Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Kate Elliott! Her work includes the epic fantasy series Crossroads, the space opera series The Sun Chronicles, and the young adult fantasy series Court of Fives, to name a few of her many books. Her next novel, The Witch Roads, is described as the “fantastic first in a new duology…filled with rich worldbuilding, political intrigue, and themes of class and family secrets” in a starred review on Library Journal. Her newest book will be released on June 10, and the conclusion to this epic fantasy series, The Nameless Land, will follow on November 4. I’m thrilled she is here today to discuss facing questions about whether or not to keep writing and why in “If This Can’t Make Me Cry Anymore: Thoughts on Writing and Quitting.”

About The Witch Roads:

Book 1 in the Witch Roads duology, the latest epic novel by fan favorite Kate Elliott..

Status is hereditary, class is bestowed, trust must be earned.

When an arrogant prince (and his equally arrogant entourage) gets stuck in Orledder Halt as part of brutal political intrigue, competent and sunny deputy courier Elen—once a child slave meant to shield noblemen from the poisonous Pall—is assigned to guide him through the hills to reach his destination.

When she warns him not to enter the haunted Spires, the prince doesn’t heed her advice, and the man who emerges from the towers isn’t the same man who entered.

The journey that follows is fraught with danger. Can a group taught to ignore and despise the lower classes survive with a mere deputy courier as their guide?

If This Can’t Make Me Cry Anymore: Thoughts on Writing and Quitting
Kate Elliott

What is the artist’s journey? Why do creative people create what they do? How do they persist in creative work over years and even decades? When different individuals face a diverse array of barriers, obstacles, and (sometimes) sudden, catastrophic shock, what methods do they use to overcome these situations? How do they keep working?

Some people never have the time, chance, or opportunity to fully rise to the art and vision that exist within them. Entire books have been written about institutional and cultural barriers that block artists. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is a long essay written in the early 20th century about barriers for women trying to make art. Ursula Le Guin’s “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter” deals with similar themes from the perspective of the late 20th century, and Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, published in 2019, provides an essential look into the Nobel Prize–⁠winning Morrison’s thinking about art and culture.

But I want to talk here about work and art on a personal level.

To be clear, sometimes circumstances force a person to stop making art (whatever sort of art they may be creating). An artist may decide they need to take a break, or a pause, or even quit altogether if that seems to be the path they need to follow at any given time. Sometimes death or exceptional hardship make that decision for them.

But in other cases, artists struggle with the question: Should I keep working? And if so, why?

Why do we artists (in the largest sense of the word artist) do the work we do, often with little return or under great stress or surrounded by people or a society that tells us we ought not to do it, that we aren’t worth it, or the work isn’t worthwhile enough, that we ought to spend our time on something else? What if we start telling ourselves those same things? What of the stresses and strains across a career, which may be a career of rising success, or of success followed by a fall, or of failure followed by success, or (most commonly) a fairly modest but hopefully relatively steady creative journey that lasts a lifetime? Why do some people give up, or burn out, while others plug on?

The song “Black Swan” by Korean pop group BTS speaks to one aspect of this question: “They say my heart isn’t beating anymore, When I listen to music.”

The song was inspired by the Martha Graham quote: “A dancer dies twice—once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.” In “Black Swan,” the members of BTS ask themselves what happens if music no longer touches them:

If this can’t make me cry anymore
If this can’t make my heart tremble anymore
Maybe I’ll die like this

How can people go on creating in these circumstances? How can they find their way back?

A few writers I know have enjoyed pretty smooth sailing throughout their careers, but on the whole most writers I know have trudged through ups and downs. Martha Wells famously thought her career was over before breaking out into an international bestseller (and forthcoming Apple TV+ series!) with the Murderbot books. Malinda Lo published four YA novels, eked out another small deal while assuming these would likely be her final books, and then won the National Book Award for Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Other writers have had huge, splashy debuts and then more or less slipped away into obscurity soon afterward.

I am sure there are writers who are slackers and don’t work hard, and treat writing as a game, but I don’t know those people. The writers I know work hard, and often meet with poor sales and less publicity, and occasionally with modest success or a major triumph. But we keep working. Why? That’s the question I keep circling back to. Why?

I’ve had my ups and downs in publishing, and suffered through a couple of serious setbacks, and kept plugging along. My first published novel came out in December 1988, and I never thought of quitting even when a deal or a hope went wrong and I had to regroup. I always kept going, often through sheer cussedness and because I still had so many books I wanted to write.

In Spring 2022, for reasons I won’t go into detail about, I had a very upsetting publishing experience with FURIOUS HEAVEN (The Sun Chronicles 2). The experience was so discouraging and debilitating that it left me with a flinch reflex toward book three of the trilogy. By which I mean, every time I ventured to think about book three, I flinched. This is not a conducive emotion for productive writing.

For about a month, that spring, I thought I might as well stop writing. “What was the point, after all these years and so many books?” I asked myself. Was it worth it? If the thought of writing a book whose plot and characters I knew and loved made me flinch, why was I writing at all? Maybe it was better to just quit.

That’s a grim word: Quit.

But there I was, drained of hope and any sense of a future, of anticipation, for my art. This dreadful feeling ground on for weeks. “Is my lifelong love for story and writing finally over?” I wondered. I had thought I would never be over it.

As a last gasp, I poked through old folders. I always have a hodge-podge literary storeroom filled with fragments and partials and “first 5000 words” of possible stories and novels. Oftentimes I will write 5000 words of a “thing” and then a year later come back to it, when I need a break from my contracted work, and decide I should write it differently, from a different angle or with a different point-of-view character, because I’ve changed my mind about the character but not the setting, or the setting but not the characters. This ferment goes on constantly in my head. It’s part of how I keep things fresh.

So that April, 2022, I found scraps of a thing I had tried poking at from several different angles, and I poked at it again, with a new point-of-view character and some vague alterations of setting, although I wasn’t yet clear on the details of the setting. More or less, I began hiking into unknown territory.

And strangely, it was kind of fun. It was definitely more encouraging than flinching. So I wrote a little more. I showed the early chapters to my writers’ group, and they proved to be kindly enthusiastic. I thought to myself: “There is something sparking here, something that reminds me of why I write.”

But book three sat there, under contract, waiting. Publishers waiting. Readers waiting. Characters and plot waiting. Yet I flinched again. I was still hurting, it seems.

I finally said to myself, “Let me just write this other thing for a little while more, another week, a month at most.” Let’s call it “priming the pump.”

I started writing onward into the wilderness of a fantasy novel in a world I didn’t really know and with characters I was making up as I went along (I don’t normally work quite like this, but that’s a different essay). And something astonishing happened. The book kept going, and it kept going, and it kept going. In fact, it was rather as if a vision with the weight of a grand piano had dropped out of the sky and fallen into my head, a complete novel I hadn’t even known I had in me.

I wrote 240,000 words in six months. The story flowed out of me. What I realized was that I had given myself permission to make the love of writing the most important thing at this moment in my life, when I needed that as the driving force for my art. Had I kept trying to push against the flinch, I wouldn’t have written it. I wouldn’t have written anything. Is the Sun Chronicles book three delayed because of this? Yes, it is. But book three is half done now, and for all I know, I’d never have touched it if I hadn’t allowed myself to let the love and mystery of whatever art is, whatever compels me to write, to lead what I was doing.

Reader, I sold it, and revised it rather extensively. It became a duology: THE WITCH ROADS and THE NAMELESS LAND, coming this year, in June and November 2025, from Tor Books.

When people ask me what THE WITCH ROADS is about, I can talk about plot and character and world-building, and I’m happy to do so because I think it is a cool story and I adore the characters and setting.

But what I really want to say is that THE WITCH ROADS is the book that reignited my love of writing during a terrible period when I wondered if I should just quit.

And maybe that offers one answer (among many) to my question. Artists keep working because, so often, art is a gift.

Photo Credit: April Quintanilla Born in Iowa, Kate Elliott grew up in rural Oregon, where she learned early to clean out stalls and pitchfork manure, thus preparing her for adult life. She’s written epic fantasy (Crown of Stars, the Crossroads trilogy, Black Wolves), space opera Unconquerable Sun (gender-bent Alexander the Great in space), young adult fantasy (the Court of Fives trilogy), alt-history fantasy (Cold Magic), science fiction (the Novels of the Jaran, the Highroad trilogy), two novellas (Servant Mage and The Keeper’s Six), and even a few short stories (most recently in the collection The History of the World Begins in Ice). Fantasy duology The Witch Roads arrives in June and November 2025 from Tor Books. She answers the question “Where should I start with your novels” here (boy band style). You can find her on Bluesky at kateelliottsff.bsky.social While not writing, she’s either paddling outrigger canoes or spoiling her schnauzer Fingolfin, aka High King of the Schnoldor.