I’ll admit that this first drew me to giving the Pathfinder Tales a look — with authors like Tim Pratt (who’s won a Hugo Award!), Liane Merciel, and Howard Andrew Jones involved, I knew Paizo took their universe seriously, and the addition of upcoming novels from Max Gladstone and Sam Sykes pushed me over the edge. There’s nothing like seeing a bunch of great authors excited about a new IP, and I haven’t looked back since.

“There’s no open submissions — please don’t write a Pathfinder novel on spec! — but authors who’ve had some pro-level sales are welcome to email me with a writing sample, meaning a couple of short stories or chapters from a novel. I don’t require that it be sword & sorcery specifically — I’m a firm believer that a great writer can hop between genres. But if I feel like the author’s skill and style is a good fit, then they’re “in” — but the work is just beginning.

“The first thing we do is pitching. I encourage authors to send me a shotgun blast of at least half a dozen ideas of just a few sentences each — “Character X does thing Y in nation Z.” That allows me to quickly nix any that I don’t like, or that are too close to things we’ve already done or have on the schedule. Sometimes pitching can take several rounds before something intrigues me enough to give the go-ahead. I’m also happy to have authors pitch me parts of an idea — say a character, or a type of story — and to work with them to craft the right pitch together. So if an author comes to me with a cool character concept, I can help match it to the right region or organization within the world.

“Once we’ve got the right pitch, I have them write up a short outline — a few paragraphs. That’s often the point at which I take it around to some of the other senior managers and continuity folks at Paizo and make sure everybody’s on board. If they are, I have them expand it to a full chapter-by-chapter outline, usually about 5,000 words, which shows every twist and turn of the plot, any magic or monsters that are key to the story, etc. Only when *that’s* approved is a novel officially greenlit.

“Tie-in has a lot of potential pitfalls, and if an author’s misunderstanding of how a given spell works breaks the plot, I’d rather have them revise a few thousand words of outline than 90,000 words of manuscript.”

“This might seem really elaborate, with so many rounds of feedback, but in a project like this, I need to be able to vett as much of the novel in advance as possible. Tie-in has a lot of potential pitfalls, and if an author’s misunderstanding of how a given spell works breaks the plot, I’d rather have them revise a few thousand words of outline than 90,000 words of manuscript. So far, the policy’s worked pretty well.

“Once an outline’s greenlit, the author’s free to write. In general, I let the authors set their own deadlines — some people can turn a novel around in a few months, others need a year or more, and I’d rather give a book a later release date than have it feel rushed. How much an author and I interact during the writing is up to them — while some know the rules and world inside and out, most email me pretty regularly with questions, and I answer them and make sure they’re provided with the most pertinent sourcebooks for the topics they’re writing about.

“When the novel comes in, I go through it with an eye toward both rules/continuity and story development, then send the author revision notes. When the revised manuscript comes back, I edit it (along with Paizo Senior Editor Chris Carey), we get it all laid out and prettied up, then ship it off to Tor for production.”

From a more personal perspective, what were you able to take from the experience of writing your first novel, Death’s Heretic, into writing your second, The Redemption Engine?

Buy Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter

“Confidence and fear. The former came from the fact that I had empirical proof that I could, in fact, write a novel. That’s worth a lot. At the same time, I had a terrible fear of what I call Sophomore Album Syndrome — Death’s Heretic had gotten some nice accolades (hooray!), but how could I have any assurance that I could repeat that magic trick? As my wife is fond of reminding me, when I finished The Redemption Engine, I said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s great, but it’s at least good — and it’s done.” (As it turns out, the audience has near-universally declared it better than my first book, so I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson there.)

“But to dig a little deeper into that confidence part — I think that seeing a book all the way through its life cycle erases a lot of the mystery from the process, and that’s a huge boon. Before I started editing novels, I was terribly intimidated — how could I possibly write a story that long? But then I spent a few years looking behind the curtain — helping authors craft pitches and outline stories and patch up broken manuscripts — and realized that books don’t spring fully formed from your head. You assemble the bits and pieces, and sometimes a part’s missing or wrong and needs to be replaced, and suddenly this doesn’t seem like the Great Mystery of Art, but rather a craft you practice. That gave me the confidence to start Death’s Heretic, and knowing that I could finish Death Heretic gave me the confidence to plug away at The Redemption Engine, a thousand words at a time, for the two years it took to complete.

“One note about that, though. I wrote a bit on Chuck Wendig’s blog about things I learned writing The Redemption Engine, but I want to reiterate the most important one, which is that at some point I’m going to die. And when I die, it won’t matter if I’ve published one book or a hundred, because I’ll be dead. That realization, while morbid, really helped free me from the frantic race to write as much as possible. Writing professionally is an awesome job, but it’s still a job, and that old adage about how nobody dies wishing they’d spent more time at the office still applies. So I encourage everyone to look askance at the advice that says writers must sacrifice for their art. As soon as I gave up that constant nagging voice saying “I should be writing” and allowed myself to wholeheartedly embrace other activities and adventures, I started enjoying life a lot more — and found that I still got almost as much writing done.”

How does being the series editor affect your approach to writing your novels? Do you get carte blanche approval to do whatever you want? ;)

Buy The Redemption Engine by James L. Sutter

“If only! While it’s true that being one of the setting’s creators means I’m generally trusted to play with the most beloved toys, I’m still absolutely beholden to my colleagues and the audience, and I take that responsibility seriously. For instance, in The Redemption Engine, the heroes spend a lot of time in Heaven and Hell, both places that Paizo Editor-in-Chief Wes Schneider is deeply invested in, so he and I spent a lot of time talking about them. And Creative Director James Jacobs and I have a long-standing and good-natured argument about the alignment system, primarily because I love to subvert it and introduce moral ambiguity. So when I decided to put angels and devils in my relativist blender, I knew that I’d need to craft things just right to make something that felt good to both of us. And of course, I don’t edit or develop my own novels — my colleagues have been more than happy to step in and hold my feet to the fire!

“What does it mean to be an atheist in a world where gods are empirically real? What are the moral implications of magically turning an evil person good?”

“But yeah, all of that aside — it’s really fun to get to cherry-pick creatures and locations that I’ve created, as well as those of my colleagues. My novels tend to start out as questions about the setting — ‘What does it mean to be an atheist in a world where gods are empirically real?’ ‘What are the moral implications of magically turning an evil person good?’ — and then quickly become an effort to shove in as many toys as possible. Did that central question of Death’s Heretic *require* a planes-hopping adventure full of snarky psychopomps and singing chaos snakes and robot cops and gravity-reversing jellyfish? Of course not. But those things are awesome, and I figure that the best way to ensure an audience has fun reading a book is for me to have fun writing it.”

It strikes me that your many roles at Paizo — editor, author, world designer, gamer — revolve around collective, collaborative storytelling. What are your thoughts on collaborative storytelling, and its effect on linear (novels) and non-linear (RPG campaigns) narratives?

“Collaborative storytelling — collaborative anything, really — is a blessing and a curse. While it’s easy to get exhausted or frustrated by having to advocate for your ideas or accommodate others’, I find that as long as you’ve got the right crew of collaborators, the final result is always better than the individuals could create on their own. I encounter that all the time, whether it’s working with my colleagues to continue building the Pathfinder setting, advising authors on ways to patch holes in their novel outlines, or simply getting feedback from friends on my own stories.

“RPGs are collaborative storytelling in its purest form. Everybody gets to contribute, and the story can go anywhere. That’s the fun — that sense of opportunity, the chance for everyone (including the Game Master) to be surprised. At the same time, there’s a reason why direct adaptations or journals of RPG campaigns rarely make good novels: they’re meandering, full of dead-ends and side treks that were fun in the moment but of limited interest to those not playing — in other words, they’re non-linear, just like real-life. As humans, we live non-linearly, so we tend to want our stories to be linear — it’s that idea that there’s a point to things, or at least a climax, that keeps us engaged.

“Role Playing Games are collaborative storytelling in its purest form.”

“Man, good thing we’re reaching the end of the interview — this is getting pretty meta. Thanks to everyone who made it this far in James and Aidan’s Story Philosophy 101 — office hours are 11:00 to 7:00 on Twitter, and your term papers will account for 100% of your final grade.”

It was a pleasure to have you, James. I won’t mention to your readers that this interview is almost long enough to count as a novelette.

“That’s okay — blog posts are paid by the word, right?

*someone passes in a note from off-camera*

“Wait, really? How come there are so many bloggers, then? The internet is so confusing!”

Now, excuse me while I wander off to badger my friends into starting up a new Pathfinder campaign. There’s a gravity-reversing jellyfish who needs dealt with.

“Thanks again, Aidan! This was a blast!”