Behind the Book: Complications

If you have 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 is 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 had never been writing for, in a register I had 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 is not 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 is, I think, kind of a romance, which is another thing I had never written.

That is a different and riskier thing than writing a woman character inside my usual voice. It is one thing to put a woman in a scene and write her well from the outside. It is 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 is why the prose came out the way it did. It lives in the fast automatic inventory Vivienne takes of another woman in three seconds. In decision-making and observation instead of event. That texture is me writing deliberately in a voice that is not my own, one I had to research my way into.

What did the research involve?

Reading. I read other books by women, books written to be read by women, and I studied what they were doing that mine were not. The biggest thing I learned is that women often want a very different kind of literature than men do. This was not a small adjustment in subject matter. It 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 do not understand that, you will write a book that a woman puts down after ten pages because it is quietly built for someone else.

So the research was really a study of a different reader. What holds her attention. What she trusts. What she finds satisfying that I would have skipped, and what I would have leaned on that she would 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 carry the weight that a fleet or a bomb carries in my other books.

What made this the hardest kind of book to write?

Complications is a book I probably would not read if I had not written it. It is not something I would pull off a shelf or buy at Barnes and Noble. It would not catch my eye. And that was the challenge, and, I think, the point.

It is easy to write the book you would want to read, because your own taste is a reliable compass. You know when a scene is working because it is working on you. Writing well in a register you do not personally reach for, for a reader whose pleasures are not your pleasures, takes that compass away. My own instincts stopped being a dependable guide. I could not 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 could not navigate by feel, and check the work against what I had learned instead of against what I would enjoy.

That is 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 is not me.

Did it work?

I judged it the only way I could, by whether it held me, and it did. It is still not a book I would have bought. But reading it back, it landed. It was interesting, interesting enough that it left me thinking maybe I am missing something by not reading this kind of book. That is the version of success available to you in a register that is not your own. Not I loved it, but this is real, this works, and it has shown me something I had been walking past.

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 were not mine. It will not 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 the rest of your work?

On the surface it does not 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 are not 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 cannot fake my way past.

A galaxy will not tell me I got it wrong. A woman reader will. Writing for her, in her register, was the most exposed version of the thing I am always trying to do.

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