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How to Write Absurdly Well — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky (interviewee); David Perell (host) Date ingested: 2026-04-13 Original file: /RAW/videos/How to Write Absurdly Well — Adrian Tchaikovsky.md Source type: VIDEO TRANSCRIPT — INTERVIEW Original URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO0qHnhpkDs Published: 2025-12-31 Mode when ingested: SCHOLAR

Argument type: Practitioner interview — inductive craft reasoning from extensive specific experience. Tchaikovsky demonstrates claims through specific named examples from 60+ books. Arthur C. Clarke Award winner (Children of Time). Background includes role-playing game master, stage fighting, live-action roleplay (1,000-person battles), historical broadsword training at Leeds Armouries. Well-produced podcast interview with clean transcription. All claims attributed to Tchaikovsky unless noted.

Transcript quality: Clean. Native English speaker, professionally produced podcast. Direct quotes are reliable where marked.

Summary

Worldbuilding precedes and generates everything else — it is not preparation for the story but the source from which character, plot, and emotional resonance emerge. The method: start with a single what-if premise; follow its ripples outward through logical consequence until the world has sufficient internal coherence and pressure; let the world tell you what the story must be and who the characters must be. The left wall (science or history as the constraint you expand outward from), the one big lie (the single permitted departure from reality, everything else kept honest), not planning endings (the book's own momentum takes you there), and fight scenes as character revelation vehicles are all downstream applications of this foundational worldbuilding commitment.

Key Concepts

Notable Claims

On worldbuilding as the generative source:

  • The role-playing game master background is the origin: "when you're creating a world for a role-playing game, you make it very robustly because you don't know what players are going to break." This discipline of making the world robust for other people translates directly into making a world for a book. [DIRECT QUOTE — lightly edited for sentence clarity]
  • "The world itself will have sort of flash points and pressures and fractures inherently within it because when you're making a world it's not static." The world pre-exists the story; it has its own tensions. Those tensions give you characters and plot without needing to impose them. [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • Process sequence: world (weeks of formalizing, months/years of background marination) → chapter plan (plot as the most interesting route through the world's pressures) → first draft. Writing speed: extremely fast (60+ books). The long phase is the world; once the world is solid, the book comes quickly.

On the stone-in-pool method:

  • "The image I usually use is the idea that you're dropping a stone into a pool. And then you have the ripples from where that stone impacts, and you follow them out, and each set of ripples is a consecutive sort of logical therefore. If you just — that is your starting point, well, therefore this must be true. And if that's true, then this must be true." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • A good what-if "begins to expand" — you feel it has enough material for a full book. Half-ideas exist; often a book happens when two half-ideas click together and produce a complete whole. Children of Ruin example: uplifted octopuses (half-book) + alien neurology (half-book) → complete novel.

On what makes a good what-if:

  • First criterion: originality in the space. "I don't want to ever repeat someone else's work." If entering a crowded idea-space (e.g., dragons), must find a genuinely interesting spin or not go there.
  • Second criterion: a seed that grows — the idea expands rather than stops.
  • No formula beyond "I'd know it when I see it." The feel of a complete book vs. a half-book is intuitive but learnable. [PARAPHRASED]

On the left wall:

  • "What science says is possible — that is your left wall as you write the book. So you can only expand outwards from that." The constraint is not a limitation but a structure: working out the contours of that left wall is your research. [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • Historical fiction equivalent: the left wall is what we understand about that time.
  • Fantasy equivalent: you build your own left wall by hand. "You end up with a world that has the same amount of logic and reality to it as your science fiction world. It's just that you have built it by hand rather than importing large chunks of it from the real world." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • The unknown unknowns problem: you don't know what you don't know. Either you get it wrong and don't realize it, or you discover mid-book that your assumption was wrong and may have to rewrite. [PARAPHRASED]

On the one big lie:

  • "You can get away with one big lie. And it's just that one thing which is just convenient to have in the book to make the plot work in the way that you want, and that is your one big lie. But, in order to support your one big lie, everything else needs to be true." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • Children of Time example: the big lie is the nanovirus accelerating spider uplift from hundreds of millions of years to tens of thousands. The lie is the timescale. But the evolution itself is as plausible and real as Tchaikovsky could make it — because that's what gives the book its effect. The reader comes away feeling "this is a thing that could happen." [PARAPHRASED]
  • This is not a structural principle — it's a permission structure: you get one.

On characters emerging from world:

  • Characters are not built top-down from psychological backstory; they grow out of the world. "By the time that character has emerged as — ah yes, let's have him in the book — there are all those strings attaching that character to all the other parts of the setting already there. They're not things I necessarily need to tack on by hand because it's inherent in who this character is as to how he's going to relate to everything else that's going on." [DIRECT QUOTE — lightly edited]
  • Pawnbroker example from City of Lost Chances: "I know that this pawnbroker is from this particular culture. He is an immigrant in the city from a nearby nation which has previously been invaded by the same people who are currently occupying this city. So he's already got all of this informing him even before I know who he is and what he's doing." The world creates the character's situation; the character's nature then fills the gaps. [PARAPHRASED]
  • Characters will also surprise in the writing: "They have that going on as well. Or they've got a thing romantically for this other character that's not in the plan at all, but it's just like it's a thing you discover when you meet them because there is a gap there that all of the exactly that shape that they then move to fill." [DIRECT QUOTE]

On city vs. travelogue settings:

  • Travelogue fantasy: "You can walk away from the consequences of what you do because you're always going on to the next point in the map." You don't need to worry about what happens back in Bree after you've fled.
  • City settings: "You are a resident of that city. You've lived there all your life. You have an existing relationship with all of these people and factions and events. And when you do a thing, you have to stick around and live with the consequences." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • City settings require more prep but are "commensurably more rewarding when you've done it." The board with red strings is not a metaphor — you need to know who hates who. [PARAPHRASED]
  • "Challenging is fun." [DIRECT QUOTE]

On fight scenes:

  • Background: several years of stage fighting, a decade+ of LARP (including 1,000-person battles), three to four years of historical broadsword training.
  • First principle: authenticity at the detail level. Fantasy-educated readers will throw the book across the room if you do something obviously wrong (stab through a breastplate with a broken sword). But once you know it, you can get it right: "Yes, you stab them in the armpit where the breastplate doesn't go." [PARAPHRASED]
  • Second and more important principle: put as little research as possible on the page. "Once you have learned all these clever things from whatever means you're using to learn about fights, you need to learn how to put as little of that as possible on the page. Because the temptation, as with anything you've done the research on, is I am just going to vomit all this stuff on the page to show how incredibly intensive my research has been. And at that point, pacing goes out of the window." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • "Once you know that stuff, it will inform the details you do put in. And it will genuinely show through." The iceberg principle applied to action. [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • Three scales of fight: (1) duel — technique is the narrative; character expression through what they choose not to do; (2) skirmish — mobile, complex; literally plan it with objects on a desk; (3) battle — general's-eye vs. slot-in-visor perspectives; The Heroes (Joe Abercrombie) as model for the slot-in-visor.
  • Fight scenes as character revelation: "The fight scene is also a vehicle for advancing the narrative. The narrative of the fight is also an opportunity for you to express the characters who are involved in the fight." Example: skilled fighter who is fond of unskilled opponent doesn't take the kill shot, then gets killed for it. Character development through what is not done. [PARAPHRASED]
  • Emotional perspective over technical precision: "Getting into the head of the characters... having the narrative of the fight told as much through the emotions as through the footwork or the precise blade work." This insight came from LARP experience — "you feel it here" — the visceral physical fear of a charging battle line, even in a game. What that experience gives you is the emotional reality to put on the page. [PARAPHRASED]

On not planning endings:

  • "What I've never done is actually work out the very last ending." The penultimate scene is usually fixed; the final beat is not.
  • Rationale: "letting the book — letting the trajectory and momentum of the book to that point tell you how it should end has worked really well for me." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • The feeling: "You get to the point of feeling that you are chronicling." At a certain point you stop driving and start following what the story has become. [PARAPHRASED]
  • "By the time I get to that final scene, the motion of the book to that point takes me to where it needs to go rather than me trying to say, well obviously it's going to end in this way." [DIRECT QUOTE]

On endings as most important:

  • "Absolutely no bones about it, the ending is the most important part of the book. The most important part? Definitely because it's the bit that your readers are left with." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • "The ending needs to be the bit where everything that you intend to tie up in the book turns out to have been inextricably leading to that ending. Even though while it was doing that leading, that wasn't remotely obviously where it was going." A good ending is the logical result of what preceded it — but also a surprise. [DIRECT QUOTE — lightly edited]

On the three-sided knowledge structure:

  • "You get this three-sided knowledge structure. There's what you as the author know, and there is what the characters in the book know, and there is what the reader knows."
  • Three modes: (1) character knows more than reader (unreliable narrator — reader catches up to what the narrator was concealing); (2) reader and author share knowledge the character doesn't have (post-tech settings; tragedy of dramatic irony); (3) character reveals information that surprises the author (the book I didn't plan; discovered mid-writing who had the item).
  • Dogs of War as the most extreme example: Rex narrates war crimes he cannot recognize as war crimes. The reader knows; the character doesn't. "You as the reader are potentially just kind of chewing your fingernails off saying this is this is this is really really terrible and Rex is such a this kind of amiable likable character who just thinks he's being a good dog." [DIRECT QUOTE — minor cleanup]

On writing maxims and dogma:

  • "Any piece of advice is useful so long as it doesn't basically become 'this is the law.'"
  • Children of Time is 60% exposition by volume — and it's his most successful book. Counter to show-don't-tell orthodoxy. "Sometimes that is the best way of doing something."
  • The Hero's Journey: "It's just one structure. The idea of saying, 'Well, all this is the story that all stories must follow.'" When someone maps a book onto the hero's journey and claims "I guess this is kind of our descent into the underworld" — they're fitting the book to the model, not the model to the book. "Once you are reducing something that far, then you're left with a model that is completely worthless." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • Every writer does something I find "absolutely unthinkable." Maxims encode what worked for one writer. "There's no one way of doing this, and at the end of it, you always converge on having a book." [PARAPHRASED]

On the numinous as an unachieved goal:

  • Two books that achieve what Tchaikovsky wants to one day achieve: Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood and Susanna Clarke's Piranesi — both create "an incredible sense of the numinous. Of this kind of just the all of there being just a world that is just out of sight but is very very real."
  • This is on his list. "I haven't yet done that." He frames it explicitly as a goal not yet reached — a Level 7-equivalent for his own craft development. [PARAPHRASED]

On the subconscious in writing:

  • "Ideally as a writer your subconscious and your conscious are working in lockstep and supporting one another." The conscious mind handles the framework (world, chapter plan); the subconscious fills the gaps between the points on the map and understands connections before the conscious mind does. "That's where it's coming from." [PARAPHRASED]
  • "You're almost writing in partnership with yourself at that point and you learn to delegate certain parts to your subconscious because once you've done it enough you have faith that your subconscious will come through with the goods when you need it to." [DIRECT QUOTE — minor cleanup]

On monsters:

  • "Monsters that tell us about us are always going to be more interesting than just a monster." [DIRECT QUOTE]
  • Fafnir → Smaug: Tolkien inherited Fafnir (a man who became a dragon through greed) directly from Anglo-Saxon myth. Smaug is interesting because he is greed made manifest. The monster as embodied human failing is already a thematic argument.

On reading for improvement:

  • Reads peers writing now, not the greats. "We're all already informed by this great melange of previous writing that's gone on." Reading contemporary work is more generative than re-reading canonical work. [PARAPHRASED]
  • Currently believes we are "in a bit of a golden age of really interesting science fiction." [PARAPHRASED]

Contradictions Flagged

  • World-first vs. character-first: Tchaikovsky's method is explicitly world-out; the Weiland/Herne framework documented in Character Arc Architecture is psychology-in (Ghost/Lie/Want/Need/Truth). Both are presented as viable by their respective advocates, but they are different starting points. Tchaikovsky does not claim arcs don't exist — his characters do change — but they emerge from situational friction rather than from a constructed psychological wound. This is a live methodological tension.
  • Not planning endings vs. ending is most important: These two claims sit in apparent tension but Tchaikovsky reconciles them: not planning the ending is how the ending becomes the only thing it could be. The planning-in-advance version would impose an ending; the emergent version lets the book's internal logic determine it. Reconciled in his own account, but the tension is worth noting for practitioners who find it paradoxical.

Questions Raised

  • What is the relationship between the stone-in-pool worldbuilding method and the character psychology framework? Can a writer use both — start with a what-if, build the world, then apply Ghost/Lie/Truth to the characters who emerge? Or do they pull in different directions?
  • The numinous as an unachieved goal: is the sense of the numinous in Mythago Wood and Piranesi a property of the writing (prose level) or a property of the worldbuilding? Does it require the Level 7 "living deeply" quality from the Herne taxonomy, or is it an architectural property of how the world is constructed?
  • The three-sided knowledge structure: is this Tchaikovsky's own formulation, or does it appear in narratology literature? If it's original, it's a vault-worthy insight; if it has an academic home, knowing that would give it more weight.
  • "Monsters that tell us about us" — does this principle extend beyond monsters to all worldbuilding elements? Is the principle: all invented elements should embody a human truth to be maximally interesting?

Last updated: 2026-04-13