Oct 9th 1-2-3: Red Rising - Rejection, Resistance, and Revolution
Greetings!
The last two weeks have been quite eventful in my life. I am blessed to be alive and here writing to you all.
For today, I want to go back to a story I read a couple of years back that impacted me massively. I want to talk about Pierce Brown’s, Red Rising.
So what’s the story behind Red Rising?
1: The Story Behind The Story ( 3 minute read )
He awoke from his slumber. Rested yet tired.
6 failed novels.
12 rejections.
Sleeping above a garage.
Pierce Brown was no stranger to difficulty, and before Red Rising could become a phenomenon, he had to write it. So what did he do?
He went for a hike in the Cascades in North America. Along with him, he brought Sophocles’ play, Antigone, to reread. The story is an Athenian tragedy where the heroine defies the King of Thebes to bury her brother after he was deemed a traitor.
This is when Brown had a character brought to mind.
What if a character was willing to sacrifice themselves for a future they wouldn’t see?
It was around this grief-driven hope that Brown began to build the world of Red Rising, and along with it, its story.
As he wrote, he worked odd jobs and lived at his parent’s home above the garage. After the 6 failed novels, he was able to write Red Rising in 2 months, blasting it out without any breaks.
Red Rising was a story about rising up, and it became a similar story behind the scenes as well.
Growing up, Brown had moved through seven different states during his upbringing. This transience exposed him to class divides, social anxiety, shifting identities, and the feeling of being an outsider.
These were all themes that would be echoes in Red Rising through the primary character, Darrow.
Along with Antigone, The Count of Monte Cristo inspired Brown to push into the themes of class struggle and disenfranchisement.
For the setting, he chose Mars seeing as it was the obvious first planet we as a species were looking to inhabit. His fascination by it never left him since he looked at Mars through a telescope as a child in Arizona.
Roman mythology, along with Greek Tragedy and the history of Irish immigrants helped give him the inspiration he needed for the world of Red Rising.
The world is driven by the characters, as anyone who has read Red Rising will tell you, and boy are the characters fantastic.
Brown also wanted to incorporate a sense of realism and plausibility to the world building in spite of the story being a “monster-baby” of science fiction, fantasy and historical fiction.
To do this, he adjusted human physiology based on gravity differences across planets, changing the way bone density and height would be affected depending on the pulls of gravity.
He also utilized Greek and Roman names, symbolism, and political and military imagery in order to drive his design and descriptions of how the characters, classes, and world functioned.
Along with this, the violent realism present in the book were brought front and center when necessary. He didn’t want readers to simply read the violence, he wanted them to feel it.
Once the story was completed, he sent it to his editor and agent in order to possibly get the book published.
While editors and agents rejected and wanted massive changes to the book, Brown said no.
He believed in the tone, the complexity of the story and characters, and the themes.
Any sweeping changes to tone, pacing and structure were outright rejected by Brown, and he resisted any requests for heavy rewrites.
His agent, Hannah Bowman, was a relatively new agent. She believed in Red Rising too, so rather than try to push for heavy changes she fought for his version.
This led to the publisher Del Rey. Bowman pushed and pushed on the manuscript which led to an offer for a 3-book deal.
An easy choice for Brown, he accepted.
He was now working with his dream publisher.
The book was released in 2014 and instantly became a best seller.
Since then, Pierce Brown has written five more books that directly follow the story of the main character, and is slatted to have the final book released next year in 2026.
So what can we learn from this story?
If you have a strong vision for a story like Brown had, do not accept compromise.
The refusal to compromise is often what makes the work great.
Would Brown have listened to market feedback, Red Rising could have easily been another cookie-cutter sci-fi novel that blended into the bookshelves.
Instead, the story is not only powerful, but authentic, pointing to all of the resistance and rejection that Brown had felt before and had overcome in writing, and getting Red Rising published.
Don’t ask for permission, make what you want to make, and don’t compromise on your vision.
2: Creative Insights From Us
I. What’s an idea you keep coming back to? How does it feel and seem different than what is part of the mainstream currently?
II. Remember that resistance, whether internal or external, is part of the process. Stay faithful to your vision and keep creating!
3: Inspirational Quotes From Pierce Brown
I. “I wrote six books above the garage … Six before Red Rising came gushing out.”
II. “The violence … should feel real. If your story deals with a lot of human pain … the reader should feel that pain and suffering.”
III. “Almost everyone interested in the novel wanted me to change the tone, alter the story, and make it simpler … I balked at that.”
Thank you so much for reading!