Never Say You Can’t Survive: How To Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories

Since the publication of her debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky, Anders has sometimes been called the inheritor to Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction crown; this makes her the perfect author for a how-to guide to storytelling, especially in the midst of the global pandemic that has turned many of the concepts of speculative fiction into realities. In this volume’s raw introduction, Anders delineates how writing helped her survive 2020 and says, “Putting any kind of story together makes you a god in your own private universe and grants you control over a whole world inside your own mind, even when the outside world feels like a constant torrent of awfulness.” The ensuing guide offers strategies, interspersed with personal narratives, designed to support storytellers searching for control of those private universes we each have in our own minds.