 Solaris’ Fantasy: Daniells, McKenna and MaxeybyGillian PolackI wanted to interview three fantasy authors who publish with the same publisher but live on different continents, just to see what would happen. The publisher is Solaris Books. The three writers are (in alphabetical order) Rowena Cory Daniells (Australia), Juliet McKenna (Britain) and James Maxey (USA). Rowena was kind enough to set the interview up for me, so I’ll let her introduce herself first. Rowena Cory Daniells: I’ve been involved with Spec Fic for over thirty-five years. With The Chronicles of King Rolen’s Kin, I set out to write the kind of book that you curl up with on a Saturday afternoon after a hard week. I hope readers have as much fun reading the trilogy as I had writing it. My new fantasy trilogy The Outcast Chronicles is due out in 2012. My long suffering husband and six children are used to me staring off into space, when my head’s in a book. I’ve served on the management committees of state and national Arts organisations and in my spare time I studied each of these martial arts for five years, Tae Kwon Do, Aikido and Iaido, the art of the Samurai sword. Juliet E McKenna: I’ve always been fascinated by myth and history, other worlds and other peoples. After studying classical history and literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, I worked in personnel management before a career change to combine book-selling and motherhood. My first novel, The Thief’s Gamble, was published in 1999. The Tales of Einarinn series was followed by The Aldabreshin Compass sequence and my most recent trilogy, The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution, explores divided states, personal conflict and the rights and responsibilities of power. I’m now working on a new fantasy trilogy, The Hadrumal Crisis and a couple of other projects. As well as writing assorted short fiction, I teach creative writing from time to time and write articles and reviews for online and print magazines. Along with the other members of The Write Fantastic, I go to library events and literary festivals to promote the fantasy genre. I live in the Cotswolds, England, doing my best to fit all this around life with two teenage sons and my husband. He and I met through studying Aikido and we now run our local club. James Maxey: I started writing my first book when I was eight. It was about ghosts and pirates. Almost forty years later, I’m still writing about ghosts and pirates, plus dragons, supermen, angels, devils, circus freaks, politics, god, sex, violence, love, death, and all my other favorite toppings on the great pizza of life. Currently, I live in Hillsborough, NC, and am engaged to be married on 11-11-11 to Cheryl Morgan, who displays zen-like patience in dealing with my propensity to daydream. My daydreams mostly produce other daydreams, but occasionally give birth to novels and short stories. I’ve published about twenty short stories in various anthologies and prozines like Asimov’s, and the best of my short fiction will soon be released in e-book format as the collection There is No Wheel. My four novels currently available in bookstores (and world-wide via Kindle) are Nobody Gets the Girl, Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. I’m currently at work on a series of books pitting medieval superheroes versus elemental dragons. The first two books in the series, Greatshadow and Hush, will hit stores in 2012, with the third book, Sorrow, following early in 2013. Gillian: Why fantasy trilogies? Why Solaris? Tell us about your writing, your publisher and how they fit together? James: I became the author of a trilogy purely by accident. I wrote Bitterwood as a stand-alone book, with a classic three act structure, beginning, middle, end. I believed a book should tell the story of the most important incident in the character’s life, and that it was robbing from a story write a sequel in which you say, “Wait, that wasn’t the most important incident, this next thing was!” When I sold the book to Solaris, my agent asked me to write out ideas for a follow up, which I did, but without enthusiasm. Solaris passed on these poor ideas, as they should have. If Solaris was interested in a multi-book fantasy, I wanted to start from scratch with a brand new idea specifically created to span multiple volumes. Alas, Solaris passed on the new proposal, but by this time they were getting very positive advance reviews on Bitterwood and they again asked me to think about more books in that setting. As it happened, one huge event had occurred in my life since selling Bitterwood that changed my whole concept of “the single most important event in a character’s life.” I sold Bitterwood to Solaris in March 2006. In May 2006, my partner Laura Herrmann passed away from breast cancer. During that time, I was very focused on endings, and probably at the peak of my resistance to the idea of sequels. Things came to an end. Stories don’t go on forever. And yet... and yet, following Laura’s death, my story did go on. I had to go find a new house, I had to navigate through a landscape of changing relationships and finances, and I found myself coming to terms with the reality that my life as a successful writer was just starting at exactly the time when other parts were ending. Suddenly, the neatly wrapped up conclusion of Bitterwood no longer looked so final to me. Sure, the good guys had triumphed and evil had been vanquished, but the very next day all the surviving characters had gotten out of bed and asked themselves, “Now what?” My dragon characters still wanted a very different world than my human characters. The evil king from the first book, for all his flaws, had kept a lid on conflicts that were now free to boil over. So, even though Bitterwood was already on the presses, I returned to Solaris with a proposal for two more books and am extremely happy they said yes. I feel like the two books I wrote were exactly the books I needed to write to help me come to terms with some of my own hopes, doubts, and ghosts. My next series returns to the multi-book idea I generated when I was trying not to write a sequel to Bitterwood. At the time, I had an idea for a series I jokingly called, “Bad Girls/Big Dragons.” The idea was a fantasy setting in which the dragons were so powerful they’d become primal forces of nature. Each book in the series would pit an outsider female protagonist against one of these dragons, and the books would be designed so that, more often than not, the dragon would win. Each book would stand alone as a chronicle of that particular encounter with a primal dragon, with the series tied together by a supporting cast that would move between books. My initial proposal had been something I’d only given a few months thought. Since then, I’ve been developing the idea in ever greater detail. After I turned in the last Bitterwood book I finally took the time to write the first book in the series, Greatshadow. I now refer to the series “the Dragon Apocalypse,” with a premise of the books being that one of the characters is a time-traveler who has journeyed back from a future in which the primal dragons rose up in a single day to wipe out all of mankind. This character will spend the series trying to prevent this, but despite her plotting each book will bring mankind one step closer to the final, fateful day. I wrote Greatshadow “on spec,” with no publisher or agent. Then, I met the new Solaris editor Jonathan Oliver at World Fantasy last year and he and I just clicked. We seemed to have extremely similar tastes in books and media, and showing him the Greatshadow manuscript was a no-brainer. I’m really excited about working with him moving forward. Rowena: Wow, James, sounds like you’ve been through some really life changing events. So sorry to hear about the death of your partner from breast cancer. It would be fair to say that fantasy stories in great arcs that span many books with a cast of characters and an in-depth created world comes naturally to me. I don’t seem to be able to work shorter. Even when I set out to write a short story, it turns into a novella. I’m currently developing a new trilogy story arc for King Rolen’s Kin. When I closed the first trilogy I rounded off one of the main narrative themes, but left another one open. This allowed me to come back into the story with unanswered questions. I plan to put the characters through the wringer, to really test them and what they believe about themselves. This is the joy of fantasy. Because you are writing in a created world, you can come up with societies and events that push your characters to their limits. This is what I’ve done with The Outcast Chronicles which I have to hand in to Solaris in May (to be published in 2012). My Master’s thesis was about persecution and discrimination in fantasy books. With this trilogy I have a race of mystical beings who are persecuted and hounded by those without power. The trilogy tells how they are banished and seek out a new home. Once again, it gives me a chance to test the characters and the beliefs about themselves and the people who oppress them. I did a lot of research of minority groups and persecution, while writing my thesis. Having said that, I set out to write a rollicking tale of adventure. The two things are not exclusive. Solaris Press is based in the UK and I’m here in Australia, which means the guys are getting into the office, just as I’m going to bed. So I send them an email, then look for an answer the next morning. I’d love an opportunity to meet them in person. Maybe I should go to the next World Con in the UK. I made it to the Glasgow World Con in 2005. Juliet: Why trilogies? Well, the series I’m currently working on, The Hadrumal Crisis simply falls naturally into three phases, and the same is true of the story I told before that, The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution. I started out with The Thief’s Gamble, back in 1999, and wrote that as a standalone, since getting one book published was the peak of my ambition then. Only that publisher, Orbit, offered me a two book deal . . . so I had to come up with a sequel. I’m very interested in what you say here, James, about the dangers of sequels short-changing the reader. I was thinking very much along those lines, and yet, as you say, real life does go on. Specifically, there were loose threads and unanswered questions left over at the end of Thief. Working out where those led gave me the sequel, The Swordsman’s Oath, and with those two books written, I realised there were three more stories ready and waiting to be told about those characters and the challenges they faced. At the end, I realised I written a series with a five act structure pretty much by accident. However at that point, I had definitely reached a conclusion for those characters. Yes, their lives would go on (mostly) but forcing them into some new adventures really wouldn’t have been playing fair with the reader. So I looked elsewhere in the world which I’d created for a new idea, for more unanswered questions, and that’s what gave me the story arc for The Aldabreshin Compass, starting with Southern Fire. Though once again, that four book series is more a sequential series than one continuous story as my more recent trilogies have been. So really, the number of books in each of my series has essentially been determined by the nature of the story I have to tell at the time. Why Solaris? That’s down to the vagaries of the book publishing business. My relationship with Orbit reached a natural break point at the end of The Aldabreshin Compass for various reasons on both sides and as I was looking around for a home for the Lescari Revolution proposal, Solaris was being set up under its first editorial director, Marc Gascoigne. Marc and I got on very well and he was as keen on the project as I was, so we soon had a deal in place. Happily the change of regime as Rebellion took over the imprint has gone very smoothly, so on we go. On a personal level, it’s tremendously convenient, since I live in the Cotswolds and Solaris is based in Oxford. If I need to, I can just hop in the car and drive to the office. So that’s pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum to you, Rowena! I do hope you get a chance to get over to the UK some time. I’ll give you a guided tour of Oxford. Where were we? Oh yes, publishers and writing and how they fit together. What I’ve always looked for in an editor is someone who understands what I’m exploring within the fantasy genre. I write stories set very firmly in the epic fantasy tradition but along with a good many other writers these days, I want to test those traditions, to see how they hold up when the fantasy world is as complex and contrary as our own reality. I like to turn the accepted conventions on their head if I can, or at very least hold them up by their feet and give a good shake to see what falls out of their pockets. In The Thief’s Gamble, our heroine Livak, only goes off on a quest because she’s blackmailed into it by wizards who have almost nothing in common with Gandalf. I like to write fantasy where the focus is on the ordinary people, even if they do find themselves in extraordinary situations. That said, in Southern Fire, I wanted to look at the pressures on an absolute ruler, a hereditary warlord with the power of life and death over his people. What good will such powers do him and his fellow warlords when their entire culture is threatened by wild, destructive magic, especially when sorcery is forbidden to these people on pain of death? I went back to the ordinary people for The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution because I wanted to look at what might happen if those common folk decided they were sick of being pushed around by the ambitions of rival princes and started shoving back. Now I’m looking at the implications of powerful magic; specifically, what sorts of checks and balances stop wizards from ruling fantasy worlds. The days have long gone when a writer could get away with Archmages holding back because they’re simply decent, honourable chaps. So what happens if those checks and balances break down? Well, that’s why this new series is called The Hadrumal Crisis. Gillian: Often, in interviews, writers get asked questions that match their genres: you write fantasy trilogies, so obviously you get fantasy-trilogy questions. As writers, however, you draw upon your life experiences and your passions to make your work come to life. Are there any particular events, emotions, causes that have directly influenced your writing? James: I think that you’ve arrived at a highly accurate insight. While science fiction and fantasy may be the genres I write in, the entire reason I write is because it allows me to try to make sense of my life in particular, and the human condition in general, if I may say that without sounding utterly pretentious. The first book I ever published was a superhero novel called Nobody Gets the Girl. I wrote about superheroes because, duh, I’m a complete nerd and am totally in love with that stuff. Same with dragons and spaceships. But, the real heart of Nobody Gets the Girl has nothing to do with men in capes. Instead, I started the book pretty much exactly the same week that my previous wife left me. The premise of the book is that there’s a stand-up comic named Richard Rogers whose life gets erased by a time machine accident. Richard is still real to himself and the scientist who built the machine, but to the rest of the world he’s an invisible, intangible ghost, a man who never existed. He goes on to have a kind of superhero life—an invisible, intangible man is pretty much the ultimate spy. But, underlying all the geeky fun of the book, Richard is constantly struggling with the heartbreak of his old life being completely wiped away. His pain was my pain, the invisibility I felt every day coming home to a house where half the rooms were empty. I’d sit and type late into the evening, trying to figure out what moments in my own timeline I could have changed to avoid the fate that had befallen me, aware that Richard did live in a world where time travel was possible. What might it do to a man to be granted the power to try to erase every tragedy? Would anyone have the intelligence to do it right? Would anyone have the wisdom to walk away from the chance? Hopefully, I’m not making the book sound too mopey. It is, in the end, a book about people in colorful costumes doing battle with 100 foot-tall, heavily-armed baby dolls. And Richard’s capacity to feel sorry for himself is matched by his ability to laugh at himself at all the right moments. But the driving power of the book, the whole reason I banged out the first draft in just forty-five days, is the underlying struggle of a man who thinks he’s lost everything to rediscover just how much of himself can never be stripped away. I will conclude by saying, with the deepest, most naked personal introspection, that Nobody Gets the Girl is available world-wide on Kindle. Whew. I’m glad I got that off my chest. Rowena: I had six children in ten years. In the past females just kept having children until they died. (I watched a program on a Celtic village they’d uncovered and most of the females in the graveyard were aged between thirteen and twenty-five. They’d probably died giving birth). I loved being a mother, but I was also aware when the youngest went into high school, that I had no chance of a career (other than writing) because I’d spent close to twenty years with my family. (I ended up doing my Masters in Arts Research and now lecture so there is a happy ending to that story). The book I wrote for my Masters eventually became the basis for my new fantasy series. In this series, I wanted to explore a society where females were not limited by their reproductive organs and their weaker physical bodies. The Outcast Chronicles is about a race of mystics who are persecuted by people without gifts. The mystics’ society is based on my research into many different societies and the research I did during my Masters into discrimination and persecution. The mystic women send the males to the brotherhoods when they reach seventeen. No one, not male or female, is completely good or bad. There are characters who try to do the right thing, but they are inherently flawed. They all have blind spots and discriminate against the opposite gender, and those people without gifts because they are shaped by the society they grew up in. Just as we are. The seeds of the conflict arise from the characters’ beliefs. So while they are dealing with an attacking army or a storm that threatens to sink their fleet, they are also dealing with the limitations and flaws within themselves and their own society. In real life, King Henry the Eighth created a new religion because he needed a new wife to give him a male heir because he believed female heirs were worthless. In my fantasy story I put my characters through challenges and into danger that make them question everything they’ve been told and believe. We are all shaped by our society. You only have to look at books and movies from each decade to see how the concerns of the times shape the stories we create. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a bit of a boy’s club, because women didn’t take charge in the world he grew up in. Juliet: How do I draw on such life experiences in my work? Well, there’s the general and the specific, as I see it. I draw on my own life in everything that I write, and on my friends’ lives, and on complete strangers’ experiences thanks to biography and autobiography, to make sure that my characters’ actions and reactions are believable when facing such challenges. There has to be emotional truth, emotional validity, underpinning any character whom the readers are going to invest their passions in, who they are going to identify with. A story and the people in it have to matter, or the whole book becomes worthless. As to the specific, I’m very cautious. I once heard the award-winning writer Bernice Rubens talking about this very subject in a panel discussion at a literary festival. She referred to the two novels which she wrote in the throes of a collapsing marriage and then in the aftermath of the divorce. They were marvellous therapy, she told the audience, but not anywhere near her best work. With the benefit of hindsight, she was firmly of the opinion that writing for catharsis and writing for publication are very different, and often mutually exclusive. Of course, Bernice was a ‘literary/contemporary’ writer. Once again, James, I find your perspective illuminating here. The distance that the SF & fantasy genres can give us from ‘real life’ in what we’re writing—as in writing about superheroes as a means of addressing loss—so often means that we can actually tackle tougher subjects with more emotional truth and universal impact than so-called ‘naturalistic’ fiction actually can. Just one reason why I love our genre. My own passions? As Rowena says, books reflect their times and so my books certainly reflect my own concerns and passions about life and politics in its broadest sense—issues of gender and equality, the rights and abuses of power, the burden and lessons of history, so on and so forth. But those are the themes that emerge naturally from my writing, as I strive to be true to myself and my world view, rather than anything that I consciously set out to do. One thing that having children soon teaches you is that kids’ books with An Improving Moral Message are generally the most tedious and least likely to be requested for a re-read, right from the picture book state up. I can’t imagine I’d ever set out to write A Book With A Message. I want to write exciting stories! James: To pick up where Juliet left off, I have exactly the opposite take on “Book with a Message.” I, too, want to write exciting fiction, but for me the excitement doesn’t stem just from men fighting dragons or priests confronting elder gods, though of course those things are in my work. But, the action would feel hollow to me if I wasn’t actively exploring large ethical questions. These are the kind of things that get my mind buzzing. My next book, Greatshadow, is chock full of action and adventure, but on its highest levels it’s also examining man’s relationship with natural world. Greatshadow is the primal dragon of fire, dwelling on a volcanic island roughly the size and climate of Hawaii. The king and the church want him dead, and with good reason, since Greatshadow’s malevolent spirit gazes out on mankind through every candle flame, and the beast is more than eager to take the life of anyone careless with fire. But the king also wants the island for its old growth forests, since his own land has been mostly stripped bare and he needs the timber to maintain his navy. I don’t consider myself a rabid environmentalist, and I don’t try to hammer people over the heads with my views, but I do hope the book is at least somewhat thought-provoking on the trade-offs that must forever be made between civilization and wilderness. If Greatshadow’s not a “Book with a Message,” it is, most definitely, a “Book with a Question.” Rowena: I like that James. A book with a question. It’s the questions that keep me reading. I like to follow tortured characters who set out to do what they believe to be right, but find as they experience events and grow, that their assumptions aren’t necessarily correct. Juliet: That’s really interesting, James, not least because I definitely write books with A Question. You know that particular everlasting question we all get asked—“Where do you get your ideas from?” My honest answer is invariably “from ‘What if?’ ”. That’s what’s kicked off every book and series I’ve written. What if the focus of a fantasy story isn’t a Hero with a shiny sword and all the advantages of rank and privilege, but a woman living on her wits on the fringes of society? What if magic turns up causing trouble for a hereditary, absolute ruler in a realm which bans wizards on pain of death—and this definitely isn’t collegiate wizardly magic which he could negotiate with, but howling savages with handfuls of fireballs? What if the ordinary folk who get trampled beneath the ambitions and quarrels of their feudal lords decide they’re mad as hell and not about to take it anymore? What if, after decades of wizards staying aloof from mainland wars and politics, the Archmage gets backed into a corner . . . ? So starting from there, my characters work through the challenges that follow, on every level from the intensely personal and emotional through the not-getting-killed by swords or spells to the impact all this has on their lives and those around them—and like Rowena, I and they find out their initial assumptions may well have been way off track. Once I’ve done all that, then I can see the ethical questions which the book’s been exploring along the way—they’re always there and yes, James, I agree, without that a story is hollow—but I couldn’t set out with those in mind. Even though I am definitely a planner as a writer, as opposed to one of those who simply type Chapter One and dive right in to see where the story takes them. Gillian: Rowena, you have led me to my next question, which is very kind of you. I would love to know how you read, as writers. Also, what do enjoy reading, and why? Rowena: I’d love to list a whole pile of really erudite books, but at the moment I’m lecturing, trying to finish a trilogy that has developed a life of its own, renovating, five of my six kids are still at home, and I am caring for an elderly relative. I get to read blog posts which I find via Twitter (it’s great way to catching up with interesting articles) and the backs of cereal packets. When I do read I like to mix it up with a bit of fun paranormal romance like Nalini Singh, hard-edged fantasy like Joe Abercrombie, anything that pushes the boundaries of the genre and research on other times and cultures. For instance I found Jared Diamond’s Collapse really interesting. It made me realise how blind we can be to the accumulative pressures on our society. For instance on Easter Island the locals cut down all their trees to make giant sculptures and failed to notice that without trees they couldn't make boats to fish and feed themselves. We’re pretty much in the same boat now, but I’m not going to get political. Juliet: I read crime and mystery fiction for relaxation; Val McDermid, Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, Lindsey Davis—I could go on but you get the idea. Oh, and Lee Childs when I’m in the throes of a copy edit or a final proof reading. Because I find I cannot read Epic Fantasy while I’m actually working on a book of my own. I’m in completely the wrong mindset; always looking for the tricks, the smoke and mirrors and analysing as I go. Which is pretty lousy, given I love the genre! Seriously, it’s reached the point that I can only read epic fantasy on holiday, somewhere well away from my usual working environment. Then I can enjoy it as it deserves. Though that analytical mindset does mean I can read epic fantasy for review while I’m working. I’m on the Interzone reviewing team and I have a regular column as a contributing editor to Albedo One. I do read urban fantasy; Kelley Armstrong, Patricia Briggs, CE Murphy, Mike Carey, Charlie Houston, to name some favourites. That’s sufficiently far removed from my own work not to trip the analytical mindset. The same with SF; Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, Justina Robson. I also read a good deal of non-fiction; general history, social history, biography and auto-biography. I like to claim this is research, and honest, a good deal of it does make its way into my writing, one way or another but truthfully, I’d be reading this stuff anyway because I find it fascinating. James: As Juliet said, it’s difficult for me to read fantasy while I’m writing fantasy, so most of the stuff I devour is non-fiction. Currently I’m reading a book about the periodic table called The Disappearing Spoon, and I just finished reading The World Without Us. Before that I read a book called Salt that was about, well, salt; the role it played in shaping world history and culture. I like books that take some seemingly simple or dull subject that then expands out so that you see the whole world in a new light. When I do read fantasy, my tastes tend toward humor, with Terry Pratchett being the master of this form. I stay away from outright parody or satire in my own writing, but I love to sprinkle in plenty of humorous touches and wordplay. My all-time favorite novel is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I love the social commentary mixed with insane antics mixed with tight, beautiful prose. If I ever write a book even half as well, I’ll feel as if I’ve done something good for the world. Gillian: Drawing the questions together a little, what do you get from these favourite authors and how do you (you yourself, not a mythical writer) use it in your writing? What techniques do you use to translate the lifestuff that’s important into a fantasy novel? James: From a lot of my favorite books and writers, I learned to write outside my comfort zone. There are times in my writing where I worry I might be going too far. People have picked up my fantasy novel to be entertained, and may not want to be confronted with a pagan orgy followed by an Old Testament-style slaughter of heathens within the first ten pages of a book. Yet, Bitterwood does indeed open with a pagan orgy followed by a horrific level of limb-severing violence inflicted by an ill-tempered prophet with an axe. This scene isn’t there for gratuitous sex and violence. Instead, I’m trying to portray the most traumatic event in my protagonist’s childhood; the moment when love, violence, god and hatred all got mashed together so tightly he’s never since been able to untangle them. Bitterwood is literally baptized in blood in the opening chapter, which explains why, twenty years later, he’s got the internal hardness necessary to kill dragons four times his size while armed with little more than pointy sticks while his fellow men sensibly accept their proper role in the food chain. Yet, I wavered just before the book had gone through its final edits, and gave serious thought to writing a kinder, gentler opening. I didn’t want people thinking I was some sort of violent tempered pervert, or worse, some cynical hack tossing in gratuitous sex and violence to sell a book. Plus, what if children read this book? Or worse, my mother? But, most of my favorite authors, people like Harlan Ellison, Hunter Thompson, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck, all write fiction that must certainly have taken them far outside their comfort zones. Harlan Ellison is unabashedly left leaning in his politics, but one story that stands out of his is titled “Hitler Painted Roses.” In it, the gates of hell are opened and the damned escape, but Hitler refuses to leave. He’s painting roses, and doesn’t want to leave the work unfinished. In everything I’d ever read before this story, Hitler had been either a monster or a madman or a joke; Ellison managed in this single scene to portray him as a human who I could feel empathy for. Few things have shocked me out of my day to day assumptions quite as much as this moment in a short story. He must certainly have gotten hate mail for what he wrote. If other writers have the courage to write in these outer realms, who am I to back down? As for the non-fiction I read, I feel I couldn’t write fiction if I didn’t appreciate reality. I think a writer is obligated to know a little bit of everything. I’d be uncomfortable creating plausible dragons if I didn’t understand biology and evolution. I’d be uncomfortable writing about kingdoms and wars if I didn’t read history. I’d never be able to have one character bury another and say a few words over the grave if I didn’t study the world’s religions. And there’s no fact too trivial to latch onto that might not one day prove useful. In the Bitterwood universe, two of my dragon species give birth to live young while a third species lays eggs. This is a tip-off to the different origins I’ve worked out for the dragon races; the egg layers are purely reptilian, while the live-birth dragons have a mammalian biological template despite having scales. (There are numerous scaled mammals, the most famous of which would be the pangolin.) I had someone tell me that it was stupid for a beast covered with scales to give live birth instead of laying eggs; it would kill the mother. But, somewhere along the way, I had studied the reproduction habits of porcupines, and knew that they gave birth to young already fully covered with quills. If porcupines could do it, dragons could do it. If I went into a book just making everything up from thin air, I wouldn’t have the confidence to be a writer. When I tell my carefully constructed lies (which is, after all, the art of fiction), I want to be as certain as possible of the truth underneath them. Rowena: I learn from all writers. I learn what I don’t want to do and I see what I’d like to achieve. Because I teach film treatments, script, storyboards and animatic I see a lot of films and TV series. I’m always analysing story structure, characterisation and world building. I see a TV series like Deadwood and I think, I’d love to create that level of reality. This must have been what it was like in the west before law and order arrived. The strong ruled. It’s such a different world from our politically correct world now. Then I see a show like Being Human and I realise I want to get that level of reality into my characterisation. I want my characters to be flawed, but try to rise about their limitations. I could go on all day. Juliet: Now you put it into words, Rowena, I guess that’s pretty much what I do too, but unconsciously or by some sort of writerly osmosis when I’m actually watching the film or TV show or reading a book. One hallmark of writerly failure for me personally is if I catch myself admiring the technique when I’m in the middle of something. I know that may sound paradoxical but it’s probably tied into the difficulties I have reading fantasy while I’m writing it, if that makes sense. Though I do consciously get tips from reading interviews with my favourite writers or going to hear them give a talk, and also from the writer and director commentaries on DVDs. I find those very useful. When it comes to getting “the important life stuff” into a novel, and as we’ve already established, that is vital, I guess my touchstone is always being true to the particular character I’m writing at the moment, whose point of view the reader is following, even if they’re a villain or somehow repellent. Even when that means making the hard choices about what they do and where the plot goes. Then they will have that three-dimensional quality that brings a book to life, with the emotional and psychological validity that follows. But as with themes, I don’t think I could write a decent book if I set out with a conscious plan to get the important life stuff in. Which is probably why this perfectly good question has rather baffled me. Gillian: My final question concerns books and is linked to Juliet’s answer. What writers do you most admire for their technique? What is it you specifically admire in their work? Juliet: I could go on and on here, so I’ll just go with what I can see from the bookshelves as I type. On the epic fantasy side, Kate Elliott and Robin Hobb for the way they create convincingly believable worlds and societies that don’t just rely on the quasi-medieval-northern-Europe default settings that can plague our genre. On the crime side, Michael Connelly and Robert Crais for their dialogue and pared down description that still manages to set a scene while drawing you right into the main character’s head—first or third person. Val McDermid, for not flinching from writing about violence and focusing on the exploration of such behaviour rather than indulging in mere exploitation to give readers a tacky thrill. Sara Paretsky for doing the same with feminist politics. Urban fantasy—Kelley Armstrong and Charlie Houston—very different writers indeed but both making a hidden, paranormal world credible. Mike Carey, for making the paranormal coming into the daylight scarily believable. For SF, Charlie Stross and Walter Jon Williams, for their knack of telling an exciting, fast-paced story where the tech is integral to the plot while making that tech comprehensible to the unsophisticated end-user like me. Ken MacLeod for doing the same with economics and social politics. Terry Pratchett, er, quite possibly for all of the above. James: I’m not completely certain I understand what you mean by technique. Technique, in the sense of specific skills, seems hugely important if you’re a singer or a dancer. But writing fiction is such a strange mish-mash of elements that it’s astonishing that anyone ever succeeds at it. I have a lot of favorite books, but not that many favorite authors. As I mentioned in a previous answer, my favorite novel is probably Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson. On a technical level, the work is almost flawless. If you read it out loud, you can truly appreciate how Thompson is putting the right words in the right places. But practically all of Thomson’s work is built out of clean, bright prose, and no other book length manuscript that he wrote comes anywhere close to capturing the same energy. If writing technique is akin to glassblowing, Hunter Thompson was a master bottle maker . . . but only one bottle wound up capturing lightning. The same is true of Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn deserves its status as arguably the greatest American novel because Twain chose to tackle the greatest American failure, slavery. Yet, stylistically, the dialect can make the book kind of a long, hard slog. Tom Sawyer is much, much more pleasant to read, a genuine masterwork of prose, but, once you’ve read Huckleberry Finn, you can’t help but feel like the book is empty. It’s a good read, but is it a great book? I’m not saying that craft isn’t important. I’ve stopped reading plenty of books because I found the writing clunky or banal. It’s just not something I focus on anymore. Rowena: Every time I think I’m getting somewhere with the craft of writing I discover there’s another area I’m deficient in. As James said writing fiction is such an intuitive thing, it is amazing anyone gets it right. Having said that, people do and I do admire them. Like Juliet, I’m a big fan of Terry Pratchett. I’ll be reading one of his books and come across something so elegantly succinct, I’ll think why do I even bother to write, when he does it so well? In my early twenties I discovered Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series and loved them. I used to have a second-hand bookshop then, so I read voraciously. Another writer I found in those days was Joanna Russ. You can’t go past Georgette Heyer’s regency books. I’ve read every one at least three times and each time I do, I discover something new. But I’m also a big fan of TV series. I like to watch the whole series from beginning to end to see how the larger story and character arcs are developed. For instance I found Deadwood really powerful. It’s a western without any of the gloss. It examines how people really behaved when they were beyond the confines of law and order. I’ve been watching Being Human, which looks at how the characters try to retain their humanity when they are no longer human. This show just keeps getting better and better. Because I teach script and storyboards, and because I write I find the craft intrudes on the film/TV series/book and I see the bones of construction. If I find a book or movie, or TV series that sweeps me away, then I know the story is so powerful, I’ve forgotten to look for the craft. That gives me a real buzz. Juliet: I absolutely agree with you on TV series, Rowena, and I think that’s something we as writers need to be aware of these days. Not least because the upcoming generation—my sons are in their mid teens—access ‘narrative/story’ in so many more ways than those of us in our forties and older do. When I was their age, if you were out when your favourite TV show was broadcast, you missed it. You saw films once at the cinema, unless and until they turned up on the telly years later. My lads can watch DVD box sets, catch reruns in the same week or online if need be, if it’s something I haven’t recorded on the DVR. They play detailed and immersive computer games with ongoing storylines and character arcs. There are plusses and minuses, so I’m not saying either situation is or was better or worse. But it is certainly different. Books mentioned in this column:
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