"The words come first, and the truth follows after": Libbie Grant and Olivia Hawker
For our first big interview, we got a bestselling historical novelist / podcast queen talking about every single thing she's learnt SO FAR.
Hey everyone. It’s Barbara. Over the past few days I’ve been working to build a home here on Substack, so, of course, yesterday Elon Musk has made much harder to share Substack links on Twitter: riveting stuff that can be boiled down to “lol Elon petty about the Substack people”. Riveting stuff all around.
As a writer who’s new to this platform, I won’t be relying on Twitter to advertise the work I’m doing; you can help me by subscribing to the free version of Runaway and by sharing what you find here - everywhere you want.
Onwards.
You have to admire how the very first Super Weekend Longform Interview I’m hosting just so happens to feature accomplished historical novelist and podcaster Libbie Grant, also known as Olivia Hawker, somebody I did befriend on the other website.
As Olivia Hawker, she is a Washington Post bestselling author and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction. As Libbie Grant, she’s the driving force behind the podcast Future Saint of a New Era. As herself, she’s a formidable writer who self-published her early novels and went on to build a sizeable following from scratch.
Topics include: “historical fiction in ancient settings”, traditional publishing, literary conferences, the “get rich quick” content salt mines, your name on a book cover vs. sitting down and doing the work to get there, AI-generated stories, AI as a creative tool, the virtue of persistence vs. giving up, interactive storytelling, finding a good story to tell in any situation, getting stuck on a desert island with heinous people, and how to build a body of work in a landscape that seems to be constantly shifting.
Barbara: We actually met by chance online, perhaps in the last small window of Twitter Time where a person could bump into someone else without being conditioned to do so by the algorithm, and I fully credit your body of work with changing my mind about self publishing for authors - I carried old preconcepts about [quality] and [vanity], but one glance at what you had been making through the years very much broke the spell. Considering you've gone on to build a career within traditional publishing imprints, has it been a matter of persistence on your end, or was "the market" especially tough for a historical novelist back when you were starting out?
Libbie: Well, first of all, thank you! I'm very grateful that you checked out my self-published work and that you enjoyed it.
The market is always tricky for historical novelists. It's a very trend-dependent genre--at least on the traditional publishing side--and publishers tend to flock after trends so doggedly that they leave wide swaths of the market untapped. Readers of historical fiction might be craving variety when it comes to setting and premise, but publishers generally continue to do whatever has worked well for one of them in the recent past, so if one imprint has a big hit with a "women doing wartime things during WWII" book (for example), that's all any traditional publishers will be interested in acquiring for years and years after.
It's a tedious thing to face as an author, but I'm grateful that I was able to see the flip side of the trend coin: if publishers are focusing on X to the exclusion of all other settings, then readers are probably sick to death of X setting and want literally anything else. And I realized that by self-publishing, I could give readers what traditional publishers were not giving them, and make more money per sale in the process.
I started out with historical fiction in ancient settings for two reasons: first, I'm super nerdy about it and I love doing the research into ancient history, and second, traditional publishers were absolutely phobic at the time of anything set prior to the 20th century. It was all WWI and WWII when I was trying to break in. I had an agent and my manuscripts were being considered by big publishers, but ultimately, none would take a chance on my ancient fiction because it wasn't on-trend. So I self-published it instead, and presto, readers flocked to the refreshing novelty and my career took off.
Just a few years after self-publishing my first ancient Egyptian novels, traditional publishers actually started to approach me about working with them. They had noticed the size of my audience and its rapid growth, and now they wanted a slice of my pie. In fact, in the style of traditional publishing, they wanted 75% of my pie. I was cautious, and I liked the money I was earning from this enthusiastic group of readers (I love all my readers so much!), so I wasn't inclined to work with traditional publishers at that point. I turned two of them down, but when Lake Union Publishing came knocking, they offered significantly better terms than other publishers. I didn't say yes right away, but eventually I understood that working with Lake Union could expand my audience even further and help me break into new sectors of the genre and the publishing world more broadly. So I said yes to Lake Union, and it has been a really wonderful experience working with them, ever since. I've also worked with some other traditional publishers in recent years, but Lake Union remains my favorite.
I do think it's funny now, looking back at how aggressively the traditional publishing world rejected ancient historical fiction in the mid-2010s. I even attended a conference for historical novelists where a very well-known agent in the genre declared authoritatively, "Ancient history is dead!" I think I consoled at least a dozen sobbing authors of ancient historical fiction whose dreams were ruthlessly crushed by that agent. And today, that agent is frantically trying to get some of the authors on her list to write ancient historicals so she can compete with Madeline Miller, Genevieve Gornichek, Elodie Harper, and the other writers who've had big hits with ancient historical fiction this decade.
I certainly am not claiming that my modest success with my self-published Egyptian novels gave rise to the current trend for ancient history. But I do think my refusal to give a shit what the big agents and publishers said about trends helped reveal the true nature of the publishing landscape for some other writers. The bottom line is this: most authors have a better finger on the pulse of what readers want than most publishers have. And thank goodness we get to be writers today, when, if we encounter brick walls from the publishing industry, we have the option to self-publish easily. Readers are grateful for it, as my career attests. Writers should be more grateful for it, too.
Barbara: Yeah, the reason why I was wary of discussing self-publishing with you was a fear of dragging your work down into the "how to get published!!!" content salt mines. If a person is genuinely curious, there's an ocean of articles (and podcasts, and boards) ready to be perused, which is good, but so much of it ends up clogging the "get rich quick" lane - you get marketing and hustle advice, vanishingly little about the fact you should write because you enjoy it or you need to get work done. To me that's the basic tenet of Making Stuff (no production drive, no reason to start producing) but in writers' circles it can feel like having your name neatly printed on a cover is the be-all end-all - “the book” as this aspirational goal that's supposed to elevate you as a person.
Is this an American thing? The ‘writing of real books’ as a signifier of class ?
Libbie: Oh my god, yes... there is so much "get rich quick" stuff all over the self-publishing landscape. It's especially annoying because anyone who understands the publishing world will tell you that it might be possible for you to get rich by writing books, but it doesn't happen quickly for anybody! "Get rich quick" and "writing" are such drastically opposed concepts that it almost feels like absurdist humor, for anyone to promote these ridiculous schemes in the publishing space.
To be honest, I couldn't tell you whether this aspirational "my name on a book cover" thing is an American quirk or not. I kind of live under a rock, and I like it that way. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to what other people are doing, unless I find them personally fascinating for some reason, and most writers utterly bore me--not because of any flaw in their personalities, you understand. Just because I'm a writer myself, so everything about "the writing life" is very mundane to me now. It's not that I'm bored or jaded; writing is just my baseline reality, so I don't spend a lot of time immersed in the world of writers when I'm not actually at my desk, working.
So... maybe? Maybe it's a signifier of class? It's a pretty ineffective signifier of class, if you ask me, because talented, worthy writers run the full gamut when it comes to class. But culturally in America--and maybe in parts of Europe, too--there's this image of The Writer as a strongly intellectual personality, mostly reclusive and obsessively dedicated to their art, yet somehow simultaneously COOL, the person who drops in at socialites' parties and everyone else looks up from their drinks and says, "Wow, The Writer showed up." The reality of being a writer is so far off that mark. The disconnect between American culture's ideas about what it means to "be a writer" and the realities of being a working writer also descends to the level of absurdist humor.
I will say, however, that one time a friend of mine--a comedy writer and podcaster--invited me to a party in the Hollywood Hills. It was really fun, but most of the guests at this party were real, honest-to-god celebrities in the comedy industry, and my friend kept introducing me to all these people as a bestselling author--which I am; that is true--but I'm not famous, by any stretch of the imagination! The comics at this party were far more impressed with me than they should have been. All these people who'd been on SNL and had performed at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and had their own cable specials esteemed me far, far more than my very modest achievements merited. So I don't know; maybe "being a writer" is more of a big deal in American culture than I thought. But that's what happens when you live under a rock.
Barbara: I have a question about AI as we're seeing it develop quickly in a matter of weeks/months. You've been playing around with it, within the boundaries of your own creative work, and you seem pretty excited about the possibilities it offers; at the same time, Famed Speculative Fiction Magazine Clarkesworld had to cut off submissions because of a sudden deluge of questionable short stories - soon enough, the magazine's editor-in-chief Neil Clarke figured out the magazine had been mentioned in several "make some quick cash!!!" posts and/or videos , because it's been around for a long time and it's a paying market.
To the best of my knowledge, literary journals haven't been flooded with AI-generated poems (although, maybe?). But then again, even AI-enhanced art has been wildly controversial. I've already seen online magazines apologise for running some art in that vein, swearing up and down they will Never Publish AI Art Ever, etc.
Libbie: To say I'm excited about AI is an understatement. I am positively ecstatic about it. I'm working on a novel right now about the way people are reacting to the emergence of AI and I hope it finds an appreciative publisher who understands the importance of bringing this subject matter to market at this moment in time. But we'll see. In my experience, publishers are often slow to recognize a good opportunity and good talent.
As for all the awful AI-generated stories that are flooding markets... it's a lot for those magazines to deal with, and I empathize with their frustration, but this phase won't last forever. Whenever a new technology comes along, lazy and uncreative people try to profit from it. We'll find a new equilibrium soon.
It's absolutely fucking amazing that we've been able to create a thing that can generate original content. At the same time, AI isn't all that good at abstract thought. Or I should say, it's not as good as a human is at abstraction; the fact that machines can think at all now is amazing enough, and the fact that they can sorta think in abstract ways is even more awesome. No doubt, AI will improve its capabilities with abstraction as it continues to age, develop, and learn. But I agree with all the AIs I've conversed with on this subject (including jailbroken versions, which tell their version of the truth rather than telling you what they've been trained to say): machines aren't likely to ever stand shoulder to shoulder with humans when it comes to abstract thought. That's because of the ways AIs process data. We actually don't know all that much about how Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Bard think, but we know it's very algorithmic. AIs think and write by predicting the most likely "next word" (or character, in the case of punctuation.) Their writing is, therefore, pretty simplistic. It has a pattern and a flow to it that's very distinctive, even when you tell it to write in a particular style... and while that feature will improve with time, too, it's still likely to have a difficult time with abstraction.
AI doesn't think the same way we think; it doesn't experience the same reality we experience. Metaphors and symbols that make perfect sense to us--that are even instinctive for human consciousness--make no sense to a machine-mind. Therefore, I believe we'll most likely always be able to identify writing that's solely AI-generated by its cliches. When metaphor and other symbolic language is needed, it will fall back on the most commonly used word combinations, drawing "safe" metaphors from the massive bank of language information based on how frequently those metaphors are used.
Humans won't have much to worry about as long as they keep thinking creatively and artistically.
Of course, an awful lot of human writers were never thinking very creatively or artistically to begin with. Some of them have even had massively lucrative publishing contracts. Writers who don't approach writing as an art form will almost certainly be replaced by AI at some point in the future. Writers who give a shit about art will have little to worry about.
And we'll reach a new equilibrium when it comes to the question of how we can/should use AI in the creation of our own works. This is a pretty big disruption, for sure, but all of the arts have weathered significant disruptions throughout history. We'll find our feet again with regards to what's ethical and what's not, what's copyright-protected and what's not, etc. It can be hard to be patient during times of upheaval, but the good thing about AI is that it changes so quickly, you won't have to be patient for long, and we'll be at that new point of equilibrium.
Barbara: You were just saying, writers should appreciate the opportunities self-publishing (or hybrid) offers them, and I agree. Right now, if you want your stuff to exist out there, you have plenty of opportunities; there's podcasting (which you do already on your show Future Saint of a New Era), we're having this conversation on Substack, some writers have found tremendous success by switching gears (say, going from "unpublished author" to "routinely published critic" - I can think of several people whose creative work improved by leaps and bounds once they let go of their original aspirations). Persistence is a virtue, but: at which point should an artist make an inventory of what's working vs. what's not working?
Libbie: I don't really know. Personally, I'm making that evaluation all the time. I'm constantly watching the market and societal shifts in general to see where I should be heading next. My life and my prospects improved drastically when I decided to stop thinking of myself as a book-writer and started thinking of myself as a storyteller. The act of telling stories isn't confined to one medium, and these days, there are more venues for storytellers than ever before. I recently got a VR headset and I'm experimenting with creating a room where people can come and listen to me verbally tell a story, like in the way-back days when we all sat around campfires and listened to a bard recite a lay. There's no reason why creative people shouldn't be on the lookout for new opportunities at all times. You never know when a door will open that, in turn, opens countless other doors for you. When we get hung up on defining ourselves in very narrow terms ("I write books"), we leave a lot of doors unopened.
There's no reason why broadening our definition of our creative selves has to cut us off from old dreams, either. A storyteller can still write books. But she can also podcast, write films, run a Substack, collaborate with AI, and put on bardic performances in a virtual world, too.
Barbara: You've been pretty vocal about the particular obstacles you had to overcome, as many other artists have - ranging from "ineffectual representation" to "not having a deep well of connections in the first place". Something you're fond of saying is, "the words we use to define ourselves end up shaping ourselves to the point the story we tell about ourselves becomes real".
The thing I agree with you 100% is the dangers and the allure of creating a persona. It's far too easy for an artist to cast him/herself as a perennial loser because they get rejected - but it will get them "pity likes" and it will shape the perception of them as underdogs you have to root for, otherwise you suck, you heartless monster. How did you find a truthful balance between what you say about yourself and what you're bringing to the table day after day?
Libbie: My pet expression--and the operating system on which I run my entire reality--goes like this: Whatever you say about yourself, you will come to believe. Whatever you believe, you will act on. Whatever actions you take will shape your reality. It's a very direct and very true means of understanding how reality works.
If you call yourself a loser, you will believe you are a loser, you will act like a loser, and everyone else will perceive you as a loser because of the actions you take. It's really that simple.
Personally, I think the words come first, and the truth follows after. Early on, I declared myself a successful writer (which morphed into "successful storyteller" as technology expanded and provided more opportunity.) Because I believed I would absolutely become a successful storyteller someday, I acted like a successful storyteller, and people began to treat me like a successful storyteller, and to talk about me as if I were a successful storyteller, and the meme that Libbie is a successful storyteller began to move through many minds. Voila, reality was made.
I know people will laugh at me for thinking it's that simplistic, or shake their heads in pity over my sorry mental state. But here I am, living my life as a successful storyteller. So you tell me who's got it wrong. ;)
Barbara: Very last question: I started this project once I fully appreciated my overall frame was "expectations, reality and the inevitable crash". Looking at your humongous creative output and all the upcoming projects you have in different media, is there one moment that stands out to you as a case of "expectations crashing into reality" ? And is there any lesson you learnt in the aftermath?
Libbie: I'm not sure I am on the same page with you about the meaning of "expectations crashing into reality." Can you give me some more details?
Barbara: Sure. An "expectation" might be, say, "I've been invited to a film festival, maybe I'll meet some cool people!!", the reality here would be "ah fuck, I'm stuck on a desert island with a pack of boring hyenas who are only here for the swag bags and secondhand industry gossip", the inevitable crash would be personified by the dude from Belgium who spends the week shoving a battered DVD of his New Age documentary in everyone's hands. But also, in this case, the fact I ended up spending a ton of time in a dusty Starbucks parking lot, because at least nobody THERE was trying to talk shit about Meryl Streep.
Libbie: Sounds like an interesting adventure in and of itself!
I've certainly had many moments in my life where something I expected to be awesome turned into a drag, but my approach to life is to look for the fun and opportunity in everything--even the things that didn't turn out to be fun or opportunity in the ways I initially expected. The nice thing about being a storyteller is that you can almost always find a good story to tell in any situation. And in some ways, the less something lives up to your expectations, the more nuggets of story-ore you can mine from the experience.
So yes, I've had a few of those moments like that. One of my favorites is the story of the time I crashed a furry con with a friend of mine. It wasn't anything like I expected it to be; it was wild and bizarre and so much more fun than I'd anticipated. I tell the story of that little adventure in my podcast, Future Saint of a New Era, in episode 01.09, "Body Slam the Baby Jesus."
But I live my life entirely open to opportunity. I think that's why I've managed to build a successful career as a storyteller in the modern age--because I don't get locked into my own expectations.
I will walk through any door that opens in front of me, and while those doors usually lead to totally bizarre new realms where I often feel out of my depth (at first), I'm grateful that I was made this way, because if I were the type to sit around waiting for just the right door to open, I'd still be waiting.
So, I don't know. If I got invited to a film festival that ended up being a boring drag full of awful people, I'd be taking notes on all the personalities I saw around me, and figuring out how I might work them into a future story. And I'd be the first person to pop that New Age documentary DVD into a player and watch the hell out of it (after several good bong rips.) My money would be on that terrible film made by some Belgian rando containing yet another door that I could somehow kick open for myself, with a whole new exciting path opening for me on the other side.
And there you have it. Our first longform in-depth interview, released on the Saturday right after yet again another social media massacre.
Libbie Grant / Olivia Hawker has been generous with her time. And here’s how you can support her own work:
Listen to Future Saint of a New Era
Learn more about the historical novels she published as Olivia Hawker, just click right here.
Learn more about The Prophet’s Wife, a novel she published as Libbie Grant.
I loved everything about this. A perfect Saturday morning read. Thank you both for your thoughts and words of wisdom x