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Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show, don’t Tell Writing Podcast with me, Suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step by step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away.
As I host successful writers who share a behind the scenes look at their own writing lives, and as I live coach writers on their pages giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger. Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn on this show.
I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can’t wait to see how this information is going to transform your writing.
So you’ve got all first [00:01:00] person narratives in this and. What decisions did you make about your virtual world? So yes, it’s mostly about in Internality and you know, the thought process so that we can make it feel real, but you also have them each create their own world of virtual reality. So what decisions did you make about, you know, do they need to sleep?
Can they touch things? Do they need to eat in this virtual reality? ’cause these are old choices.
Robert S.: Yes.
Suzy Vadori: You would’ve made and made consistent. What did you decide? Yes,
Robert S.: and I chose. That the physical needs of the biological body we’re dispensed with in virtual reality, which means you don’t have to eat. You can simulate it if you want.
If your favorite thing to do is to have a wonderful five course meal from a gourmet chef, of course you can simulate that. But if you choose not to eat anything for what seems like years on end, you don’t waste away and die. There’s no. Biological need for it. And the same [00:02:00] thing for sleep. And again, you know, sex and so forth.
You can have all the virtual sex you want, but it is not an imperative that, you know biologically that you, it has to be done, I guess. So I made that, that choice and I could have gone the other way. Now I’m working on the outline now for downloaded three. Now, without spoilers, there are gonna be some people who were uploaded in downloaded three who don’t know.
They’ve been uploaded. And so in contriving to upload them without their knowledge, I have to make the point that unlike all the other uploads, this has been deliberately changed so that they will feel hunger and they will feel the need to sleep, and they will in fact, lose consciousness for what seems to be eight hours out of what seems to be every 24 hour day.
Because that if you want to hide from the fact that somebody isn’t. A real person anymore, you have to simulate the things that would make them think they are a real person. [00:03:00] Whereas all of my uploads know that they’re uploads. They know that they’re not physical anymore. They know that they can’t be hurt, which is another big psychologically thing.
There’s a scene in downloaded to where one of the characters is recreating a scene from Dirty Harry, where Dirty Harry, you know, has the Magnum. The 360 7 Magna most powerful handgun in the world could blow your head clean off and aims at another character. The other character is curious how the scene is gonna unfold, but knows that there’s no way that her head can be blown clean off by a virtual reality gun.
There’s nothing can happen there.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. Smart choices. Smart choices. And so. In the downloaded. So to go back in the downloaded one or the downloaded, because you didn’t know it was going to be a series. I
Robert S.: know. Yeah. But now even eyeball, it downloaded one.
Suzy Vadori: The uploaded one, we’ve got these characters and the prisoners don’t get to choose their world or create everything, but the astronauts actually get to create anything they want.
And then [00:04:00] in downloaded two, each of them gets to create anything they want. And so how do you, how did you decide, like how did you use that setting to show us more about their character? ’cause you did, you could have just put Disneyland on one, in a jungle, on another and like just been completely random.
How did you. Stop that from feeling random. And how did you tie it all in? Because everything needs to do work.
Robert S.: Yes it does.
Suzy Vadori: And how did you use that setting? ’cause it could be anything.
Robert S.: Yeah, so I just had a party at my house for my Patreon patrons. They come and they’re all astonished at how reflective of me my home is now.
The Zoom camera happens to be looking at me and I’ve been in my little alcove that’s very plain for Zoom meetings. There’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull right there next to a model of Taylor Spaceship from Planet of the Apes, next to a shuttle craft from Star Trek, the original series next to some hominid skull reproductions.
Everything in my home [00:05:00] reflects me, right? That does not
Suzy Vadori: surprise me the least,
Robert S.: but most. But you go into a lot of people’s homes and they aren’t particularly reflective. You’ve got some books, everybody, you know. Any writer who goes into somebody’s home looks to see what books they’ve got on their shelves, because that’s usually indicative of who the person is.
Well, you’ve got a vase full of flowers. Oh, that’s nice. You’ve got an IKEA chair. So do you know 800,000 people in Canada? So when you go into a virtual reality where it’s shaped by your mind, you get to do what I indulged myself in doing in my own home, which is have everything that’s in there. Be reflective of your personality with really no regard for anybody else.
’cause it’s your individual silo in the upload. So we open with a character who, uh, fancies himself, you know, uh, more of a superhero than he is in real life, doing superhero things. [00:06:00] And because he knows he’s in the privacy of his own silo, nobody will ever see it. He can indulge. His fantasies. Now as that happens, something happens and his privacy is breached and his superior officer shows up and thinks he’s a complete effing doofus for flying around like Superman.
But while he’s alone, it is his environment is what he would make his environment be if he comfortably was aware that he wasn’t going to be observed. And you know, uh, I think that is. What made it fun to write these things is that people were expressing their external lives as a reflection of their internal lives as they would do it if they had privacy.
And as you will know, although I don’t spend a lot of time displaying it in the downloaded, there are people arriving completely decadent existences. There’s some guy who started his own church and everybody is, [00:07:00] is, is worshiping him as a follower and so forth, things that might be your hidden. Fantasies that you could never externalize unless you thought you had absolute privacy, which is what the virtual reality upload silos afford.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, and they love that you’re mixing that up in the downloaded tree as well. Yeah. Will Neil, will they, will they believe that they have privacy or is that a spoiler?
Robert S.: So in the downloaded three, the group that is being uploaded is being uploaded communally. Okay. So they don’t have, they think that they just are exact as they were left behind.
And, uh, yeah, it will be very interesting for them. And if you read, you’re,
Suzy Vadori: you’re blowing everything up and I love that it’s so deliberate. Um, that’s why I wanted to have this conversation. Okay. One more quick technical question and then I wanna talk about your writing for a moment. Sure. Um, so, okay. This is the closest that I got to a spoiler so we can decide, but.
The chart line in the downloaded [00:08:00] two was interesting as well, because you had it, the mission was supposed to be six years, and then all of a sudden it drops to one day because, you know, there’s this, there’s this problem, I won’t spoil it. And they have to resolve it within one day, right? Yes. And so what did that do from, I mean, I know what a death does, but, but share with our listeners how collapsing that timeline created.
Pacing the tension. What was it that we’re going for there?
Robert S.: And this is, those are the two key words you just used. I’m pacing and tension a narrative. One of the words you’d like to get in a review of your books is Pulsive narrative. What does that mean? It means you’re propelled forward. You can’t stop reading.
And one of the classic things that I’m, I’m as guilty as any other writer. It works for somebody else. I’ll take it and use it for myself. The ticking clock. Has been in fiction forever. The fact that there is a deadline that is approaching and we get [00:09:00] reminded repeatedly of how much closer that deadline is, raises the tension because, you know, part of the, the basic definition of a story is there’s a characteristic problem that he, she or they tries to solve in a variety of ways, and eventually in the end, either succeed or fail.
But I’ve learned something worth knowing in the process that variety of ways becomes tedious. If E, it makes no difference. Hey, just keep trying until you get it right. Uh, it’s like Wordle. If Wordle had an infinite number of boxes, eventually you’ll come up with that five letter word no problem. But you only have five boxes or four, whatever it is.
So you only get X number of, I think it’s five x number of tries to find that word. And each time you use up one of your tries. Stakes are higher because you have fewer opportunities left to solve the problem before the deadline. The deadline is that last set of [00:10:00] boxes that you can put your letters in.
You haven’t made it by then, you lose or the peril of a story. Your character has died, your character has lost his love or character has, uh, the war has, uh, been won by the other side. So putting in a ticking clock. Into downloaded two. Compressing it. You only got a day and having the computer remind you periodically, well, you tried this, it didn’t work.
Guess what? You’ve now wasted a good hunk of that day. The stakes are now even higher because you’ve got fewer and fewer opportunities to solve this problem before everyone is dead. It works in downloaded too because it’s worked a thousand a hundred thousand times before for other writers in other media.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. And so listeners, if you have a story, this is what to look for. It’s to tell you that you’re, even if you put it in a ticking time clock, it could be too long. If you are showing me a day where people are waiting around waiting for this [00:11:00] clock to tick out and they’re killing time, collapse your timeline.
If you are showing me them waking up in the morning and you’re writing through all the way till the end of the day, your poor timeline is probably too long. So one day was really bold and I loved it. And
Robert S.: well, and a thank you for saying that. ’cause I played with different lengths. I had a a chart where I was timing it out.
I kept adjusting the time the computer was announcing where I wrote this scene. How long would that have taken to play out? Oh, that probably took 90 minutes. So I, I was constantly adjusting to get it, hopefully ratcheting up. And, you know, I say this is an ancient technique, Julius Caesar, right? The soothsayer says, uh, beware the odds of March.
Well, it’s not yet March 15th, the odds is the 15th. Not yet the 15th of March, but that’s the ticking clock right there at the beginning of Julius Caesar. As we get closer and closer to that date where we finally get on the odds of March, we know that the ticking clock is there, something is [00:12:00] going to happen, and that’s, you know, it’s, if it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for Robbie J.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, just choosing that short a timeframe made it more challenging, right? Yes. It’s like, it’s like when 24 came out, the series and they were doing each episode was in real time, one hour. 24 hours and 24 episodes and like they had to keep it and they had to like trim their hair so that they look the same when they filmed it.
Yes. Everything. Yes. And you know, but it, but it just added that much more complexity. ’cause you could’ve easily said two weeks or three weeks and I don’t think it would’ve been as or as possible.
Robert S.: Exactly. Yeah. The tighter you could make. The better. I mean there there’re, you know, great books like Dublin as a single day.
I think you can have whole novels that take place in a day, in an hour where it’s described in a sometimes excruciating detail. You’ve gotta find the balance between how micro, micro fine, what granularity with what you’re gonna describe moments going by [00:13:00] and the reader’s patience. But what you want is for the reader to always feel it’s exciting.
The clock is ticking and I gotta keep reading to find out how it turns out.
Suzy Vadori: Absolutely. Okay, so this is an Audible original, is that what it’s called?
Robert S.: Yes. So Audible originals commissioned both the downloaded and the downloaded to, we went back and forth in negotiations. They just wanted me to write something original for them, and I said, well, I will write something that you can have first, but I’m a novelist.
I’m going to keep the print, film, TV rights. And so stage playwrights, all of that. Later on, we agreed on a six month exclusivity for them. Later on, my print and ebook editions would come out and it’s worked very, very effectively for them and for me.
Suzy Vadori: So what’s it been like? It’s a totally different construct.
I know that you’ve, you know, over the years you’ve been evolving as the publishing industry. What’s it been like to do that audio first?
Robert S.: It has been [00:14:00] wonderful in a bunch of ways. First, in a creative way, it was. Fascinating challenge to know that my words would be first heard, not as I had directed them on the page, so to say, you know, he said with a growl on his voice or whatever.
But as an actor chose to interpret the words. And there’s an old phrase from, uh, the theater and it also applies to film and television where you wanna make the script actor proof. There is no way that the line can be misread by the actor unless they literally misread and say the wrong word, that the line is so well constructed that it can’t be botched.
Now, we had great actors, I know, real fear, that they were gonna botch the lines, but I did it with great precision, possibly more than I would’ve done in, uh, a prose narrative where, you know, you’re gonna hear it in your head differently than I hear it in my head. I can’t control that because there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people [00:15:00] hearing it different ways.
But I wanted to make sure that the actor really didn’t, you know, you want them to bring their interpretation and they’ll say, that’s acting. That’s their brilliance. But you want their interpretation to fall in line with your vision, and that requires great precision in choosing the words to not give them the latitude.
To basically botch the line. So that’s part one. But there was also, I knew once they’d agreed, even before I’d finished writing, downloaded one, that we were gonna get a major cast and ultimately an Academy Award winner, I realized that a huge number of people were gonna listen to the downloaded, had never heard of me, and a huge number, don’t habitually read science fiction or maybe never do at all, but they were Brendan Fraser fans because of the Mummy, because of Encino, man, because of the whale, because of.
Endless numbers of great performances by Brendan. So I had an opportunity that I don’t have in any of my, didn’t have in any of my previous books, which was for me [00:16:00] to introduce science fiction and what it can do to a whole vast panoply of readers who hadn’t been aware. Of what science fiction could do.
Their only conception of it was probably Star Wars, pew, pew spaceships and space battles and adventures for teenagers, and not anything that was character driven, that had a philosophical underpinning that had something to say about our society. And so I threw a lot of science fiction ideas into the downward, probably more than one would typically put in a book.
Cryonic Suspension, interstellar Travel, a virtual prison system, a post-apocalyptic world, robots fighting for their, uh, civil rights. Whole bunch of ideas because I wanted to take advantage of the soapbox that Audible was giving me to show all kinds of people, Hey, there’s way more to [00:17:00] this thing that you dismiss as just sci-fi than you thought there was.
And that was, uh, part of the delight. Part of the challenge of getting to do it in this very unusual format.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. I love, love, love that you took that opportunity, Robin, and you know what better writer to do it than you. And that’s been true of your full career as well, that it isn’t just, you know what people think of as air quotes, sci-fi, right?
You call yourself a futurist. What is that?
Robert S.: The interest me with a science fiction writer and a futurist is, um. Probably about an order of magnitude and how much you get paid. When you’re giving a speech, go and give a speech. As a science fictional writer, you’re lucky if you get, uh, you know, a couple of hundred dollars, right?
And you give a speech. As a futurist, you’re looking at thousands of dollars, or you’ve, you’ve been flown. First class a futurist. It’s not,
Suzy Vadori: it’s not just marketing. I mean, your novels and your ideas have predicted a lot of things.
Robert S.: That’s true. I do, you know? Yes, absolutely. And I’ve gotten to speak at [00:18:00] conferences alongside Stephen Hawking and Ray Kurzwell, just the most amazing people, uh, Neil Degrass, Kaisen, and so forth.
Because I am rigorous in my extrapolation. I don’t say I’m going to get it right. In fact, that’s not the job of science fiction to predict the future. Its job is to protect the smorgasbord of plausible futures so that we can see. What possible roots we could go down and choose. Hopefully that’s the social value of science fiction nudge just towards the one that’s going to be most beneficial for the most people in the great utilitarian sense.
So, um, yeah, you’re, you’re definitely, seriously, I am in many of my colleagues seriously trying to predict a plausible future. If this goes on, we will end up here in terms of climate. In terms of trans rights, in terms of redefinitions of marriage, in terms of the environment and how we will deal with [00:19:00] grapple with the things in terms of political structures.
This is a plausible extrapolation.
Suzy Vadori: Exactly. And to start a conversation. And so, yeah, I mean, much as you wanted to put science fiction on that. Soak box and, and let people see that it can be all the things. I just wanted to share that you are all those things already, right? And, and in your career you, you have a greater purpose than just to entertain.
Robert S.: Absolutely. I wanted to say one other thing about the Audible experience. These are short books. The downloaded and the downloaded to you are about 60,000 words long. A typical science fiction novel these days is a hundred to 125,000 words long and in epic fantasy get to 250,000 words. This bloat had nothing to do with artistic merit or with the rise of the word processors.
People sometimes say, oh, I just had, you know, a bigger canvas. I wanna tell a bigger story. It had to [00:20:00] do with when paperback books went over a dollar. They used to be 95 cents and people would buy 50 and 60,000 word novels. You look at Agatha Christie, you look at most science fiction novels from the fifties, sixties, and even beyond in the beginning of the seventies, they’re 50 and 60,000 words long.
Remember 40,000 words. What are the most famous science fiction novels ever? Novels in quotes because it doesn’t fit the literal definition anymore, is the time machine by HGL. It’s only 38,000 words. And like every other author who signs a contract with a big five New York publisher, they specify you will deliver X number of words.
You gotta deliver that even if the story doesn’t need that many words. And so we have so much. Modern fiction. You have your A plot and then you wind in a B and a C because you need them to reach the word count you’ve contracted for. And as we happen to be talking today, this happens to be [00:21:00] today, the 35th anniversary to the day of the official publication date of my first novel.
Well, that novel, which came out in 1990 was 60,000 words. And I’ve gone and done things like Oppenheimer Alternative and. Uh, quantum night, my, uh, novels that proceeded the downloaded, which were all over a hundred thousand words long. They probably would’ve been better books had they been shorter. They could have been tighter.
And I’m a huge believer, uh, despite what we said about, you know, you want the pages to add up, you want the pages and the words to add up impactfully so that everything that you put in the book has to be there. I’m a judge for the writers of the Future contest, writers of the future.com. Check it out, no entry fee, real money, prizes, et cetera.
And one of the things that I always say, what are you looking for? I’m looking for the shorter works because they tend to be tighter the longer we, we allow works up to about 18,000 words for the [00:22:00] short story contest. Quite a long, short story and uh, so many of them that come in near that top level. The top word count that we allow are flabby, but so many of the ones that are at six and seven 5,000 words are tightly wound stories, finely polished gems.
So one of the things that this let me get back to doing is telling the story I wanted to tell without having to elaborate. Beyond what I really wanted to elaborate, just to satisfy a contractually arbitrary word count that’s based on the calculus. A publisher and company says, well, nobody’s gonna spend what now, what it costs for a hardcover for a short book.
So we need to have fatter books to justify what we wanna charge the consumer. That calculus did not figure in audiobook production. It was very freeing for me.
Suzy Vadori: That is so cool, and congratulations on the 35th anniversary. Thank you. I did. Thank you. Do that. You chose [00:23:00] this date? We’re recording on December the first, 2025, and this will come out to our listeners at some point in the next couple of months.
But did you, I, I have to ask this because you chose this date on my calendar. Did you know that it was going to be your 35th anniversary?
Robert S.: No. It was a Facebook memory that reminded you today. What I did remember was that it was one of my high school girlfriend’s birthdays the day she’ll never forgive me for saying this.
It’s her 65th birthday today. So I sent her a, uh, a birthday notice. Always remembered. Her birthday is December 1st, but I did not remember that that was the official pub date. So Facebook for all of its evils and all the time it wastes did remind me, because I noted this, you know, on its, uh, 30th anniversary five years ago that oh yeah, wow.
It’s the date. Put a little note on Facebook. Maybe you saw a couple of copies of the book still in print. Golden Fleece Robert J. Sawyer, 35 years long.
Suzy Vadori: I loved it. I’ll put it on my TVR. I haven’t read that one.
Robert S.: There you on. Okay.
Suzy Vadori: Seeking [00:24:00] a word count. You have a very deliberate writing process as well, and I’ve had the opportunity to write alongside you at writing retreats and things.
I know how dedicated you are. Would you just share a little bit about how you get these books written because you’re very prolific, very inspiring. I know that you have a word count goal. I know that you have a very specific software that you use. Do you wanna just share that with our listeners, so Sure.
Robert S.: Well, the software I use is certainly idiosyncratic at this point. The only writers you’ve probably ever heard of, still using it. Me and you’ve heard of me ’cause you’re listening to those podcasts and George RR Martin, we write with word star for dos, which was the preeminent word processing program in the 1980s, and it was last updated in 1992.
But it is designed for writing by touch typist. You never have to take your fingers off the home typing row. And if you don’t think that if you’re a touch typist, it interrupts your thought process. You are wrong in Microsoft Word [00:25:00] to do something as quotidian. As back spacing over a character, you type the long letter, you have to take your right hand off the home typing row and re chop.
Hit the, um, the backspace key in word star. There’s not a single thing that you have to do that requires you to interrupt the flow of typing. It is completely transparent, going between editing and writing, creating and revising, and you’re never interrupting to use any function key or mouse or any dedicated cursor keys or anything like that.
You can, it supports all of them if you’re so inclined, but you don’t have to. And it keeps you focused, focused on getting the words forced out of your frontal lobes, down your arms, and out your fingertips onto the, uh, computer where that I,
Suzy Vadori: I’m a, I’m an operations person. How do you backspace then? Or you don’t?
Robert S.: Oh, uh, you, uh, hit the key to the left of A and H. Okay. H, which is the [00:26:00] control h. You move your control key in Word star, the control key becomes the key left to the letter A. And so control H is backspace control. G is delete control Y deletes the line. You do all kinds of things you can’t do at all in Word like mark a block of text and then not do anything with it.
In Word you mark a block of text could be pages and you type the letter e. All those pages are gone and all you’ve got now is the letter E, right? What a ridiculous paradigm for word processing. If I marked a block of text and I want to go in and put a letter E in, I put the letter E and it’s added to the block, which is intuitively what you intended to do, right?
It’s so anyways, so go to my website, sf writer.com, WordStar dot htm, and you can learn all about it and download it, because I put a huge archive up for those who to play with Word star, but. The more useful thing you want to talk about here is my word count paradigm. I decided many, many years ago when I started my [00:27:00] career, I read a great essay in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Handbook by Frederick Poll.
And he said, you’ve gotta have a daily regimen. And for him, way back in the day, it was one typewritten page a day, 250 words on a typewritten page and a standard format. And he would do one a day. That doesn’t seem like very much. But at the end of the year, he had 365 typewritten pages and back in the day when novels were 50, 60,000 words, but he had a whole novel written by the end of the year and that worked for him.
I realized very quickly, a, because I was working on a computer or Fred was working on a typewriter, which you know, enormously slows you down in terms of productivity, that I could do more. And I soon started doing a thousand words a day and I could do more than 1200, more than that 15. And then I started doing, got up to 2000.
I’ve maintained 2000 now for 30 of those 35 years, 2000 words. I found that it works very [00:28:00] well in two different ways. One 2000 words means I’ve got a definite goal. We’re talking about ticking clocks earlier. I’m as lazy as any other writer, and I’m as inclined to do anything else in my house other than write.
Just about every other writer is right. When my house gets cleaned by me, it’s because I’m avoiding writing. So I made this deal with myself once I reached my word count goal. And I don’t say that a beginner should start with 2000, but whatever your goal is, once I’ve reached that goal, it’s quitting time.
I can call it a day. I’ve done my work. If I get up at nine in the morning, my thous 2000 words in by 11 in the morning. The rest of my day is mine. Guilt free. I can do whatever I want. I’ve done my work. Flip side, if those 2000 words are slow and coming, and sometimes they are, if I start at nine in the morning and it’s still nine at night or two the next morning, [00:29:00] and I still haven’t got them, I keep going until I get them done.
But I’m incentivized to get them done quickly because then the rest of the day is mine. That works enormously well. The other thing that works enormously well about this is you stop when you reach your 2000 words. That’s not necessarily the end of a scene because one of the biggest problems writers have is, okay, what am I gonna write today?
What, where do I pick up in the narrative? If you stop, as we often say that a good way to start a story is in media rays in the middle of things. If you stop in media rays in the middle of things. Then you know exactly where to pick up in the morning. You’re in the middle of a scene. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay.
He’s hanging off the cliff and uh, you know, somebody is stomping on his fingers as he is trying to hold on. What happens next? Oh yeah, he, uh, pulls the rip cord ’cause he is got a parachute and falls backward. Right? You [00:30:00] pick up where you left off and that is enormously, uh, efficacious for getting productively working every single day.
And I say that the final thing is. Every single day because so many, writing a novel, writing anything, short story, play, whatever. You’re juggling so much characters, motivations, scenes, uh, metaphors, things you’re trying to say thematically, and it’s really hard to keep all of that going up in the air in your head.
And when the weekend comes, if you say, okay, I’m taking off a few days. You drop all those balls and two days later, or a week later, or a month later, whenever you come back to it, trying to get them all back, juggling in the air again, meaning all of them interacting in your cranium again, is a waste of time.
So I’m a huge believer that you write every day if you’re a writer.
Suzy Vadori: Absolutely. And so Rob, just to clarify that, because this is a hard concept for a lot of writers trying to figure [00:31:00] out their practices and trying to juggle lots of things. When you’re actively writing or actively drafting a novel, you do 2000 words a day, or you do that even if you are in the editing phase, or even if you’re right now in the planning field.
Right.
Robert S.: That’s an excellent, excellent question. The only part of writing a novel I find difficult is the first draft. I liken what I’m writing. A novel is kind of like being a sculptor, but a sculptor can go to their local hobby shop and buy a lump of clay and immediately get to work. A novelist has to make their own clay out of nothing.
And the first draft is that clay and the forcing into existence. You know, uh, God managed to make Adam out of clay, but he somehow he had the clay to begin with. I got nothing. I got nothing to start with or does, nor does anybody else forcing out that first draft. Is the only part of the process I need to incentivize myself with, uh, with the word count when I’m revising.
I love revising. I’m a huge, huge reviser. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 [00:32:00] complete top, top, bottom drafts of a novel is not atypical for me, but I enjoy that work. So I don’t need, and I will do some page, some days it’ll be revising just one scene or one page even. And other days you, yeah, I’ve gone through 30 or 40 pages of manuscript and.
You know, you’re reaching the end of the revision process, not because you’ve done X number of revisions, but because the changes you are making are merely changes. Gotta ask yourself after each day of revision, is it better than it was yesterday or merely different than it was yesterday? If it’s better, then come back the next day and see if you can even improve on it.
It’s, you’ve reached the point where now I’m just, you know. Going back and forth between equally good possibilities. It’s just different. It’s not better. You’re done.
Suzy Vadori: Awesome. Yeah. Okay. I just wanted to clarify because a lot of times newer writers get stuck on this. I have to do this every single day and try to do it [00:33:00] 300 or 65 days a year, and then when they fall off for a day or two because something weird happens, they feel like they fail.
Robert S.: Right, right. We’re talking
Suzy Vadori: about when we’re drafting.
Robert S.: Okay. When you’re drafting to keep all of that in your head, and I must say, uh, you know, for most writers, myself included, once you finish that first draft, it is often very useful to just let it sit for a little while, get a little perspective on it, come back and read it with fresh eyes.
So there’s nothing wrong with, you know, you finished your first draft and then take a week off, do something else. There’s always, if you’re a full-time writer, there’s always, as you know. Accounting and publicity and blah, blah, blah, this, that, and the other thing. That can occupy your time or just lie on the couch and read books.
Uh, you teach writing. I teach writing, but I always say to everybody, the best way to learn how to write is to read good books. Just absolutely in, in and out of your genre. You know, I read some romance, I [00:34:00] read, uh, horror, although I don’t, you know, fantasy now and again. Lots and lots of nonfiction in and out of your genre.
You’re constantly seeing how somebody else has tackled this incredibly arcane process of putting human thoughts down on a page with squiggly lines.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. Thank you so much for. Writing all these books for us to consume. Rob, wait. We’ve reached the quickfire portion of the podcast. So here’s the first question.
In the quickfire, how long did it take you to write your very first novel from the idea to polish?
Robert S.: 14 years.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. I love that answer. And how long did it take you to write the downloaded? Two,
Robert S.: five months.
Suzy Vadori: Okay. Amazing. What was your first big break when you like all of a sudden were like, oh my gosh, I’m a writer.
What was your first? I
Robert S.: was extraordinarily lucky. My first novel came out 35 years ago [00:35:00] today and tanked it. Uh, the orders in from bookstores had been horrible. Uh, it had an awful cover, the original district, and, uh, there were back in the day two, there wasn’t the Barnes and Noble yet. There were two competing mall bookstore chains in the States, b Dalton and Walden books, and one of them hadn’t ordered the book at all.
I was dead in the water. And in fact, just before Christmas in that 1990, my agent called and said, well, Merry Christmas Rob. Here’s the good news and here’s the bad news. The good news is there’s nowhere to go but up. And the bad news is, uh, your publisher has turned down your second novel. Even if every copy, they managed to ship.
Of golden fleece that’s still out there sells it, still won’t earn, its out, its advance it, it didn’t work. And then two months later, Orson Scott Card, who was the book reviewer for the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, still venerable, still one of the great markets in the science [00:36:00] fiction industry, uh, came out with his yearend summation for the best books of 1990 and he said the best science fiction novel of the year.
Was Golden Fleece by Robert J. Sawyer. I couldn’t believe it. It suddenly resurrected my career. My agent did an auction for my next books. Suddenly I was back in the game, but I literally would’ve had a career that lasted four weeks from December 1st when the book came out to December 24th when my agent called to say, you’re dead in the water, if it hadn’t been for that review Now.
Do you make your own luck? Yes, because earlier in 1990, a friend of mine said a writer who was being published by ACE Science Fiction, though paperback Imprint, now Penguin, uh, random House Science Fiction. He says, first novels, they’re not gonna do any advanced reading copies. And back in the day, these old, there only were print ones, no digital ones.
You should do up some advanced reading copies and send them to the key reviewers in the field. So I went [00:37:00] at my own expense and printed up advanced reading copies, and I sent them. To the major reviewers, FNSF Magazine, the Fantasy and Science Fiction Analog, Isaac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine, publishers Weekly Library Journal, and they all reviewed the thing and that never would’ve happened.
Great reviews from all of them. But the Orson Scott card one saved my career, and it was only because I had been proactive nine months earlier when a friend of mine had said to me. You know, you gotta look after your own career. Don’t count on the publisher to do jack squat to promote you if you’re a first time novelist.
And so that, that was my big break. So the real big break was my friend John Eti, S-T-I-T-H, still writing, fabulous writer, go get his books, tipped me off that I had to take my own career’s existence to be my responsibility.
Suzy Vadori: Amazing. I got chills when you were telling that story. I was like, what happened?
Yeah. Awesome. Okay. [00:38:00] You’ve shared so much advice already during this podcast, but my last question for you is what is your best advice for someone just starting out, what do you wish that you’d known when you started
Robert S.: this was I had, somebody gave me the right advice because I didn’t know it. When I started out.
My friend of mine said to me, Terrence M Green a great science fiction writer, green, no E at the end. World Fantasy Award finalist who mentored me when I was starting off. He said, Rob, you gotta stop worrying about what your mother’s gonna think if she reads this. Because I was pulling my punches in terms of language, in terms of sex, when it was appropriate for the plot in terms of being naked on the page, which is what you are as a writer.
You are revealing. Through your characters, all of whom with one degree or another are proxies for you. Your innermost fears, your innermost prejudices, your innermost desires, and he said you’re afraid of what your mother would think. You’re pulling your punches on the [00:39:00] page. You have to be absolutely honest and naked as a writer and comfortable standing there stark, naked, metaphorically on the page for the reader.
That’s the best piece of writing advice I ever got, and I got it fortunately. Only haha. About eight years after I’d started writing. I wish I’d had it on day one.
Suzy Vadori: That’s amazing. It actually made me uncomfortable to hear you talk about that and that’s good, right? It’s good to be in that uncomfortable space.
Yes. That you’re doing something right. Alright, Rob, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your time. Where can we find the downloaded to all your other books? Where can we find you? Let us know.
Robert S.: Both the downloaded and the downloaded two are audible originals, which means if you have an Audible account, they’re free.
You don’t even have to use an audible credit. They’re part of their program that, you know, just add ’em to your cart. Listen and enjoy the print versions and the ebook versions. The print versions are. Traditionally [00:40:00] published and any bookstore will either have them or can order them in for you. Downloaded two doesn’t come out on print until, uh, May 19th, 2026.
Downloaded one is found. All my other books are available as audiobooks from Audible, and all of my other books are available as eBooks. Just look for my name, Robert J. Sawyer in your favorite ebook vendor. I’m a huge believer in publishing your eBooks wide, not just Kindle, because you don’t want to encourage monopolies.
My website. Speaking of anniversaries, uh, this year was also the 30th anniversary of my website. I was the first science fiction writer in the world to have a website, the first Canadian author of any type to have a website, and so I got a great URL Check me out at, I’m a science fiction writer, so check me out@sfrader.com.
S as in science, F as in fiction, sf rader.com.
Suzy Vadori: Awesome and amazing. Thank you so much, Robert.
Robert S.: My pleasure, Susie.[00:41:00]
Suzy Vadori: Thanks for tuning into the show. Don’t Tell Writing podcast with me, Susie Vadori. It is my absolute honor to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing, or it’s the book that you’re planning to write. Please help me keep the podcast going by helping people find us. You could subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening.
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