Writers from a Writer Ep. III: Andy Weir
- Maya Dietrich
- Mar 31
- 8 min read
Amaze amaze amaze, I have returned for my third Writers from a Writer post, fist my bump! (another last minute one, go me).
I have to say, this month's writer is one I'm really excited for. I love books, but something you may not know about me is that I also love movies and TV, and one of my all-time favourite things is when the two meet (especially when they're given a spectacular soundtrack, which mixes my three favourite things! - more on this later).
I felt like I owed you a slightly more chipper one this month, and there are few things I love more than a light-hearted end of the world kind of a book, and Andy Weir knows how to write one.
Of all the writers we've studied so far, this is the one I think my writing melts with the most. His sly satire, cunning sarcasm and skilled hand deftly navigate the world of complete and utter catastrophe with genuine humour. My writing on this blog is most similar to how I speak:
It's fast, filled to the brim with run-on sentences (use more commas, people!), and chalk-full of random side quests and the strangest allusions you could find. Most importantly, I think what makes mine and Weir's tone so similar is that we both write about what we're passionate about with a jagged edge, not "oh I love this so much I could just marry it!" more like "I love this thing so much that if I don't share it it may actually drive me insane and you'd find me in the corner eating my hair and yammering on about some long-forgotten writer. But also, like, you totally shouldn't worry because I love that passion so much that I don't really care if it drives me crazy." In short, how Carrie Bradshaw feels about shoes is how I feel about books.
He's clearly very knowledgeable about science (I say that as a broad term, because I know jack shit about science) and he clearly loves to turn his genuine interest in a field into very creative, if highly speculative, stories. I can appreciate that.
While I just have to take his word for it when it comes to the conversion of imperial units to metric or the molecular model of steel, I most definitely do understand when a writer has developed their own voice and, importantly!, is able to blend that seamlessly into their writing. You will not find a mad-scientist gone Frankenstein-crazy in a lab, drenched in sweat for God-only-knows how many years, hair a mothball on their head, and clothes so worn and stained you can hardly tell if they came that colour, or if that's all the mud and other lab-gunk encased over it. You also won't find the classic Bruce Banner, I'm-SO-such-a-super-genius-whose-fate-it-is-to-save-the-world. In fact, Weir's leading man frequently points out his inadequacy for the job (I feel you there, dude.)
But these aren't my favourite things about Weir's story. While they totally bring it to life in so many ways that highlight his fun personal style, they're not the things that made this book stand out to me. Instead, it was his insistence on this being plausible that made me turn the page over and over and over again and ohmygod it's 4am (if you've had the luxury of getting immersed in a book, you know this feeling well).
Throughout its entirety, no where will you find Spock speedily solving some lightspeed-science-issue (I told you I'm no good at science…), and you will also fail to find the classic, pretend that earth is lightyears ahead of us but everything else, including our clothes, food, cultural values, and city scapes (and of course some sort of system of government that has miraculously stayed perfectly intact) have failed to change with our growing scientific knowledge. Throughout this entire novel, the whole storyline revolves around:
Earth in a serious pickle. Must solve somehow. Must join together, make terribly unethical decisions, and make the best possible chance for earth we can.
This doesn't result in humanity building the Enterprise, and nor does it result in us all holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It is harsh, it is bargaining, and it is a best-case-scenario out of an incredibly shitty situation. Now try and tell me that's not planet earth down to a T.
I feel the need to say that I wrote this post while listening to the entire motion picture soundtrack (side note: I'd really advise doing this when you're writing. Sometimes when I feel unmotivated I put on soundtracks of book-to-movie adaptations I love so that I can both hear and see my writing, if that makes sense. Just something to consider if you're feeling deprived of a specific source of inspiration).
P.S. "You Were Loved (Burial)" and "Time Go Fishing" are my favourites, and Daniel Pemberton is also doing the soundtrack for Robert Pattinson and Zendaya's The Drama, which is a curiously different film from this one.
This is the first modern writer we've studied on here, which made me hesitant over what sort of life facts to include about him. It's easy to see how someone was drawn to writing, and how the events in their life impacted it, when they've been dead for at least 150 years… much harder to do so when they're actively alive and writing as we speak and discuss their work. When a writers' life is still unfolding, it's difficult to tell just where it will go.
While this novel is definitely intended as a fun side-quest to accompany your daily life, I think it's still a good one to study since it offers that modern (and very much so currently trending) lens. Sure, it lacks the standard English-major appeal. There are no deranged heart-throbs or wacky twists and turns encased in an endlessly presumptive yet inquiring tone that mimics the Greek Tragedy ending of someone dying, driven insane, or left bereft in the meteor-hole of what their dazzling life used to be that is the bare minimum standard for a connoisseur of books. He's not trying to write the next great classic, and that's perfectly okay. In order to actually be said "connoisseur of books," you can't just read the hard stuff. Most scholarly books were at some point in their careers considered the stuff those pesky little commoners read, anyway. Might as well enjoy those beautifully intricate stories with a side of rock-alien saving the world(s) through the power of song!
Weir grew up in Livermore, California, with a physicist father and an electrical engineer mother, and he developed a love of science fiction from a young age (understandably). He was an only child whose parents divorced when he was 8, and he started working for Sandia National Labs as an assistant when he was still in high school. He attended the University of California, San Diego, and studied Computer Science until 1994, which was when he left due to increasing costs of tuition and living accommodations to work full-time for several software companies (I'll leave it at that, because I honestly have no clue what software companies actually do). He later left these positions to write full-time, publishing small stories and comics on his website years before becoming a well-known published writer (literally me… hopefully), although he's said that "at no point did [he] ever risk [his] financial security to become a writer." He wrote a short story, entitled "The Egg," of which I have never read, but which gained him his first serious traction as a writer, and set the scene for his first published novel…. The Martian.
He did a lot of research for that book in order to make it as scientifically accurate as possible. It was originally published as a free serial on his website (again, literally me), but readers quickly asked for it to be made available on Kindle, which sold for ¢99 and sky-rocketed to the bestsellers list. He was then approached by a literary agent, and the rest is pretty straightforward - it was a huge success, had the movie made, and allowed for Weir to write more and more.
His next few things were judged pretty harshly, which is standard for any big success (miraculously, everyone seems to despise the next few things, and then jump back on the bandwagon once they let a writer breathe enough to write something good). These 'failures' did serve a purpose though, as they left Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the directors of Project Hail Mary, excited to work with Weir.
This blending of so many different creative minds working together I think is what makes most successful modern works so impactful. It isn't just the writing, just the directing, just the acting, just the score. It's every tiny, minuscule detail of those things working together and evolving the story and growing its meaning and collaborating towards a complete joint goal that makes modern media stand out - listen to "A Moment" while thinking about these things and you'll see what I mean. I think that's the most notable difference in the modern world than with any other (frankly, dead) writer I've studied: everything is done collaboratively.
I have mixed feelings about this, but hey, when it works it works I guess, and Project Hail Mary works.
I don't have a whole team of people working around the clock to ensure these posts are super successful, but I do have a LOT of personal drive to write (in fact, I literally can't stay away from it), and a decent amount of creativity (I'm kidding, there's a lot of that too).
I also discovered during my research that Weir has a lot more hope about humanity than most. He's even said that he thinks "we do great things, especially when we're pushed." This makes a lot of sense when you read Project Hail Mary. Weir goes on to say that, at its core, this is a story about friendship. It's about compassion, empathy, and concern transcending not just standard human differences, but past entirely different species, from completely different worlds. Really, it's telling us that at our core, we're all just the same. I think this idea of connectivity is what really drove this story, which is oh so clear in the writing.
Here's an excerpt from Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary:
The centre of the ship is diamond-shaped - a rhombus. Well, I guess it's an octahedron, really. Looks like it has eight faces, each triangular. That part alone is about the size of my ship.
The diamond is connected by three thick rods (I don't know what else to call them) to a wide trapezoidal base. That looks like it might be the rear. And in front of the diamond is a narrow stalk (just making up terms at this point) that has four flat panels attached parallel to the main ship axis. Maybe solar panels? The stalk continues forward to a pyramid-shaped nose cone. Nose pyramid, I guess.
(...)
Maybe this is just a probe and not an actual ship. Maybe there's no atmosphere inside because there's nothing alive inside. I might be looking at an alien artifact instead of a ship.
Still the most exciting moment in human history.
And here's mine:
The ship arrived on a Sunday.
The skies didn't split, the seas didn't dry up, and the plague didn't arrive.
But the ship did.
It was wide enough to be visible all the way from Canada to Australia. Its gravitational force caused the moon to collapse, ripped it from the sky like a chess piece, and shattered it against the stars.
Earth's gravity shifted, our bodies weighed just a little less, but it was enough to cause record-setting nuclear accidents and everyday disasters from the difference in weight shift.
It blocked the sun, too. Crops failed, billions died in the first 5 years.
Weather was disrupted as well. Strong winds from the mountains tumbled in - pressures shifted, heads ached, and by the end of 3 months, half of all life on earth was dead.
All this she knows in theory. Predicted graphs and charts with the eternal question of: "is this worth it?" She'd never know for certain - what havoc it wreaked. Because she thinks all this from her cell, inside the ship.
Very short piece this week, but I hope you still enjoyed!
As always, links to research can be found below, and I encourage you to both read and watch Project Hail Mary, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!
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