Seamus Sullivan On Writing For Starchildren...

ON WRITING FOR STARCHILDREN…

An interview with Seamus Sullivan!

Writer of

Paperless Pulp S2E3 “Starchild Diary“

To celebrate the series finale of Paperless Pulp Series Two, we asked writer / father / amazing human Seamus Sullivan a few questions about parenthood, the writing process, and the most overused phrase in sci fi!

What do you think is the most overused word or phrase in science fiction writing?

Other than “reverse the polarity”?

Honestly, I’ve had the opposite problem with sci-fi and speculative fiction in the last few years, in that there’s more original, challenging, un-cliched writing available now than I have time to read – with more coming out all the time! One of my favorite recent sci-fi books is This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, which is written with such inventiveness and love of language. One line of that book describes how poetry “breaks language into meaning”.

And I feel like this is the best possible time to be a speculative fiction fan, because there’s this wealth of sci-fi and fantasy and horror writing available now that does exactly that, breaks language into meaning. We get to read Carmen Maria Machado, we get to read Ted Chiang, we get to read Tochi Onyebuchi and Nibedita Sen, Library of America is putting out fancy schmancy new editions of established greats Ursula le Guin and Octavia Butler, which I’m loving… there aren’t enough hours in the day to read all the good stuff, let alone the hackneyed stuff. Especially with a kid!

Writing has long been called a solitary pursuit. Did quarantine change anything about your writing process?

Finding a distraction-free space in which to write became more of a challenge. I used to do a lot of writing in coffee shops and bars, which became less viable when the pandemic hit. I started writing Starchild in March of 2020, when our son was about two months old. The first draft was mostly scrawled in notebooks and on lined 3×5 notecards while I played musical chairs in our two-bedroom apartment with my wife, our baby, and my in-laws. That draft did not make a lot of sense, but any accumulation of words on paper seemed like an accomplishment at the time.

I owe a lot to my in-laws, who flew over from India for almost six months to stay with us and help take care of their grandson. They were a colossal help with meals and childcare, and enabled both my wife and me to get quantities of writing time and sleep time that would otherwise have been impossible for new parents. Once our son’s sleep schedule and our daily schedule became more regular, I started taking him for long stroller walks, and that has become a great time to relax and let ideas and images bubble up. Now that our son is a toddler I get most of my actual writing done either early in the morning, in the hour before he wakes up, or in the evening, right after he goes to bed.

Starchild Diary went through several revisions over the last year. What changed?

The Ship’s arc got clearer and clearer to me during rewrites. I always wanted the story to be narrated by an artificial intelligence that has to grow into the role of a parent, but I never wanted the AI to be one of those if-only-I-understood-your-human-emotions AIs because we’ve seen that so many times. And by the time I was working on those final drafts and had gotten through this hellish year we all had, with a baby in tow, I had more experience to draw on as a new father. And my experience was, as a straight cis man becoming a parent for the first time, it’s not that you didn’t have feelings before, but you were sort of encouraged to use a narrower range of emotions in most of your relationships. Vulnerability, physical affection, gentleness, looking silly, talking about feelings without using jokes to deflect your discomfort, those are all OK with a romantic partner but being like that with anyone else, particularly male friends, is difficult. And then when you need access to all of those abilities as a parent, you realize for the first time how much you had those abilities but didn’t have permission to use them before. So that’s the journey the Ship goes through, discovering this emotional capacity that they always had but weren’t allowed to use.

What are some of the advantages of writing for audio? What about the challenges?

Compared to writing for live theater, you give up a lot of the toolkit when writing an audio play, in that you don’t have sets or costumes or facial expressions or physicality to sell the audience on the world you’re creating. On the other hand, I’ve been mostly writing fiction in recent years, and I cheated by writing Starchild like a short story, where you’re getting the whole story as told to you by the Ship. So I like to think we get the best of both worlds with this approach, where the language alone should be enough to pull you into the universe of the story, but then we get to stack the deck further with Andrew’s performance and Neil’s sound design.

You recently became a parent! If you could only share one personal anecdote about writing with your child, what would it be?

I would love to have a fun anecdote about writing to tell him! I don’t know how interesting the act of writing is to anyone who’s not the writer. The kid’s relative indifference to the success or failure of our writing has been a source of comfort whenever my writing wasn’t going so well. As long as we feed him and change him and play with him, he doesn’t care if we hit our word count that day.

What’s your favorite ship in science fiction?

It would have to be the Enterprise-D. That ship feels like an entire world; it’s a workplace, a home, you’ve got a bar where everyone hangs out, a holodeck where Geordi and Data go to solve mysteries… One of my earliest memories was watching the “Qpid” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with my parents on a family vacation. This is the one where Q plays wingman to Picard by making everyone cosplay as Robin Hood characters. I think I might have been about five, and it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. That was my gateway drug to sci-fi. If you could do something that outlandish and have Patrick Stewart play it straight, what couldn’t you do?

Runner-up is Breq, the ship’s AI from Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice and its sequels. I read Ancillary Justice right before starting Starchild and that book sets a very high bar for depicting an AI that is going through some huge emotions and is only beginning to find the vocabulary to talk about it.