CR 044: A.E. Osworth on Using Anger to Fuel Creativity
The author discusses their profoundly unique anti-Harry Potter novel, “Awakened.”
When A.E. Osworth writes a story, they don’t hold back. Awakened, their sophomore novel (after 2021’s fantastic We Are Watching Eliza Bright), follows a coven of trans witches who use their magical powers to fight a nefarious AI that threatens the world at large. Dedicated to “everyone who feels betrayed by J.K. Rowling,” Awakened, Osworth says, was written in opposition to Harry Potter. Set in the very un-Potter world of NYC, Awakened has video game and tarot card references, rampant F-bombs, sex, drag shows, seances, and an incredibly creepy AI villain called the Hex. Clever, funny, and wholly original, Awakened is generating serious buzz. Publishers Weekly has described it as “good fun,” Kirkus calls it “a charming, magical romp,” and AP News refers to it as “a breath of fresh air.”
I recently chatted with Osworth over Zoom about the book’s inception, the use of tarot cards in writing, and why they will never, ever plot out a novel.
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SANDRA EBEJER: Your first novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, began as your graduate thesis. How did Awakened come about?
A.E. OSWORTH: This book came about because I got really mad. Again. That seems to be how my books come about. In this case, the thing I was really mad about was J.K. Rowling. This is a children’s book author who has written a series that I used to love, but that upon inspection as an adult is a pretty morally bankrupt series. I was so enamored with these books growing up that it felt like a real betrayal when J.K. Rowling started trying to drive anti-trans policy in the U.K. and across the world, so I decided to write against Harry Potter. [Awakened] is not a school story. In fact, there is no school to learn magic. Where all the kids in Harry Potter are kids, we’ve got adults here. We only have one kid in the book and that storyline is quite an adult storyline. It’s really about parenting and family more than it is about coming of age. And where all the witches and wizards in Harry Potter are cis and largely straight, there are no cis characters in Awakened. They’re all trans. So, those were my resistances.
There are tons of other things that went into this. I am a kitchen sink guy, so when I get an idea, I am putting everything that’s occurring to me into that book. This was actually [inspired by] a story that I read on Cracked, of all places, more than a decade ago, which was about a myth—but it really happened—called The Shard of Harry in Asheron’s Call, which is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. It was about a crystal shard that players sacrificed their characters to in the game that refused to power down, and they actually did have to beat it in their own game. They failed once and then beat it the second time, and only because they got extremely lucky. They could not turn it off. It wouldn’t turn off. So that idea has been rattling around in my head forever.
With the AI aspect of [Awakened], I used a really rudimentary AI to write my AI villain. It’s called Botnik Voicebox. It’s not complex; it’s not slick. If we think of something like ChatGPT as a Ferrari, Botnik Voicebox is a skateboard with one square wheel. It is so janky. I wanted it to fail worse than I was failing, so I fed it a corpus that I designed. The thing about using something really janky is that you have total control over the corpus, whereas with a pre-trained transformer, you don’t know what’s in it. You can only guess, because it has billions of data points, rather than 40,000. So I built a corpus of Arthurian legend, Machiavelli, the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. I also did spam text messages to make it fail harder. I found a database of spam text messages and I stuck that in, too. So it does very strange things.
What was interesting about the AI stuff is because I wasn’t using something pre-trained, I was doing basically what is an autocomplete keyboard. I still had a lot of agency in building those sentences, and I was essentially getting this randomness injected into my writing process and writing in response to the things that the Hex was saying. It felt exactly the same as what I was doing for the other characters. They were generated by tarot card pulls. The characters were all 10-card spreads done in December 2019, right before I started writing. And it was just writing in response to these stochastic mechanisms the whole time. So it’s a responsive book. It’s a resistance book. I’m writing against things and toward things that are happening around me pretty explicitly. It’s a long answer for “where did the book come from” because I put everything in.
You mentioned tarot cards. You are the second author I’ve interviewed who used tarot cards to develop some aspect of their novel. How did you rely on them in Awakened?
For the past decade, I have been into tarot readings. My spiritual practice, if I can be said to have one, is to pull a card in the morning for my day. It’s something that I use a lot in my life, and it’s amazing to use for writing, because whatever your feelings are about magic or divination or spirituality, what we have here is 78 archetypes, which are just story ingredients. That’s it. A deck of story ingredients, very easily accessible with a lot of documentation on the internet and in books that you can access to help scaffold a process, particularly when folks have trouble starting. Now, I have no trouble starting, but it’s still fun as hell to use something that is almost a prompt generator. It gives you a creative restraint to work with that then you get to exercise your brain into weird places. Like, I don’t think [the character] Mary Margaret would have stolen a car, for example, had I not pulled the chariot. That was where the car theft scene came from.
Awakened has so many different components—magic, drama, romance, artificial intelligence. Was it plotted out in advance?
Nope. I can’t do it. I cannot plan. If I plan a book, it will never happen. My favorite part of writing is discovering what is happening and I like surprising myself with those things, so I can’t plan. What it means—and this is what I tell my students all the time—is that I have to be okay throwing out 20,000 words and feeling nothing. And that’s fine, because that is actually quicker, more efficient, more enjoyable, easier for me to do than planning a book in advance. Even if it means I’m writing more words, I don’t cut any time [by plotting]. I don’t make myself more efficient by doing something that I hate. [Laughs] So I have to do it this way and then just eat stuff when it doesn’t work.
There were two false starts on this book before 2020, at 20,000 words a piece, and I threw both of them out. Nothing made it. And this book, I think, was 135,000 words. So that means 35,000 words came out of it. If you are a pantser, you just have to be chill with that. And I am chill with it because everything counts. I can’t have written this book without throwing it out twice before. I had to do those two in order to do this one. Because I learned a lot about what the book was, about what my skills were, and about what skills I had to develop when I false started twice.
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Who are some of your influences? Who do you turn to when you need inspiration?
I love writing against something, so as much as it pains me to say, Harry Potter is absolutely an influence, but because I am expressly pushing Harry Potter away. I made opposite choices. I made choices toward Tamora Pierce, who is another children’s fantasy author. So if I’m positioning myself in between those I am going toward Tamora Pierce with Circle of Magic and Tortall and away from J.K. Rowling. In terms of formative fantasy books, those are the stars in the constellation.
In terms of adult fantasy novels, I took a lot of inspiration from Terry Pratchett, particularly the idea of ultra omniscience in the narrator. Though I took a very different tactic in terms of who my narrator is, which I’m trying not to spoil throughout this interview because it is my favorite. My favorite thing in this book is the narrator and who the narrator is.
Sentence-wise, what’s really weird is that, given the modernity and the contemporality of my chosen subject matter—I talk a lot about computers and video games, and I have some ultra-modern language in here—a lot of influences for both Eliza and this one are classics. Whenever I’m operating with texting, emails, or Tinder profiles, I’m actually looking to Jane Austen for those. Craft wise—it pains me to say Proust, but I love a long sentence. And I know that I do because I read my own audiobook, and a couple times I was like, “Osworth! Hemingway from now on!” [Laughs] I love starting a journey with a sentence and sticking with that journey for the whole sentence. I’ve read Proust in French and English, and I find that that inclination to wend gets into my books. Maybe I will be totally different now that I’ve read it out loud myself and recorded it myself and know exactly how hard that is to do. Maybe that will impact me.
In terms of music, I have an Awakened playlist, and there are some things that made it entirely wholesale into the text. I know JR JR did. That’s the record I listen to most mornings, and it’s referenced when they’re in [the character] Mia’s house. There’s a song by L Divine that made it wholesale into the text when we’re in Cowboy Jacqueline’s. There’s a song called “Anxiety” by Jupita. [The character] Wilder has quite a lot of anxiety. Oh, there’s a lot of Florence & The Machine on here. I am big on Florence & The Machine. “Cassandra” made it into the text, particularly when it comes to what we can divine and how we’re believed or not believed when we speak. Those are all the big influences on this book.
The world is obviously a mess at the moment. On one hand, anti-trans policies are taking hold all over the world, while on the other, we’re seeing more books and works of art that are telling trans stories or have trans protagonists. As a trans author, does the release of this book feel any different than the release of your first novel?
It is a huge year for trans authorship. Denne Michele [Norris has] two books, because she’s debuting her novel and she edited Both/And. Charlie Jane Anders is out. Harron Walker is out. It is just massive. Everybody’s publishing right now. It’s great. It’s amazing. New book from Isaac Fellman, too. The thing is, books take years to make, so all of these were purchased a couple of years ago and now they’re coming out. I’m afraid that nothing’s getting purchased this year because it’s a different world and we’re going to see a swing back to white men writing white men mediocrely and that being the focus. I think what we’re seeing now is not the result of right now. I hope it can carry us through, because I really, truly believe that fiction means something and matters and drives culture. I love saying that fiction is experimentation with imaginary consequences, and that’s true inside the book, but works of fiction have real consequences and real impacts in our world. I’m hoping that the absolute wealth that we’re seeing this year from trans authors—and it is truly so good out there, and for queer fiction, too—actually does impact how we’re thinking and speaking over the course of the next couple of years, because now it’s in vogue to hate trans people again, so that allyship is really flimsy because it’s only a performance, by and large. People want to be seen as good people, and now good people can hate trans people. I don’t know if I’m just being too anxious.
I don’t think you are. I am optimistic, maybe naively, that things will get better. Then again, I didn’t think it was going to get this bad, so I don’t know.
I mean, the thing is, things are also better right now, at the same time that they’re really bad. I’m having the best year of my life right now. I’m pregnant and I have a book coming out. My friendships and relationships are the healthiest and strongest they have ever been. Just because the world is on fire doesn’t mean we do not feel joy and we do not feel pleasure. I think it’s really important to remember that, particularly as a trans person living through this time, I don’t get to live through another time. I have to live my life right now. So, yes, it’s bad, but I can’t make that my whole life because I only get one.
Writing is not a glamorous or high-paying gig. You really need to have a “why” in order to stick with it. So, what is your “why” for writing?
This is the only thing I want to do. I think all the time about if I had a whole other lifetime, all of the other things that I would also enjoy doing. I would love to be a museum curator. That sounds great. I would love to join the circus. That also sounds fun. I almost did it. There are things that I would like to do, but the number one thing that I want to do all of the time is write. It is my favorite thing to do. I love experiencing my own brain this way. I love projecting my hallucinations into other people. [Laughs] That feels really fun, because they report back to me things that I never saw in there and that’s cool. Everything about this is so amazing.
And I work in a university. I have been a teacher for nearly as long as I’ve been a writer, because I feel called to teach, because I think everyone deserves an education that fosters this, even if they don’t do it professionally. Everyone deserves the education that not only allows for you to create but allows you to iterate. I could not do anything else with my time is why I do this. This is what I’m here for. This is what I’m meant to do. It might not be the thing that gets us through the apocalypse. Maybe I have to learn how to, I don’t know, hunt with a bow and arrow in the next 20 years of my life, but this is what I’m here for.
You’ve taught many writing classes; what is one piece of advice that you frequently give to your students?
I can give you my greatest hits, the things that I say in every class: Everything counts. So even if you feel like you are stuck and you are retreading the same territory, you have to do it in order to do the next thing that you’re going to do. Even if you spend a bunch of time researching something and it doesn’t go anywhere, actually it did, because you had to do it in order to get to the next thing. Also, all the weird shit you do in your life counts. I was not a tech person before I needed to get a job out of college. I got a job in the tech industry because it was available to me and because, it turns out, if you can communicate at all with another human being, they really need you in the tech industry. [Laughs] But I didn’t know anything about tech before then. And it has deeply impacted the art that I make. I write about computers and video games and nerd culture for that reason.
Next greatest hit: Community wins every time. Do not network like a Slytherin, network like a Hufflepuff, to yoink J.K. Rowling and take it for my own self. Your relationships are what get you ahead, and you shouldn’t form your relationships to get you ahead. Be an earnest, honest person and seek connection with the people that you love connecting with and that is ultimately what will carry us all through. I say that not to make you transactional about your relationships, but to make you prioritize your earnest, honest relationships.
My other greatest hit: Storytelling is like the TARDIS. Do you watch Doctor Who?
No.
Okay. Some of my students do; some of them don’t. Doctor Who is a British television show. It’s sci-fi, and in it, the doctor is an alien who can travel through time and space. The doctor has a spaceship that is also a time machine called the TARDIS. The TARDIS, when you look at it from the outside, looks like a police call box, which is like a phone booth, and therefore the TARDIS looks like it can fit only one person. That’s what it’s meant for. One person only can fit in the TARDIS. Universally, every time someone enters the TARDIS, that’s not what it looks like on the inside. And the big running joke is that people who have never experienced the TARDIS before open the police call box, walk in, look around, and go, “It’s bigger on the inside!” They say it every time. It is the thing that repeats throughout the series. And the series is decades long, so it is very much an established catchphrase. Storytelling is like the TARDIS. You need to build it to fit only one person. It needs to be that specific. You cannot go for universality. You cannot go general. You need to get extremely, extremely specific, one person only, and somehow, due to the magic of storytelling, it is bigger on the inside. It fits so many more people when you get really granular and specific. I don’t know why. It just happens. Storytelling is like the TARDIS. There, those are my three greatest hits.
To learn more about AE Osworth, find them on Instagram.
To purchase Awakened, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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This is my kind of book! I'll check it out.