Charlie Jane Anders Wants You to Know Daydreaming Is Important, Serious Work

In this interview, Ruth Joffre talks with Charlie Jane Anders about her craft book ‘Never Say You Can’t Survive,’ building writing communities, and queer joy.

For more than a decade, Charlie Jane Anders has been on the vanguard of the speculative fiction world. From her award-winning stories and books to her long-running event series, Writers with Drinks, to the podcast she cohosts with Annalee Newitz, Our Opinions Are Correct, Anders has been pushing the boundaries of the genre and creating community for writers. When I heard she was writing a craft book and would be publishing it online one chapter at a time, I was thrilled. I also didn’t realize how much I would need these lessons in survival via writing.

Never Say You Can’t Survive was published as an almost-weekly serial from May to November 2020—a fraught time at the beginning of the pandemic when we were all trying to stay alive, to hold on to hope, and to vote Donald Trump out of office. In such dark times, writing can seem both a little frivolous and extremely vital. Charlie Jane Anders’s craft book speaks directly to this anxiety writers face and tells us: What we do matters. Writing is a lifeline.

I was lucky enough to talk with Anders on Zoom and chat about craft books, queer joy, building writing community, and what she wishes she had known when she first started out.

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Ruth Joffre: Never Say You Can’t Survive was originally published on Tor.com as a serial, and I’m pretty sure it’s the only craft book that’s ever been published that way. What was it like writing the book as a serial in our apocalyptic world?

Charlie Jane Anders: I think the original reason for that was because I had been doing writing-advice essays on a regular basis back when I was one of the editors of io9.com (I tried to do them, like, once a month), and people were always asking me when I would do a book of them, and so I was looking for a vehicle to capture some of that same energy. One of the things that I realized is that the market for craft books is very crowded. Actually, there are a billion books about how to write science fiction, and there’s a billion books about how to write in general. I thought, maybe it would be better to post chapters of the book in real time and build interest and awareness of it as the book is going.

One of the things I’ve found as a writer is that when you’re writing mostly books, there’s this long lag time between you writing a book and anyone else getting to see it or talk about it. By the time a book comes out, you feel a little removed from it. It’s hard to get the immediacy you get from posting content in real time. And then there was the fact that, by the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, it was very obvious that 2020 was going to be a really challenging year and it would be a good time to be posting chapters of a book about how to survive rough times by being creative.

Before we started, I had a really strong outline, which was how I felt confident about my ability to do this almost every week. But, as I wrote, I found I was throwing out chunks of that outline and coming up with new things, because I was trying to think, “What do people need to hear? What have I not already covered?” Something really important that speaks to what people are going through right now.

I wanted it to be more of a dialogue. Sometimes it’s easy to be stuck in your own head and come up with a bunch of ideas and assertions, and it’s not until later when people read it and give you feedback that you realize you missed something obvious. There were comments on every one of those posts that were really helpful to me when it came time to revise the essays for the book. If you compare the version that was published on Tor.com with the final book, the book is, I’d say, much better, because it’s streamlined. I added a lot of extra material, like exercises and sidebars. It turned out to be a really good process for posting writing advice people could find immediately helpful in the moment but also for producing work partly in dialogue with others.

RJ: You write in chapter 3 about the teacher who changed your life, Ms. Pennington. You’ve since gone on to become a teacher yourself, leading workshops and giving craft talks. What does it mean to you now to be a creative writing teacher and to have your own craft book?

CJA: Ms. P was a really important figure in my life. She was so incredibly creative and engaged in helping me to overcome my problems and turning this part of me that other teachers saw as a drawback—the kind of daydreaming, off-in-my-own-head part of me—turning that into a positive and something we could use to further my education. Now, when I have a visiting teaching gig, the main thing I really want to do is to be a reassuring figure and make people feel like they can take risks and experiment and do writing that feels ambitious to them. I tell them that it’s going to be okay and they don’t have to let self-doubt keep them from trying really interesting stuff.

One of the things that I talk about a lot in Never Say You Can’t Survive is intent and figuring out what’s really going on in the story you’re telling and what it means to you. And I feel like that’s the thing I always try to do as a teacher: to help people connect with their work and ask, what are you actually writing about here? What’s driving you to write the story? How could you get closer to those things you’re trying to deal with through fiction? Sometimes, that just comes from close reading of people’s stuff and saying, “Well, I keep seeing this motif coming up in your work, and maybe there’s something going on there that you might want to think about.”

I think being a nurturing figure is the way I’m paying forward what Ms. Pennington was for me, because she was definitely very nurturing and encouraging. Lately, one of the things I do when I sign books and can’t think of what else to write in someone’s book, I will write, “Daydreaming is important, serious work,” which is an important thing for people to hear. Like, people think that daydreaming is a distraction from work or it’s like slacking off, but actually daydreaming is very important, serious work. I kind of want to get that tattooed on my face.

RJ: You talk about community in several places in the book. Can you talk about the importance of community and how it has helped you both as a writer and as a person?

CJA: Community is super important to me, and it’s only getting more important as time goes by. The more it feels like the things we care about are under threat, the more I feel like we have to have community. I was at an event recently and a trans person got up during the Q and A and asked, “How do we get the mainstream, the outside world, to accept us?” And what I think we do is we build the best, strongest community we can for ourselves, and then build alliances and ties with other communities of people who are struggling and who are marginalized and under threat, and eventually there’s enough of us building alliances and working together that we can become the mainstream and they can try to fit in with us.

With writing in particular, it really is true that creating can be this solitary, isolating activity, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be something where you’re apart from everyone, sitting in a garret or whatever. I think writing can be a shared thing. And that’s always my biggest piece of advice to people: find a community of writers and become part of it. Find people who are like-minded or who are writing about stuff that you’re writing about or who share some of your interests or marginalizations and work with them, have writing dates, have critique groups, cheer each other on. I think that’s really important.

Community is super important to me, and it’s only getting more important as time goes by.

One of the things that happens in general with writing is that genres get defined by who’s viewed as being at the center of that genre. Like, speculative fiction for a long time was the province of a certain type of nerd, and I do think a lot of genres are (at least partly) signifiers of communities. I’ve tried to bridge the gaps between these different communities represented by different genres and get people to realize we’re all doing the same kind of work and dealing with the same kinds of concerns. Maybe some of us wear turtlenecks and some of us wear Wildfang overalls, but we’re all dealing with a lot of the same questions.

RJ: In chapter 16, you write about the importance of having fun, and throughout the book you talk about cozy, comforting, and affirming stories. Can you talk a bit about the importance of joy as a topic and queer joy in particular?

CJA: Making space for joy—and especially queer joy—is really important to me because it’s actually very easy to just leave it out or focus on more serious topics or default to “everything is terrible and we’re doomed.” People sometimes portray that as a kind of realism, like terrible things happen and that’s realism, but, if something nice happens, that’s unrealistic, which is clearly not true. If you look at the real world, it contains a lot of horribleness and brutality, but it also contains a lot of generosity and people taking care of each other and being there for each other.

Sometimes, I feel like I talk about joy in a very utilitarian way in the sense that if a character doesn’t ever experience joy or if the characters don’t ever enjoy each other’s company, then it’s harder for me to care about those characters. It’s harder for me to feel invested in them. Certain TV shows really over-relied on the idea that somebody finally finding true love and then getting hit by a bus the next day is sadder than somebody just getting hit by a bus when they have been miserable for years. “But they had just found true love!” That can be used very manipulatively, but the point is that you are more invested in and care more about characters who are actually having good things happen to them or are finding pleasure and enjoyment in life. I get bored with characters who don’t seem to ever like being around each other. There’s definitely a value in that, but it also becomes kind of exhausting after a while.

That’s the kind of utilitarian way of talking about joy. Another way to think about joy is just that it’s an important part of life and of human connection, and human connection is obviously super important to me. I talk about that a lot in the book. Joy is one way we experience the good part of being connected to each other and how we find each other. It’s just part of being human. I forget what writer said, “I don’t trust any writing that doesn’t contain joy.” Whoever said that, I really love it. If your writing has no moments of joy, then it feels like there’s something disingenuous or unreal going on there.

Part of what I get out of stories, as a reader and as a writer, is feeling nourished. There’s a reason why a lot of the best stories contain settings and milieu you want to spend time in. Like, I want to go live in this fictional place or hang out in this fictional tea shop or this fictional bookstore or with this amazing chosen family or whatever. There’s something wonderful about stories that nourish us by showing us a world of kindness or a world of people comforting each other. When we talk about things being cozy, that sounds kind of negative or disdainful, like it’s not hardcore or whatever, but I feel like coziness is an aesthetic that can be very nourishing and can actually allow you to talk about really serious things. Malka Older is writing a series of cozy mysteries, and it’s so good. I don’t want to give away anything, but they deal with really serious issues, and they do it through this sort of Dorothy Sayers framework of dark academia and a little bit of cozy mystery. The British used to have this thing called cozy catastrophe, which were postapocalyptic stories where, instead of it turning into The Walking Dead or Mad Max, it turned into people just like hunkering down and making cups of tea for each other, which the British love.

Joy is one way we experience the good part of being connected to each other and how we find each other.

RJ: In chapter 2, you reveal how you define success, which is 1) that you get to work with people you like and admire, on projects that you are excited about, and 2) that you get to keep writing and having people read your stuff.

CJA: When I started out writing, I actively hated the idea of having a career. Like, I hated the word career. It’s one of those words that sort of implies professionalization and that you pick a lane and decide, “I’m gonna be the next Stephen King or whatever, and that’s my goal. I’m gonna do everything in that mode.” I was thinking about this earlier because now I think of myself as having a career just because I’m on the treadmill of publishing. But I’m glad that I had this other attitude when I was starting out. And I had a day job for a very long time, which I didn’t think of as a career. I thought of it as a job that was paying the bills.

I just thought, “I don’t wanna have a career. I wanna have a situation where if something seems like a fun project with cool people, I’m gonna do that, even if it doesn’t make sense as the next logical thing from the last thing I did.” If you look at a lot of my writing career, especially the first decade and a half, there’s a lot of jumping around. That is a piece of advice I often give to new writers: Know that, when you reach a certain point in your career, people will start putting you in a box and saying, “Okay, you wrote this novel that was a fantasy detective novel about a dragon detective. Now all your books have to at least have something in common with that book because that book was successful,” and people want more of that from you, and if you write something that’s very different from that, people will be mad. I think writers should put that off and experiment for as long as possible, until they find something they enjoy doing and maybe stick to that for a while. You will get pigeonholed at a certain point, so while you have freedom to experiment, you should take advantage of it.

In terms of success, it’s very easy to move goalposts. I’m really grateful that I wrote down some goalposts so that later I couldn’t move them. I’ve had moments before where I basically said, “If I get a chocolate chip cookie, I’m gonna consider this really successful,” where the cookie is, like, being published somewhere or winning a prize. And then I got the cookie, and I was like, “But I didn’t get a chocolate chip cookie and a cup of hot chocolate, so clearly this was a failure.” And then I looked back at where I said, before the project happened, “If I get a chocolate chip cookie, I’ll be happy with how this turns out.” It’s really important to set reasonable expectations and then remind yourself of them later because, whatever happens, the world will make you aware that you could always be doing better. You could always be having more.

What’s unfortunate about the creative life is that it inherently contains a lot of insecurity and a lot of vulnerability. We always put pressure on ourselves to achieve a certain level of success, and I just think that even though vulnerability and insecurity are inescapable, you can mitigate them by setting realistic expectations and thinking of writing in terms of finding satisfaction. People often run into a problem where the insecurity and anxiety of being an artist collides with the business side of making a product and trying to sell that product as successfully as possible. It’s very easy for those two things to combine in a way where you start to obsess while you’re doing it and suck all the joy out of writing. Like thinking, “This thing that I’m just noodling on is eventually gonna be a product and I’m gonna want to sell X number of units of it, so if I include this one scene, am I tanking the sales? Do I need more of X, Y, or Z, because that might help the sales?” It just gets demoralizing after a while if you let yourself think like that. I have had times like that, including recently, where I have to squelch that sales mentality and think, “What are other ways I could see this as something that is worthwhile (regardless of exactly how many widgets I sell)?” It’s tough. Especially once you are in the kind of situation where you have a publishing company depending on you to do your part or earn your keep or whatever. I’m glad, in retrospect, that I didn’t think of myself as having a career for a very long time and gave myself that space to play around.

RJ: You mentioned working a nine-to-five for a long time. Do you have any advice for writers who are trying to balance a day job with writing?

CJA: For a long time, I had a nine-to-five job where I got to work from home, which was great, but I did have some day jobs where it was so exhausting and so draining, so stressful and taxing on my mental faculties, that I couldn’t write at the end of the day. It felt like, “I just have nothing left. I’m just going to collapse and watch TV.” And I learned the hard way that I need to find day jobs that aren’t boring and terrible but also don’t feel like everything’s on fire every day and I’m stressing and burning myself out on the job. Obviously, capitalism is a beast, but I think there are day jobs out there where you can have a fulfilling job that doesn’t, you know, suck your soul out. If you can find that, that’s really good.

Also, a thing that took me a long time to learn is that there are definitely periods when the main hurdle I had to get over was just motivating myself to write or finding a situation where writing just felt natural, where I didn’t have to kind of psych myself up to do it for a long time. Part of it is just creating a sense of habit, especially if you have a day job where you have rigid hours and you’re always at your job X hours a day. You have to think to yourself, “When I get off my job, I go here and I do writing for an hour or two, and then I go home.” Or whatever your ritual around writing is. I think having a ritual really helps.

And like I said before: Daydreaming is important work. I used to get very easily discouraged or put off if the writing just wasn’t flowing, if I wasn’t just sitting down and immediately banging out lots and lots of words, and I learned over time that sometimes you just stare into space for an hour, and that’s actually part of the process. Eventually, something bobs up to the surface that is actually interesting or your subconscious dug up and you do have to tread water a bit to get there. It took me a long time to understand that part of the process and that I shouldn’t just think, “Well, I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes. Nothing’s happening. I’m just gonna go play a video game now.” Now, I don’t beat myself up for just sitting and zoning out.

RJ: What one piece of advice do you most wish you had when you were first starting out in the industry?

CJA: One thing I always try to tell newer writers is that it might take longer than you expect to get published. But also, especially nowadays, the goal of writing stories or doing creative work is not necessarily to be published and get on the bestseller list but to find an audience or readership. You could post your stuff on Wattpad or AO3 and, if you get lucky, find a much bigger audience than you would with a traditional publisher. There are a million different ways to connect with people through your work. If you start to think of the publishing industry as just one incredibly powerful and valuable way to achieve that goal of finding an audience and connecting with your readers, then you could actually have a healthier relationship with publishing.

What’s unfortunate about the creative life is that it inherently contains a lot of insecurity and a lot of vulnerability.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need publishing. The publishing industry has a lot of issues, for sure, but there are also a lot of amazing people working in publishing today who go above and beyond to make stuff happen and care so passionately about these stories. If you think of the publishing industry as one of many means to connect with an audience, it’ll make you better at promoting your stuff if and when you do get published by a traditional publisher. A lot of aspiring authors don’t realize that having a book published is the beginning, not the end, of the process. There’s a lot of work to make people aware of your book, because it’s going to come out on the same day as, like, a hundred other books. Most books are not going to get that much attention. Most of them are going to get lost in the shuffle. If you’re already thinking of yourself as someone who’s trying to connect with audiences in various ways, you’ll be better suited to making your book successful if it does come out with a major publisher.

Also: You should learn how to talk to a publicist. Publicists are awesome. They work so hard and are so dedicated. I think it’s good to form a really good relationship with your publicists and the marketing people and everyone at your publisher, who are all working their butts off to make this thing you wrote successful. If they’re successful, if they do their jobs, you’re going to get most of the glory.

RJ: Spiritually, your book reminded me a lot of Kate Bornstein’s Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws. Were you thinking of that book at all as you wrote?

CJA: Thank you for saying that! Holy shit, yes. You’re the first person to say that. Oh my god. That book meant so much to me. It’s a book I completely devoured. It’s my favorite thing Kate’s ever done. I actually wanted to write an essay for my newsletter about this notion of self-help books that are queering self-help but also opening up self-help to have more jagged edges. That book had a huge impact on me, and I’m 100 percent sure I was thinking about it while I was working on Never Say You Can’t Survive. It’s such an incredible book. I’ve recommended it to so many people. Once, when I was visiting a bookstore in Montreal, they asked, “Can you do some shelf talkers?” And I was like, “This book! Hello, Cruel World. I’m gonna write, like, a fucking essay about it on this little card!”

RJ: One last question: What other trans writers should we be reading right now?

CJA: Oh my gosh. I mean, this is an amazing time for trans writers. There’s so much great stuff being published right now, and I feel really privileged that I’ve gotten to actually blurb or be one of the first readers of a bunch of these books. That feels like I must be doing something right if that’s happening. I love Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars. Nino Cipri is amazing.

I just read a book that’s going to be out in October called The Story of the Hundred Promises by Neil Cochrane. It’s a trans fairytale full of trans, agender, nonbinary, and asexual characters. It’s incredibly sweet but also has a lot of darkness in it. It’s so well done. Just so beautiful.

There are a lot of amazing trans YA authors out there right now; Aiden Thomas and H. E. Edgmon come to mind. Cory McCarthy and A. R. Capetta, who collaborated on the Once & Future series. Cory has a new book out called Man o’ War that I’m really excited about. It’s such a wonderful time to be a trans person reading and writing because there’s so much great stuff coming out.