In the fantasy genre Samantha Shannon’s name precedes her, author of The Roots of Chaos duology and ongoing seven book series The Bone Season, he is a prolific writer who published her first book at 21. An Oxford alumnus with a degree in English and Literature, Shannon’s love for literature and books is clear in her every action, from the way she conducts herself to her passion for classical authors and literary research. She was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2020 for Priory of the Orange Tree, which was also nominated for the Goodreads Choice Fantasy Award.
After her extremely popular book signing, I got the chance to speak with her about her research and writing process, the new revisions of the first four books of The Bone Season, and her personal connection with her works.
Date- May 25th, 2024
Location- Carriageworks
I wanted to start off by asking you about the stamina required in writing. You’ve been writing for a long time now, how do you maintain the energy to remember so much, write, and also get through multiple rounds of editing?
Well, you're assuming I do maintain the energy. Sometimes I crash. It’s interesting, I am quite an introvert by nature, so energy is something I have to regulate quite carefully. I'm lucky that when I do events I feel like I get a lot of energy from them. I temporarily become an extrovert and it's like my battery fills up while I'm at conventions. I love meeting readers. I love talking to people about books. It’s such a passionate community and I feel like I absorb a lot of that, but then when I get home the social battery just rapidly drops to zero percent.
I think it really helps if you’re passionate about what you’re doing. I mean, being a writer has always been my dream career, and I love my books so much. I'm so excited to write them and a lot of people ask me how I keep my passion up for The Bone Season series, particularly because I’ve been working on it for ten years, and I just love it. I've never fallen out of love with it. So, I think it really helps maintain your energy if you really love what you’re doing. I'm just lucky that I have my dream job, so the energy comes quite naturally, even to an introvert.
In your longer works, especially your series the Bone Season, how have you managed to keep the creative spark alive and maintain excitement and curiosity for yourself when writing each new book in this long series? And how do you do this while maintaining fidelity to the lore of the previous books in the series?
Well, the great thing about the way I designed the Bone Season is that, even though it's all part of one series and they all flow into each other, they’re each supposed to be slightly different genres. The first one is a jailbreak, the second one is a murder mystery, third one is a heist, one is like a political thriller. I think that that helps because when I go into it I know that I'm dealing with a slightly different story every time, even though its grounded by the same cast of characters.
It's also something I hope will keep readers on their toes because I genuinely believe that you will never be able to predict what happens in the next Bone Season book, because of the difference in genre within the broader fantasy category. It always feels like there's something new and exciting to discover about the series. Now that I've been with Paige for such a long time I'm always really kind of excited to put her into these situations just to see how she's going to react to them. I still love it all these years later.
That’s really good to hear, and it definitely still comes through in your work. Recently, you also did something generally unprecedented in the publishing world and decided to re-write and revise your first 4 books. What has that experience been like for you?
A: It was very cathartic. The reason I decided to do the revision was because I was very young when I wrote the first Bone Season book. I was 19 and it was published when I was 21, and for various reasons I could not give the editorial process the attention it deserved. I was doing a degree at the same time, I was not particularly mentally well, I had very severe anxiety because of the amount of media interest in my stories. I was always frustrated because I felt like the first instalment could have been so much better. There was so much rich potential for drama and so many interesting character dynamics, but I just feel that I did not have the writing experience at that time to pull it off as well as I could have.
So, when the tenth anniversary rolled around my publisher said to me that they'd love to repackage it with a new cover, I said, “Well how would you feel if I edited it?” And again, like you say, it's not really very common in the industry. I'm not sure that anyone has ever done it to the extent that I have with this, especially for a series that is still ongoing. I was very lucky that my publisher let me do it and that I was given basically complete control over the amount of editing I wanted to do.
It was just such a joyful process, being able to go back to that work, to bring 10 more years of writing experience to the same story. It's not like the story itself is particularly different, but how I tell it has changed and I’m thrilled with it. I feel like I've got this version out there now that I'm so proud of, and it feels like I'm building a much stronger foundation for the last 3 books in the series now.
That’s great to hear, and who doesn't like having two versions of the thing they love?
The way I see it, I was originally a bit nervous about doing it, because I know some readers obviously loved The Bone Season as it was originally. But for me it's very much designed with both new and longtime readers in mind. The idea is that if you loved it then, reading the new one is kind of like getting to read a book you love again, just with a slightly different perspective.
You also have mentioned realising you yourself were sapphic while writing Priory of the Orange Tree, which features a sapphic couple. What was it like to go through that process of becoming while creating Priory, and then seeing the overwhelming love from other queer people reading the book and feeling represented by it?
It was really lovely. It was a lovely way to discover ones’ sexuality, through the process of storytelling. Genuinely, when I set out to write it I didn't realise that about myself at all, but I just felt that something in Sabran and Ead’s romance was really resonating with me in a way I didn't expect. Then I was kind of reassessing my entire life based on what I was writing, and it has been such a great privilege to see how other queer people have reacted to it. Knowing that the book was sometimes there for them when they really needed it, and sometimes it’s been part of helping them embrace who they are. It's such a wonderful part of my job, that I can tell a story and someone thousands of miles away who I've never met can be affected by it. It's a great privilege. It's wonderful and it's one of my favourite parts of being an author.
How do you balance the worldbuilding and character-writing parts of your novels so that they both have an equal amount of time and importance on the page, especially with Priory and Fallen Night, where the characters often become part of and influence the worldbuilding and mythos?
Out of the two of them I would say character is the slightly more important one. Simply because you can have the most brilliantly realised world of all time, but if you don’t connect with the character who is taking you through that world then it's not going to be a particularly compelling experience. I definitely put more weight on character.
It’s actually quite interesting seeing how my publisher approached the revisions of The Bone Season series from that perspective, because back in 2013 I remember the emphasis was very much on world building when they were advertising. Then when they re-pitched it in 2023 the emphasis was very much on Paige, the main character. I think that was very much the right approach because I think that she is the person the reader is connecting with.
With keeping the balance, I will generally do a good amount of world building at the beginning so that the reader understands the world they are living in and what the rules are, but for me the character drives the world building. So going in I need to think about which pieces of information about the world are relevant to the character. That’s kind of what drives my approach to it. I mean there is always the temptation of telling the reader lots and lots of details I've made up because I do a lot of background work in world-building. But I think it's good for the reader to just see the tip of that iceberg, because that is what the character is seeing.
When adapting and reframing myths for your works, how much do you like to take from the myth, and how much do you change? How do you maintain the balance between creativity and fidelity?
Obviously, when you're approaching myths you have to remember that they were written in our world which has specific historical events and context that gave rise to that myth. When I'm putting the myths into a different world that kind of context is not necessarily there, so I have to tailor it in a way that makes sense for the Roots of Chaos world.
For example, pretty much all of the religions and the myths in the Roots of Chaos books reflect some aspect of the magic system at the heart of the book’s world, which is quite a simple magic system. It’s a duality. There is star magic from above and then fire magic from below. I try to tie all of the worlds’ myths into that duality in some way. I like to put a lot of references to stories from our world in there, but I don't just like to copy and paste them. They need to feel like they are properly intertwined with the events that happened in this world and to have logically arisen from those events.
You studied English History and Literature and are clearly very well-versed in English mythos. How do you go about doing historical research outside of these into other cultures and mythologies, and then incorporate them in your works?
I have a few layers to my research process. I do quite broad research first so I can familiarise myself with the most important historical events of the era, for example, all the key people in the situation that I'm examining. Then I'm very lucky that I have the British Library within very close reach of me. It's such a great resource because you can get virtually any academic text just delivered to your desk, it's fantastic.
I do reading, and then I also try to do in person research where I can. Whether that's going to museum, or a gallery, or sometimes I will try to actually visit the places that inspire me. For example, there's a particular kind of estate that inspired a building in a Day of Fallen Night, so I like to actually go visit those in person because sometimes you end up learning so much about the place that you wouldn't necessarily just see from something like Google Street Views. You can hear sounds and there are smells that you wouldn't have encountered. I do like to do that kind of practical in person research first. Then again, I have to think about, “would these historical events make sense in this world, not in our world?” I have to kind of treat research based on that, to make the myths feel like they are organically part of the world.
You’re also great at creating these clear and distinct characters, you’ve said you often think of them as people in your mind you can converse with. How do you then get used to writing in their voice? Get them down on the page in a way that people who don’t know them can be introduced to, and understand these characters, without the complete knowledge of them that you would have?
That’s interesting, thinking of how to introduce a character to a reader. That’s not something I’ve really been asked before. It's interesting, because you have to think about how much you tell the reader about the character outside the plot.
In certain genres of fiction the plot dominates, particularly in young adult fiction, for example. The plot is kind of the overriding, driving force behind everything. But I do think that character development is so important in the Roots of Chaos books because you have one overarching plot, but you also have 4 intertwining character arcs. Trying to balance those character arcs with the main plot is an interesting part of constructing the books.
I feel like all of the things that happened to the characters are not necessarily directly relevant to the plot, but they do shape who they are as a person and therefore how they react to plot events. It’s kind of interesting as well, thinking about the plot, leaving enough room in the plot for characters to develop beyond what you expected. Sometimes I might think I need this character to react like this, but by the time I get there the character might have grown to the extent that they would no longer react in that way.
That’s why I like to leave a little bit of room to manoeuvre, and to allow the characters to go in directions that I don't necessarily expect. I think the mark of a strong character is that they do kind of quicken, and they have their own personality, and they will sometimes push back against what you want them to do. They have enough of a free will of their own, in a way, to say “No I wouldn’t do this, I wouldn’t act that way.”
Is there any advice you would have for yourself at 19 when you published your first work, now that you have a decade of experience in publishing?
I think that a lot of people who looked at my story, that I wrote my first book at 19, I got my book deal at 20, published at 21, and I think that they view that in an aspirational manner. I think our society in general tries to convince people that they need to achieve certain milestones by a very young age. We see this in things like 30 under 30 lists.
There is a celebration of achieving something at a young age and as someone who went through that process I really just want people to know that there is no expiry date on when you can achieve your dreams. For every author like me who was published in their early 20s there are authors who weren't published until they were 40, or 50, or older, and have still made a great success out of being an author, so I would advise people not to treat my story as an aspirational one. It's not that you can't be brilliant at a young age, I mean look at Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, she was the same age as I was when I wrote The Bone Season.
I am glad I published The Bone Season at that time because I think timing is very important in publishing, and if I waited the Bone Season might never have been published and I wouldn’t be in the position I am now. But it is also fine to wait. You're only ever going to get better as a writer in the time you spend not being published. Everything you write gives you experience, whether that's life experience or just experience with the craft. There really is no hurry, and I would hate to think I was making people think that they haven't been successful soon enough. The fact that I have revised my books should prove to you that sometimes it's okay to wait a bit longer and just leave your book in the oven for a little bit. It's not going to do any harm.
I think it's very kind of you to say that, rather than using your young age as something to use as a point of fame, to show that there are pros and cons to being published so young.
Very much so. I mean I do understand that I had a very privileged experience. The fact that I was so young made the media interested in a way that they probably would not otherwise have been. That allowed me to become a bestseller with my debut novel, the importance of which cannot overstated, but it was a double-edged sword. It did have a pretty big impact on my mental health for example, because I was so young I just didn't have the ability to withstand a lot of the pressure at that age. So, please don't use my story as the blueprint for what an author’s journey should be like.
You’re a great world-builder and you’ve often mentioned you’re love for etymology, have you ever considered pulling a Tolkien and making your own language?
Oh, I'd love to do that. I've always been really nervous because it's such a complex process and I haven't yet been brave enough to attempt it. Especially when you have such greats as Tolkien leading the way in that regard. I remember I was asked to review an exhibition about Tolkien, which was at Oxford a few years ago, and the Guardian asked me if I could go review it. I saw Tolkien’s tree of tongues that he created, which is this incredible diagram of the language tree of the languages that he had created, and how they all linked to one another, and which ones descend from which, and it was really intimidating actually. I always feel that Tolkien was such a great linguist that the world was almost secondary to the languages for him. It was like the world was the stage for those languages to exist. I would definitely like to try it at some point but for now I'll just play with existing languages and have more fun that way.
Alright that’s everything, thank you so much for the lovely interview.
Not at all. Thank you.
After the interview we talked about her upcoming works and her excitement in returning to the Bone Season series. Her love and passion for both writing and her fans is clear and makes it impossible to not want to read her work, and to see what more is to come. Her epic fantasy novels are still being published, giving readers the chance to see her vast worlds unfold with each new published work, and watch her become a household name in the fantasy genre in real time.
