Write the Book You Want to Read: A Conversation with Ann Leckie

Congratulations on finally being a Hugo loser.
Thank you! It feels great. It feels wonderful.
After last year, winning all of those awards, did you just come into this year thinking, “okay, I’ve already gotten all of mine?”
I did. Actually, I was surprised. Ancillary Sword picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me. I thought, “I got all the awards last year, and this year, everybody’s going to say, ‘she got hers.'” And that’s such an understandable thing to say, because I totally did get mine. I figured I would go to the Hugos and I would hang with my friends and I would go to the cocktail party and it would be awesome.
I’m really happy for Cixin Lu and Ken Lu, but at the same time, I know that if Ken is still here, he’s going to walk through the convention center all day and not be able to get two feet without people stopping him to congratulate him. And I can just walk. It’ll be awesome.
Before we talk about the trilogy and the new book, I’d like to jump back in time. I’m curious how you got your start as a writer, and if you remember the first story you wrote.
I don’t. I’m one of those people who always wanted to be a writer, so I have a fair amount of juvenilia, though fortunately, I was too old for my juvenilia to be on the internet. I don’t know what the first thing I wrote [was], but I often said oh, wouldn’t it be awesome to be a writer? Then I hit college and didn’t have the emotional or intellectual energy for anything but classes, and I thought, oh, I guess I’m not really a writer, and none of my ideas are any good.
A couple years after college, I actually decided I was going to try and write something, but I didn’t know a lot about the science fiction magazine field. But I did know that the drugstores were full of issues of True Confessions, and I knew what they paid. I bought, like, a dozen. They’re out of business now, but at the time there was True Love and True Stories and True Romance and True Confessions. I took an armful of them home and I read them until my eyes bled and then I just kind of splurted out something and sent it off. And they bought it.
But it doesn’t count, because True Confessions did not give you a byline, because their shtick was that these were true, really honestly true stories, and I had to sign a thing saying it was, and just the names were changed to protect the innocent. And I had totally made the whole story up, and I totally signed it, and I totally cashed that check.
You and everyone else, I’m sure.
Exactly. Yeah, there’s no way most of those stories were actually true—or else a lot of people are leading very clichéd and melodramatic lives. But the process of writing that story had been really unpleasant, because really, I didn’t like reading those stories and it wasn’t the kind of story I wanted to write. In some ways, it was an important lesson to me: that it was not worth going through the trouble of writing stuff that I personally didn’t like.
It was a long time before I tried again. I had my kids. And my kids are adorable, right, and when they were babies, they were the most adorable babies in the world, but when you’re in the house all by yourself with a toddler and an infant, it is not very intellectually stimulating. I decided I had to do something, and that was when I ran across NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and I said, oh, that would be something.
This was 2002. I had already been building up the universe that ended up being in the trilogy. I said well, I’ll write something with those little pieces of stuff that I’ve been putting together. And the result I didn’t think was too bad. In retrospect, it was really not very good, but it was enough that I said, well, maybe I could make a go of this. When my daughter went off to kindergarten and my son was still a toddler and my husband was working nights, at nap time and I would take my son in and lay him down next to daddy and then I would go to Starbucks and write for two hours and come back and then the toddler would, ideally, be ready to wake up.
That didn’t last very long, because he stopped napping really early. But eventually I found a church daycare down the street that I could leave him at for a few hours while I went to Starbucks and wrote. SO that’s how I got my start.

And you say you were already building up the universe. Was it all in your head at that point?
It was all in my head. It took a really long time to assemble it. My daughter was born in 1996, and I started writing—writing it down—in 2002. Sometimes I say this to people and they look at me like I have three heads, but you know when you’re bored and there’s nothing to read? Maybe you’re standing in line and you start making up little stories or putting things together? That all just kind of accumulated over years.
Apparently, some people don’t do that.
When you finally started writing, did you feel like you knew the universe well enough to jump into a novel, or did you have to go back and revise it?
I did have to go back and revise it some. I had a lot of detail, but I discovered very quickly that I didn’t have as much as I thought I had. Fortunately or unfortunately, NaNoWriMo requires you to write at a breakneck pace, so I got used to just pushing on through. When I went back and revised, I did rresearch and added some things in.
And was your first stab at things a more traditional space opera narrative?
It was much more traditional. I’d already had the idea for Ancillary Justice, but I felt that it needed to be in first person and I didn’t think that I could write that first person point of view, so I ended up writing around that story. So instead I wrote the backstory for a character that plays a crucial role in the first book. That meant thant when I went to write Ancillary Justice, all of that backstory was fully formed, but I had to figure out how to bring it in, because the plot doesn’t make sense without her. And that was kind of weird.
I’ve never read a lot of Tolkien. I’ve read Lord of the Rings, but my brother read the whole Silmarillion, and explained that once you’ve read that, you realize The Lord of the Rings is just a little thread in a huge tapestry. So, do you have other threads you can follow?
I do. I have several others. Although because Ancillary Justice is kind of the base story I started playing with, a lot of them hook into it in one way or another. There are definitely other areas to look at. Maybe not on the scale of Tolkien, but few of us are on the scale of Tolkien.
 Not everyone has, like, 40 years to develop their worlds.
Or to invent three or four languages, yeah.
You’ve announced you’re writing more in this universe. How connected is it to the trilogy?
I’m not 100 percent sure, but I know that it will be removed from it in space. I’m not sure where on the timeline it’s going. As I have the story so far, it could go a number of different places. It won’t be unrecognizably distant, let me put it that way.
You’re so early in your career as a novelist. Do you feel like you’re the kind of person who needs to write a few things in this universe and then do something different?
Probably, yeah. In fact, though I may or may not get the chance, I’d write some fantasy as kind of a break, and then come back to science fiction.
How does it feel to have completed the trilogy, and gotten to the point where people can actually read it?
It’s a huge relief. Obviously, it was something I wanted for a long time, and I consider myself really lucky to have had happen, but when the first book became popular, suddenly it became very frightening. I could see people on Twitter: people were saying, “I can’t wait to see what happens in Ancillary Sword.” and I’d be like, “neither can I!” I’d think, what if I can’t finish this? What if I am run over by a bus and die? Does my family have to give back the money? What if I can’t do this? Finishing it up was a huge relief. Now I can kind of relax and enjoy.
Did the shape of the trilogy change during the writing? At the point you sold the trilogy, how developed were books two and three?
I’m very much a pantser, but I knew when I wrote the first book that the next two books were there waiting. That was always part of the structure of the thing, but knew I couldn’t go to an agent as basically a complete unknown and say, here’s the first book of a trilogy. And even if an agent took me on those terms, what were the chances that a publisher would then want all three books? So, I wrote the first book to be as self-contained as it could be, hoping that I could go on and do the next two.
When I started submitting the first book to agents, I began writing the second one, even though I thought, this is probably stupid, because if I never sell it, my work is for nothing. Nut I needed something to work on. At the same time, I didn’t have an outline for the sequels. I just knew their general shape.
So this was true of the second book, and I think it continues in the third: you sort of start off with this wide, epic space opera canvas, and then you zoom in closer, and them move in even closer. Without spoiling anything, the whole trilogy, basically, winds up centering around one person and one individual choice. Was that the theme you started with? The epic in miniature?
Everything hinges on that one choice. I don’t think it was conscious, but, of course, things that I believe and value and assume are important and true about the universe are going to work their way into my fiction. So, I wasn’t necessarily planning to do that, and actually, when I realized that it was going to have to be on a smaller scale, involving multiple planetary travels and that kind of thing. I also didn’t want to write the same book twice anyway, and there are some really cool things to do with really exploring the world-building and sticking really hard with character.
I love science fiction, and one of the things I love about it is that it’s so very different. You can read stuff that’s just fast-paced adventure, and the characters are cardboard, but who cares, because they’re heroes, and we love it. And you can read stuff that’s really deep character, and everything in between. And I thought about it and I said, well, maybe the middle one has to be character. And when I came to the third, well, the stakes are still epic, but here’s the situation I’ve got.
It wasn’t really intentional. At some point, you need to just trust the process and trust the back of your mind. Do the things you can do and your subconscious does a lot.
Did you have any big missteps when you were writing, where you got 100 pages in and you had to throw a lot of it out?
It took me almost 10 years to write Ancillary Justice. I had been thinking about it for a long time, and started in earnest in 2005. There was two or three years of beginning to write and discovering that it wasn’t working and scrapping everything and going back. It took a while to figure out how to solve the problems inherent in what I was trying to do.

Do you have a favorite character to write?
There are a lot of characters that I have really enjoyed. I love writing Breq, obviously. If I didn’t love writing Breq, I wouldn’t have stuck with her for three books. I loved writing Translator Dlique in book two. I had so many complaints about how briefly she’s on stage, and relatedly, there’s a character in book three, who would be a spoiler to name at this point, who was such massive fun to write. And, in fact, when Translator Dlique had to go offstage, and I said to myself, but, I will make up for it, for myself, when we get to three, because I knew that character was coming. And I said, and I will enjoy the heck out of that character.
I know you’ve talked in the past about how much research you’ve had to do, particularly into tea, and in making sure you were writing it honestly, you wound up becoming passionate about it. Is there anything you were researching for the third book that was new?
Some food. Actually, I got super interested in the process of making fish sauce, which was kind of interesting and fun, but mostly I did a fair amount of mythological and historical and anthropological reading, which is super interesting.
Have you gone back and read through the books yourself yet? Can you do that?
Not all of them. I can’t read all of Sword yet. Even thinking about reading all of Sword makes me want to cry [laughs]. I last read all the way through Mercy when copy edits came in. I think I did read through Justice at one point to go back and, like, who was where at what time and how many soldiers were here or there. Especially between Sword and Mercy, I had to kind of refresh my memory.
I think distance is important when you’re revising, which was one of the drawbacks the schedule I’ve been on. When I first sold the books, the publisher how long I needed between books, and I said oh, a year should be good, because that sounded great to me. But I discovered that a year’s really brutal, because you don’t have the chance to set the work aside for months and then come back to it and look at it fresh.You’ve just got to keep going over and over and over it. If I can avoid that, I want to take longer next time.
Looking back at where you started with your career and the way the genre has changed over the last three years, from my point of view, it seems like you came along at this watershed moment, where all these conversations about race and gender are happening. And your books happen to be a part of that conversation. Was that a conscious choice?
I was definitely conscious of the conversations around race and gender, which have really been happening for 10 years now, I think. I watched RaceFail happen. I was not really a participant, but I definitely watched a lot of it go down, and a lot of it was food for thought for me. When I did sit down to do a lot to write the novels, a lot of my assumptions had been informed by those conversations. To that extent, it’s not an accident my books fir into the conversation, because I actively thinking about those issues. At the same time, definitely there’s some kind of synchronicity going on, because it just hit at the right moment, I think.
If you did write a fantasy novel, do you think it would be as kind of oddball as fantasy as the Ancillary trilogy is as a space opera?
That’s hard to say. Probably what I would do, because clearly I found this is a way that works for me, is write in the same universe that almost all of my fantasy short fiction is set in. But it’s hard to say how oddball it would be. When I was writing Ancillary Justice, it did not feel oddball to me. When I was writing it, I thought, “this is really traditional, old fashioned space opera and nobody’s going to want it, because it’s not fresh and new.” And then it came out, and everybody said, “this is fresh and new and not traditional!” And I was like, “bless your heart.”
It definitely feels like ’70s Le Guin in a lot of ways, but nobody’s writing ’70s Le Guin anymore.
Exactly. And I was writing it because well, I had decided, as I said earlier, the best thing for me to do was to write the stuff that I wanted to read, and that pleased me, and then leave whether it would sell to the universe. That would not be my call, because it’s never anybody’s call except, you know, fate.
I said well, this is the kind of thing I would love to read. When I pick up my favorite books, this is what I like to see. I just jammed everything in it that I love to see. I would probably do the same thing with my fantasy—put in things that I thought were really cool. Whether that would be oddball or fresh would be up to the reader, right?
Ancillary Mercy is available now.