedoms than we ever did before, that the potential for questioning orthodoxy and for questioning what is perceived as the norm is more open than ever before.

[00:17:46] And we have more potential for everybody to invent the languages, to convey the new possibilities and realities that perhaps have always existed as part of the human condition, but which we just simply have not had the words in the cliches, if you will, to say that before.

[00:18:05] And that is what we do.

[00:18:06] And then, you know, again, to sort of use another example, Mary Shelley, who is one of my favorite examples of a writer who wrote something wonderful and who I would consider to be a great model.

[00:18:17] And the reason for that is because she understood more than I think a lot of her contemporaries how important mythologies are to the task of the fiction writer.

[00:18:30] Frankenstein is what I consider to be one of the best examples of a modern myth, right?

[00:18:35] The reason why Frankenstein is so wonderful is because it is a singular work that injected a new mythology into the modern age.

[00:18:44] When we now talk about technology, we're talking about AI, we're talking about social media, always we invoke Frankenstein's monster.

[00:18:54] Yep.

[00:18:54] The uncontrolled, unforeseen consequences.

[00:18:57] Yes.

[00:18:57] Yes.

[00:18:58] When we're talking about HIVT, we're talking about bioengineering, we're talking about stem cell research.

[00:19:04] We're always evoking the shade of Frankenstein's monster.

[00:19:10] So as a mythological figure, the monster is just as potent and evocative and important for us as Apollo or Dionysus or Zeus, whoever.

[00:19:22] It is part of our mythological imagination.

[00:19:25] That's what writers need to do, right?

[00:19:27] Anyway, Mary Shelley went into the collective unconscious and retrieved this figure of the monster out of that and said with words what could not be said in words.

[00:19:40] She invented this new term, this new concept, this entirely new way of thinking.

[00:19:46] I would say that as a writer, that is what we aspire to do.

[00:19:50] We writers aspire to be able to excavate that kind of mythology, to be able to add to our collective imagination in that sense.

[00:19:59] Okay.

[00:20:00] So then I think the natural follow-up is how do you do that?

[00:20:04] And how do you get better at doing that?

[00:20:07] Yes.

[00:20:07] What a great question.

[00:20:08] I don't think there's a huge amount of – so you can get mythological, you can get mystical, you can get all kinds of philosophical about this.

[00:20:16] But I tend to be very pragmatic and practical, so I will offer some practical approaches that can work for people to get good at this.

[00:20:24] So oftentimes people say, well, you're talking about something so mystical that how can people practice for it?

[00:20:29] That seems like you just – either you're born with it or you're not.

[00:20:32] And I disagree with that intensely.

[00:20:34] I think that this is one of those ideas where you – we should not take the approach that being creative, being worthwhile as an artist is something so beyond the possibility of practice that we shouldn't even bother trying.

[00:20:53] That's not true.

[00:20:54] It's something that we can practice for.

[00:20:56] And I would say there are a bunch of things you can do.

[00:20:58] One of them is what I call a practice rejection of cliché.

[00:21:04] What does that mean?

[00:21:05] That means you leverage your mental patterns, you leverage your patterns of thinking, and realize that the goal is to invent a new language.

[00:21:15] The goal is to invent new visions, to see more clearly a vision of the universe that no one else has seen, to really delve into the collective unconscious.

[00:21:25] So that means you reject clichés whenever you can.

[00:21:29] In practice, that means, for example, you're asked, you're invited to contribute to an anthology of short fiction.

[00:21:36] The theme is, say, wizards, right?

[00:21:40] So right away into your head come these visions of wizards and ideas and plots and setups.

[00:21:48] You have to learn to say no to all.

[00:21:54] Much of trying to be creative and being a good fiction writer is to recognize when clichés are choking you, and you have to say no.

[00:22:02] And so, you know, the easy thing would be to just give in and act like ChadGPT.

[00:22:06] And this is, by the way, is the reason why ChadGPT writes terrible fiction, because it is a machine that literally trades in clichés.

[00:22:14] You have to be better than the machine.

[00:22:16] You have to say the reason these images are coming to me is because other people have used them hundreds of thousands of times.

[00:22:23] I can't use them.

[00:22:24] I will reject them.

[00:22:25] The reason this plot is coming to me is because I've read it so many times.

[00:22:30] I'm going to say no.

[00:22:31] You keep on saying no to these ideas until new ideas come to you, and you still say no to them.

[00:22:37] You keep on saying no until these ideas stop coming at you so easily.

[00:22:43] Now you have to do the hard thinking of trying to make connections in your brain between things that have not been connected before.

[00:22:51] That's what the magic is, making connections between things that had previously not been connected.

[00:22:57] So when I was challenged to write a story about wizards, I rejected all these clichés.

[00:23:01] And I said, OK, what would I want for my wizard?

[00:23:06] Maybe it's a mother.

[00:23:09] Maybe it's a mother who does not speak the language of the society around her.

[00:23:13] Maybe it's a mother whose magic is about animating things that are not otherwise alive.

[00:23:21] Things of beauty, objects, animals made out of paper.

[00:23:25] Maybe that's something that I want to write about.

[00:23:29] I have not seen a wizard like that.

[00:23:31] That's an interesting wizard for me to think about.

[00:23:34] What is her story?

[00:23:35] So, you know, obviously for those who know my work, they'll know that this is the origin of the paper menagerie, which literally is written in response to a call for submission by an anthology of wizards.

[00:23:47] This is where I went.

[00:23:48] So my point is this is clearly something you can practice.

[00:23:53] Practice saying no.

[00:23:55] I'm hardly the first to make this point.

[00:23:58] Practice saying no to the easy ideas is one of the most important things you have to do as you improve as a nurse.

[00:24:04] So that's one thing.

[00:24:07] Other ways you can sort of practice and get good at it, which is to realize, again, how your brain works and to deliberately shape it and craft it and push it and exercise in directions that will help you.

[00:24:21] So, for example, if you're writing in a particular genre, then you have to push your brain to read and absorb information that's completely unrelated to what you're doing.

[00:24:33] If you're writing epic fantasy, then read a lot of math.

[00:24:36] Read a lot of electrical engineering.

[00:24:38] Read a lot of the latest developments in weather and climate patterns.

[00:24:43] Try to read outside of the narrow area of focus and try to read things that are completely unrelated.

[00:24:50] Try to read as far away from where you are to really offer your brain the ability to make connections between completely unrelated areas and to just sort of stimulate it in a direction that it otherwise wouldn't be in.

[00:25:05] That's how you come up with an interesting new idea is how you really get deep.

[00:25:09] And then, of course, a third way I would offer to practice and get better is to simply try to live your life as a human being more deeply.

[00:25:18] And that means to listen to more people, to do more random things, to learn more skills, to simply engage more deeply with the world.

[00:25:28] The more you do that, the more you allow yourself to live a more wholly embodied life, the better you are.

[00:25:36] So I'll offer you an anecdote to illustrate this.

[00:25:39] The novelist Curtis Sittenfeld was challenged to engage in a competition against ChatGPT over the summer.

[00:25:47] Now, she is well known as a great writer of what we now describe as beach books.

[00:25:54] She's a great writer of beach books.

[00:25:56] So basically, readers were invited to submit to the New York Times a bunch of prompts that describe their ideal beach reading book.

[00:26:07] And then Curtis's editor would feed one of these prompts or a combined prompt to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to write a story based on that prompt in the style of Curtis Sittenfeld.

[00:26:20] Curtis herself would also write a story based on the same prompt.

[00:26:24] The two stories we published in front of readers and readers would judge which one is better, which one is hers, or which one they like more, basically.

[00:26:33] And Curtis explained that her methodology was quite different from the machines, as you would expect.

[00:26:38] She said one of the things she did was she decided to go research the real world.

[00:26:43] She decided to go into the city.

[00:26:44] She would set the story in.

[00:26:45] She would listen to music.

[00:26:47] She would walk around.

[00:26:48] She would absorb the world as it really was into her so that she can then write the mythological version of it.

[00:26:57] And, you know, long story short, when the results were published, it was very easy for me to tell which one is by Curtis and which one is by the machine.

[00:27:05] Because the machine-ridden one is exactly what you would expect of a cliché-driven machine, even a machine that was told to try their best to not be a cliché-driven machine.

[00:27:18] Whereas Curtis's book had this sort of deep lived-in-ness, this sense of reality, this sense of rootedness in the experience of humans that you could sort of feel.

[00:27:31] And it's explained when she revealed that she wasn't just sort of waiting there for readers to submit their prompts.

[00:27:39] She was going out there into the world and living her life and trying to be a real agent in the universe so that she can then see that unique vision of the universe she could convey.

[00:27:51] So that's what I would say.

[00:27:52] I would say that instead of trying to grow more flowers and flowers and imbue yourself by creating more art, by absorbing more art, I think artists should engage deeper with life, with dirt, with the very earth of existence.

[00:28:08] That's a great way to get better.

[00:28:11] Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:28:12] I mean, the engagement with life is how you come to view the world in a unique way, right?

[00:28:21] I think I want to jump back to the practice saying no part.

[00:28:25] Is there a balance?

[00:28:27] By which I mean, if I reject every trope and cliché in my work, I will create something entirely novel that no one has ever seen before.

[00:28:36] And to make the weird connections, I seem to recall that when Outcast's Hey Ya first was released to the airwaves, no one liked it.

[00:28:43] Because it sounded completely unlike anything else on the radio.

[00:28:46] And it was only after repeated exposure to it, probably by people paying the stations to play it over and over again, did it become a beloved song.

[00:28:56] Is there a risk in saying no to everything?

[00:28:59] And then if there is, how do you decide which things to keep and which things to jettison?

[00:29:04] There's absolutely a risk to saying no to everything.

[00:29:07] You can, in fact, push yourself so far into the realm of novelty that you lose in the audience.

[00:29:15] I mean, that's what happened to me.

[00:29:17] The Paper Menagerie was not accepted by the anthology for which it was written because it was deemed to be too far outside of the vision of what a wizard could be to be accepted.

[00:29:28] So that's something that happens.

[00:29:30] Now, you have to sort of accept that as a risk of artistic experimentation.

[00:29:35] Sometimes it works out.

[00:29:37] I mean, in my case, the story wasn't accepted by the anthology, but it ended up being published by a great magazine and it ended up being loved by a lot of readers.

[00:29:46] Sometimes it may be too much.

[00:29:48] I've certainly had stories I've written that could not be published at all because editors just said, I can't respond to this.

[00:29:57] I don't know what it is you've done here.

[00:29:59] This is not really – I can't respond to it.

[00:30:02] I don't think our readers will respond to it.

[00:30:04] It just doesn't work.

[00:30:05] So that happens.

[00:30:06] So you have to learn with experience what kind of experiments work and what kind of experiments don't and how far you carry this just-say-no policy.

[00:30:16] I think you obviously want to push as far as you can before you push into the realm where you are no longer speaking and building on what's already there, but you stepped off the edge and now you're in the void and you're speaking to no one.

[00:30:33] So with experience, you learn where that little line is.

[00:30:38] And I would say that you want to get to that line and as far beyond as possible while still holding on to the edge because you've got to have people follow who still wish to be understood.

[00:30:50] Right.

[00:30:51] And some of that might be expectation setting where – so you wrote the paper of Nezri for an anthology on wizards and the people who are going to pick up an anthology on wizards are expecting certain things at least.

[00:31:04] And so you can't go as far, but you can submit to another venue with different – just a standard fantasy approach or whatever.

[00:31:11] And it's okay because it's still recognizably fantasy even if it's not recognizably wizardy.

[00:31:17] Yes, that's exactly right.

[00:31:18] That's exactly right.

[00:31:19] Yeah.

[00:31:19] Yeah.

[00:31:20] So then I guess an interesting question would be writing essentially on spec versus for a given venue or imprint or something.

[00:31:29] Right.

[00:31:30] So as working writers, we live in a society that supports the arts via the market.

[00:31:36] So that's a reality you have to recognize, which is to what extent are you practicing art for the purpose of engaging with an audience and to what extent you're practicing your art for the purpose of discovering a new vision of the universe.

[00:31:51] They're both valid goals, but you have to sort of understand which it is that you're doing.

[00:31:56] And I would say that readers don't always know what they want either.

[00:32:00] Sometimes readers want the comfort of something that is, in fact, very clichéd, but beautiful.

[00:32:06] I mean, I sometimes enjoy reading a Regency romance for the simple reason that it gives me some sense of Jane Austen, but isn't exactly that.

[00:32:16] And yet it's comforting because there's a bunch of things I know to expect.

[00:32:19] So you have to understand that there's – and there's also different standards of what is good in that.

[00:32:27] That a good Regency romance is not necessarily the same as a good experimental novel.

[00:32:33] They're both good, but for a greater confidence, like you said.

[00:32:36] So I think, again, this is one of those things that you gain with experience.

[00:32:41] You learn that there are some projects you enjoy doing precisely because it's comforting.

[00:32:46] And goodness in that sense is do you competently execute the tropes of the genre in a way that is comforting and yet still sufficiently new to not be boring?

[00:33:00] In other cases, you might want to engage in a project that is not like that at all, which you want to push as far as you can.

[00:33:06] And there's nothing wrong with either of them.

[00:33:08] You do both of them.

[00:33:09] You have to figure out what kind of artist you are and to what extent you wish to do one versus the other.

[00:33:14] Or maybe you want to do both, but in different proportions.

[00:33:19] Great.

[00:33:20] So let's jump back in time a little bit.

[00:33:23] You started writing in, I think, the early 2000s?

[00:33:27] That's right.

[00:33:28] What was your sense of good writing then?

[00:33:30] Was it this or has it changed over time?

[00:33:34] Changed over time, drastically.

[00:33:36] When I first started out writing, I really was thinking that the way you get better is to learn all the technical aspects.

[00:33:45] How do you haze a story?

[00:33:47] What is the structure of a story?

[00:33:48] And I'm not saying those things are not important.

[00:33:50] They are.

[00:33:51] But they are basically techniques you learn in the same way that as a musician, you have to start out by just practicing scales.

[00:33:59] As a painter, you have to start out by just drawing sketch, learn how to sketch, learn how to draw, learn how to do all the basic things.

[00:34:08] You got to do all of that.

[00:34:10] And initially, I thought that was all there is to writing.

[00:34:13] You learn all these tricks.

[00:34:15] You learn all these techniques.

[00:34:16] And you just do them.

[00:34:18] You just execute them well.

[00:34:20] So that was my early sense of what is good.

[00:34:23] But it wasn't until I've had some initial success and I started feeling a sense of dissatisfaction with my work that I started examining closer what I admired about writing and the writers who I admired, what they actually did.

[00:34:38] What was interesting, turns out that it's not merely the technical aspects, the craft aspects that I admired.

[00:34:44] It's not so much how well they pace and how well they can sketch a figure using a few details.

[00:34:52] Those sort of things are interesting and you can learn them.

[00:34:55] But that's not going to turn you into a Mary Shelley and that's not going to turn you into a Le Guin.

[00:35:00] It's not.

[00:35:01] You have to go take the next step.

[00:35:03] And that's where I had the revelation that the next step really is realizing that all these writers are memorable precisely because they literally invented their own languages to tell the stories.

[00:35:17] And after that, it was a matter of study of what does that mean?

[00:35:21] How do you do that?

[00:35:22] How do you actually see the universe in this interesting way and then convey it?

[00:35:29] In other words, it's sort of like you'll learn how to tell a story and those are the techniques.

[00:35:34] But do you even have good stories to tell?

[00:35:37] How do you even find a good story that's actually worth telling?

[00:35:41] And that part was much harder.

[00:35:43] That part is where I had to learn all these tricks I told you about.

[00:35:48] How to say no to the cliches.

[00:35:50] How do you empathize?

[00:35:51] How do you actually expand your experience, your inner eye to actually see the things that you need to see?

[00:35:58] Right.

[00:35:59] Gotcha.

[00:36:00] Okay.

[00:36:01] Thank you so much.

[00:36:02] This has been phenomenal.

[00:36:04] I really appreciate your time.

[00:36:06] Thank you.

[00:36:07] Yeah.

[00:36:10] That's it for this week on 10,000.

[00:36:11] Thanks to Ken Liu for his time and his thoughts.

[00:36:13] And thank you for listening.

[00:36:14] We'll be back soon with another conversation.