James Barclay, Jasper Kent and me answering questions about writing, fantasy, music and life.

There are ethical problems wrapped up in writing historical fiction. Should you use a real, once-living person as a character in your fiction? Their lives reduced to nothing more than plot points and themes? In essence, a human being’s existence shackled to the pursuit of the writer’s own ego?

Would you want some future author to make you the bad guy in their little story, the walk-on joke, the mumbling idiot, the obstacle?

And let’s face it, we don’t even know what the people around us are truly like, never mind those who existed hundreds of years ago. In those cases, we often only have a few scraps of paper to sketch out the things they did, with little hint to their motivation.

This becomes even more of an issue in fantasy, where the historical characters are divorced from the realities of their lives. It’s something I’ve certainly struggled with while writing the Swords of Albion books, which utilise a host of real people from the Elizabethan age. To be honest, even after writing I find it hard to decide if it was the right thing to do. I justified it to myself by my attempts to make the historical figures as true to how contemporary accounts described them, but that still leaves a great deal of psychological gap-filling.

The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men are set around the Court and Government of Queen Elizabeth, but she plays only a secondary role. I have less interest in the cosseted lives of Kings and Queens than I do in the men and women who do their bidding.

The stories concern spies, who had, for the first time, become a powerful weapon of the state in this era. And so in the first book one of the central characters is the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, a dour, puritanical man who suffered much personal misery in his life, but who gave his all in service to the Queen. His successor in The Scar-Crow Men is Sir Robert Cecil, a clever, cunning politician who battled against prejudice and mockery for his hunchback and short stature – the Queen called him her ‘Little Elf’. These two men represent different approaches to power and control, one quite honorable, the other self-serving. They act as counterpoints to the flawed, vacillating central character, the spy Will Swyfte.

Swyfte’s friend is the acclaimed playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine among other plays. He was something of a rising celebrity at the time. He may have been a spy (there is some evidence); he may have been gay. In the books, Marlowe is another counterpoint to Swyfte, a man slowly being destroyed by the dark business of spying and the demands placed upon him by service to the state. Marlowe allows the reader to see Swyfte’s strengths and flaws more easily.

Despite my antipathy towards the lives of Royalty, the fact that important people play important roles is inescapable in this era. The common man was mainly concerned with simple economic survival. And so, as Swyfte travels the known world in his spying, we encounter James VI of Scotland (and future James I of England), Philip II of Spain and Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV of France. Each one responds – and responded – in different ways to their regal status, and again, each one allows us to see Swyfte in a different light.

Dr John Dee is a key figure in both books, and the third, to come, and he really is the link between the history and the fantasy. Dee, who tutored the young Elizabeth, was both a scientist and an occultist, an inventor and mathematician who communed with angels and cast magic circles. Many of the themes I’m tackling have Dee at their centre.

There are others – Sir Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, the Earls of Leicester and Essex, the master criminal Laurence Pickering, the King of Cutpurses, who may or may not have been an invention of the Elizabethan equivalent of the tabloids. Each one was chosen carefully for what they said about Will Swyfte, in the same way that any writer chooses supporting fictional characters.

I hope I did them justice, but know in my heart I didn’t. No writer could.

I’ve been interviewed over at fantasyliterature.com by Justin Blazier, talking about The Scar-Crow Men, ebooks, psycho-fairies and folklore.

When I decided I was going to write an historical fantasy, the attractions of the Elizabethan era were many. It was, for one, a time very much like our own, when society was going through massive changes – a rapid increase in new technology changing the way people lived their lives, foreign wars over resources and in pursuit of power, religious intolerance and religiously-motivated acts against the state funded by foreign powers, heightened surveillance at home, a fear of foreigners among the common man, rising wealth for a few but near-poverty for many, and massive leaps forward in art, literature and music. Not only would we understand the Elizabethan man and woman, there were stark resonances with our own age that would add a nice layer of complexity to any story.

Spain was the sixteenth century equivalent of the US, a global superpower influencing geo-politics at many levels. Under King Philip, the country ruthlessly pursued power and wealth, invading Portugal and putting pressure on France and the Low Countries while exploiting the New World’s resources of gold and silver. Though a devout man, Philip was not averse to using religion as a cover for some of Spain’s more aggressive actions and thereby keeping his subjects firmly behind him.

Beside Spain, England was a small nation with ambition and pluck, but little real power and no great wealth. Thanks to Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic church, the nation lived in a near-constant state of fear of either retribution from the Catholic powers of Europe or insurrection within from Catholic agitators. Young priests were being trained in foreign seminaries and sent to England to foment revolution and to spy. The Government feared Philip’s expansionist policy and rumours of an invasion of England began long before the Armada set sail.

This was a dark time of terror and sweat and deceit. Yet in a sequence of stories that were essentially about duality, I could also look to the other, more positive face of the time. This, too, was the English Renaissance, with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Bacon and other writers blazing a trail, alongside composers like Tallis and Taverner, and architects like Inigo Jones. There was a great deal of enlightenment after long centuries of moral repression. Brothels were tolerated, including one composed entirely of young men. London was growing at an astonishing rate – faster than it could truly cope – and had become one of the great cities of Europe. So it was an exciting, vibrant time too.

The stories were to be about the point where fantasy collided with reality, but the more I researched, the more comparable and contextual collisions I found – socially, culturally, religious, political. Any fantasy – any story – needs a rich world and plenty of innate conflict. It was all here.

And while England was increasingly embracing what would come to be science, it still had the supernatural fears of past centuries at its back. The Elizabethan era was really the point where the country was caught between reason and unreason, hope and fear, past and future.

With the idea of a country trying to move forward while held back by the hooks of a superstitious past came the opening for my antagonists, the otherworldly Unseelie Court. Their existence was encoded in every myth and legend and folktale; the English had always lived in fear of the Fair Folk. But under Queen Elizabeth, England wanted to break free of their shackles and move into a new, brighter age.

Next time I’ll look at some of the historical characters who populate The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men and why I chose them.

The Scar-Crow Men, the second of my Elizabethan fantasy novels, is out soon in the US and UK. It’s fantasy noir, renaissance punk, historical fantasy, sword and sorcery, historical urban fantasy or one of half a dozen other labels, depending on who’s speaking. Like some of my other work, the story exists at the point where the fantastic smashes up hard against reality, only in this sequence that reality is in the past, five hundred years gone, among well-documented, pivotal events.

Writing historical fantasy – to adopt the broadest label – has its own peculiar demands. We’re talking about an alien world here, with its own customs, clothes, politics, transport, weapons, social classes, art, music and economy and every aspect needs to be fully realized for the reader to settle into it.

To say this entails a massive amount of research, doesn’t begin to do the job justice. The writer needs to understand everything, both as its own thing and in context within the time period. This involves more than the invention of a secondary world fantasy, more than looking out of the window or Googling or location research for a contemporary fantasy (both of which I’ve written in the past).

Our knowledge of history degrades the further back we go. Characters walk on stage and then disappear. Our understanding of events is based on often-biased accounts. And sometimes there are vast parts of life that are simply missing in contemporary accounts.

The Elizabethan Age is reasonably well-documented, particularly with regard to affairs of state. The lives of the common men and women are there too, but the information is scattered widely. While writing this sequence, I sometimes had to embark on three different strands of research for a single sentence.

The Scar-Crow Men unfolds in the shadow of the murder of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, a killing that has all the mystery and intrigue of the JFK assassination. The previous volume, The Sword of Albion (or The Silver Skull in the US), is set at the time of the Armada and the Spanish invasion of England.

Over a few posts here I’m going to be writing about what goes into creating these historical fantasies, looking at the places, the people, the milieu, not only setting the context but also underlining the basic premise that the more reality you get, the more effective the fantasy.

Here’s an excellent short lecture by Sir Ken Robinson (and very funny too – he’s a natural stand-up).

“The school system came into being to meet the needs of industrialisation… You were probably steered away from things you liked doing as a kid on the grounds that you would never get a job doing it. Don’t do music – you won’t be a musician. Don’t do art – you won’t be an artist. Benign advice. Now, profoundly mistaken.”

Thanks to the people at Fortean Times magazine, here’s a recording of the panel I was on at this year’s Unconvention in London, alongside Adam Nevill, Natasha Mostert and host Nick Cirkovic. We talk about ghosts, night terrors, our experiences of the paranormal and writing.

“Literature, meanwhile, is so intrinsically involved with magic’s very substance that the two may be effectively considered as the same thing. Spells and spelling, Bardic incantations, grimoires, grammars, magic a “disease of language” as Aleister Crowley so insightfully described it. Odin, Thoth and Hermes, magic-gods and scribe-gods. Magic’s terminology, its symbolism, conjuring and evocation, near-identical to that of poetry. In the beginning was the Word. ”

Alan Moore wrote a sprawling, in-depth and typically smart study of the occult for Kaos Magazine called Fossil Angels. The magazine folded before publication, but you can now read the piece online. The quote, above, comes from part two.

Part One is here.
And Part Two here.

Is there any point to online translators? I don’t think I’ve had one worthwhile result. One reader just forwarded me this five-star Amazon review from the Japanese version of my novella The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke and wondered if I could make any sense of it. It was translated from Japanese to English by Google’s Babel Fish:

“Mercury of the queen this picture makes tune in motif, this time mark [chiyadobon] being awarded tailoring and the English fantastic literature grand prix in fantastic literature. What kind of big picture 54cm×39cm where you think and starts and, passes. Thinking, without looking into, as for this picture those which could be caught in the mental hospital. There is no such a large expectation. When so you look at this picture, steadily it becomes large. Feeling of size is gone in any case. You have not looked at such a picture. Just the [zu] paragraph which is not. After so looking at this picture thoroughly, when you read this book, this writer it is enormous, you understand. Like this picture it is small to the last, it passes shortly only volume. So this is the work where feeling of size is gone. Seeing too much television of recent card magic?….”

By the great Rhys Hughes:

“Victorian gentlemen greatly enjoyed making the Beast with Two Backs. In their spare time they studied engineering especially for this purpose. It is not clear why the activity was kept secret from their wives, but so it was. “

Harlan Ellison on the idiots who write for free, and the idiots who ask them to do it.

If I had to choose one book that had the greatest influence upon me during my formative years, it would be Harlan’s short story collection, Deathbird Stories – and when I say influence, I don’t just mean writing, but philosophically and politically too.

At Fantasycon 2010 this past weekend, I moderated a panel discussing the tightrope authors have to walk between writing what they want and maintaining a commercial career in the current tough publishing environment. For anyone aspiring to be an author, it’s essential listening:

(The sound quality may not be great in parts due to microphone malfunction, but it does improve if you persevere. Many thanks to Adele at Un:Bound for getting it all down.)

The panel guests are Saran Pinborough, Mark Morris, Conrad Williams and Tim Lebbon, all horror authors now working in other areas. We touched on why horror is commercially dead as a genre (as opposed to individual novels) and the difficult issues facing writers of SF and fantasy in an industry going through a period of rapid change.

It’s worth another blogpost on the challenges facing all the speculative genres in the coming years, I think. Whatever you’re used to on the genre front, the landscape is going to look very different.

If you’re interested in the technology I use to help with my writing – novels and screenplays – I’ve written a short piece here.

You’ll all find contributions from Mark Charan Newton, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Nick Harkaway and more.

I’m on Stargate producer Joe Mallozzi’s blog talking about my short story in the just-released superhero anthology, Masked.

And a Writing For TV panel at the alt.fiction literature festival with me, Rob Shearman, Stephen Volk and Bill Boyes has just been made available as a podcast.”

On matters of meaning and a golden age of fantasy – at Babel Clash.

For the next two weeks, I’m going to be guest-blogging at Borders’ Bookshop’s Babel Clash alongside acclaimed SF author Justina Robson.

For a start we’ll be talking about putting the reality into fantasy, but after that we could go everywhere and anywhere.

…in one hour. I’ve been asked to hold a workshop for would-be fantasy authors at the alt.fiction one-day event in Derby, UK, on June 12.

It’ll cover devising your world, your protagonist, and your main storyline as well as a section on what you need to do to get your work to the attention of editors and agents. All in one hour. It’s fast-paced. You’ll need to think quickly and work hard, but you will find it rewarding. Come with paper and pen. And it’s an early start, for me – 10am – so I will undoubtedly be curmudgeonly. I will need caffeine.

I’ll also be doing a signing at 4pm with other Midlands authors Graham Joyce, Kim Lakin-Smith and Gav Thorpe.

Then at 9pm I’ll be doing a panel with Stephen Volk, Rob Shearman and Bill Boyes on writing for TV.

You don’t want to seem like a nutter when you’re on public radio. So when the host asks me – as they always do – where do you get your ideas from, I steer clear of the truthful answer: “psychic connections through the aether” or “hypnagogic messages dictated by our mysterious overlords“. I usually mutter something about stumbling across an interesting fact. Always go for the boring option. It keeps you out of the coats with no arms.

But we can speak honestly here. We all know about the mysterious connections in life. The stuff that goes on behind all those scientific processes. The weird, inexplicable occurrences lurking in the corners of day-to-day existence. The gods and imps and fairies and demons that we like to call other things because, you know, that whole coats with no arms thing…

When I say “the universe speaks to me”, I mean it speaks to all writers, all musicians, all artists. We each tend to put a different face on it, but it’s the same voice. So where do my gods and fairies and demons lurk?

In pubs with stone and timber and glowering locals and beer with strange names. In deep rural life which city folk think is backward, but is wild and dangerous and so removed it might as well be another planet. In bands that you might stumble across in the back rooms of pubs and never hear from again. In stone circles, crumbling ruins, lonely pools, old houses. Across those city liminal zones – industrial estates under sodium at 3am, empty, broken-windowed factories and wasteground with rainbow-streaked puddles. In black-faced, mirror-glassed morris men and biker gangs. In snatches of music heard after midnight. In moots and meets and markets held under moonlight. These are the places where stories are born. These are the locations where my writing gods live.

And for a specific example, here’s one of the inspirations for Age of Misrule…

The Dancing Did remain one of my favourite bands, a quarter of a century after they split up. Characterised as “neo rustic pagan bop” or “a cross between The Clash and Steeleye Span”, you can find out more about them here.

Their album, And Did Those Feet, is little-known but essential, particularly if you like fantasy or any of those things I listed above. The lyrics are clever, witty and poetic and deal with ancient things encroaching on the modern world – listen to ‘The Wolves of Worcestershire‘ or ‘Charnel Boy‘. A remixed version with a booklet and additional tracks is available from Cherry Red.

The Dancing Did’s thematic equivalent today may well be Cornish collective Kemper Norton though the music is very, very different. I came across them through the regular ravings of Warren Ellis, another fan. More inspiration. I bet they never imagined they’d be dragging a story about Elizabethan spies and Faerie into the light…

I think we can all agree that the current technological revolution is Changing Everything. Traditional business models are broken. No one listens to the Establishment any more because these days people take their guidance from their far-flung, self-selected tribe (something politicians and newspapers advising people who to vote for have clearly failed to grasp). Critics in old media dishing out their views from on-high are now redundant.

The landscape has also changed significantly for writers. I regularly get messages from aspiring authors asking for advice, so here are a few blunt words. I was also prompted by Mark Charan Newton’s recent bloggage about writers suffering in the current net environment.

I started my writing career in the pre-mass-internet days…with the dinosaurs, net kids!, or about 16 or so years back for everyone else. I know what it used to be like. And before anyone thinks this is a grumbling diatribe about the good old days, things are much better now from the business/research/connectivity perspective. So let’s not go there.

The net now is like a city centre pub. You’ve got the group getting drunk and having a laugh. The intense couples ruminating over a glass of claret. And you’ve got the swivel-eyed, shaven-headed men in brown leather jackets at the end of the bar who bellow at anyone who will listen. And they’ve all got an opinion, and they all want to tell you.

This analogy isn’t just about bloggers. It’s about anyone who chimes in with their take on a book – on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Good Reads, wherever. If you’re a writer, it’s nigh on impossible not to hear what people think about your book.

It didn’t use to be like that. You’d get a flurry of print reviews when the book came out, and then silence for months while you worked on the next one. Now they come in a torrent, every week, every day.

Back then, reviews were carefully considered. Today some are still carefully considered. But as in that city centre pub, some are rants, abusive, vitriolic, opinions filtered through prejudices. And that’s how it should be – the net has given people a voice, and it’s up to them what they want to say.

Here’s the thing: you can’t write unless you’re sensitive – the two go hand-in-hand. Writing is about empathy. It’s about digging into yourself and saying “This is me”. Non-writers think a book is a book is a product, a can of beans, but from a writer’s perspective it’s not. Any criticism stings as sharply as if someone said, you’ve got a big nose, a fat butt and you smell like pee.

It takes a while to build up the thick skin you need. I’ve been pretty fortunate on the review front, but I was also lucky to grow up in an environment – a working class mining community – where you needed a thick skin just to get through the day. Even so, in the pre-mass-web days, you got the chance to grow a hide. You got time to breathe and learn and make your mistakes in public. New writers don’t have that opportunity. They’re flung into the torrent of opinions from day one. And I know many suffer badly. Some have been laid low by depression. Some have given up. Most don’t realise they’re walking from their quiet room into a war zone, and when the bombs start falling they run back and forth until shell-shock sets in.

Judgments are harsher now. Online, many don’t have time for niceties. If a book doesn’t hit all the marks for them, THEY WILL DESTROY IT! (Their caps…) Poor new writer. You’ve slaved night and day for the big chance you’ve always dreamed about, and the minute your book comes out, YOU ARE DESTROYED!

But it’s not just the effect of opinions on a poor new writer’s brittle ego. They find it harder to build a career. In the Dinosaur Age, a writer’s career had that chance to breathe and grow. Now, as with the 24-hour news cycle of modern politics, careers can move from beginning to end in the blink of an eye. Authors are praised to the heavens, but one less than successful book and the meme spreads in a keystroke, bringing it all crashing down.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying stop being hard on writers. I’m simply stating that this is the way it is. Everything has changed. It’s tough to get a book published. It’s tough when it is published. And it gets tougher.

The modern writer has been increasingly immersing themselves in the online world and the reader communities. Now I’m wondering if new writers ought to go in the opposite direction. Retreat, or at least hold it all at arm’s length, simply to keep writing and to grow as a writer. Get inside the bubble where the words are all.

It reminds me of how Alan Moore used to go to conventions until, at the height of Watchmen, he experienced all of this face-to-face. And then he retreated to his house in Northampton for the sake of his writing. Few public appearances. No internet (which admittedly is taking it a bit far…) But he did it to survive as a creator.

So, yes, I pity the new writer. If your first book is coming out, you’ve got it harder than I ever had. You’re going to be judged. You might be torn apart. You might be built up so fast your head is spinning, and then torn apart. It might just be the death of a million tiny pinpricks. Or you might ride that upward trajectory for the rest of your life. But it’s going to be out of your hands, and it’s going to be very hard to ignore it. So a few words of advice:

Do not get Google Alerts. You might initially be excited that people are talking about you. Eventually it will destroy you.

Find a few reviewers you trust. That doesn’t mean ones who praise your work, but ones who can offer some constructive criticism which will benefit your writing. (See blog post below). Ignore the rest.

Don’t read Amazon reviews. It’s a bear pit. Or any of the other book review sites, for that matter. As I mentioned in a post below (“The Amazon One-Star Review”), there’s barely a book on the site that doesn’t have at least one one-star review, and that includes the classics. And they’re often delivered in a manner that would earn a punch on the nose if delivered in real-life.

And finally, don’t be needy. Who cares what people think? You don’t have to seek it out. You wouldn’t go round that city centre pub asking people what they thought of you or your work. Why do it on the net?

The rest of it – the pace of career change, the chance to build a writing life when you’re immediately centre-stage and in the spotlight… Sadly, that’s something you have to live with. The advantages of this life far outweigh any other job, from my perspective. It’s a great prize. But if you’re just delivering your first MS to your agent, know that it’s getting harder by the moment.