We have received your emails and DMs about wanting more from our interview with Olivie Blake this past May — and we are finally here to deliver! In honor of the release of The Atlas Paradox, here is our extended interview with the writer of The Atlas Six, which includes questions that did not make the first cut in a conversation format so you can pretend you were sitting at the table with us while we sipped coffee and watched LA cyclists pass by.
If you haven’t read The Atlas Six yet, THERE ARE SPOILERS ALL OVER THIS ARTICLE SO GO HERE FOR OUR ORIGINAL, SPOILER-MARKED, POST.
Sanah: So the last time I spoke to you was August [2021], which seems like a billion years ago because a lot has happened since then. But since then, you’ve been on the New York Times, Good Morning America, and so much other stuff, just killing it. So what’s it been like for you? Anything unexpected?
Olivie: Yeah. Um, everything is unexpected. I think [because of] the isolation that’s still sort of ongoing from the pandemic is that for a long time I never saw any of this live. I can only describe what happened with The Atlas Six as a feeling, I just sort of felt like something was happening. But that feeling could easily be drowned out by like, the baby isn’t sleeping.
Actually, when I hit the New York Times bestseller list, I got a call from my editor, which I declined, because the baby was sleeping. And I [texted her and] was like, “What do you want?”, like, you know nicely of course [everyone laughs]. She’s like, “No, no, you need to answer this call.” As soon as she said, “You need to answer this call,” (and it’s Wednesday. It’s like, famously, Wednesday at 7pm on the East Coast, or something like that is when the list comes out.), I kind of had an idea of what it was. And literally, in my head, I was like, “Do I want to take the phone call that says I’m on the New York Times bestseller list? Or do I want the baby to keep sleeping?” So that’s what my life is, minute to minute, and I did answer the phone. My publisher was also on the line. And even though I knew that that was the phone call I was answering, I still was quiet for a few seconds. And then I was just like, “No, like, no”.
I mean, this is very, it’s just, it’s so many emotions at once. You know, it feels so beyond belief and such. I just feel so lucky. And I also feel like a con artist all the time. I get questions from journalists that are like, “The book went viral on Booktok, can you describe your Tiktok account.” I was like, “I don’t have one. I don’t have anything to tell you about what happened here. I do think it’s amazing, though.”
Anthropologically speaking, if I look at this as an amazing social trend, that’s the only way that I can look at it because every other way seems crazy. Do I see why dark academia was so “vibey,” for lack of a better word? Yes. Absolutely. Do I understand how that led people to my book? No.
I wrote the book. But everything after that just feels like this ride that I’m on as opposed to something that I’m actively doing. So there are definitely moments when it feels like the bottom is going to fall out. And like, of course, it’s gonna get taken away from me somehow. But I think what helped was writing Book Two because I feel good about Book Two. Knock on wood [everyone laughs].
Sanah: That’s really exciting. I think people are anticipating that book like crazy, not to freak you out. [everyone laughs]
Olivie: I am really, really excited about getting this book out there. There’s a lot in Book One that I have not been able to comment on, that I hope becomes a lot clearer in Book Two.
You know, there’s a lot of reasons why I don’t want to give away extra-textual details. And there are also characters whose stories I want to talk about, but it’s, it’s much more impactful if you read it blind, you know if you’re going into it in the story, as I intended, as opposed to me saying things.
Sanah: Yeah, no, I think it’s a good idea. Also, for just a second, the show. I know, you definitely can’t say anything, I know. But, what has that for you personally been like? That entire process?
Mehreen: And I want to add on to that, how involved are you in that?
Olivie: I’m executive producing-
Sanah & Mehreen: [synchornized, excited, gasps]
Olivie: My role is very, high level creative, I’m not writing. When I went through the process of optioning I would just kind of say, “So, What do you want from me? What kind of show are you trying to make?”, and every single person gave me a different pitch. Like, every single person gave me a different comp, basically, and a different vision for the show. And I think when it came to the producers I chose, they are a British production company, so they’re looking at it from a very British TV way where it’s like, long episodes, and not that many, like a Sherlock kind of mindset. Almost like a feature-length episode, and fewer of them. And to me, that felt correct.
And also, they were asking me the right questions, like one of their earliest questions was, you know, “There is sex in the book, how is the sex going to look like? How are we going to translate it? Do you want it to be very explicit? Or what kind of story are we telling people?” They were giving me the different pitches of like, you know, “Are we talking about like a Shondaland type sex scene? Or…”
Mehreen: Or are we talking about a fade-to-black type situation?
Olivie: Yeah. And so like, I was really glad that we got to have that conversation and really early on because I was saying that for me, the sex scenes are about power. And the sort of the academic scenes are very sensual, like the hand touch, that’s got to be the sexy part. And the actual sex is more about like the plot. We’re really early in the production.
Sanah: That’s so exciting! I was gonna ask if it was, more fun to write the sequel or more stressful? Like, is it more stressful to know that you have to follow up on a book than to start a brand new one?
I’m going to tie this into a little bit of craft advice. It was very hard to get started. Because you’re in this headspace of like, I have to write a book. I have to follow up an unprecedented success. Like how is that even possible to do? But once I started writing, it was actually much easier. It was actually much easier than editing The Atlas Six because I was trying to blend 2020 me’s voice with 2021 me. There were lots of times where I was like, it almost feels like it’d be easier to write certain things from scratch. But, I don’t have that kind of time. So there are still times when I’ll read a passage and be like, wow, like, I wish I’d phrase that differently. But it’s too late. Versus this one, I just got to go right in and be the writer that I am now with all the practice that I’ve had for the last few years.
I liken this to the feeling of the anxiety of a blank page, that’s just like sitting down and realizing you want to do all these things, but not really knowing whether that’s possible. People always ask me how to deal with writer’s block or how to deal with anxiety like that. And I always think it’s just like, you just have to start and you just have to go. If things aren’t working, then, put something skeletal and you keep going. And that was essentially how I wrote Book Two. Every time I hit a little roadblock I was like, alright, well, let’s just paste this out quickly, like, let’s just put something skeletal here. That will get me to my next point and I can always make it better later. So I think one of the tidbits that are probably going to go down as sort of lore for this book is that I wrote it in four weeks.
Sanah: That’s crazy!
Olivie: I drafted it in four weeks, and then there was twice that amount of time editing it. But that’s me, kind of just ripping off the band-aid and like, let’s just write this. I know what I have to write, I know what story I need to tell.
Sanah: You’re a bit of a pantser. Right? Parisa and Callum’s scene was a one-go for you?
Olivie: Yes, I refer to myself as a reformed pantser [everyone laughs]. I use a very bare-bones outline now. But I knew emotionally where we needed to be at the end of Book Two. And I just had to trust that instinct of how we would get there. And every day was just point A to point B, just do it. Just get there. And then going back through and editing and actually doing the finessing; that took much longer. But I think that I feel better about the book in general, because I got to remove a lot of the distractions like questioning myself as an artist. Am I good enough to do this? It doesn’t matter. I have to do it.
Sanah: Yeah, impostor syndrome has no place in the sequel.
Olivie: Yeah, right. It’s just focusing on what needs to be done. I’m actually very grateful that the production schedule was so compressed, because I think if I had the time to wonder, it would have been worse. And now with Book Three, it’s essentially like Act Three, it’s kind of falling action. So I know, essentially, everything that’s happening. And I’m really just looking forward to getting a down and out of me.
Mehreen: I’m so excited about it! Well, I’m a Hanya Yanagihara fan and one of the things she talks about with A Little Life is that she just wanted to create a book where the main character never got better — and that was kind of her driving force in creating that book. So I guess, I wanted to know if you had a driving concept that was like, “I just want to make this, and then everything else will be centered around this.”
Olivie: What this series comes out of, is that question of like, how can you be ethical when it’s impossible? And, you know, I think Book One is a very sort of narrow exploration of that, on purpose. I really wanted Book One to feel very claustrophobic that like, you only exist in this house, the characters only exist in this house, we’re not worried about the outside world right now. We’re worried about, “This is the moral ambiguity that is given to you and where do you fall? And how do you decide?” But this series as a whole, is much more about, “What do we do about stolen knowledge? About power that is not held rightfully? What do we do when people are willing to break the world to align it with their own values?” And I don’t know that I have… well I obviously don’t have a bigger answer for that. But this book, all three books, are more about breaking that down and making it more about how does this change six people. What does it mean for six people? And especially six people who are extremely strong, and if anything, their strengths are kind of their weaknesses.
Mehreen: I was thinking about the first part of what you were saying about how you wrote it from this perspective of dealing with ethics and whatnot. And it’s seen so vividly throughout the book. One of the things that you’ve touched on a lot is this concept of furthering knowledge but understanding how to further knowledge without letting it get weaponized. Like it’s seen so so aggressively throughout the book, in the best way, it was very satisfying — like scratching an itch. So yeah, I think that was a perfect answer.
Olivie: Yeah, so I was talking to Tendai Huchu who is the author of the Edinburgh Nights series. And he asked me, “ How did you get away with so many divergences from the plot to just talk about ethics and ruminate on things?” And I laughed so hard when he said that and I was like, “I didn’t have an editor.” Nobody could stop me. I came in with this ultimate power play that was just like, “Yeah, we’re just gonna diverge for a moment and talk about whatever or we’re gonna we’re gonna live in this philosophical discussion, or we’re going to talk about physics.” That, to me, I think that’s where when people are speaking positively of the book, that’s where the vibes come in. When people are speaking negatively about the book, that’s where the pacing problems come. So it depends on how you want to view it.
But for me, I actually wrote this book for the academics. I wrote this for people who want to just sit and talk about “What does this mean philosophically? What should the world look like? What does it look like now? What would be the responsible thing to do? Am I wrong?” I think the thing about everything, all these characters, they’re their own unreliable narrators. So the way I wrote this book, there technically is no objective truth. It’s just what each character sees is the truth. And I am not expressing anything; it’s up to the reader to decide, what is in that invisible space? And like, what is the real truth? What is every person actually like? Because they’re not going to tell you. Yeah, and that for me, like, I’m the kind of reader who wants to and puzzle that while I’m reading. So I’m always writing for the audience who is like along for the ride. Who’s willing to have their mind changed and wants to think about it.
Sanah: Yeah. Especially when some of the characters are so convincing. At the end of the book Callum puts everyone in boxes and I’m like, “You know, you’re right. You’re so right. You identified everybody perfectly.” And then I asked you about that. And you were like, no [everyone laughs].
Olivie: This is something that actually the characters have a discussion about in Book Two. But he’s not wrong, either. He’s just simplifying. And so he’s right. But there’s always a little bit more to it than that. So he’s right. But not at every moment. And you know, he’s making projections based on the way that he views people, which may be accurate, but people change. So that’s part of what this is, these characters who sort of think that they are already advanced in their understanding of the world, or maybe learning the ways that they’re wrong.
Mehreen: Callum is one of my favorites because he’s aware of so many larger issues, and he’s also aware that he’s ignoring all of them for his benefit.
Olivie: I mean, are you supposed to like Callum? No. I think the love-hate reaction is perfect because that’s exactly what the characters even say in the book that’s like, “You want to feel strongly about him, but don’t.” And, yeah, for me, he’s just a character that I assigned a lot of privilege to on purpose. He has the privilege to decide that, people’s emotions don’t matter and be like, “I’m, inundated with them and I don’t need to care about them. I don’t have to tie my feelings into other people’s feelings. I just have to be surface-level aware.”
Sanah: He is interesting. We’re just talking about in the car his introduction, which is like, he could start a war if he wanted to, but he doesn’t have any ambition.
Olivie: Yeah, that’s the irony of it. I think. And I’ve met a lot of people like that, too, who have like so much charisma and are using it for nothing.
Mehreen: Yeah, I think those are the scariest people that are just so charming with whatever they say. Like they could tell you the earth is flat and the way that they deliver and the way that they’re so confident in it — you’d agree. And that’s Callum.
Olivie: I mean with him, you get the feeling that if he really wanted to win over everybody in the house, he could. But, he just spent no time doing that. You kind of have to respect him. No, you don’t have to. You don’t have to respect him for that. But you could.
Sanah: Yeah, and I think people do. I was gonna ask if you agree with the tagline, “What if physics were dark and deadly and sexy?”
Olivie: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. That was my take on it. I was reading about theoretical physics. You know, for fun, as one does, of course. And I was like, this is kind of hot. You know, like the time stopping moment.
What I’m hoping the TV show gets right, that maybe is a weakness in the books because you can’t see it, is the time-stopping moment with Tristan and Libby. Like that should absolutely by far be the hottest moment.
Sanah: Like the drama from the line in Tristan’s perspective “With his help, Libby Rhodes has stopped time.” I can see it. I can see the drama. And also, how did you come up with the line? “How would Caesar have made Brutus pay if he had lived?”
Olivie: I don’t know, it just felt, right? I mean, it’s sort of a lofty intellectual concept. Lots of people have been stabbed in the back. But who’s gonna think about it? Caesar? And can you also, can you imagine you’ve just tapped on the floor of the Roman Senate? 30 times? So crazy. If it were possible to live through that, wouldn’t you take the most insane revenge ever?
Sanah: Yeah. I’m scared of Calum now. Like towards the book, no one could look him in the eye except for Parisa. So we’ll see what happens in Book Two. Do you think that Libby’s the only one with the potential for corruption arc out of the six of them?
Olivie: I only call out Libby specifically, because lots of people are quick to be like “Libby’s a good guy.” No one’s good. I said that right away in the book. No one here is good. Yeah. Some people are just aligning to a morality that they’ve decided to make known. And Libby is very familiar. She’s meant to be someone that any of us could be. And that’s why it’s so interesting to kind of fuck with her because it’s just like, I’m trying to say that anyone could go this way. And how do you respond to that? How do you feel about that? I liked it. I liked the tension. I love the tension when you’re reading a book and you see yourself and it’s kind of bad.
Sanah: Yeah! It made me so uncomfortable because I knew I would react the same way as her.
Olivie: Yeah, and I think that fiction drives empathy. And it’s just boring. It’s boring to have a good guy. It’s boring to always root for the good guy. Because no one is that good. In young adult? Yes. Someone has to be good so that we can model ourselves off of someone. But, this is Adult and no one has to be good.
Sanah: Oh, I need to ask about Nico and Libby. The progression of their relationship from Nico saying they aren’t friends. To him crying out when he sees that she’s taken. Was that relationship always there? Or is that something that you wanted to develop throughout the story? Like us watching him start to take care about her?
Olivie: I think the possibility of it was always there. I think there’s a point that he recognizes, right before that happens, that so much of his life has turned on her decisions, or like the fact that always having her there as a point of reference has determined what he does next. Their relationship is very important. But I don’t think it’s as straightforward as people sometimes make it seem. It’s very dynamic.
Sanah: What are your favorite moments to write? Generally and then also, specifically?
Olivie: Oh my gosh in Book Two Reina and Callum have what is probably the funniest conversation I’ve ever written.
Sanah: Really? Do they even talk in the first book?
Olivie: That’s exactly where I was going. What I love is getting to show something different by showing you someone’s perspective you haven’t seen before. So obviously, with Book One, that’s Ezra, but when you take one character out of the equation, suddenly everyone’s a little mix, right? And so then we get all these scenes with characters who didn’t have scenes of significance with each other before, and then you get to see a new side of them.
I’m a very easily bored person. So the things that are most interesting to me are something we haven’t seen before. Getting to show a side of characters that we haven’t seen is, always my favorite thing to write. You know, when we’ve been in someone’s perspective, and we think they’re right for a really long time. And then we see it from someone else’s point of view. And suddenly your mind changes, ideally.
There’s a moment in Book Two that I’m just waiting for. I’m just sitting on like, I just cannot wait for people to read it. I feel it. I feel like it’s gonna change a lot for the audience. Yeah, and I just can’t I just can’t wait.
Mehreen: A little non-deep question, do you really hate fringes? [everyone laughs]. Everybody hates Libby’s fringe which is so specific.
Olivie: It allowed me to give her a tick, you know that she’s constantly like messing with them. That’s what’s annoying people, not the presence, just the fact that she’s playing with them. But also they give me a way of measuring time. Because there are a few times like, I think in the rewrite, Tristan, is like, “Oh, she can put them behind her ears.”
Sanah: That makes sense. The scene where the house is breached, that’s sort of our introduction to the characters in action together. Even though we already met them, we see how they respond to the situation so differently. So what was that like writing our initial introduction to their magic, and how their magic is used?
Olivie: An inspiration [for the scene] would be Kingsman: Secret Service. I liked the idea of that, where they were just being tested and eliminated. But instead of being physically tested, they were being intellectually tested. I think that was, from a craft perspective, it was like “Something has to happen, something’s got to make them work together.” The scene that we leave on right before is all of them being like, “We don’t have to be friends. We don’t have to tell each other anything,” in a way that makes you feel like they maybe won’t change their minds. So then I was like, what needs to happen here is something that puts them in actual danger. But what kind of danger could they possibly be in? So it kind of led me into that scene? But like I said, focusing on the human element of like, of how are they each reacting to this. And how is it changing? How is it changing their relationship? Because everything that happens between Tristan and Libby depends on that moment when they both need each other.
Sanah: Right. It also helps us to understand their abilities so much more than that.
Yeah. And especially I think Tristan is the fairest character. Like, if anyone is telling you the truth, it’s probably Tristan. And he probably would never have given Libby a chance if he hadn’t been in that situation. So it was an opportunity to pair people up and see like, how Callum and Parisa might have been friends if not for what she saw him do.
Mehreen: I wanted to ask about your decision to make magic a part of science rather than like a thing that just existed. Where it’s a science that we all know, and it’s been manipulated or understood in a different way that has created it instead of something that’s just like “there”.
Olivie: Theoretical physics works really well as a magic point. I think, just theoretical physics is sort of going through a golden age right now. Where the people who are writing about it are very, very poetic and they’re often referring back to like the classics, like; Carlo Rovelli is my main person here. My main dude. And he always starts by talking about the ancient philosophers. And so when I was coming up with this idea of having a library with everything, it seemed like well, maybe it didn’t start with magic as this like arcane thing. It started with naturalism as an idea of like, what is the human Animus and how that might progress if that information was something that you could continue contributing to? So how would we grow from a starting point of, just wondering about the universe? So it just became sort of a natural place. I also don’t think you have to understand everything about a magical system. I don’t really like it when you have too many rules. If there was a rule for everything, then they would exist, right? Like we’re still in a world where this is not plausible. But, I still wanted the audience to have an understanding of what is hard or difficult. I think when you’re writing magic, you just have to have something you can point to where it’s like, this is a familiar feeling. So always bringing it back to like, they have to rest after they do something. It’s like, that’s something that we’re familiar with. You can’t just run a marathon and not feel anything. So you know, you run a marathon, you got to rest for a while and you got to rest leading up to it. This is all stuff that we just kind of know, instinctively. So I wanted that to be a thing, as opposed to magical systems where you don’t know if one thing is harder than another or you’re just told like, surprise, this thing is harder.
Mehreen: Was that something you were always interested in? Theoretical Physics? Or is something new?
Sanah: Didn’t your husband help you with the research?
Olivie: Yes, he’s a physics teacher. He cares more about the mechanics. But he handed me a lot of books. Like we had all the books that I read for this, we had in the house. And then I kind of went from there, pursuing things that I could use. I will say there’s an explanation of fission and fusion in Book Two that my husband came up with. And when everyone has read that it’s just literally a sentence, but it’s very clever. That like, it simplifies it very easily. And after he said it, he was like, “Yeah, nailed it!”
Sanah: Gideon, how’d you come up with Gideon?
Mehreen: I am a fan of Gideon. I never thought I’d be so invested in somebody named Gideon. But here we are. You’ve done it.
Olivie: I got it [the name] while I was watching Once Upon a Time. It had that feel to it, that I was like, hmm, this feels right.
I think that just turned out to be a lucky bit of like, because having so I’ve essentially created a dream realm. That’s basically the fourth dimension because it’s, it’s it happens to be a confluence of space and time, and it works within different psychological theories of having like a collective human subconscious. But I don’t know how it came about; like he just was that way. I wish that these were questions that I anticipated when I wrote it, because now there’s a lot of stuff I just don’t remember. But also what I like about Gideon is that he has had a very hard life, which we’ve only gotten hints at so far. So his optimism is very hard-won, you know, it’s not something where nothing bad has ever happened to him. It’s that he’s seen a lot of bad things and decided that they’re not important. And so that brings a very valuable perspective to this book, which is full of people who’ve been through bad things and see the world in a bad way. So it was kind of important to have a character who didn’t see it that way. Someone who literally exists in dreams. And so that’s kind of the that’s what’s missing, I think with just the six who are like, you know, fighting to the death. So they bring the stakes, but then he grounds it. Yeah.
Sanah: Were you planning to have him always be one of the potential initiates?
Olivie: Yes. I definitely wanted to explore the idea that there are some people who are good enough but get cut. And I, I also had to be wary of like, I can’t introduce a character who’s extremely powerful and then be like, “But yeah the society didn’t pay any attention to him,” that it doesn’t make sense. Clearly, someone was watching him, and then decided that what he can do wasn’t good enough.
Sanah: Last question, the allure of knowledge. Was that sort of a founding principle for when you came up with the society? How people would react to the allure of knowledge?
Olivie: Yeah, pretty much. It had to feel once in a lifetime, it had to feel like “How could you go back to normal life?” And in that moment, they’ve spent this whole year kind of being molded to make this decision.
Make sure to go pick up a copy of Olive Blake’s The Atlas Six, in stores wherever you buy books along with her most recently published, My Mechanical Romance, written under Alexene Farol Follmuth, Book Two of The Atlas Six trilogy, The Atlas Paradox (out today!) and Alone with You in the Ether, out this winter.
AND, if you loved this interview, go check out our socials for our giveaway of a signed copy of The Atlas Six, running until November 25th, 2022.
