Behind the Book: Complications

If you’ve read any of my other books, you know the shelf they sit on. Military conflict. Hard science fiction. Thrillers with bombs and fleets and the end of the world. Whatever their differences, they are, broadly, men’s books. That’s the register I reach for by instinct, and for a long time it was the only register I wrote in.

Complications was a deliberate turn in the opposite direction. I wanted to soften. I wanted to write a book that women would enjoy, a book aimed at a reader I’d never been writing for, in a tone I’d never worked in. No apocalypse to fall back on. No technology to carry a scene. Just people in rooms, and what happens between them.

How do you write a book for a reader who isn’t you?

You stop writing as yourself. What I did was take on the persona of a woman writer. I wrote the book as if I were a woman, and I did a lot of research into what that meant. How a woman writer sees these rooms. How she renders these interior calculations. How she builds these relationships and lets them breathe. The main characters are mostly women. Vivienne Holloway is at the center, and her mother, Christine, is the force that shaped her. It’s, I think, kind of a romance, and I’d never written one of those either.

That’s a different and riskier thing than writing a woman character inside my usual voice. It’s one thing to put a woman in a scene and write her well from the outside. It’s another to shift the whole authorial sensibility, to try to write from a woman’s way of seeing instead of about women from a distance.

That’s why the prose came out the way it did. It’s in the fast automatic inventory Vivienne takes of another woman in three seconds. In decision-making and observation instead of event. That style is me writing deliberately in a voice that isn’t my own, one I had to research my way into.

What research went into Complications?

Reading. I read other books by women, books written to be read by women, and I studied what they were doing that mine weren’t. The biggest thing I learned is that women often want a very different kind of literature than men do. This was a different set of instincts about what fiction is for. What a scene should carry. What a reader wants to linger on. What counts as something happening.

The pleasures are different, and if you don’t understand that, you’ll write a book that a woman puts down after ten pages because it’s built for someone else.

I think a lot of men who write women get this wrong and never find out, because nobody tells them. They write a man’s appetites into a woman’s body and call it a character, and the women who pick up the book put it back. I didn’t want to be that writer.

So the research was really a study of a different reader.

What holds her attention. What she trusts. What she finds satisfying that I’d have skipped, and what I’d have leaned on that she’d find hollow. I had to learn to build a scene around a look across a conference room, a key in a hallway, the thing a character chooses not to say, and to trust that those things matter as much as a fleet or a bomb does in my other books.

What makes a book hard for its own author to read?

Complications is a book I probably wouldn’t read if I hadn’t written it. It isn’t something I’d pull off a shelf or buy at Barnes and Noble. It wouldn’t catch my eye. And that was the challenge, and, I think, the point.

It’s easy to write the book you’d want to read, because your own taste is a reliable compass. You know when a scene is working because it’s working on you. Writing well in a tone you don’t personally reach for, for a reader whose pleasures aren’t your pleasures, takes that compass away.

My own instincts stopped being a dependable guide. I couldn’t feel my way to the right choice, because the right choice was often the one my own taste would have argued against.

I had to write toward a target I couldn’t find by feel, and check the work against what I’d learned instead of against what I’d enjoy. That’s an unusual discipline, and not a comfortable one. Most writers, most of the time, write toward their own taste. I set out to write away from mine, on purpose, to reach someone who isn’t me.

I think every novelist should try it at least once. Writing only toward your own taste is comfortable, and a writer who never leaves that comfort ends up producing the same book over and over with different covers.

How do you judge a novel outside your usual genre?

I judged it the only way I could, by whether it held me, and it did. It’s still not a book I’d have bought. But reading it back, it landed. It was interesting enough that it left me thinking maybe I’m missing something by not reading this kind of book. That’s the version of success available to you in a tone that isn’t your own. It’s real, it works, and it’s shown me something I had been walking past, even if love is too strong a word for it.

And the exercise gave me more than the book. Writing as a woman, studying what women’s fiction values, building the story around women’s minds, opened a viewpoint into how a different reader thinks and what a different kind of literature is doing.

It was an interesting exercise, a way of learning to see through eyes that weren’t mine. It won’t be the last time I do it, either.

There are a couple of other books where I set myself the same kind of problem, deliberately writing outside my own taste and into someone else’s.

How does Complications fit with Richard Lowe’s other books?

On the surface it doesn’t fit at all. It has no spaceships, no bombs, no immortal admirals. Next to a galaxy that murders its sister or a nuclear war that spans the planet, a quiet drama about law interns looks like a different writer entirely.

But it comes from the same instinct that runs through everything I write. I keep reaching for minds and sensibilities that aren’t my own default. A cat narrates Buttercup. A galaxy thinks across seventeen million years in Collision with Andromeda. An artificial mind shares a woman’s head in Peacekeeper. Complications points that same instinct at the hardest target of all, not an invented consciousness I can build however I like, but a real readership with real, informed expectations I can’t fake my way past.

A galaxy won’t tell me I got it wrong. A woman reader will. Writing for her, in her tone, was the most exposed version of the thing I’m always trying to do.

Frequently Asked Questions