Charlie Jane Anders has a secret notebook full of background information, histories, linguistics, and might-have-beens about her book, The City in the Middle of the Night. And you will never see it.
You shouldn’t ever see it. Even if you are her biggest fan, even if she is one day enticed by ample money or sweet-talked into publishing it as bonus content, even if her heirs are tempted and desperate enough to do the same, these notes should never become part of your reading experience.
I know about this notebook because she and I engaged in one of my favorite forms of performance recently: a conversation between authors as peers staged to look and feel intimate, in a packed bookstore full of fans. This type of event is typically referred to as an “In Conversation With.” I was in conversation with Charlie Jane, and she was gracious enough to share some juicy facts about her process of writing The City in the Middle of the Night. In the course of that conversation, she mentioned these vast, unpublished parts to the story. I was unsurprised.
Part of my acceptance in that moment was that I know Charlie Jane and I respect her commitment to fervid and extensive research into her novels. The other part is more complicated, and something that most folks who aren’t writers might not know… Every book is the tip of an iceberg. Most of what an author knows, through research and through experience, is ballast to fiction. What is written and what is published are a tiny sliver of all that exists. Every writer you have ever read and loved is ninety percent unpublished underwater knowledge, and ten percent ghostly blue published prose.
The first part of that iceberg, the deepest and least-known layer, is made up of garbage. This includes failed drafts, other versions of the story where the point of view character was someone less compelling, or maybe the whole thing written in third person rather than first. It’s wads in the bottom of a digital trash can.
It’s also fan fiction, teenage poetry, old blog posts, and the roughly million words of crap most writers have to process out before they even start to get good. Some of it belongs to the book you end up reading, but a lot of it doesn’t. Many writers topping the bestseller list right now—including Seanan McGuire, Neil Gaiman, and Naomi Novik—honed their craft in writing fanfiction. There’s no shame in that, but it’s never part of the book that gets published. It’s essential, and the book would not exist without it. But it’s part of the vast, unseen body of work that keeps it afloat.
The middle layer is made up of experience. Most writers held a number of other jobs in their lives, and that work often informs the creative work. Most of us write stories that draw from what we know about the logistics of frying chicken and tater tots at the same time. We write crime fiction based on the years we spent in the dispatcher’s chair, listening to emergency calls. I myself worked in home improvement warehouses for the better part of a decade, and what I know about hinges and drywall and the shelf life of paint directly informed my work in all my novels so far.
Life experience outside of work also figures into the great bulk of this underwater section of the iceberg. Writers often hold in our disappointment, our rage. We keep these feelings as the earth keeps organic material and slowly converts it into something that will burn. We write about the despair we swallow when someone thinks they get to decide who gets to be people, as N.K. Jemisin does in the Broken Earth series. We hold on to the singular experience of heartbreak and explain it through time travel, as Sandra Newman does in The Heavens. We mull for years over the meaning of forgiveness in an abusive relationship and then we spin those years into galaxies of gold, as T.J. Berry does in Space Unicorn Blues.
The topmost underwater layer is the one the reader can almost see. It’s the one that writers talk about at events and in interviews, when someone asks about research and the process and where they might find that dread well from which writers draw ideas but refuse to draw a map. This is the one that Charlie Jane was willing to indicate, just pointing to what’s beneath the water and tell us it’s there. For her, it’s a notebook she carried for years, filled with details that she as the author must know, but will never find a place to belong in the book itself. For writers like her, it’s the foreign language we developed for a people to speak. It’s the maps drawn in grains of rice traced with a fingertip to shape the city, or drawn on butcher paper tacked up to the wall to serve as a vision board while the work is ongoing. It’s character details that open up a whole way of thinking about how a person will react to stress, like knowing they were burned as a child and that it made them fearful, or they can’t carry a tune but it’s kind of charming that they try. There is sometimes no scene in the book that needs this information, but the author’s got to know it anyway.
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For me, these submerged layers are the better part of worldbuilding. Cities in my books are a palimpsest of places I have lived, improved by the ways I wish they worked and tortured by the worst I’ve seen them do. I build them by reading history and newspapers and eavesdropping on the subway. I find one instance or one image that seems to encapsulate it all, and that’s the extent of what I tell the reader. People are quilts made up from scraps of folks I know, their mannerisms and their moments. Their speech patterns are taken from actors and poets and ideas I had about how a smuggler ought to speak, cut into new shapes and sewn together into a square. The saying that there’s nothing new under the sun was old when it was included in the Bible. All our art is made out of something else. Novels are no different.
Like Charlie Jane Anders, every writer has a vast, secret reserve of everything that went into a novel. Sometimes, it’s as simple and concrete as a notebook or a series of concordance files or a lot of notes in Scrivener. Most of the time, it’s a vast network of experiences, influences, and inspirations, some of which aren’t plainly and consciously known to us. Sometimes, this work can be shared for the benefit of completionists and obsessive fans. But I believe that Charlie Jane’s approach of keeping the water level high and keeping the notebook to herself is the correct impulse.
When readers get too deep below the surface, the waters get murky. Sometimes it can be instructive and fascinating, like The Silmarillion. Other times, though, we end up with the post-Potter revelations of J.K. Rowling. The part of the iceberg that’s below the water can tear the belly out of your ship and sink your ability to enjoy what’s published. Give it a little space and let it awe you on its own terms.
Every iceberg is a marvel. Every published book is a prodigious effort, and there is always more labor to it than the reader can or should see. Enjoy the marvel for what it is; delve deeply and sail around it on all sides, if you can. But know that what’s underwater is there for a reason. The most important and difficult part of that effort is deciding what to push above the surface and what should remain below. Charlie Jane Anders knows what belongs in The City in the Middle of the Night and what belongs in her notebook.
Trust her.
Trust me.
Trust the story.
Photo: Dake (CC BY-SA 2.5)
Meg Elison is a Bay Area author and essayist. Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award and was listed as a Tiptree Committee recommendation. Additional novels in The Road to Nowhere series include The Book of Etta and The Book of Flora, publishing April 23rd with 47North. She is the first college graduate in her family, after finishing her BA in English at UC Berkeley in 2014. She spoke at her graduation. She writes like she’s running out of time and lives in Oakland.
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I love your imagery of patchwork and how characters and places are stitched together from things you know and have experienced. Authors often speak of “craft,” and that’s what I think it is, the ability to patchwork things in an interesting and evocative design.
I could not agree more. The publishing of Tolkien’s “notebooks” were a mistake as (I feel) the same with George R.R. Martin and the Westeros backstory.
This is a fantastic article.
I am always fascinated by how writers work, but you are definitely right that knowing too much can undercut the magic.
The generalities of writing can be useful but knowing the specific pieces stitched together by an author is less so.
> The publishing of Tolkien’s “notebooks” were a mistake
What’s the mistake? What was lost, or who was hurt?
Those who don’t like unfinished notes don’t have to read them. Those who do have gotten great joy from them, and produced some awesome spinoff fanfics that also give joy.
This is why I haven’t read the Hustory of Middle-earth books (except for Lays of Beleriand, because the poetic Leithian is awesome). See the mechanics of how a fantasy world was designed and constructed makes it feel less real and cohesive.
I live for backstory and footnotes!
When a painting goes into a museum, we long to know how it got painted. How many behind-the-scenes documentaries exist detailing the process of filmmaking for your favorite movies? To be perfectly honest, if I’ve already read the book and marveled at it, I wish to see and know more about how it was made. Have you never yearned to peek into the bowels of a grandfather clock? As writers, we’re prone to smoke and mirrors–but every audience longs to know the magician’s secrets!
What about the case of Rothfuss publishing Auri’s story, Slow Regard of Silent Things, supposedly after much persuasion from his publisher. He wrote it for himself as background.
I personally couldn’t finish it. I love her character in the main story, but a little goes a long way. Some readers loved the novella, which otherwise would’ve stayed in a drawer.
I liked JKR’s post-Potter revelations on Pottermore. I liked learning McGonagall’s back story and stuff. I’m not that keen on The History of Middle-Earth (at least not the one volume I’ve read), but there are people who want to know how things are constructed, as @7 said.
I disagree completely. Done well, a background story provides deeper details that makes a story richer. I thoroughly enjoyed Clarke’s The Lost Worlds of 2001, published in 1972 which provide details as to how the story of 2001 (for both the movie script and book) was developed. And as one comment noted above, if you don’t want to know about the development of a given story don’t read it.
I’m unable to get into Sherwood Smith’s Sartorias-deles universe. Too much essential information lives in juveniles I find unreadable. Her adult stuff is fine. I love Stranger to Command. I’ll never reread Crown Duel. A protagonist who in incapable of changing her conclusions despite a mountain of evidence—I won’t spend time with her. Yes, that’s typical adolescent behavior. It doesn’t entertain me.
Much essential information is buried in books she wrote as a teenager. (What is the deal with Sator?) I will never learn them because I won’t read the juveniles that explain them. I tried a few. I don’t want to read another.
It’s too bad. Grownup Sherwood Smith writes great stuff.
Reading this article, I cannot help but assign a defensive tone to it. Makes me think perhaps you’ve had a few rabid fans be a little too demanding, and that makes me sad, because now you clearly have the attitude that it’s better to not share your background, making of, information. Personally, I agree with many of the comments here, in that if you don’t want to partake in the background info, you don’t have to. It’s 100% the reader’s choice, and by making that information available you allow all your readers to be happy. I love Harry Potter, but I don’t care one lick about anything Rowling has to say outside the series, and I’m capable of separating book-knowledge from Pottermore-knowledge, which this article seems to imply I can’t. For the same reasons that I don’t allow Orson Scott Card’s personal opinions and beliefs to negatively impact my enjoyment of Ender’s Game, I see no reasons as to why Rowling’s ridiculously stupid idea that wizards used to teleport their feces before toilets were invented should impact my enjoyment of Harry Potter.
This is not to say, of course, that you as an author owe your readers the background information. As the author, and I presume owner, of the IP, it should entirely be your own discretion as to whether or not the information goes public. However, if you’ve finished the work, whether it be a single novel or a series, and you have no intention of publishing more in that setting, then I have to ask: what harm does it do to you to share some of that shallow portion of the iceberg with your fans? Unless your background information is toxic or prejudiced, I really don’t see how you’re doing harm to anyone. If a fan cares enough to look into that information, chances are none of the information will ruin the original work for them. And if it does, that’s on them, not on you.
I guess all this to say that I don’t agree with your only argument for not sharing information from that shallow portion of the iceberg, and that you should have more faith in your readers’ ability to mentally separate knowledge based on the source (which truly isn’t difficult at all and I do not understand why you seem to think it is).
There’s a few different points to address here though surely and it’s important to be clear what type of additional text/information we’re discussing. There’s a huge difference between the following:
1) a book providing backstory to a world i.e. The World of the Wheel of Time;
2) a writer revealing their notes, or information on early drafts/iterations of the story; and
3) a writer tweeting additional details which purport to supplement their published work (particularly when using their work as a vehicle to argue points in contemporary political or social discourse).
Of the three things above, I have no problem at all with the first or even second. If an author has the detail to support it, I enjoy reading more about the world they have created, particularly when presented in a structured and deliberate manner. Similarly I find it interesting hearing about a writer’s process. Joe Abercrombie did a great review of his First Law trilogy where he gave a lot of insight on things which he felt worked and didn’t work, as well as early ideas and drafts. This can definitely go too far, and that’s more likely to be the case when notes are published by a writer’s estate, but is fine in moderation. The third is clearly infuriating, definitely undermines the published work and we would be better off without, but is fairly limited in occurrence.
Good article, and good message. I spend a lot of time with older fiction, and there is a lean economy to those tales that is lacking today.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a well-loved, well-respected novel.
Her first draft, Go Set a Watchman, is neither.
Watchman strikes me a layer of iceberg that should have stayed submerged.
>15, I was actually quite taken by Watchman, as a novel, despite its flaws. It was fascinating to read it as the starting point and inspiration for Mockingbird.
I don’t think there can be a hard and fast rule about this. In some cases I’m intrigued by the backstory and find it adds. In other cases, I discover it undercuts by emphasizing the author’s own interpretation of their work and gets in the way of my own interpretation. My takeaway doesn’t need to be what the author intended, and if my love for the work is based on my perception then yes, there could be a hole in the hull. “Oh, he actually meant that? That’s terrible.” It’s reader-beware territory; but I wouldn’t say never do it.
“… I see no reasons as to why Rowling’s ridiculously stupid idea that wizards used to teleport their feces before toilets were invented should impact my enjoyment of Harry Potter….”
Actually this concept was first used, as far as I am aware, in 1953 in ‘More Than Human’ by Theodore Sturgeon. In that book, the wizard (telekinetic girl) Janie removes the feces and urine right out of her friends’ rectums and bladders and dumps them outside, which is an even more elegant solution to the problem of elimination than the flush toilet.
The problem is that there is no reason why wizards should change to the muggle solution when they have a better magical one.
What is it about publishers- not so much authors BTW- that when their book took off, there had to be a prequel…or a sequel? We’ve seen it in the 22 movie arc of Marvel; supposedly the last one drops today.
Go Set a Watchman was written decades before To Kill a Mockingbird. I did read Watchman because I read/review over 200 books a year, and I didn’t like it at all. But, we need to read it without Mockingbird in our heads the whole time, because it wasn’t written at the time!
It’s the same for the Tolkien notebooks. And the Pottermore books. I’m 62 and a retired theologian who loves SciFi and fantasy. I read Narnia and Tolkien and Anne Macaffery long before anyone “needed” backstories to “understand” books. Has the tech crazy age we live in sucked all of our imaginations out of our heads? Can’t we just read, reflect and not parse every. single. word/thought/idea…spending hours taking authors to task for not seeing what we see?
@19 “We’ve seen it in the 22 movie arc of Marvel; supposedly the last one drops today.”
Comics have always been serial, with multiple prequels, re-dos, what ifs.. etc etc. If you are fatigued by Marvel now, just wait.. lol
The near-universal existence of such author’s notes is, for me, the final backstop against the more aggressive attempts at death-of-the-author or the reduction of a work to a mere ‘text’ to be examined in isolation. There are often connections and implications that are not explicit in the text or on the screen but nevertheless influenced what was released, and many of these can only be provided by the author. That doesn’t mean anyone must incorporate such things into his or her interpretation of a work, but even an assessment of an author’s ex-parte thoughts that ultimately leads one to reject them can help add depth and nuance.
A takeaway from this piece, though, should be that any attempt to release such background material must be carefully edited, perhaps even more so than the original work. A raw document dump is a disaster, distracting the audience with irrelevancies and stuff that is just plain bad. Unpublished material works best to provide some extra depth and insight when it is paired with information to explain why it was not included in the final published work, and the author’s thoughts on the matter should only be given weight when they can be clearly tied to ideas that were in mind at the time the work was being written.
American superheroes aren’t the only comics. Others don’t need constant reboots. Why are American comics and movies still dominating the world although they only produce sequels and reboots while other countries still produce new works?
@@@@@ 19, Andrea Stoeckel
Go Set a Watchman was written decades before To Kill a Mockingbird. I did read Watchmanbecause I read/review over 200 books a year, and I didn’t like it at all. But, we need to read it without Mockingbird in our heads the whole time, because it wasn’t written at the time!
My first draft of a writing project doesn’t resemble my second draft. The second draft isn’t just better. It’s a different document. First drafts explore. The next draft harvests and transforms.
I wouldn’t publish my first drafts. Harper Lee made the same decision.
Until the choice was stolen from her. Why? Greed. Nothing will get your character out of jail faster than the book/movie being a hit.
Lee never followed up on her big hit. Until they published her first draft. It was not her choice. It was not their right.