An Interview with Sean Williams
Sean Williams is an award-winning Australian speculative fiction author whose work spans science fiction, fantasy, and young adult fiction. He has authored more than 40 novels and 120 short stories.
Sean is best known for his Books of the Change and Books of the Cataclysm fantasy series, as well as his contributions to the Star Wars universe, including the Force Heretic trilogy and the bestselling novelization of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. His work often explores themes of identity, transformation, and the interplay between technology and humanity, earning him widespread acclaim and multiple awards, including the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Sean has also collaborated with fellow Australian author Garth Nix on the Troubletwisters series for younger readers.
In addition to his fiction, he is a prolific essayist and has contributed to discussions on writing and the speculative fiction genre. A passionate advocate for the arts, Sean resides in Adelaide, where he serves as an active member of the local literary community. When not writing, he enjoys music and is a self-proclaimed audiophile, often integrating his love of sound into his creative process. His dedication to storytelling and innovation has established him as one of Australia’s most versatile and celebrated authors.
Sean gave us some time out of his schedule to talk to us about his career, the Australian spec-fic scene, and any advice he had for emerging writers.
Q: What got you into writing in the first place?
Reading, basically, and being exposed to a wide range of stories from an early age. Both my parents were teachers, and they both loved books. Our house was full of them. The policy was that I could read anything I was strong enough to physically hold, and I appreciate that they trusted my ability to decide for myself what I was ready to read and what I wasn’t.
As a result, I read some enormous and very adult books when I was very young. Alex Haley’s Roots was one I remember clearly. It was quite eye-opening, for an eight-year-old, and not really my cup of tea, then.
I frequently turned to Agatha Christie novels (which my mother had plenty of) and novelisations of Doctor Who for journeys to other worlds.
I loved mysteries and sci-fi back then, and I still love them now. Reading them made me feel happier than anything else, and doing writing exercises in primary school taught me that I could get that same happy feeling from writing my own stories. I started doing that in Grade 3 and haven’t really looked back since.
Q: How has your career influenced your writing?
I can answer this question a number of different ways.
The first is to say that I’ve been extremely fortunate in that for most of my life my career has been writing, and the ways that being a career writer has influenced what I wrote are various and significant: in order to make a living in the publishing industry, it’s necessary to keep abreast of sales, trends, opportunities, and so on, mainly by keeping in touch with the people who work in the industry. Ideas are cheap, and at any given time I could write one of several different things, so the choice of what to write is often driven by what might sell.
But I can honestly say I’ve never written anything I didn’t want to write, because where’s the fun in that? Writing a novel is hard work; I’m far too lazy to do that just for the money. I have a long list of novels that I might have written, and might yet still write, if the conditions are right.
I could also answer this question by looking at the many part-time jobs I had, back when I was starting out, or at the job I currently have (Discipline Lead of Creative Writing at Flinders University). Or I could look at various studies I’ve undertaken at university and elsewhere, since education is a kind of job. All these things feed into what I write, how I write, and who I write for in many different ways.
These days, I can afford to be bit more experimental because I don’t need to rely on sales to put food on the table. That has made me slower. But that’s okay. With sixty books under my belt, I feel I’ve earned a bit of a rest from that particular treadmill.
Q: How do you find time to write?
One doesn’t find time to write: one makes time to write. Basically, I push everything else I can out of the way until there’s space to write, and then I do it. It’s harder now, with a university job to juggle, but it’s entirely possible. Like a lot of writers, I find time in the mornings when everyone’s asleep, or on the weekends. Or in tiny slices of time between obligations: it’s amazing what you can achieve in fifteen minutes.
Q: Are there any particular authors you look up to?
So, so many. The authors I read when I was young still cast long shadows: I mentioned Agatha Christie, but didn’t name Terrance Dicks (author of many of my favourite Doctor Who novels), and there was also Susan Cooper, Ursula K Le Guin, Alan Garner, Alan D. Foster, and Tolkien, of course.
I became a big fan of the usual suspects (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) in my early teens, and then moved on to Larry Niven, Bob Shaw, Anne McCaffrey. I admire all of these, and it’s a shame that I think only one of them is still alive.
Among living authors, well, there are too many to mention and I’m afraid I’ll offend someone! Suffice it to say that I read widely and try to read well. I also prioritise books by authors who are women or belong to minorities, because they’ve been disadvantaged in the industry for so long. Their viewpoints are incredibly powerful, after a lifetime of reading so many books by white men.
“I find time…in tiny slices of time between obligations: it’s amazing what you can achieve in fifteen minutes.”
Q: What are you reading, listening to, or watching at the moment?
As I type this, I’m hanging out for season two of Severance, which I think is the best speculative fiction for years, on either small or big screens. I’m listening to Deepspace’s Neon Blue Utopia, which would make a great soundtrack to a cyberpunk project. And I have Yellowface by R F Kuang lined up to start tonight, for something a bit different.
Q: What is your approach to writing short fiction, as opposed to novels? How do you start?
Both start with an idea: for me, that’s where every creative project begins. It could be something conceptual I want to explore, but it could also be a technique or a constraint, or even just a tiny fragment of wordplay. It varies. When I can marry that idea to a character and a conflict, I feel like it’s starting to become something I might want to write, but even then it’s still only theoretical. I’m not ready to start a short story until I’ve got the voice in my head, which might take a few goes until I’ve got that right. Once I can get a first page down then I reckon I’m good to go. Even then, though, I’ll wait until I know the ending before starting in earnest. It helps me to have something to aim for—particularly with a novel. I’ve learned from too many fun beginnings that good endings aren’t guaranteed. I reserve the right to change my mind about the ending en route, but I rarely do.
The big difference for me between writing short stories and novels is the editing process. Getting the words right is important for both, of course, but the shorter a text, the more critical every word, every punctuation mark, becomes, and so I spend more time at the sentence level in shorts than I do in novels.
Flash fiction can be nightmarish: I’ve spent a week back-and-forthing with an editor over a single word. It wasn’t a disagreement; we just knew I hadn’t found exactly the right one just yet. One wrong word out of a hundred, or even fewer, can make the difference between success and failure on a creative level.
Q: Can you give us a few of your favourite pieces of short fiction that you’ve read over the years?
This is almost as hard to answer as the question about authors I look up to! There are so many great short stories. I read them in bursts, depending on what I’m writing at the time, as I’m very influenced by what I read. So I read shorts when I want to write a short, and when I do read shorts I tend to read single-author collections. Recently, I enjoyed S J Norman’s collection Permafrost, and I also really liked Helen Marshall’s Tomorrow’s Language and Lisa Hannett’s The Fortunate Isles.
Good short stories are so often about nailing the right length, and the novella “This is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone has really stuck in my mind as a good tale that doesn’t outstay its welcome. I love flash fiction, too, and one story I constantly come back to in the classroom is Angela Carter’s “The Snow Child”: no matter how many times I read it, I find something new to admire every time.
Q: What’s one trope you’re tired of seeing at the moment?
I don’t have a beef with any particular trope. I am tired of seeing any tropes used badly, though.
Q: What’s one thing you wish people wrote about more?
Matter transmitters. I think they’re the coolest trope in science fiction (and I have a PhD in the subject to back me up) and I honestly feel as though it’s an idea whose time is waiting to come. One day, an author or showrunner (or hell, an inventor) is going to prove that this neat idea is the one we’ve been waiting for our entire civilised existence, about which there’s an awful lot of interesting things to consider, beyond the obvious, and then I’ll be satisfied.
Q: You’ve written both short stories and novels. Can you talk about the difference between the two formats and how they inform each other?
Let’s see. Speaking from my own experience, here . . . I learned structure from writing novels and style from writing short stories. Also, I learned the art of finishing things from writing short stories, but the necessity of sticking at things from writing novels. Short stories got me noticed as a writer, but novels made my career sustainable. Each format is valuable at different times in a writer’s career, and I think it’s incredibly shortsighted for wannabe novelists not to at least try their hands at shorter formats. It can be educational in lots of ways.
As with many things to do with writing, we have a situation here where opposites can be true. Short stories are exercises in nuances and incompleteness, while novels usually need to feel complete. At the same, short stories usually stand alone, but novels can lead the reader towards a sequel or another book in a series. Somehow, we the author must negotiate this without looking too confused for our audience.
Q: You’ve written books by yourself and also with other authors (Garth Nix, Shane Dix, etc). What’s it like collaborating with other writers? What’s the process like and how did you find it?
I like collaborating and I like not collaborating. There are pros and cons to both.
When I write on my own, I can get tangled up in my own ideas and feelings, and that can lead to work that isn’t as polished or as insightful as I would like it to be. It can also be lonely. Collaboration knocks me out of my usual way of doing things, and that’s incredibly valuable. Brainstorming is so much more fun, too, when someone else is involved. That’s pretty much how all my collaborations began: by sitting with a friend and shooting ideas back and forth. It’s not as big a step as it might seem to actually take one or more of those ideas and work on it becoming a finished thing, together.
On a practical level, there are lots of different ways to collaborate. I’ve written about some of them for the Conversation.
“…it’s incredibly shortsighted for wannabe novelists not to at least try their hands at shorter formats.”
I like to write first drafts, so that’s a big thing I bring to most of my working relationships, but I wouldn’t dream of even starting a draft without everyone involved knowing where the story is going and what it’s doing.
It’s important to all be on the same page, and the only way to be sure of that is to communicate with each other, and to keep communicating, because things always change en route. Communication is so important, because even though the goal of writing collaboratively is to write something, along the way you also end up building or expanding on a relationship. For me, that’s usually been a positive thing, but I’ve seen collaborative teams end up in disastrous, genuinely hurtful places. That’s no fun. So I choose my collaborators carefully, and I try my best to do right by them, but even so things don’t always work out. It’s a gamble—like writing solo.
Q: You’ve written several books in the Star Wars Universe. What’s it like creating stories in someone else’s world with particular rules, themes, and story beats to hit? Was the process both difficult and enlightening?
Yes, both! Writing in a franchise I love is a great pleasure, but it can also be a great chore. You’re mindful of everyone else who has a stake in the outcome, from the copyright owner to the reader, and you’re usually the last in the chain to be told anything. I’ve had to write whole novels in four weeks because other creators in the chain needed more time—but that can be an adrenaline rush, so this isn’t a complaint. It’s nice to be so completely immersed in the world, and it’s just a fact of doing business in this space. I like it, and I would do it again, but I would go in with my eyes open, for sure.
My inner fanboy does handstands every time I get to write lines for Darth Vader, say, or the Doctor, so it more than evens out.
Q: World building is an important element of many speculative fiction stories. Can you discuss how you approach worldbuilding with examples from your work?
Some books require immense amounts of worldbuilding. For the Orphans series I cowrote with Shane Dix, I spent a very large amount of time inventing a whole new system of standard units while also building a 3-D model of nearby stars—the kind of map you can probably download in seconds today. This mixture of the new and the real helped me get a sense of the world and of the story that would take place within it. It’s the same for everything I’ve written: there’s something invented rubbing shoulders with something real, and both need to be built for the reader with great care, which takes work on my part, whether it’s designing the vast future history of Evergence and Astropolis or the more intimate landscapes of the Books of the Change.
I used to think that world-building was the secret sauce that made speculative fiction unique among all forms of literature, but I don’t think that anymore. The kinds of worlds we build are often very different from the everyday, for sure, but the act of building worlds out of words just as important for romance writers, or crime writers, or literary writers, or whatever. Every time a reader picks up a book, they are choosing to step into another place, and whether it’s somewhere real or fantastic, whether it’s somewhere they’ve visited before or not, it’s the author’s job to capture the best facets of that world in the best possible way to tell the story the reader deserves in exchange for their time and money. There may be some broad differences one could point to, but I personally see as many differences between individual works within a given genre as between works in different genres, so claiming this as a special case for speculative fiction feels a bit disingenuous. Even magic systems don’t belong entirely to fantasy: anyone writing historical fiction or fiction set in some parts of the present-day world must invest in understanding and portraying the magic system we call religion. What’s the difference? I don’t see it anymore.
I’ve come to this conclusion after working on two mimetic novels of my own, i.e. books with nothing made-up in them at all, and therefore, in theory, requiring no worldbuilding. One is Impossible Music, and the other is the novel I’m writing right now. Impossible Music required an immense amount of research and great care in terms of representation, not just of Deaf culture but also of Adelaide and the people who live and work there. It was incredibly hard work, immensely satisfying work, and I’m going through it all again now. It’s so much easier, in some ways, to just make stuff up; I didn’t realise how lucky I had it! But that’s a false feeling too.
Whether a world is real or imagined, or a mixture of the two, every writer must put in the hours (days, weeks, months, years) building it right.
“The best ways to turn a rejection into an acceptance are by finding the right market or by writing something better. Everything else is pointless.”
Q: What was the one moment that made you feel like a Real Author™?
There have been lots. But define “Real Author™”. It’s a moving target. Well, it’s certainly moved for me down the years. At first, it was to get a story published. Then to be nominated for an award. Then to win an award. Then to have a novel published. Then to have a novel published overseas. Then to be translated into another language. Then to be earning enough money from writing to chuck in all the part-time jobs and do nothing else. I did all of those within ten years of dropping out of uni to try my hand at becoming a “Real Author™”, and I’ve been coming up with new metrics ever since, like being a #1 New York Times bestseller, or having my work optioned for film and TV, or whatever.
Between the industry constantly changing and Imposter Syndrome, I doubt I’ll ever feel like I’ve solidly hit any target—but that’s good. It’s helpful to not feel too settled. It keeps the job interesting, and keeps me learning.
I have my first poetry collection coming out this year, and that definitely feels like a “Real Author™” kind of moment.
Q: How do you beat writer’s block?
By writing something. Anything. No matter how terrible I think it is. I enjoy writing, so if something is getting in the way, the best thing I can do is remind myself that, hey, let’s get on with it and I’ll be fine. No hurdle is insurmountable. Unless it’s physically or psychologically impossible to write, of course—I don’t mean to diminish any crises of those sorts. I’ve suffered from both kinds.
Sometimes you just need a break, and it’s important to learn how to tell the difference between that and something you can push through.
Q: How do you handle rejections?
By remembering that they are normal, and expected, and a sign that I’m taking chances with new things. I had one the other day. It stung, no denying that, and I would very much rather the piece had sold, but I can’t get hung up on it. If I did, what would be the point? The best ways to turn a rejection into an acceptance are by finding the right market or by writing something better. Everything else is pointless.
Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d like to give to new writers who are eager to break into the speculative fiction world?
Don’t just read speculative fiction. That’s always my first piece of advice. The second piece is to write as often as you can, on many different projects. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Not many writers succeed at the first thing they try, and even if they do few are happy doing only that thing forever. Get used to trying different things as early as you can, and you’ll be better prepared to deal with an industry that demands great adaptability of nearly all its authors.
You can find more advice from me here, also at the Conversation.
Q: Is there something about the industry that you wish you knew before you got involved?
The only thing that comes to mind is how interminable the waiting can be. It’s much faster now, without postage factored in, but it can still feel like forever, those gaps between submission and response, completion and publication, hitting the bookshelf and reading reviews. Each one can feel an anxious eternity.
Q: What is the biggest difference between writing a novel in 1999 and writing one in 2025?
That question makes me feel old—even older when I remember that my first book came out in 1995, and I finished my first novel in 1983. Yikes!
It’s a good question, though. I went into writing those early novels without any immediate connection to the publishing industry. I was just a young guy in Adelaide, writing my hardest (on a typewriter in 1983, a PC in 1993) and hoping my damnedest that the words on the page would be any good. Only when it was written did I start trying to reach out and meet people, for advice, mainly, but also for an understanding that what I was doing wasn’t completely bonkers. Meeting people was a lot harder before the internet came along—which is not to say that it’s easier now. There are a lot of scams and bullshit artists out there, more than in my day, which I guess relates to there being more ways to publish, including respectable self-publication, and everything seeming both endlessly possible and endlessly confusing at the same time. In the 90s, I was staring at a monolithic edifice and wishing for a chisel.
I do feel incredibly sorry for young writers who want to be trad-published, these days. It’s very hard to make the leap into the bestseller echelon, and perhaps just as hard to stay there. There are no mid-tier safety nets to catch someone falling, or to help someone coming up the ladder to learn their chops. It feels very all-or-nothing, which will excite some, dismay others. Being successfully published has always been a challenge, but today’s challenges feel particularly grim.
Q: What changes have you seen in Australian speculative fiction since you started writing?
It’s a lot more diverse than it used to be, which is great. The field is “leakier” now too, by which I mean we see spec-fic appearing in literary mags and imprints more often than in the past: there’s an acceptance of different kinds of storytelling now that might feel conditional and might not always be very well informed but at least exists.
But I’m talking about the industry: do you mean what’s being written about, by Australians? I don’t see that this has changed terribly much, in broad thematic terms. More is being set in locations that are recognisably home, to my eyes, and that’s encouraging. Not that we need to limit our explorations of the possible to more-or-less mimetic representations of the here and/or now, or anything like that, in order to write spec-fic that is identifiably Australian. But I think we’ve lost some of the past’s cultural cringe that kept us looking elsewhere for validation or market-share or whatever it is we want our stories to earn us. We live in Australia, and we are Australians, so we should feel to respond to that (or push against that) any way we want.
Q: Is there any work you have coming up that you would like to speak about?
I’m working on a middle-grade novel that’s inspired by the time I spent in Antarctica: it’s only marginally speculative, but it is set on the closest place on Earth to Mars, and is written from the perspective of a kid’s dead sister, so who knows? We’ll see what it looks like when it’s done. I’ve also got the poetry book I mentioned (two poetry books, actually) coming out this year from Brain Jar Press, and I’m super excited about those. To be honest, a lot of my creative energy (and narrative drive) goes into music, these days. It’s a relief from writing and teaching about writing to make art in a field that doesn’t rely on words to tell a story, and my most recent album on Projekt Records, Distant Objects in Soft Focus, definitely comes from that need. I love the way ambient music encourages us to bring our own stories into safe spaces. Isn’t that what all of us, writers and non-writers, want in the end?