Interview with Madeleine Nakamura
Amanda: Welcome to Bookish Brews, Madeleine! I’m so excited to talk to you about the phenomenon of “writing defensively.” Before we get started, can you please tell us a bit about yourself and your book, Cursebreakers and its sequel, Angel Eye?
Madeleine Nakamura: I’m really glad to be talking about this too! I’m an author and editor based in Los Angeles. I write queer fantasy novels and spend most of my free time on embroidery, video games, cooking, and tabletop RPGs.
Cursebreakers is a gaslamp(ish) fantasy about Adrien Desfourneaux, a professor of magic and disgraced ex-physician who has bipolar disorder. Adrien learns that low-ranking soldiers of the military that controls his city have been falling into comas with no explanation. Reminded of the freak accident that caused him to abandon his former career as a doctor, he goes looking for information and ends up entangled in the conspiracy between an ambitious group of his fellow academics and a coup-hungry faction of the military.
As Adrien tries to survive the chaos, he struggles to navigate his deteriorating mental health, the guilt of his past, his history with addiction, an unrequited love, and the uneasy alliance he’s ended up in with a damaged young soldier named Gennady.
The sequel, Angel Eye, is about Adrien’s recovery following the events of Cursebreakers—which is complicated by the discovery of a medical serial killer targeting hospital patients. Angel Eye has a publication date of June 3, 2025. Both novels have received starred reviews from Kirkus.
Amanda: I love this topic that you picked to chat about and I think a lot of us will be able to relate. Can you tell us what you mean by defensive writing?
Madeleine: When I say writing defensively, I mean becoming so preoccupied with the hypothetical reactions of your readers that you start to contort and minimize your own work in an attempt to preempt criticism. Maybe even before a single person has laid eyes on your draft, you’re busy imagining all sorts of potential misreadings or interpretations that you feel would be devastating to hear, so you panic and begin trying to make your book unimpeachable in advance. It’s an understandable urge, I think, but it never pays off.
Amanda: That is definitely understandable, especially considering publishing a book puts a writer in the public eye. And who does it largely manifest in and where do you think that this phenomenon comes from?
Madeleine: For many of us, particularly authors of color and LGBTQ+ authors, a significant amount of this anxiety has to do with anticipating social criticism: I don’t want people to think I’m an assimilationist queer, I don’t want people to misunderstand what this story is saying about disability . . . whatever specific pitfalls you most want to avoid because those are the issues you’re passionate about and have heard the most discussion about.
Readers often seem to react worse to missteps from writers they feel “should know better,” and marginalized writers want to do well by our peers—we know how important it is to write about this stuff authentically. Every story reflects the political context it’s created within and exerts some amount of pressure on that context, and part of making good art is trying to be precise in what your work is saying about its context. Which perspectives do you elevate? Which lives do you frame as central? It’s something I think most writers are deeply concerned with, but marginalized writers deal with an extra dimension: by virtue of existing, we’re expected to function as activists and advocates at all times. That makes it easier to become paralyzed by the prospect of making mistakes.
All that said, the anxiety can be more general, too, or even petty: I bet this sentence I adore will be read as pretentious unless I cut out some words. If I leave in my favorite worldbuilding details, they might be seen as useless cruft.
Amanda: What do you think happens to writers when they start writing their stories in this defensive way?
Madeleine: You end up locked in a permanent back-and-forth with an imaginary readership who is a thousand times more critical and uncharitable than most real readers will be. You’ll write a scene, and then the worry starts to creep in, so you go back to start sanding off edges. If you don’t snap out of it and realize that you’re doing this to yourself, you end up with something pale and featureless. It’s a destructive creative habit to have.
I’m always torn on how to talk about this, since it’s a delicate subject deserving of nuance. Every writer should be thinking about what their readers might perceive; that’s just fundamental. And in terms of politics, it’s wonderful and necessary for writers to be concerned with things like research and sensitivity. The politics of a piece of media are a relevant point to consider in criticism; I really have nothing in common with the people who sigh about how “You can’t say anything these days” or “It’s just not that deep.” The problem is that some writers are creating primarily from a place of anxiety and appeasement, which never works out well.
Amanda: You implied earlier that this anxiety is affected by external factors such as how readers react worse to writers who “should know better”. Can you talk more about these external factors that contribute to writers writing defensively?
Madeleine: I think defensive writing is partially caused by observing real patterns in book spaces and their critical habits. There are a million intense discussions every day online regarding the political dimensions of different books. A lot of the time, those discussions are conducted in a useful way. We do need to be able to talk about when a book is racist, imperialist, sexist, homophobic, etc. Sometimes the discussions are decidedly not useful, and things get ridiculous. That’s an undeniable part of the publishing atmosphere.
There are cases of unfortunate sacrifices (very often trans women and/or women of color) who end up shredded by the autocannibalistic, zero-sum game instinct that often boils over in writing communities. Then the dust settles, the infractions are understood as minor or invented, and everyone quietly pretends they weren’t part of it until it’s the next author’s turn. It’s not unreasonable to feel cautious. And it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: people who are terrified of being the next up protect themselves by choosing someone else, enforcing the same atmosphere they’re afraid of.
Some of the anxiety is self-imposed, though. By paying too much attention to hyper specific internet spaces, or by taking the wrong writing workshop group too seriously, it’s possible to convince yourself that the type of reader who calls Vladimir Nabokov a pedophile for having written Lolita is a majority. They’re not; they’re just loud and dedicated. It’s also necessary to make peace with the fact that criticism is inevitable and survivable. Some criticism will be outrageously stupid, and some will be spot on. Crucially, it will happen no matter how much time you spend trying to avoid it. You might as well focus on doing your due diligence and making something you like, and then forgo the rest of the agonizing. The emails will come anyway.
Amanda: We already talked about what happens to writers when they start writing defensively, but how does defensive writing manifest in the writing itself? What does it do to the story?
Madeleine: One of the most common tells of defensive writing I notice is when a character almost seems to turn to the reader, like someone staring into the camera in a sitcom, to explain the story’s morality. The author is worried that someone is going to criticize them for portraying some misdeed, so they stop the novel to say, “And by the way, that’s terrible.” The character is possessed and becomes a temporary mouthpiece for the author to reassure us that they, too, disapprove of bad things, and that they, too, care about all the same sensitive topics. Most of the time, they’re right, but the well-intentioned result is still graceless and unnecessary for anyone but the most uncharitable reader.
Overall, I think defensive writing is most noticeable in terms of the holes it leaves, rather than any inclusions. The protagonist never gets up to anything too questionable because the writer is worried about likability. If two friends fight, neither of them will say anything a communication therapist might disapprove of. Everyone has the exact same carefully cultivated views on everything important, and they’ll use the exact same language to talk about it. The lovers feel like coworkers; they stiffly ask permission before each kiss to head off Goodreads reviewers who have the perfect .gif from The Office ready to imply that the author doesn’t care about consent.
The result is a feeling of texturelessness. If your story reads like you’re glancing nervously up at your audience after each paragraph, it’s difficult to maintain any sense of authenticity or impact. The lack of conviction will be perceptible.
I don’t want to make it sound like I think this phenomenon is overtaking all fiction. It’s a troubling trend for sure, but there are plenty of great books that avoid timidity. I see egregious defensive writing more commonly in ultra-online writing group drafts than I do in anything on the shelf; I think it’s more of a hurdle writers go through in their creative development than it is an oncoming literary apocalypse (even if it’s tempting to feel that way when interacting with a certain type of agent).
For many people, the point in life at which they’re making a serious effort to establish their own creative footing coincides with the point at which they’re trying to put together a coherent political perspective, and those are both inherently awkward processes. When someone’s insecurity causes them to prioritize the performance and perception of belief over action, that skewed priority reflects in their developing work as well.
Amanda: Have you struggled with the urge to write defensively in your stories? What are some ways that you worked to avoid this in your novels?
Madeleine: I struggle with it all the time. I know I’ve made writing decisions that were driven by the desire to explain myself and prevent myself from being misunderstood in some crucial way. I’d like to think that I’ve been able to make those decisions fit well with my books, but I’m still a nervous writer. Even now, I’m constructing my thoughts about all this like I’m defusing a bomb. I have whole revision rounds of my manuscripts dedicated to grimly undoing the hedges and flinches I’ve added in previous rounds.
I have a much better handle on it now than I used to. When I was working on my first two novels in college, I ended up losing all perspective on what I valued in my writing because I was unlucky with some creative writing workshops—especially my thesis workshop. The advisor didn’t like fantasy and her tastes in prose were much different from mine, so I spent hours a week crushing my work into a shape I hated for the class.
By the time I was out of those workshops, I’d lost my footing completely as a result of too many bizarre classroom experiences. I ended up stripping a huge amount of worldbuilding from my drafts because I had been editing for people who had difficulty with genre fiction. The same problem repeated with workshops after graduation, until I realized that I needed to get more selective with my collaborators. Now, when a writing partner tells me something needs to change, I can trust that they’re probably onto something.
In Cursebreakers and its sequel Angel Eye, I’ve tried to ensure that I’m writing for people who like what I like and understand what I’m saying. I do have to admit that some of the worldbuilding I axed from Cursebreakers stayed gone, which I now regret, but I did a lot of repair work on the draft before publication.
My protagonist is a wordy guy. That’s fine! There’s a place for books like that. He’s a mess, but I haven’t minimized that just in case anyone out there might be annoyed by him. I’ve tried to take great care in depicting a main character with bipolar disorder; I’m not going to overexplain that experience for someone who’s skimming. One of the central characters is a young soldier, and it would be easy to be thoughtless about what role the military plays in this setting—but I know where I’m going with the series and what payoffs I have planned. I’ve chosen to write as though I trust my readers and expect them to trust me too. It’s paid off, because even though my books aren’t going to be for everyone, the responses from people who get what I’m going for have made me feel very seen.
Amanda: Did I miss anything that you want to share with the readers? Is there anything else you’d like to leave us with?
Madeleine: I’d just like to express my sincere gratitude to everyone who’s helped me in my career as a writer and everyone who’s picked up my books! And thank you so much again for the opportunity to chat with you about this.
