It’s been a while since I did a writing essay. In the meantime, I’ve spent a lot of time reading newer fantasy and science fiction best sellers award winners as well as listening to podcasts about writing and the publishing industry (like the Publishing Rodeo Podcast). This post is the results of all that writing, listening, analyzing, and thinking. Hopefully, it will be useful to all of you budding speculative fiction writers out there.
First, as always, a few caveats:
When I say best sellers, what I really mean is successes in some more or less loosely defined way. That includes actual best sellers, major SF&F award winners, and books within the genres which sold at least pretty well while also receiving critical acclaim. And when I say recent, keep in mind that publishing is a slow moving business and that only so many books make it big every year. So, recent means going all the way back to 2018.
The books I’ll be analyzing in this essay have proved successful in at least one of ways described above. They are the kind of books I could only dream of writing. I’m not necessarily a fan of all of them, and my analysis will reflect my opinions, but that is not to bash the writer or their work in any way. They are succesful books, and that is, at least to some extend, because they are good books.
And, yes, I know that what really determines whether a book will sell (and probably also if it will have a chance of winning a major award) is the amount of push it receives from its publisher. Alongside reading successful SF&F books, though, I’ve also read a couple of books which clearly did not make it big. And while don’t doubt that luck and timing are big part of becoming a commercially successful author, I do think there are some fundamental differences between the books in those two categories. (Some day, I might write an essay on books that flunked, but probably not; that does feel like bashing the writers and their work.)
What I want to do with this essay is highlight some of the commonalities between the successful SF&F books, the elments which set them apart from less successful books. And the big caveat here is, of course, that while I try to pinpoint what the books I’ve chosen did well and not so well, it all boils down subjective opinions. Still, my hopes are that I’m not completely off and all you aspiring writers out there can use this analysis to help you write the kind of books which will make publishers provide that all-determining big push.
Right onto the essay itself.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, published in 2020 (Bloomsbury)
This book made the list for being nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards (amongst others) as well as having been very well received by critiques, reviewers, and readers.
It’s Clarke’s second novel (and she had a few short stories published before that), so while Piranesi is not a debut novel, Clarke was far from an established best seller when it was published. On top of that, her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, was published 16 years earlier. So while that was a smash hit as well, certainly building expectations for Piranesi, and while Clarke had the benefit of praise and cover quotes from someone as big in the SF&F world as Neil Gaiman, it was certainly no guarantee beforehand that the book would become the success it since has.
Piranesi had a lot going for it before reaching the public, but it being only Clarke’s second book, it could just as easily have been crushed beneath its expectations instead of taking off the way it did. So, I definitely think there is more to it than just being the work of an already successful author.
Right. So let’s look at the book’s qualities.
The cover quote from Gaiman seems doubly good as a marketing tool, because Clarke’s writing is very Gaimanesque. She has the same straight forward but beautiful prose, the same fairytale/ magical realism-like story worlds. That may not be your thing, but a lot of people (me included) loves that in a story.
I’ll note down prose, descriptions, and setting as strong points of Piranesi.
The book is named after the protagonist of the novel, a character living in a world consisting of one big mansion, an endless succession of rooms filled with statues in various states of decay. Piranesi is, seemingly, the only person in this world except from the mysterious Other, who visits from time to time. Piranesi is a researcher, exploring and investigating the world he inhabits, but he also suffers from a strange form of memory loss. The plot revolves around him re-discovering his own past as well and finding the truth behind his home.
If this sounds familiar to you, please tell me in the comments, because I have never read anything quite like it. The amnesiac MC trying to figure out their own past may have been done a million times before, but Clarkes still manages to make it feel fresh. And the story world came across as completely original to me.
We’ll add originality as a strong point as well.
One thing that surprised me, in a good way, was how interesting Clarke managed to make the mystery of who Piranesi was, what had happened to him, and how he ended up in this strange mansion-world. Amnesiac characters are usually not that interesting in themselves, and Piranesi is no different in that regard, but the mystery is appealing. And while Piranesi is a somewhat bland character, the Other and other characters introduced later are, while not exactly sympathetic, pretty interesting.
Mystery will be added as a strong point while the characters is something I would argue neither pulls the story up or down. The same thing is true of the dialogue, IMO. It’s solid and does the job, but the dialogue itself wasn’t a selling point for me.
The only thing I would say made Piranesi less than perfect was the structure/pacing. In this way, it is again very similar to Gaiman’s writing and Clarke’s own Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which probably suffers way more, actually, in that regard). The slow pace isn’t necessarily a problem (though some authors or readers may feel so), but for a long while the story doesn’t really go anywhere. It takes a while before Piranesi really seems to be working on figuring out the main mystery of the story, and until then, the book is mostly world-building.
So, while the plot itself is interesting, I’ll throw in pacing as Piranesi’s one weak point.
And let me just repeat that the elements I’ve listed as strong/weak points of the story are, of course, entirely subjective. Some people may love the characters in Piranesi, or hate the setting, or not mind the amnesiac protagonist at all. But I have tried to focus on both my own opinions of the book as well as what reviewers/readers who enjoyed it seemed to think are the book’s strengths and weaknesses. I will do the same for the other books on the list.
What I end up with for Piranesi is a pros-cons list that looks like this:
+ Prose, descriptions, setting, originality, mystery
+/- Characters, dialogue
– Pace
The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang, published in 2018 (Harper Voyager)
The Poppy War made the list for being nominated for the Nebulas and the World Fantasy Award as well as being a massive bestseller. On top of that, reviews seem to be mostly positive, so this really checks all the boxes for making the list. I was actually a little surprised when I discovered this was the oldest book on the list, because it’s definitely the one I most often see in the bookshops still. Succesful indeed!
Even so, I considered not including this book, because this really wasn’t for me. In fact, I could not get myself to read all the way to the end. Again, this doesn’t make it an objectively bad book; it just wasn’t for me. I actually ended up including it specifically because it wasn’t my kind of book in an attempt to keep my own reading preferences from skewing my analysis too much. So for The Poppy War, I’ll rely more on observations from other reviewers than I will for the other books.
This is Kuang’s debut novel and one that have her propelled to the top of the best seller lists. Something she has managed to follow up on with subsequent books. She has, as far as I know, no track record from short stories or other types of writing before her novel debut. So, any push the book has received seems to be solely based on its own merits.
The story takes place in a fantasy interpretation of 20th century China and follows a war orphan, who has been picked up by unwilling foster parents who treat her like s**** and use her as free labor in their illegal drug business. When the MC realizes she is to be married off to an elderly government official as a bribe for him to look the other way and ignore said drug business, she takes desperate actions to get into an academy as a way of avoiding the marriage deal. She succeeds and is accepted into the most prestigious military academy of them all only to realize that a poor peasant girl will not be treated any better here than she was at home. From there, school scenes follow, delivering exposition, and the MC finds out she has a talent for magic only for her life to get even worse despite her abilities as war breaks out.
Now, does that sound familiar? Yeah, that’s because the story (at least as far along as I read) follows some very common YA plot beats closely; the kind you find in stories like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, etc. There’s nothing wrong with YA, but I must admit, it’s not my favorite genre, specifically because YA books generally seem to follow the same plot skeleton so closely. (All genres have their beats, but few follow them as rigidly as YA books do, IMO.)
Likewise, the fantasy China setting didn’t really work for me, because it felt too familiar. It didn’t read as a story-world inspired by Chinese history as much as a one-to-one transcription of 20th century China’s history with a fantasy element added on. And while I won’t claim to be well versed in Chinese history or culture, I’ve read enough about it that the background events of The Poppy War felt too familiar.
However, those are my opinions, and the book wouldn’t have been included here if not for the fact that a lot of readers feel differently. So, let’s look at what other reviewers point out.
If I was ever in doubt that taste definitely varies, reading reviews of The Poppy War made that clear. The very things that threw me off the book, the familiar YA underdog Plot and school Setting as well as the originality of the Chinese-inspired story world were the first elements mentioned in virtually every positive review. The characters, too, and the MC in particular, seem to get mostly positive comments.
The prose and dialogue don’t get that much attention, though when they are highlighted, comments are mostly positive. I would argue that the writing style is typical YA. It’s more “telling” than you see in most stories aimed at adults. It’s not my favorite style, and don’t think it’s a strong point of the novel, but I don’t think it’s dragging it down either.
One strange thing I noted when reading reviews was that tone seemed to split readers into two sections. Some loved the gritty tone and violence while others generally liked the book but found the violence at least somewhat off-putting. Also, a lot of reviewers comment that The Poppy War is definitely not a YA novel because of all the violence. And, yeah, you might not want your teenagers to read it or least want to warn them beforehand, but in every other way, this was a YA novel.
It seems, though, that Kuang has succeeded where many writers have failed, combining two genres (YA and grimdark) in a way that draws in fans of either genre instead of pushing away everyone except the few readers who love both genres.
One point where I will let my own opinion shine through even though it disagrees, to some extent, with a good deal of the general feedback the book has received, is in regard to the pacing. The Poppy War follows the classic YA fantasy beats of underdog teenager discovering they are special, having magical powers, and having to deal with some great foe tightly. It even has the classic school room scenes to deliver exposition along the way. However, the book deviates a lot from the common structure as to when those beats are introduced in the story.
It took a loooooong while before the magic was introduced and even longer before it really had an impact on the story and the MC discovered their own powers. And considering that most readers seemed to enjoy the grim war part of the story the most, it definitely seems like too much time is spend in the military academy and almost as long on showing the MC’s life before that.
I’ll throw pacing to the con side of things.
Finally, I’ll add exposition to the con list as well. Most reviewers don’t seem to take note on this, and it is common in YA books to use a school setting and the classes it includes to deliver exposition. That’s fair, but I’ll argue that it was handled clumsily in this book, often stopping the story for several pages to get in some world-building.
Pros/cons:
+ Plot, setting, originality, world building, characters, tone
+/- Prose, dialogue
– Pace, tone, exposition
Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon), published in 2022 (Tor/Titan)
Nettle and Bone was nominated for the Locus, Nebula, and Hugo Awards, and while it doesn’t seem to have made as big a splash as some of the other books I’ve included, reviews tend to mostly positive.
T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon has a long and solid list of publications behind her, both within short fiction and novels, with books for both adults and younger readers. But while she does have a solid track record and established fanbase which definitely accounts for some of the books success, Nettle and Bone does seem to achieved more popular success than T. Kingfisher’s previous adult books.
The story follows Marra, the youngest of three princesses who has left palace life and court intrigues behind to be a nun. It’s a life she’s pretty contend with, but she is forced to return to her old life when one of her sisters die and her remaining sister and her country both are put in danger by a strategic marriage gone horribly wrong. Along the way, Marra picks up some strange allies and visits some shady places.
It’s a classic farmboy adventure turned on it’s head. For one thing, the farmboy is a nun who is not keen on adventure but rather content with her life before the start of the story. On top of that, the witches and fairy godmothers’ involved with the plot have dubious abilities and personalities.
Kingfisher manages to take what is, essentially, very familiar plot, setting, and characters and make it all feel fresh. So, originality definitely goes on the pros list.
I’ll admit, I’m a pretty big fan of especially Kingfisher’s short stories. Like Piranesi, they feel very Gaimanesque in their setting and world building, somewhere between fairy tale, classic fantasy, and magical realism. The prose is not nearly as beautiful as that of Gaiman and Clarke, but like Gaiman, Kingfisher can be very funny. Nettle and Bone very much reads like a longer version of Kingfisher’s short stories in this regard.
So, I’ll add setting, world building, and humor to the pros list as well. Prose lands on neither or.
I’ll just add that Nettle and Bone is not an all-out comedy piece, but the horribly inadequate fairy godmother and the chicken demon joining the MC’s entourage made me laugh more than once. And, honestly, I think most stories can be improved by having a few comedic elements like that.
Much as I liked Nettle and Bone, I do think I prefer Kingfisher’s short stories, though. Once I got past the novel twists to the familiar plot, the story did feel like it begand to meander a bit. The world building was still interesting, and some of the side characters were pretty cool. The MC, though, was kind of bland and story didn’t feel like it was going where it needed to go quickly enough.
Characters go on the neither or list, and pacing gets tossed onto the con list.
+ Originality, setting, world building, humor
+/- Prose, characters
– Pace
Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, published in 2019 (Tor.com)
This book made the list by being well received by critics, being nominated for basically every major SF&F award, and for just selling really well.
It was Muir’s debut novel, but she had a pretty strong track record with short stories, having stacked a couple of big award nominations already. Still, I think it’s fair to say that the author’s reputation was definitely not the only reason the publishers chose to push this novel.
It’s clear by now that originality is something all the books I’ve looked at so far have in common, and Gideon The Ninth has one of the most original premises I’ve ever seen. Necromancers in space is strange and new in itself, but on top of that there’s the over-the-top sword fighters, the god-like but absent emperor, and so much more. This was a wacky and strange story with a very novel concept.
The story takes place partly on the gothic home planet of the Ninth death cult and partly on the abandoned and derilict home world of the First house, the emperor’s old planet. Muir uses the strangenes of her original premise and add layers to it by creating a unique world. It is space as we have never seen it. Mostly dead planets, sure, but not the dull and barren kind of dead of the real world universe, dead as in occupied by necromantic nobel houses.
What I’m trying to say is that the world building is definitely a strong point of the story as well.
Even if you haven’t read the book, I think it should be clear by now that this book is over-the-top weird in many ways, and that includes the characters. They never really act like real people. Honestly, it was one of the things that threw me out of the book and made me care a little less for it. However, I think it’s a deliberate stylistic choice, and it’s clear that many other readers really dig that aspects. So, characters go on both the pros and the con list.
Despite being hooked by the strange premise, I nearly gave up on this book before the plot really got going. The first part of the book (almost a third of it, if I remember correctly) takes place on the home planet of the main characters, but the story doesn’t really start moving until they leave. At that point, we are served a really interesting murder mystery full of tension and danger, but it seems like a major pacing issue that it takes so long to get there.
The writing was, for the most part solid without being mind-blowing in any way. There were a few places where Muir’s choices for the prose felt odd, but in a book that was generally odd all around, maybe that shouldn’t surprise me. Either way, it was not enough to negatively affect the story as a whole.
+ Originality, characters, mystery
+/- prose
– Characters, pace
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, published in 2019 (Tor)
As an aside, I also reviewed this book way back, here.
A Memory Called Empire made the list by winning the 2020 Hugo Award as well as being nominated for the Nebulas the year before. It was also generallly well received by criticts. It’s a bit more “artsy” than the other books I’ve included, and I’m not sure how well it actually sold. However, I still see it on bookshelves here and there, and I doubt it (and the second book in the series) did as well at the major awards as was the case without also seeing decent sales.
It’s another debut novel, however Martine seems to have a solid backlist of both short stories and poems as well as having a wide network of established SF&F authors. Again, though, looking at what the book did well, and the commonalities with the other books I’ve gone through, I do think it’s primarily the book itself that caused the publishers to give it a push.
In some ways, this was classical space opera with a galaxy spanning empire, interplanetary politics, alien races, and massive space fleets. On the other hand, this nothing like the action packed adventure space opera novels usually are. The focus was much more on the characters, the people living at the edge of the massive empire and trying to maintain their independence and the way their culture is threatened by said empire. The space battles and alien races are shoved into the background, at least in book one of the series.
The MC, Mahit, is being send as ambassador representing her small space station at the court of the massive Teixcalaanli Empire. To help her, she has a neural implant which is supposed to merge her mind with that of her predecessor. Only, her precedessor suffered an untimely death, leaving with a very incomplete implant. While navigating the court intrigues and the foreign culture, she has to keep the implant secret and discover what happened to the previous ambassador.
Compared to the other books on the list, A Memory Called Empire did feel like the least original one. Even so, it did shift the focus for a space opera novel completely, and the neural memory implant and the way it was used in the novel was very interesting and unique. So, as with the other books, originality was big part of what made this book stand out.
Martine focused a lot of the book on the treatment of themes such as the effects colonialism and erradication/appropiation of swallowed-up cultures in a larger empire. I have mixed feelings about how the treatment of the major themes were handled, but I will say that Martine at least managed to give a lot of attention to the themes without making the story feel heavy hande with its morals. And it seems that many readers, especially readers for whom the story struck a more personal noote, liked it specifically for how it highlighted the effects of colonialism and the struggles of the colonized. So, we’ll add theme to the pros list.
It is also a very well written book. The prose is beautiful at times but never gets in the way of the story. Poetry is also a big part of the story, and even though I’m not much of poetry fan myself, I enjoyed this element as well. So that’s another for the pros list.
As you might have guessed, this is a pretty slow and introspective novel. I don’t think the slow pace really hurts the story, though. It seems very deliberate. So, that goes on the neither or list. Martine does manage to compensate, though, adding a very interesting murder mystery to keep readers hooked.
Cool as that mystery is, though, I don’t think it’s handled very well in the book. A lot of pages is devoted to characters questioning whether the very obvious murder ever took place. And the mystery os resolved by the MC questioning a suspect who answers honestly without there being any sort of pressure on them to do so. Overall, it made for a pretty unsatisfactory main plot, IMO.
Likewise, the characters felt like a weak point. The side characters range from okay to meh, but Mahit herself is bland and horribly incompetent at her job to the point where even when we get the explanation for her lack of competence, my reaction was “nope, that’s not enough of a reason.”
+ Originality, theme, prose, mystery
+/- Pace
– Plot, character
Conclusion:
It’s time to sum up my finding, and one thing is clear right away: Originality is the one strength all the book above have in common. That’s probably not terribly surprising — science fiction and fantasy are the genres of novel ideas — but I think it’s nice to have some sort of data to back up what’s probably many readers/writers initial assumption (even if said data is highly subjective).
When it comes to grab you publisher’s (and readers’) attention, it’s not enough to add some minor tweaks to a well-trotten story idea. Again, this might sound intuitive, but if you’re anything like me, you know the feeling of reading (and probably giving up on) an otherwise well-written book, with interesting character which all just feels too familliar.
I won’t claim an unoriginal SF&F book can’t become successful, but my analysis does indicate that it is something that can really hurt the book’s chances.
Another element all the books had in common was prose. It was not a strong point for most of them, and they were written in very different styles, but none of the books suffered because of their prose.
I guess the lesson here is, get the basics of your writing right. You don’t have to be the next shakespear, but there’s a certain threshhold you need to pass.
In the realm of the less clearcut but still relevant takeaways, three of the stories definitely had strong settings and/or world-building, and some would probably argue the two other stories had as well. And only one of the books seemed to suffer badly from clumsy exposition.
Again, this is not terribly surprising. Setting/world-building plays a major role in most SF&F stories.
Likewise, three of the books had interesting mysteries to keep the readers hooked. This is probably especially useful in slower paced books, but a novel like Gideon the Ninth, which is all-out action in the part of the book where the mystery takes place, also uses mystery to great effect. And, it’s probably not a coincedent that thrilers/mysteries generally top the best seller charts.
The one thing that did surprise me when doing this analysis is how little importance pacing and characters seemed to have. You’ve probably heard many times how important it is for a book to have good , strong pacing, and I usually tell myself that interesting characters is one of the most important things for me when picking up a book.
It seems, though, that pacing and characters plays a much small role in getting a big push from a publishers than I, at least, would have thought. Pacing was actually a weak point in four of the five books above.
It seems the key takeaways for those of hoping to become succesful SF&F novelists are:
– Make sure your core concept is original
– Make sure your prose isn’t holding you back
– Having strong setting/world-building and mystery plot will help a lot
– Maybe focus less on characters and pacing
This is, of course, not a definitive check list. Nothing is ever that simple. It could very well be that some books needs really interesting characters whereas other books can get away with being weaker in that aspect. And I think it’s important to simply try and write the best book possible and the kind of book you want to read. Otherwise, you will probably burn yourself out trying to churn out a hit novel.
Timing is another aspect I didn’t touch upon except in my opening caveats. But when a book is published and when it is send to a given publisher probably makes a hugh difference as well, at least in some cases. That is basically outside of your control as an author, though, so I don’t think that worth focusing on.
This turned out be a pretty longwinded post. I hope it proved useful for you. If nothing else, I, have at least learned a thing or two from writing it.
Let me know in the comments if the essay was/wasn’t useful for you.
Toby Backman 