We sat down with Andy Weir, author of The Martian to learn about his writing process and ask questions from our Tapas community members. Find out his advice to fellow writers, what part of space he would explore and his favorite board games.
Tapas: What’s your process? Do you do the research and let it marinade?
Andy: I like to start with the science and then work from there. So, what I found with The Martian is science dictates the plot. With the one I’m working on, I Said, “I want to design a city on the moon.” (Yay!) And so, I did that. Then I came up with a bunch of different things that can happen in this city. This story I have is the sixth or seventh idea I’ve had cause all the other ones were like “eh, not very interesting,” or “that’s not very plausible”, or “that’s not very good.”
Tapas: How much time do you spend on the research part as opposed to the writing part?
Andy: About 50/50. I love the research part. That’s the fun part. I like doing the research and the math and working all the stuff out.
Tapas: Have you thought about releasing Fantasy stories under a different pen name?
Andy: I hadn’t thought about that. If I was going to write Fantasy, I would certainly want to shamelessly take advantage of my name recognition to get people to read it.
Tapas: How did you start writing? Is there any advice for writers struggling to convey their ideas on paper?
Andy: There is no shortcut. I did a lot of writing. If you do something long enough, you eventually suck less at it. I mean, I’ve been writing since I was a kid. Short stories. Aborted attempts at books. Whatever. I’ve done lots and lots of writing. The Martian is actually my third book. The first one I wrote while I was in college. Thank God for the days before the internet. So, it’s not out there anywhere and it’s awful. Fortunately, no one will ever see that. The second book, I think, had a really solid plot and interesting characters, but my writing skills were poor. And so, the actual wordsmithing and flow of the narrative is not great. It’s kind of too wordy. It’s not well written, you know? I could go back and rewrite that. I’d have to rewrite it from scratch. I could back and rewrite it someday, but I don’t want to because I have better, cooler ideas now. Just keep writing.
Tapas: How seriously do you take people’s feedback?
Andy: I listen to what the feedback is, but, like, broadly. You can’t please every person, right? But, I’m like “Oh, broadly speaking the feedback is they love the scientific accuracy.” What’s weird is direct feedback, people emailing you, very few people will go out of their way to tell you they didn’t like your stuff. Very few people will criticize you directly. Because when you read something you don’t like you’re usually like “eh” and you just don’t think much about it afterward. If you read something and you’re like, “Aw, this was awesome! I gotta say I loved your book.” You know? So, the feedback you get, it skews very positive. You actually don’t get a whole lot of constructive feedback from fans and your readers. Reviews give useful feedback. Reviews where they are not talking to you, but talking to each other about it. Then you’ll get a bunch of useful feedback. Some of my favorite comments are the really negative ones. Like the one star amazon reviews. Some of them are funny as hell. One of them was like “if you like the manual to your humidifier, you’ll love The Martian.” Another one was, “there are hundreds of books out there about Mars. You should read all of them before reading The Martian.”
Tapas: Kendradraws asks, “what is your best advice on building a following online these days and getting your work out there?” What tactics did you use to promote your story? Was networking with other authors important to you? How did you grow your following?
Andy: I didn’t make any attempt to network with other authors. The reason I got eyes on my stories initially, I think, is just, once again no short cut, slow build up. I was posting short stories and webcomics to my site for ten years before I even started The Martian. I had a mailing list. You can sign up for my mailing list and I’d email you when I posted new content. Over time, I slowly accumulated regular readers. And so, I had about 3,000 regular readers when I started The Martian, which sounds like a lot, but over 10 years, that’s actually not that many people to build up. That’s an average of about one a day.
Tapas: Was that word of mouth organic growth?
Andy: Yeah. One thing I did was I made a couple of webcomics. You know about Cheshire Crossing (revamp coming soon to Tapas!), but I also made Casey and Andy. You can pull people into your sites with comics quicker than you can with short stories. This wasn’t a deliberate plan on my part. This was just like, “I wanna make a comic!” So a lot of those regular readers translated over to my short stories. Actually, only a small percentage. I think I had about 50,000 page views a day during the height of Casey and Andy. It was actually a reasonably popular webcomic. And then, one or two percent of those people transitioned across to reading my narrative fiction. I get asked that question a lot, “Okay, so I’ve written something. How can I get people to read it? I’m just giving it away. I’m just posting it to my site.” And that’s hard. I backed into it by building a large reader base over 10 years. That’s maybe not what people want to hear. Another thing is there are countless sites where you can exchange stories where authors read each other’s stories, like Tapas/Tapastic, and you can post and you’ll get critiques from other authors. I would say just keep writing, make a catalog of stories you have written and then make sure you have a mailing list so that you can tell people when you posted a new one. It reminds them to read your new stories and maybe talk to their friends about it. Don’t ever use that mailing list for anything other than saying there is new content. That’s it. Don’t say “Merry Christmas.” Don’t tell them, “How do you feel about the election?” Don’t say, “Hey, I haven’t written a new story in a while and here is why.” Because that’s what makes people unsubscribe from mailing lists.
Tapas: Who are some of the authors that have influenced you?
Andy: Well, I grew up reading classic sci-fi because my dad is a sci-fi dork. When I was growing up, he had this huge bookshelf of about six-feet high, three-feet wide and a foot deep just jam packed full of paperback sci-fi books that he accumulated over his life. I don’t think that man has ever thrown away a book. I grew up reading these. I grew up reading baby boomer sci-fi like stuff from the 50s and 60s. Those are the ones that are kind of like the model that I use. So, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke and also, although people don’t remember him that well, Clifford Simak. He’s one of my favorite writers also. There’s a bunch more like Larry Niven.
Waking up in the morning, and seeing that Larry Niven had given The Martian a pull quote for the back…it was like…I called my dad, it was like 6:30 in the morning, “Dad! Larry niven gave me a pull quote!” It was awesome. And if I had to pick just one, I would say Asimov and really, believe it or not, less for the foundation stuff and more for his short stories and his robot stuff.
Tapas: Is there anything you’re into right now?
Andy: I don’t get to have any fun now… It’s kind of like a busman’s holiday. I spend all day writing and editing my stuff and reading all day and then just to do more of that? What I really like to do when I’m not writing is just to brain melt and board games. I like board games.
Tapas: Symphorians asks, “If you or your robot surrogate could explore anywhere in space, excluding Mars, where would you go?”
Andy: Europa is pretty unique because it has liquid oceans. Liquid water oceans under the surface, so that’d be worth looking at. One of Jupiter’s moons. Europa is way outside the habitable band for the sun. It’s super super cold. Way out there. However, it has so much water on it, much more water than Earth does. But, as it goes around it’s tidally locked to Jupiter, so just like our moon always has the same face pointed toward us, Europa always has the same face pointed toward Jupiter. However, its orbit is slightly elliptical. It’s not a perfect circle because of that it gets closer to and further away from Jupiter during the course of its orbit, which means the amount of gravity pulling on it is different.
So, yeah, I’d say Europa because there are a lot of questions of whether or not there is life in the water there.
Tapas: El_Psy_Congroo asks, “What was your creative process in the actual movie? Did they give you the ability to give input?”
Andy: My main job on the film was to cash the check. I did it. No. I had no authority or say or anything. They chose to include me, which was pretty cool, but they didn’t have to. Drew Goddard wrote the screenplay, wrote the adaptation. He did a good job. He got nominated for an Oscar for it. And he was on the phone with me pretty much every day while he was working on it, but always was technical questions. A few creative questions, but mostly technical questions. Then, when it went to shooting, I would get a few questions here or there from Ridley Scott. Always technical. He doesn’t need my advice on how to make movies.
Tapas: What’s your favorite board game?
Andy: Well you ask me in any given month and I’ll give you a different answer. My favorite board game right now is Favor of the Pharaoh, which is a dice collecting game. You roll dice to pick up cards that give you more dice, basically. But, more complicated than that. I really like games. It’s fun. Another really good one is Karuba, which is like a path-making game. Again, I don’t want to spend 20 minutes telling you how the games work, but it’s fun.
Tapas: Are these like 14-hour games?
Andy: No! I don’t like those. I don’t like those games that become long play horizons, which is where they take like 6 to 7 hours to play or whatever. Karuba takes about 15-minutes to play a whole game. Favor of the Pharaoh is probably about 15 to 20. Actually, what I like, are the games you can play quickly and you and your buddies can just get together and play a bunch of them.
Tapas: Tiny_Waffle_of_Doom asks, “what cheers you up on a Monday?”
Andy: Monday is my favorite day because that’s my boardgame night. So, I’m already cheerful on a Monday. Actually it’s like, I’m gloomiest on Wednesdays. Generally, what cheers me up is thinking of other stories, taking a step back from what I’m working on and thinking of the math or science behind some other story that I’ve got in back of my head. I also really like craft projects like woodworking and stuff like that. Some day, when my life is less chaotic, I’m going to set up a woodshop in my house. I used to have one. Back before all this when I used to live in the Boston area. I had a basement, an unfinished basement with lots of room, and set up a woodshop there.
Tapas: How do you get in the writing zone? Do you have a routine?
Andy: Sit down. Grab a diet coke. Start writing pretty much. I drink a lot of soda. Like way more than I should. I installed a restaurant style soda fountain.
Tapas: THAT’S AWESOME! Doesn’t everyone always have that dream when they’re a kid?!
Andy: Or I want my own video arcade. I’m a child of the 80s and we didn’t have home systems until later.
Tapas: Do you have any now?
Andy: No. I don’t play videogames at all.
Be sure to read Moriarty and his selection of short stories Principles of Uncertainty on Tapas now!
