Q&A Excerpt: Fonda Lee

Fonda Lee was a 2024 guest lecturer for Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. Fonda is the author of the epic fantasy Green Bone Saga, consisting of the novels Jade City, Jade War, and Jade Legacy, along with a prequel novella The Jade Setter of Janloon and a short story collection, Jade Shards. She is also the author of the science fiction novels Zeroboxer, Exo and Cross Fire. Her most recent work is the fantasy novella, Untethered Sky.

Fonda is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, and a five-time winner of the Aurora Award (Canada’s national science fiction and fantasy award), as well as a multiple finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Oregon Book Award. Her novels have garnered multiple starred reviews and appeared on Best of Year lists from NPR, Barnes & Noble, Syfy Wire, and others. Jade City has been translated in a dozen languages, named to TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Fantasy Books of All Time, and optioned for television development.

She has also written acclaimed short fiction and been an instructor at writing workshops including Clarion West, Viable Paradise, and Aspen Words. Fonda is a former corporate strategist and black belt martial artist who loves action movies and Eggs Benedict. Born and raised in Canada, she currently resides in the Pacific Northwest.

In this excerpt transcribed from a question-and-answer session, Fonda talks about taking a break between finishing the first draft and starting revisions and how to approach revisions on novels with multiple points of view.

QUESTION: I know everyone’s different, but I’m curious: when you talk about taking a break between first draft and revision, which makes a lot of sense to me, how long do you find works for you? And do you try to step away from all writing, or do you let your brain go somewhere else?

FL: That’s a great question. I usually try to step away for at least two weeks. And there are times that I have to step away for much longer because I need to work on another project. Like Jade City, for example—I wrote the first draft, and then it went into a drawer for about five or six months because I had another book that I had to work on and complete in that time period. And the longer time away actually really helped because, at that point, I’d almost completely dissociated from the first draft. It was easier to come back and really cut into it.

I’ve also had projects where I started writing it, and then it stalled out, and it was months or even years before I came back to it. But I would say it really depends on what you need. If you feel like, “Hey, this first draft, I can tell it’s pretty clean. I know it’s hanging together pretty well,” maybe you only need a week or two away, and then you’re ready to go back in. If you’re like, “This is a hot mess. I do not know where to go with this,” you might need to completely step away from it and work on something else.

I never say step away from writing altogether because I think it’s important to at least be maintaining a creative habit, even if it’s not working on that project. Maybe it’s brainstorming another project entirely, or maybe it’s working on a short story. Short stories are great for me as palate cleansers between book projects, or even between the first draft of a book and tackling the revision of a book, because they are something that is creative. It’s still working my writing muscles, but you’ve got to take a break from leg day to do arms, you know.

QUESTION: My question has to do with revising multiple POV stories. Do you do a revision pass where you focus on just one character?

FL: I definitely have done that because it’s easier to handle. Remember earlier when I said eat the elephant one bite at a time? It’s easier if you can break your revision down into some manageable chunks, and they can be chunked in whatever way feels most intuitive to you.

I had a novel where different POV characters were in different places, so it made more sense for me to focus revision on one POV character at a time. The book I’m working on right now, I’m just doing one POV character. I’m revising that POV character all the way through because that’s the one that I’m rewriting. I’m changing his personality. So I need to lock him down first, and then I can go back to the other POV character.

Another one of my books, Jade Legacy, was 250,000 words long, but it covered thirty years, so the way for me to break that down was in acts. So I was like, this first section of the novel until the first big time skip is about the length of a novella, and I can focus on getting the revision done on that before I move on to the next section.

So it depends on what’s the most intuitive way to handle revision. Sometimes you have different timelines. Whatever the natural way is to divide it so that your brain has to flip around less, that’ll help you in revision. Because a large barrier in revision is when you’re trying to change gears, and that can really slow you down because your reader can switch gears from one POV to the other relatively easy, but once you’re in the voice of a character, it’s easier to stay in the voice of that character.

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for clarity.