Q&A Excerpt: Arley Sorg

Arley Sorg was a 2024 guest lecturer for Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. Arley is an associate agent at kt literary. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist and a three-time Locus Award Finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards. Arley is senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He has been a guest critiquer for the Odyssey Workshop, was the week five instructor for the 2023 Clarion West workshop, and is a Guest of Honour for the 2024 in-person Can*Con, among other teaching and speaking engagements. Find him at arleysorg.com, his Twitter, Facebook, or Blue Sky. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

In this excerpt transcribed from a question and answer session, Arley talks about whether short fiction credits will help you sell novel-length work and the importance of writing what you love rather than writing to trends.

QUESTION: I dabble with book writing, but I’m mostly writing short stories to help myself learn discrete aspects of the craft. My thinking was, if I had a body of published short stories, that might make me more credible in the eyes of an agent or editor down the road. So I was wondering how viable an approach that is nowadays, and if it is, is there a ballpark number of pro publications I should have before starting that agent hunt?

AS: There are definitely agents and houses that will be impressed by that. And there are definitely agents and houses that do not care, that will feel like, “Short fiction is not novel markets. We do not care. We’re Penguin Random House. We’re gonna get your book in bookstores, and those people in bookstores do not read Clarkesworld, so who cares that you sold to Clarkesworld. We want to know if we can sell your book.”

I have lots of friends who did that, where they came up in short fiction first, and then they sold books. And I have friends who don’t write short fiction at all and are award-winning novelists. So you can do it either way.

I would say, if you enjoy writing short fiction, then you might as well. But if you don’t enjoy writing short fiction, I would never tell someone you have to write short fiction in order to sell a book because it’s not true. You don’t have to write short fiction in order to sell a book. But that is how some people have done it. It has worked for some people. And I personally have friends who are agents who have signed people on their short fiction. I have a friend who signed two people on short fiction. Those people have not even written a book yet, so that is also a thing that happens.

But Clarkesworld, or even Asimov’s—if you take Asimov’s alone, they’re publishing like, what? A hundred-something stories a year, and how many of those authors are getting agent deals from the stories they’re selling? Not most of them. So even though you may hear, “Oh, this person did this,” that doesn’t mean it’s gonna work for everyone. So I’m a big believer in do what works for you. Do what you enjoy doing.

I love the idea of challenging yourself, the idea of practicing skills like N. K. Jemisin. She uses short fiction to test concepts. And then, if the concept works, she will write a book later on. So I love the idea of using short fiction to practice skills, or just because you love writing short fiction. But I don’t think that people should write short fiction if they really don’t want to.

I think people should experiment, so if you’re afraid of it, or if you’re not good at it, then do it and have fun. Just see what happens. Like Tochi Onyebuchi, for example, who’s another award-winning author—he finds short fiction very difficult, so he writes it very rarely. And he doesn’t enjoy writing it as much as novels, but he still does it from time to time, and he finds it useful. And his short fiction sells. And then his recent book, Goliath, was based on an earlier short story. Ellen Klages also did that. She wrote a short story in college, and then thirty years later she expanded it into a novel or a novella, and it won awards.

So, short fiction—I enthusiastically encourage people to mess with it and to enjoy it. But you don’t have to. Everyone has different paths to “success.”

QUESTION: My question’s about trends. I think there’s this tendency to say you want to follow your passions, but you also want to be aware of what the markets are doing, and at the same time you also don’t want write so much to a trend that you date yourself. So I’m curious what your thoughts are on this from the perspective of editing and helping writers through this process, and just kind of seeing the industry from your perspective?

AS: For me, I’m a big believer in write what you want to write. It doesn’t matter if it’s on trend or not. And there are plenty of writers who successfully write stuff that really isn’t on trend. Travis Baldree is a great example. If you had explained Travis Baldree’s book to me, I would have been like, “Definitely not gonna sell. Nobody cares. Nobody’s gonna buy it.” But look at Travis Baldree now! And what Travis Baldree does—when it came out, it was not a trend, and now it’s becoming a trend.

I think trends are cool to talk about, and I think they’re interesting. And I think that if you want to write to trend, you can. But I think that authors really should write what they’re passionate about, and make it as good as possible, and that is going to be more likely relevant than following trends, especially because trends come and go. Sometimes they stay longer, sometimes they don’t. Publication cycles are long, and there are plenty of other houses.

A lot of times, if you’re trying to write to trend, it comes out forced, it doesn’t come out legit. But maybe you’re excited. Maybe what you do is on trend. Maybe that’s what you write anyways, and that’s great. So write it. Maybe you’ve been writing romantasy for ten years, and now people are finally buying it. That’s great. Keep doing it. But if you don’t want to write romantasy, don’t write romantasy, because there are so many imprints, there are so many publishing houses, there are so many ways to get published. And I don’t think that anyone should do anything soul crushing just because they think it might give them a 5% better chance of selling. If you write a romantasy, I’m also gonna see five hundred other queries of romantasy. Is your romantasy great? Did you write a book that is awesome because you loved what you wrote? That’s what’s important.

I think trends are more important for agents and editors because when I represent a book, I have to sell it. When the editor acquires it, at most major houses, they have to sell it. So maybe an editor loves the book that I love, but that doesn’t mean that the house is gonna buy it. They have to sell it, and trends can be part of that equation. But I don’t think that it should be part of an author’s equation in terms of “What am I gonna write?” unless they just enjoy writing it anyways.

That’s my opinion. Write what you want to write. Just make it damn good.

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for clarity.