Taking Out of This World Risks with Andy Weir
Sandra and Sandy are excited to welcome Andy Weir, renowned author of Project Hail Mary and, more famously, The Martian to the podcast. Before he became a self-published, best-selling author, Weir spent two decades working as a software engineer, and it wasn’t until he was laid off that he actually got to pursue writing as more than just a hobby. And so The Martian was born. After creating weekly blog posts to share his work, thousands of his fans requested he publish it on Amazon - and the rest, as they say, is history.
In no time, The Martian was a bestseller, and on its way to becoming a massively popular movie. Since completing The Martian, Weir has kept his eyes trained on worlds beyond ours. Project Hail Mary and Artemis really hone in on space as a character, and Weir acknowledges as much when he talks about his books’ structure. As a beloved author in the world of science fiction, the pressure is on now that he’s writing his next book. His advice for himself? He’s taking the same tip he gives to budding writers: Just put pen to paper. After all, you actually need to write to consider yourself a writer.
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Transcript:
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It lies somewhere between the pit of your stomach, your racing heart, and your brain, somehow trying to keep it all together. That's an area we call The Adrenaline Zone. I'm retired astronaut Dr. Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm retired Navy fighter pilot, Admiral Sandy Winnefeld. We’re two adrenaline junkies, who love spending time with people who are really passionate about pushing their boundaries as far as possible.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Many people don't think of writing as risky. But those who have tried to get the attention of editors and publishers know the crushing disappointment from endless rejections and unflattering critiques,
Sandy Winnefeld: Andy Weir was one of those authors. He tried and tried to get his work published before deciding to take matters into his own hands and create a blog to share his work as he created the story, we all now know as The Martian.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: The end result is a worldwide bestseller, followed by a blockbuster movie.
Many thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Freedom Consulting Group, if you're looking for stimulating work and our national security intelligence sector, check them out at freedomconsultinggroup.com.
Sandy Winnefeld: Today, we'll talk with Andy about what it takes to be a successful science fiction author and how he exposes his characters to risk in order to get the reader’s adrenaline pumping. So, welcome to the show. Welcome to The Adrenaline Zone!
Andy Weir: How are you doing? Thanks for having me.
Sandy Winnefeld: It may seem odd that a podcast about people who take risks would want to interview a famous science fiction writer, but we really are interested in all kinds of risks, including the risk taken by characters and fiction.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: But we'd like to start at the beginning if we may. So, did you grow up reading science fiction? How much did the fact that you had a physicist and electrical engineer as parents shape your interest?
Andy Weir: Yeah, I absolutely grew up reading tons of science fiction. My father, the physicist, had this huge bookshelf just jam-packed full of sci-fi books. I don't think the man's ever thrown away a book in his life.
So, I grew up reading baby boomer era science fiction – my dad's era. So, I was I grew up with Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak, and so on.
That's what kind of defined what science fiction is for me. Of course, my dad was a science dork. My mom was an electrical engineer really, just to pay the bills. She wasn't passionate about it. She's like, 'This is what I do because it pays money.' But Dad was all about science.
Sandy Winnefeld: I know that baby boomer science fiction. When I was in third grade in Virginia Beach, Virginia, my school library had one science fiction book and it was Robert Heinlein's The Red Planet.
Andy Weir: Red Planet! It's one of my favorites of all time.
Sandy Winnefeld: Kind of ironic because we're talking to the guy who wrote The Martian a little bit later on.
Andy Weir: Yeah, Red Planet also featured people kind of surviving thanks to photosynthesis. There was one scene where these guys are actually inside of a plant that's native to Mars in that book.
They are kind of scared of the dark and so they turn on their flashlight and it turns out that's what made them live because the inside of the plant was converting their carbon dioxide into oxygen for them because they were shining a light on it and they didn't even realize that they'd accidentally saved their own lives.
Sandy Winnefeld: Amazing!
Andy Weir: It's funny because I wasn't just reading copies of those old-school books. I was reading the originals, the pages were yellowed, and they kind of had that 50s book smell to them. There was an ad for cigarettes at the halfway point back then.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Oh, my goodness!
Andy Weir: Yeah! Back then, in the 50s, in stuff like that, juveniles, as they were called, science fiction books and anything that was really going to teenagers probably had cigarette ads.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: How the world has changed!
Andy Weir: Like, it's not just like a looseleaf thing. It was between pages 121 and 122, just like this glossy ad for cigarettes.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It’s hard to imagine.
Sandy Winnefeld: One thing that I'm curious about is I read somewhere that you started programming computers for Sandia National Labs when you were 15 years old. Now that's pretty impressive. Tell us about how you got into that?
Andy Weir: It sounds cooler than it is. I mean, I had a great time, but it sounds like I'm like some sort of child prodigy kind of thing. But it really wasn't. The Sandia Labs had a work experience trainee program thing where they would get, I think there were like 9 of us high school kids who were interested in science and stuff like that.
There were a lot of applicants, of course, but I was one of the ones who won a spot. It was to be like a gofer or a lab assistant, test tube cleaner, or whatever. And the lab I ended up in they said, ‘Well, we don't need any of that but what we do need is someone who can turn raw data into graphs.’
Back then there was no Excel - there was nothing like that. And so, they said, 'Here's a book on how to program in C' - there was a computer with a compiler on it - 'First, learn how to program in C, and then start writing programs to take all this data and process it. And also, make graphs that display and stuff like that.' It was kind of cool that that was my introduction to programming and I ended up being a programmer for 25 years.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, you could have been perfectly happy just writing software. You didn't start writing hit best-selling science fiction novels. So, tell our listeners how you got into writing in the first place. And how much did your experience writing gaming software impact your science fiction writing?
Andy Weir: Well, I always wanted to be a writer, even when I was a teenager. Actually, when I went to college, I kind of had to make up my mind after programming computers for several years while I was at Sandia Labs and now it was time for me to go to college, I was like, well, I actually really like programming but I still wanted to be a writer. I had to kind of make up my mind when I went to college, like, what direction I was going to go, and I decided, I like regular meals so I'd go ahead and become a programmer.
So, that's what I did in my profession, but I always wrote on the side. Then later on in the late 90s, I was working for America Online. And I got laid off when they merged with Netscape. I ended up getting a bunch of money from stock options because I was forced to sell them at what turned out to be the all-time high of AOL.
So, I assure you, I would not have made a wise stock decision left to my own devices. but I was just kind of compelled to. Anyway, I ended up with enough money to live for several years without working, so I took a stab at writing.
I spent three years writing a book, it was called Theft of Pride. You haven't heard of it because it didn't get published because it sucked. That was actually my second full-length novel. I wrote my first full-length novel when I was in college, and it sucked even worse. The Martian was actually my third completed novel.
But after three years, in the 90s, after three years of not being able to get any interest in the book, I went back into software engineering, and it wasn't like this sad Charlie Brown music hang your head kind of thing. I like software engineering and I liked it. I like computer programming.
So, I did that but then I just started writing on the side for fun. I would write short stories or I made web comics and stuff like that. That was my hobby. And then, as the internet got more and more prevalent, I ended up with more and more readers.
Eventually, I wrote The Martian. It was a serial that I wrote and I was posting it to my website a chapter at a time and I ended up with a bunch of people really into that. When I was done, people said, 'Can you make an e-reader version of it so I can just download the whole thing and read it on my Kindle or whatever?' I said, ‘Sure!’ I figured out how to do that and did that.
Then other people said, ‘I don't know how to download a thing from the internet and put it on my Kindle, can you just put it up on Amazon so I can get it through their system like any other book?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I figured out how to do that. It's very easy to self-publish with Amazon.
I did that and then it started really selling on Amazon and became a Kindle best seller, and then kind of a best seller in books in general. That got the interest of agents and publishers and the film studio, and everything just kind of happened all at once.
Sandy Winnefeld: Wow!
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, we're gonna get into some of that dynamic in a minute. But I'm curious, do you think that the onset of the internet and your ability to get your creative content out there made a difference in your success because before it was always these gatekeepers to publishers, right?
Andy Weir: Right, absolutely! I think I would not be here if it weren't for the ease of self-publishing. Basically, it cuts the old boy network completely out of the loop.
If you write something that people like, you can put it up directly for potential readers. And if they like it, they'll tell their friends about it, and so on, and you'll get some traction. So, there's no longer the notion of there's a good book, but it just never gets published.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: And so, you created a website of your own to start with writing your blog to engage with your readers.
Andy Weir: Yeah, that stemmed out of my comic. I made a webcomic, which was just three times a week. It was a silly joke per comic kind of thing. That was fun and I ended up with like, quite a lot of regular readers of that.
And then, when I decided to end the webcomic because I was getting sick of it. I ended it but at that time, I had like a mailing list already and I said, ‘Well, I want to write more narrative fiction. I want to get into short stories and serials and stuff so that's what I'm going to be doing from now on.’
A lot of my webcomic readers said, ‘Sure, we'll hang out and see what that's like.' So, I started off with an audience. It took me about 10 years to build up my audience just in the digital space, and that was all before The Martian.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, did the audience give me any feedback that caused you to modify your story or your characters or anything like that?
Andy Weir: Absolutely! I had about 3000 readers. It was just funny. I had like 50,000 people on my mailing list for the comic I made, but then when I said, 'Well, here's a mailing list just for narrative fiction if you're interested in that.' And so, it was about 3000 for that. But I had about 3000 people who were just reading each chapter as it came out. I thought at the time that I was writing seriously niche stuff like that. Most people wouldn't be interested in science fiction that has such an obsessive focus on the math and the science behind things. I assumed that it didn't have any broad appeal. So, I was writing for like, what I thought was 1% of 1% of potential readers.
Anyway, my little mailing list of 3000 people was those people, those like hardcore science and math, dorks who just love to run the numbers and stuff like that. So, I had like, 3000, expert fact-checkers. All of them would check every claim I made and if I made any mistakes, they were on it right away, which was great.
And so, The Martian came out being extremely accurate except for a few violations of physics that I did on purpose for narrative purposes. But I will say that I didn't really take advice on ‘Your character should do this or you should do that, or here's a cool thing that could happen.’
I didn't really take that kind of advice but the worst of it was when I got basically how gasses separate completely wrong. The whole part where he had accidentally filled up the hab with a bunch of hydrogen, in my first draft of it that I posted, the hydrogen was all kind of up at the top of the dome and he was trying to basically burn it off like that. And people said, 'That doesn't happen like that. It diffuses uniformly and it's lighter, but it doesn't separate. At an atmospheric scale, it would do that but not over just a couple of meters. So, you're wrong.' And so I had to gut and rewrite that whole thing because it was just wrong.
Sandy Winnefeld: At least you learned a lot along the way, I suppose, doing this.
Andy Weir: Yeah!
Sandy Winnefeld: I guess Crown published The Martian for you. I'm curious, what do you think really got their attention?
Andy Weir: I think it was just simply the Kindle and the Amazon sales. The editor I've worked with on all three of my published books so far is named Julian Pavia. Julian is the sort of guy who's always out on the lookout for new talent and stuff like that.
And so, he realized early on that self-published works are a good place to check, like, it's already gone through a few filters. It's like, these are writers that can actually finish their book, and then we'll see what's selling well that doesn't already have a print deal. He says, 'how well it is selling', and that sort of thing.
So, he saw The Martian was selling really well and he had an interest in it. He mentioned it to his friend who was an agent named David Fugate. David Fugate read it and he liked it. And so, he contacted me and said, ‘Hey, do you have an agent? If not, do you want one?’
Now, back in my 20s, when I'd written Theft of Pride, I spent three years sending query letters out to agents and getting rejected. Now there's one knocking on my door and I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely! You can be my agent.’ And then he's like, ‘Great because I think Crown Publishing, which is an imprint of Random House, wants it.’ I'm like, ‘Okay, do that then.’
And then, 20th Century Fox – somebody just cold emailed me from Fox and said, ‘Hey, we want to option the film rights for The Martian. So, this is before it was published as a book.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Oh my God!
Andy Weir: They said that we want the film rights for The Martian and I said, 'Talk to my agent.' So, my agent had set me up with a film agent at CAA. And then, my film agent, a guy named John Kassir was negotiating the deal with Fox, while my literary agent, David Fugate was negotiating the deal with Random House/Crown.
All that was going on at the same time while I was a computer programmer. So, I'm in my cubicle, fixing bugs, and then sneaking off to a conference room to take a call about my movie deal, and then back fixing bugs. So, it's a very surreal time. The two deals, the film deal, and the book deal came together four days apart. So, it's like on a Monday, we closed the book deal, and then on that Thursday, we closed the film deal.
Sandy Winnefeld: Wow! So, I guess the lesson is to have an agent.
Andy Weir: Have an agent.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That's an amazing story.
Andy Weir: I mean, I know that I'm incredibly lucky and that doesn't happen to most people.
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Sandy Winnefeld: How did it feel when you heard it was going to be a movie?
Andy Weir: Yeah, that was incredible. I mean, the book deal was what I was really excited about because since I was a kid, I dreamed about seeing Blah-blah-blah by Andy Weir in a bookstore. I still get a kick out of it to see my books in a bookstore.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: As you should!
Andy Weir: Yeah! As for the film deal, I wasn't that excited because everyone told me not to be. They said, ‘Look, you're gonna get like 25,000 bucks or something. That's for you to enjoy but they're almost certainly not going to make the movie. What they do is they option the rights to anything that might someday be something they want to make a movie to. That amount of money is like a breath mint to a movie studio. They just hand it out to everybody who has anything that's remotely marketable so they can secure the rights before their competitors do.'
So, I was basically told by everyone to not get excited and that they're not actually going to make the movie, but enjoy the money that you get. I'm like, ‘Okay.’ So, I was zeroed in on the book and just did not even pay attention to the movie process because I wasn't taking it seriously.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, then how did it feel when you were told there was going to be a movie and it was gonna have Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain in it. Oh my gosh!
Andy Weir: Well, what happened was – there's no moment where you pop the champagne for a movie, it just kind of creeps from being unlikely to being more likely, to eventually being very likely to now we're shooting and now we're filming.
And so, what happened first was we got Drew Goddard set to direct and write the film. He started writing the film and then he left the project for a Spider-Man movie, to direct that instead. But he'd still written the screenplay. And then, the studio was like, 'Now we don't have a director anymore.' It looked bad although the screenplay was really good. And then, Matt Damon was interested in playing the lead. And so, the studio is like, 'Great, now we've got a lead with a big name as the lead. What about a director?' And so, they put out feelers, 'Okay, we've got this script with this lead, Matt Damon, anybody wants to direct it?'
Ridley Scott said, ‘Yes.’ And so, Ridley Scott was set to direct, and once you had Matt Damon starring and Ridley Scott set to direct, then a lot of the big names were very interested in being a part of it like Jessica Chastain, Sebastian Stan, Michael Pena and the whole cast. I mean, it's an incredible cast.
Once they had all this big cast all set up, and everything like that, it started to really be likely. Then the next thing you know, they're making sets but it could still be canceled at any time. I guess the moment you celebrate is when they have their first day of filming in the can.
So, they'd actually shot film – filmed a scene or two. The moment they do that is when they're now committed to all the contracts they have with the actors because if you've filmed any of it, that means you've activated all the actors' contracts and so they were going to have to pay whether or not they finished making the movie. They're gonna have to pay Matt Damon his entire salary for the movie. Jessica Chasteen, her entire salary for the movie.
So, once they start shooting a film, they won't cancel in the middle, except for extreme circumstances because it's cheaper. Even if they regret starting the process, it's cheaper for them to finish the film and put it out there to recoup losses if nothing else.
Sandy Winnefeld: And at this point, you are out of the loop, right? I mean, nobody's going to Andy Weir and going, ‘How do we want Matt Damon to play this role?’
Andy Weir: Right! Certainly, my only job in the film was to cash the check. But they chose to include me in a few things. When he was writing the screenplay, Drew was on the phone with me almost every day. He and Ridley both wanted the film to retain the scientific accuracy that it had.
So, Drew was on the phone with me every day. Once the script was done and they were doing the filming, every now and then I'd get a question from Ridley that would go through his staff. It wasn't like he called me on the phone, but I think I got like one or two questions and they were always just scientific.
So, he said, like, ‘We want to show Watney pouring hydrazine fuel from one container to another out on the surface of Mars. He’s in his spacesuit and he's doing that, would that work?’ I said, ‘No, it would evaporate immediately when exposed to Mars' environment.’ So, he was like 'Okay.' And so, if you watch the movie, what he does is he hooks up a pipe in a tube, like, it's a hose that goes from one thing to another, and that that's how he got, like, transferred hydrazine. They really wanted it to be accurate.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I have to tell you that The Martian, that movie is the only one that made me feel homesick for space. It was, I mean, scientifically accurate but you also did a good job - I think, what really made it hit me internally - is the banter between the crew and the dynamic with the ground. That felt so on.
Andy Weir: I've heard that from a lot of NASA folks. They say the same thing, ‘How did you get that so right?’ The answer is that I've been a space dork since I was a little kid and I've watched every single documentary about everything.
So, I've seen the astronauts being interviewed. I've listened to recordings of communications between the space shuttle and so on. And then, I amped it up a little bit. They're not quite as unprofessional in real life as they are when they're chatting with each other.
I mean, I'm sure when it was just you guys talking to each other, not on vox or anything like that then you probably were, 'Ha, ha, ha, ha,' but talking to Mission Control is always very crisp and clear.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Most of the time.
Andy Weir: Yeah. I love that stuff. And then, you might appreciate that I was told by folks at NASA and JPL and stuff like that, that the most inaccurate part of the book and of the movie is the high level of cooperation shown between NASA and JPL.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I will not comment on that, one way or the other.
Sandy Winnefeld: Andy, you said you one day dreamed of having a book in a bookstore with your name on it and now you've got several. Did you feel any sort of extra pressure or reputational risk when you started writing Artemis and Project Hail Mary because The Martian is so huge, and now you got something you got to live up to, right?
Andy Weir: Oh my God! It was so much pressure. I mean, for Artemis, it was just imposter syndrome out the wazoo. I knew that there was no way this was going to be as popular as The Martian.
I knew that so I was just setting out to say, like, 'I just want to make a book that people say like, I enjoyed this book, and they can still say that it's not as good as The Martian. That's fine but I enjoyed this book.'
That's kind of what happened. I think I made some mistakes with Artemis because I'm always trying to grow as a writer. In The Martian, the plot was hopefully pretty engaging but the characters were pretty flat.
So, for instance, Mark Watney has a very interesting personality, but he doesn't undergo any change in the novel. He's the same at the end as he was at the beginning. And you also don't know anything about him. When you finish the book, you don't know anything about him. Other than he's a guy who didn't want to die, which can be said about most people, right?
He's very clever and he's kind of witty but you don't know what his plans are if he does get home. You don't really know anything about his life before he was an astronaut. You don't know anything; he had no depth. That's fine. I was going for a plot-driven story. But for Artemis, I decided I want to try harder. I want to make the main character with some complexity and depth.
So, while Mark was based on the idealized version of me. Mark was like all the traits I have that I like about myself and none of my flaws. So, kind of witty, snarky, and smart. But then also, he's really brave, which I'm not. Everything is magnified. He's much funnier than I am. He's much smarter than I am. He's much more interested in science even than I am and he's not afraid of things and he doesn't give up. So, he’s just the good parts of my personality, none of the bad. And then for Jazz, who's the main character of Artemis, for the 6 listeners of yours who've read that.
Sandy Winnefeld: Wait a minute.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I've read it.
Andy Weir: You read it? Good! It wasn't nearly as popular as The Martian. So, for Jazz, many people don't believe this when they first hear it. but this 26-year-old Saudi woman is based on my own personality also. But she's more my real self – more my flaws and mistakes.
Her attitude and personality are almost identical to what I was like at her age, and also the recurring theme of just not living up to your potential, of like, you're smart and you're not taking advantage of it. I got a lot of that. And so, she was more like the real me, and Mark is more of the idealized me.
In the end, it turns out people don't like the real me as much as they like idealized me. So, they had a hard time liking Jazz. Also, I made her too immature, because I was really immature when I was that age. So, people are like, ‘She's supposed to be 26 but she acts like she's 15.’ The main problem is because when I was 26, I guess I acted like I was 15.
So, a lot of people just couldn't really vibe with Jazz as well as they did with Mark and so I learned some lessons there. Like, your main character can be flawed, but you can't make them unlikeable.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: But it's realistic, right? I thought she was an incredibly complex character and I was curious to know how you came about writing her but now that you just said that. Was it a little risky to put your flaws out there like that?
Andy Weir: Yeah, absolutely. But I really didn't want to just be a one-trick pony. I mean, I didn't want to just crank out another book of a resourceful scientist in a life-or-death scenario, right? I was just like, Jazz is clever and resourceful and comes up with good solutions but also, really, for me, the main character in Artemis was Artemis – the city itself.
What I wanted to write was basically Chinatown but on the moon. Chinatown is the main inspiration for Artemis. It's like the story of what has to happen in the ugly underbelly as a city grows from a small town into a big one. That’s what Artemis was all about.
And then, in Project Hail Mary, all the reviews in Project Hail Mary say, ‘Andy Weir went back to his roots.’ I feel like it's the opposite. In The Martian, it's the whole world trying to save one guy and in Project Hail Mary, it's one guy trying to save the world.
Sandy Winnefeld: I saw that in a bookstore when I was getting ready for a trip and immediately grabbed it because I knew it was going to be a terrific book. And so, without giving anything away, it's about somebody traveling to another star system trying to, as you said, save Earth from something really nasty.
But you do some really impressive physics in that book in every single chapter. So, how much extra research did you have to do beyond that which was necessary?
Andy Weir: Tons and tons and tons of research and there's a lot of speculative science in there. But for me, that's what I love. I mean, the actual writing is a pain in the ass. I like doing the research. I'm happiest when I have four Excel spreadsheets open in front of me and I'm double checking like, let's see what is the wavelength of light of a ship traveling at this rate that's using mass as fuel that now it'll have a Doppler shift, but how much of a Doppler shift at what time and just all these things. I went way down the rabbit hole way further than I needed to go for the book, but I just really like the research.
Sandy Winnefeld: Do you have a university professor you send it to and go, 'How am I doing here?'
Andy Weir: Well, not usually. Usually, I just do it myself and I have a good time with it. It's fun. It's like if you like gardening, yes, you can hire gardeners, but you like gardening so you do it yourself, right?
Although I did double check on things, again, without too many spoilers, neutrinos matter a lot in Project Hail Mary. And I wanted that science to be accurate. And so, it turns out by the most ridiculous of coincidences, I had a friend in high school named Chuck Dooba. And he and I were lab partners in our physics class in high school physics class, in fact, and we would hang out and stuff like that.
I went on to be me, he went on to be a particle physicist, Dr. Charles Duba, who was part of the team that won the Nobel Prize for pinning down to within a very small range, what the mass of a neutrino was. He knows his way around a neutrino.
Sandy Winnefeld: If you can catch one!
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Handy friend to have!
Andy Weir: Yeah, a handy friend to have. So, I talked to him a lot about getting my neutrino physics right.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: But in that book, you also had a relationship between an alien and the human hero, which has nothing to do with science, and it really complicated things. So, how did you come up with that?
Andy Weir: Well, that was fun because it was a buddy comedy. I mean, I had that in mind from the start of the book. Of course, that's the core of the book, although people don't know that until the second act reveal, right? And then, it's a first contact book. It's these two guys who are working together and that enabled me to do something I've always wanted to do, which is make my own space aliens, where I just start from the ground up, and say, 'I'm gonna figure out how their biosphere works. I'm gonna work upward from there and then just whatever they are, they are.'
They're not remotely comfortable in a human environment, which always bugs me. I mean, I understand for storytelling purposes, you want to have your aliens and humans in the same room. That's why like all the Star Trek races are comfortable with the same gravity and atmosphere and temperature, etc. So, I wanted to make an alien that's alien. So, we've got a meter and a half high, five-legged, rock-covered spider that never evolved sight because the light doesn't penetrate to the surface of his home world.
Sandy Winnefeld: I can't wait to see it in the movie.
Andy Weir: Yeah, I've been seeing some ideas and mock-ups made by ILM and stuff like that, that are going through the movie process. We'll see how those land.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Cool!
Andy Weir: The directors want to do it with practical effects as much as possible using CGI only for the stuff that can't really be done with practical effects.
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Sandy Winnefeld: So, here's a question on your writing. I've published a couple of short stories myself and I found that the only way I could do it is to sort of follow Stephen King's advice. And that is to come up with a dilemma and then let it take you where it will, rather than trying to outline the whole thing.
What is your approach because you're doing some pretty sophisticated stuff and you almost have to outline it, right?
Andy Weir: Well, I generally make it up as I go along. I come up with a dilemma but I generally try to come up with a dilemma that can really be milked, like being stranded on Mars. Well, there are a lot of ways to go with that.
But I guess for The Martian, I actually did just make it up as I went along, because I was posting it to my website. In my original mind, the way I envisioned it when I first started writing it was that the whole book is going to be just his log entries. There were no characters at NASA, nothing like that. None of that stuff. His crew was only mentioned in his log entries. You never saw what they did. It was like he was going to show up on his own at the Aries 4 landing site, and surprise the Aries 4 astronauts there.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow!
Andy Weir: That was my idea for how the ending would be. But the more I worked on it, the more I just kept being pulled away from that sequence of events because I'm like, I just could not see it as plausible that NASA would not notice he's still alive.
Like, I just couldn't find any way that that made sense because especially within this fictional setting, they had five Aries missions planned and this was Aries 3, so they still have two more. So, they still have this massive focus on Mars. And so, they're probably mapping the living crap out of it. And so, I'm like, ‘Wouldn't they at least look at the Aries 3 site?’ And then, I'm like, they have to figure this out. And then, I realized that it's really interesting to show what people at NASA do and think and say when they realize the guy is still alive, but they can't talk to him.
Sandy Winnefeld: And he's growing potatoes.
Andy Weir: Well, they didn't know that.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah. I bet it must be more fun writing that way because you're discovering yourself almost as though you're the reader.
Andy Weir: Yes. But that's how I wrote The Martian. And then, after The Martian, my publisher is like, we want another book. I didn't go straight to Artemis. I actually started writing a different book called Zhek, Z-H-E-K, which was a soft sci-fi book about aliens invading Earth and stuff like that. I had faster than light travel, telepathy, you name it.
And so, I started writing that and I was like, what works for The Martian was me just setting up the scenario and letting it take off. With Zhek I tried the same thing. I got 70,000 words in, for reference The Martian is about 100,000 words. 70,000 words in before I realized that it sucked. It was just this meandering plot that wasn't going anywhere.
And so, that taught me a lot. It was painful to shut that down but it taught me a lot, which is, among other things, that other writers can have their own methods, but I need some structure.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That's risk management at its best, right? You are abandoning something that's not working.
Andy Weir: Yeah, it would have been bad to release that. Either, it would have been a massive flop, or it wouldn't have been anything like what I've written thus far. It would have undergone so many rewrites before the release that it would have been a completely different story from what I had so far. There's no way that what I had would have been successful.
Fortunately, I ditched that and I ended up writing Artemis because I had a lot of fun trying to design the city itself. I didn't have characters for it. But designing Artemis and, like, how do you make a city on the moon? Why do you make a city on the moon? What's their economic reason for existing and so on? So, I was having a lot of fun with that and I'm like, ‘Come on, Andy! You want to write this, so do it. Write this.’
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, it's a combination of a little bit of structure with a little bit of permission to wander a bit and somehow keep it all loosely threaded?
Andy Weir: Yeah. So, for Hail Mary, I had the general sequence in mind for what the book was, but how you get from point A to point B, I didn't know when I started writing. I was like, ‘Well, I know this major event's going to happen, then this – the first contact, and then this, and I knew what the ending scene was going to be right when I started the book. I knew what the final scene was going to be. And so, I just said, like, ‘Alright, I started getting from here to there.’
Sandy Winnefeld: Andy, I've always thought and I think a lot of other people would agree that fiction is vital to technological progress, as it sort of gives us the freedom to dream a little bit without the sort of strict accountability of academic rigor – the flip phone foreseen by Star Trek, right? I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. Where can this dreaming take us?
Andy Weir: Honestly, I've always thought that was a little bit overblown. I think that's the sort of thing that fiction authors say because they want to feel like they're a big part of scientific progress.
But in my opinion, scientific progress is made by scientists. It's very, very, rare for a science fiction author to come up with something that a scientist hasn't already thought of, even in terms of high concept.
For instance, Arthur Clarke, I think, is generally given credit for coming up with the idea of an artificial satellite because it was in his books, or he was the first guy who had a book that had that in it. But I've got to believe some scientists thought of that earlier, it’s just that scientist didn't have a megaphone for the masses.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah, the only way I would push back on you, Andy, is that I think the scientists come up with the stuff but dreamers like you come up with how the stuff can be used. I think it inspires people in some ways.
I saw that with one of the short stories that I wrote, where I was trying to take a technological thing and show people how it could be used. So, dream a little bit. I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: No, I agree. Although, where do you go to get some of your out there science ideas? Do you read specific journals or do you look around the internet, and talk to friends?
Andy Weir: Well, I have just a deep interest in most sciences, not even just like the ones I write about. I'm interested in biology. I'm interested in medical technology. I'm interested in all this stuff.
And so, I guess it's just like, you're always knowledgeable in your hobbies. If someone's a gearhead and he's all about cars, he can tell you all about cars, right? So, I can tell you all about interesting things going on in science because that's what I gravitate toward. Google has already figured out how to fill my newsfeed with science-related articles and so on. And so, that's just kind of how I'm wired, I guess. It's what I'm into.
Sandy Winnefeld: Have you had any interactions with people like Sandra, that have helped inform your approach to this? Or has it all been done at arm's length?
Andy Weir: I would have to say mostly at arm's length, because so when I wrote The Martian, I didn't know anyone in aerospace at all. I did get to meet a lot of really cool people in aerospace afterward. One of the happiest times of my life was when I got to spend a week at Johnson Space Center, just getting given tours of everything.
I got to go to a Lunar sample lab, put on a bunny suit, and hold a rock. They showed me ALH84001, which is the meteorite that they found in Antarctica that they thought had evidence of life from Mars. I have a shergottite of my own. I have a walnut-sized meteorite that is a rock that originated on Mars.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Awesome!
Andy Weir: Man, it was so much cool stuff. I think my favorite was when I went into the Mission Control Center for the station. They let me sit at the Cronus station and control a camera mounted at ISS. They put the feed on the big screen.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, we have lots of fun stuff at JSC. I'm glad you got to visit.
Andy Weir: Man, that was great. And like hanging out pretty much all day with Ellen Ochoa. Like, I didn't expect it. I thought she'd come to say 'Hi' and then be on our way.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: My colleagues and I love The Martian. We’re homesick for space.
Sandy Winnefeld: Are you working on anything new?
Andy Weir: So, my wife and I had a baby about a year ago, a little over a year ago. Thank you!
Sandy Winnefeld: Happy Father's Day, by the way.
Andy Weir: Yes, my second Father's Day, actually, because he was born just before Father's Day 2021. So, I just didn't have time to even think about doing work. It's just nonstop. I'm only now starting to kind of get my head above water enough to start writing again.
I've been thinking of book ideas for a while. I think I've got one. I generally don't talk to people about what my next book is going to be about until I'm really, really sure that's what's gonna get released.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, on a related note, though, do you have any advice for someone starting out as a novelist or even as a science fiction writer?
Andy Weir: I've got three bits of advice that I have for any would-be writers. Number one is you have to actually write to be a writer. You need to put words onto a piece of paper or into your word processor, whatever. It's not enough for you to just think about your story or imagine the cool scenes. You have to start writing the words because it's a fact.
I just experienced this 3 days ago. I just started writing the first chapter of my next book, well, what may not be my next we'll see. It's like, everything is awesome in your mind until you start writing it. And then, you're like, 'No, this doesn't work.' or 'This seems clumsy.' That's when you start to find the problems with your idea.
It's easy to think a story is perfect when it's in your head but when you start putting it on paper, that's when you start running into the problems and that's when you start solving the problems. You have to write. Just thinking about it is just daydreaming, that's not writing. That's number one.
Number two, and this one's very difficult, resist the urge to tell your story to friends and family. Make a rule for yourself that the only way anyone experiences it is by reading it. That sounds weird and it can be really difficult, especially if they're actually interested if they're not just like, ‘Sure thing, sounds cool.’ And then change the subject. But if they're, like 'Wait, that's awesome, then what happens?' You have to resist the urge to talk to people about it because telling the story verbally satisfies your need for an audience, and it'll sap your will to actually write it. So, make a rule for yourself that the only way anybody ever can experience your story is by reading it.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I can see why you would be tempted to do that to see if it is working or not, right?
Andy Weir: Yeah, you don't have to write the whole book. You can write a chapter and hand it to a friend and see what they think. And then get that sweet, sweet validation that you crave. But if you just tell the story verbally, then you'll be like, ‘Okay, I got my dopamine for that. What's next?'
And then, finally, the third bit of advice, I'd say is like, there's never been a time since the advent of the Gutenberg Press, there's never been a better time to self-publish. The old boy network has been removed between you and the readers. You can publish directly to them.
I definitely advise people to try to get an agent to try to get a traditional publishing story. I don't think that self-publishing is superior, but it is much, much better than Vanity Press Publishing was in the old days. You can acquire an audience and you can become successful.
The reason, by the way, that I recommend traditional publishing over self-publishing is because traditional publishing does more than make books and give them to people. They do the marketing and publicity. They get you on the talk shows. I mean, they put ads out in places. They make sure that they do the book tours.
Publishers are fully aware of the impact of eBooks on things and stuff like that. So, they're fully aware that they're transitioning over to being heavily focused on marketing and publicity for books for their big releases.
Sandy Winnefeld: I've got one last question and that is, do you have a routine? Do you get up early in the morning and write for a few hours and then give it a break? How do you work?
Andy Weir: In the pre-baby days, what I would do is set myself a goal of 1000 words a day when I'm writing a rough draft. Once I'm editing, I don't really have to force myself to work because I like editing. I don't know. I enjoy the process of editing. It's getting that first draft out that's painful.
And so, I try to write 1000 words per weekday, or more accurately, 5000 words a week. So, if it's Tuesday, and I've now written a total of 2500 words for the week, I'm not encouraged to stop writing if I've got a good thing going because I'm like, now I'm working on Wednesday's quota.
But until I've done that, I have a bunch of rules that I apply to myself. Like, I can't do any of my hobbies, which include woodworking and clockwork and stuff like that. I also can't watch any form of video entertainment, no TV, no YouTube, no streaming, anything. Those are the rules that I try to apply to myself.
Now that I have a baby, it's total chaos. I get up in the morning and we've got to feed the baby. When the baby takes a nap, I maybe can sneak a few pages here and there. I don't know. But he's getting older and he's getting easier to deal with. His naps are longer and he sleeps through the night.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Well, your father experience will give you more material for your writing. I have no doubt about it.
Andy Weir: I'm tapping into that for this next book. I really am.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Andy, it's been delightful talking with you. I think we could probably talk for hours. It's so fascinating to listen a little bit about the process and some of the experiences you've been through. We really want to thank you.
Andy Weir: I think when a nerd is talking to an astronaut, the astronauts is probably the more interesting one but…
Dr. Sandra Magnus: No! Personally, I've really enjoyed this and I have like a million more questions, but we really appreciate you being a guest today and hanging out with us for a little while.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah, I look forward to seeing the movie and your next book if and when it comes out, right?
Andy Weir: Someday, thanks so much for having me.
Sandy Winnefeld: Good luck!
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That was author Andy Weir. I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Thanks again to Freedom Consulting Group for sponsoring this episode. Do work that matters. Check them out at freedomconsultinggroup.com. Join us back in The Adrenaline Zone next week for a new episode and be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.
