I’ve long thought of award-winning author Daryl Gregory as a writer’s writer. He’s not only hilarious, inventive and a hugely talented prose writer, but a master of craft. Lift the hood on any of Gregory’s books and you’ll learn a lot about how the engine of a novel should run.
Gregory’s latest novel is no different. When We Were Real (Saga Press, 2025) follows an unlikely group of travelers on a bus tour of America’s glitches—the anomalies that prove they’re living in a simulation. It’s been seven years since the Announcement (and ensuing Freakout) revealed their world is nothing but binary code.
What can’t be fabricated, however, is the friendship between JP and Dulin. When JP learns his cancer has returned, Dulin takes him on this week-long tour. Among the modern-day pilgrims on the Canterbury Trails Tours (get it?) are a pregnant influencer determined to make her child so famous he’ll never be deleted, a conspiracy theorist, a nun questioning the existence of God, and a professor on the run from a cult that takes The Matrix as gospel.
As the diverse cast of nineteen travelers barrels from glitch to glitch, Gregory dives deep into what makes each of these simulated humans tick. Even in this virtual world, these characters and their most basic human needs—connection, meaning, love—shine through, making this novel a delightful and heartwarming success.
Simulation stories have become their own genre—but this one is different. It bursts with heart and hope. Where did this story came from?
Most novels are snowmen—you start small, keep rolling bigger snowballs, stack them on top of each other, and finally decorate with a top hat and carrot nose. This one started with a cross-country tip I took years ago with my friend, Jack Skillingstead. A few years after, Jack had to have surgery for a brain tumor. He’s fine now, but that put me in an existential mood. The characters of JP and Dulin aren’t me and Jack—Jack’s not dying, and I’m not six-two—but I stole details from real life to create them.
Next I added in my critique of The Matrix—what happens to all the people who didn’t get superpowers? After the initial freakout—oh my goodness, we’re in a sim!— how do you go on living?
The bus trip was the next snowball. If the book was just two guys talking in a car, that would be boring (I didn’t think I could pull off a 400-page, rolling version of My Dinner with Andre). The book needed different opinions on how to live in a simulation, and characters to argue those opinions. I realized this was a chance to borrow from The Canterbury Tales. What’s a modern pilgrimage? Nineteen people on a coach bus, traveling across America.
In an interview from 2021 you said that you’re interested in “psychological realism in the face of surrealism.” Say more.
I’m attracted to putting ordinary people in outrageous circumstances, and showing how they’d react, as realistically as possible. I’m always asking myself, how would I react, how would my friends react, if this crazy thing were true? We’d be constantly looking at each other and laughing nervously—this shit is crazy, right? Being able to laugh at the darkest things is important to me, a mark of being human.
Every character has their own goals and story arc, and when the shit hits the fan, each plays a role in saving the others. But JP and Dulin are the heart of the book. I wanted to write about male friendships—decades-long friendships, through bad times and good. If we all found out we’re living in a simulation, our relationships wouldn’t suddenly be invalid. If we feel love, it’s real, whether we’re made out of ones and zeroes, or even more unlikely, a cloud of quarks. (Quarks? Really? That’s what they came up with?) (No, I don’t know who “they” are.)
Can you say a little about using fait accompli when writing a novel? What does this allow you to do in terms of storytelling?
You’ve hit on my go-to move—starting a novel at a time in the world that’s well after other novels would have ended. WWWR is set seven years after we found out we’re living in a sim. The freakout period is over, and none of us got superpowers like Neo in The Matrix. I like this approach because it moves revelation (surprise) to premise. It’s your ticket into the story. If you buy into the premise, then you’re on board for the consequences.
Can you tell me about the Chaucerian influence?
Chaucer’s great innovation was to place characters of high and low status together, from all walks of life, and give them equal dignity and attention. Once I realized I was writing a Canterbury-like Tale, I knew I had to include a broad range characters—gay and straight, binary and non-binary, Black, white, Asian, rich and poor—and give each their due. Every person on the bus gets a point of view chapter, and we learn why they’re on the bus and what they want from the trip.
Large casts require a fully orchestrated climax. What practical tips do you have for writing action sequences with so many moving parts?
My first bit of advice is to remember that every character, no matter how minor, has wants and needs that they’re working at all times to satisfy. David Mamet offers three questions the writer has to answer to make a scene dramatic: Who wants what? What happens if they don’t get it? And why now?
It may be that, in order to make the ending work (in other words, that you say what you mean to say), you have to change what characters want, or put more or different obstacles in their way, or have them achieve their initial goal only to discover a bigger problem.
My second piece of advice for handling these complicated endings is to outline first (even if that’s just summarizing the story for yourself). Then, abandon the outline when you think of something better during the writing of the book, and re-outline, then revise, over and over. If you’re a pantser, then your first draft is your outline. You still have to revise as you come up with better ideas.
Plots are magic tricks. If in the middle of your novel you realize that your book has to end with a rabbit popping out of a hat, you need to go back, add a top hat (the one you picked out for your snowman), and figure out how to slip the rabbit into the hat when nobody’s looking. The reader reads front to back, like a good and honest citizen, but the author is a cheat who writes in any order.
This novel, as well as Spoonbenders before it, makes use of multiple POVs to power the novel’s engine. What have you discovered about multiple POV novels?
Multiple POVs are tremendously useful—for certain books. (The book is always the boss.) You get a range of voices, you get the Rashomon quality of destabilizing truth, and you can expand the scope of the action, and more importantly, expand the amount of information you can give to the reader. When you’re pinned to one POV, as in a first-person book, it can be very difficult to show what’s happening in the world outside of the character’s sight.
But my, are there pitfalls. The first is that could be diffusing the focus. Are all these POVs necessary? Second, you’re often slowing the pace. With every change in POV, you have to re-establish which character you’re now following, where the character is located in relation to the others, what their goals are… In When We Were Real, as with Spoonbenders, I decided to make the characters into a kind of family. When it’s one character’s turn to take the POV spotlight, the others are often on stage. This helps the reader keep track. But this novel has nineteen (though a few share a chapter). This is insane!
To lessen the cognitive load, I borrowed a trick from the Canterbury Tales and presented characters at first by their titles—the Engineer, the Comic Book Writer, the Tour Guide—rather than their names. I also put a bus seating chart at the front of the book. Print that out and keep it with you!
I think you’re one of the funniest writers out there. Seriously. Do you have any working theory of what comedy brings to a novel?
Comedy comes out of character, and comedy reveals character. For me, the only jokes that work are the ones that come from the character’s brain in reaction to what’s happening in the scene. If I can’t imagine the character saying or thinking it, the joke has to go. That said, I do rig the game. In every book, there are one or two highly verbal characters that I give wordplay or witty lines to. Comedic scenes, however, can take many forms. Like we talked about earlier, psychological realism in the face of surrealism can be very funny. Then there’s the old comedy rule of making the high low, and the low high. What this means on the page is that a character can care deeply about something extremely minor. In WWWR there are a couple character who are deeply concerned with things like the number of their social media followers—even as bullets are flying.
Also, stay in touch with your inner boredom. In an early draft of WWWR, the Rabbi is at a tourist stop, traipsing around a field of artificial sheep (it’s complicated), and it was ho-hum. Then I thought, what if one of the sheep starts following him? This bothers him. Then the sheep keeps showing up at other stops. He finds it standing on the ceiling of his hotel room. He’s going nuts, and nobody else is concerned. But then, of course, I needed to pay off the joke. How can I use this sheep in the climax, to complete the Rabbi’s story?
Best piece of writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
The piece of advice that’s most helped me lately came from the South Park guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The advice is simple: Every beat of your story should be linked by either the words “therefore” or “but.” If the beats can only be connected by “and then,” you are, in their words, f***ed. This is a story: the character wants something, therefore they try X, but they hit obstacle Y, and they try again with Z. This is not a story: this happens and this happens and then this happens. I apply this test to scenes on a daily basis.
Daryl Gregory is the award-winning author of numerous novels, including Revelator, Afterparty, and Spoonbenders, a Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award finalist. His novella We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. He currently resides in Seattle, Washington.
