An Interview With... Myself?

Available at all good bookshops, and Amazon!

With the release of my new book, The Pincers of Death, I am delighted to have as my guest... me.

Q: Hello. How are you?

A: Er, fine, I suppose. Probably about as well as you are.

Q: So, a sixth book about Isambard Smith. Looking back, how's it all gone?

A: Pretty well, thanks! I've achieved the dream of being published, which is really something. I've hugely enjoyed writing the books, and I've met loads of great people through them - not least, discovering the UK's steampunk scene. I'd like to be richer, of course, and I'd like to be doing other, more serious, writing as well as the Smith books. But it's been brilliant, really.

Q: How carefully do you plan what you're going to write? And is the plot secondary to the jokes, or vice versa?

A: As the stories have gone on, both the setting and the structure of the books has tightened up. Space Captain Smith is a much more freewheeling sort of book than A Game Of Battleships. At that early point, I was happy to do all kinds of things to get a joke in. Now I'm more careful about the world-building. I'm very careful about the jokes, too. Often they hinge on one word, so they have to be written just right to work properly. You have to get the tone right, and you can't have people acting out of character.

Q: So there's a kind of consistency, then?

A: Yes. I didn't want to write the sort of totally wacky, surreal comedy where anything can happen so long as it's funny, like the Airplane films. There's a kind of insane internal logic to the Space Captain Smith world. You could write a guidebook to Smith's universe. While it would be mad, it wouldn't contradict itself.

Q: Are you writing satire, then?

A: Not really. It's more parody than anything else - nothing as grand as satire. That said, sometimes a sort of crude satire is inevitable. You can't really write about an idiotic tinpot dictator without including shades of Mussolini and Donald Trump, for instance, because they have those stereotypical attributes. I tend to find that most of my targets are extremists of one sort or another, and they have a lot of overlapping characteristics, both with each other and with real life maniacs. I think there are a fair few people out there (usually powerful ones) who would gladly side with the Ghasts, purely because the Ghasts are so vicious.

Q: Several times in the books, the characters refer to an "over-empire" or tyrannical world government in the past. Is there a detailed future history for the Smith novels?

A: Only a very vague one. I imagine that everything got much worse, and that some kind of bland tyranny controlled the world (and perhaps the Solar System) for a while, before it splintered into the various nations we see in the book. Smith's Britain and many other countries are having something of a Renaissance (in a backward, insular way!). Of course, if I ever sell the film rights and make a fortune, I'll claim that I had every detail of the books worked out from the very beginning. That seems to be the done thing.

Q: Will there be more adventures for Isambard Smith?

A: I hope so. I'm very wary of doing the same thing to death, however. Everyone remembers a comedy series that started off really well and just went on too long. I'd hate for the Smith books to end up like that. I think it would be interesting to write about some of the secondary characters. It would enable me to introduce a slightly different tone, and to spoof particular things. I reckon a book about Wainscott would be fun, and would be a great chance to parody that "Best super-soldiers evah!" thing you see in some military SF. But Smith isn't done yet...

Q: Well, thanks for letting me interview you, me.

A: My invoice is in the post.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pincers-Death-Space-Captain-Smith/dp/1910183245

https://www.waterstones.com/book/pincers-of-death/toby-frost/9781910183243

Tension

Tension is what happens when we feel the risk that something bad is going to happen. The threat doesn’t have to be violent, or even clear in its details, but it can hang over a story like a dark cloud. In The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, for instance, we know that the house is probably haunted and that there is something wrong with the heroine: the details of how these factors will collide aren’t apparent in the end. The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons uses tension as a sort of guessing-game: what method will the haunted house use to attack its next occupants? It’s rare to see a novel that lacks tension and succeeds, which is not to say that every story has to be a rollercoaster of terror, but that there needs to be something at stake and a threat to it for the reader to read on.

Characters at Risk

A lot of science fiction and fantasy films open with a massive battle, in which thousands of indistinguishable people are fighting. This isn’t tension: it’s grandeur. The aim – at least not in the sweeping overhead shots of a billion CGI knights charging into one another – isn’t to create tension as to who will win, because we don’t know anything about the sides yet and have no reason to care about them. It’s to overwhelm the viewer with the sheer scale of what’s going on. Personally, I wouldn’t suggest that writers attempt this, as it’s much more suited to a visual medium. Focusing on the struggles of one person, and his internal thoughts (which a film can’t do as well) will be much more powerful.

Some guys fighting some other guys

There’s no tension where there’s no risk. Take the not-very-good thriller Hannibal, sequel to the vastly superior Silence of the Lambs. Very quickly it becomes clear that Hannibal Lecter is an author’s darling (one of the biggest Mary Sues in literature, if you ask me) and will never be lost for words, let alone put in real danger. The other characters are the ones we wonder about. We see the same thing in the recent film Blade Runner 2049. There is an extended fight sequence between the two blade runners in an abandoned hotel. The trouble with this is that there’s absolutely no question that they will survive: in fact, everything about the characters, and every piece of marketing, suggests that they won’t just live, they’ll make friends. So get on with it! Stop smacking each other around and move the story on!

Fancy a drink?

Creating Tension

So how do we create tension? Firstly, something has to be genuinely at stake. That means, to my mind, that there has to be an objective, a struggle to get it that has the risk of genuine harm to the parties, and a side (or just a person) that we’d choose over the other. In other words, something to fight over, a fight, a person we’d prefer to win and a credible chance that they won’t. The fight doesn’t have to be literal, of course: it could be a fight for self-expression, or a difficult choice between two suitors, although having the problem personalised in a single villain does help to focus the reader. And of course, the more righteous the cause they're fighting for, then the more we'll want them to succeed.

One technique is to show the different parties converging on the prize, step by step. The reader will contrast their progress, raising the sense of urgency. Another trick – The Terminator springs to mind – is to show how they are progressively weakened and damaged by the contest. If every step forward by the heroes is accompanied by loss, who will get there first, and what will be left of them when they do?

But perhaps the best trick, for me, is to make the reader want them to win. We need to want the characters to succeed, and that means making them likable. They need to be fighting - really or metaphorically - for something we want them to have. They need to deserve what they're trying to get, and if there's a strong chance they may not get it, and get hurt in the process, the tension will appear.

Something to Ignore

I don’t want to talk politics here, but suffice it to say that I’ve never had much time for conspiracy theories. In particular, whenever I see the phrase “mainstream media” thrown around, I tend to assume that I’m dealing with a crackpot. However, there is a story that the newspapers do want to tell about publishing: while it's not a conspiracy, it’s always much the same story, and I suggest you get into the habit of ignoring it. It runs like this:

A debut novelist has got a record advance for a novel about (fill in the details here, but it probably won't be SF). The novelist, who will not be over 40, does something adorably quirky for a living (let’s say she makes cupcakes whilst riding around Oxford on a vintage bike). The novelist is very happy and the advance is in six or seven figures. Occasionally, the novelist will be a trendy young man or an older woman, or the author will look glamorous and seductive instead of a bit like Amelie.

Back off, man, or I use the spoon.

If I sound cynical about this (which I do), it’s because I don’t think it helps anything except sales of whatever paper it appears in. First, the chances of you, or me, getting a colossal advance are so small as to be not worth serious consideration. They’re up there with being hit by lightning or winning the lottery, and you don’t have to write a novel to qualify for either of those. Second, I’m deeply unsure as to what these huge advances actually mean. Is the publisher likely to make it back on this novel? If not, will it be tied to the author’s next work? And what will it do for the author’s long-term career? And is it some kind of loss leader to publicise either the author or the publisher?

I don’t know the answer to any of those. All I can say is that I’m suspicious about this story in its various forms, and I don’t think it’s healthy for writers to see this as the eventual destination. Of course, that's not to say that a million pounds wouldn't be nice. After all, if someone did offer me a million quid to write a novel or two, I’d take it, even if I had to be photographed selling cupcakes on a vintage bike. 

Why Comedy?

I don't think comedy is taken seriously enough in writing. Let me rephrase that: I don't think comic writing is given the level of respect that it deserves.

I should say now that I write comedy. The Space Captain Smith books are comedies and while my novel for Games Workshop, Straken, isn't a comedy, I was interested to see that GW advertised it in their magazine, White Dwarf, as having a streak of black humour. In other words, I've got an angle on this, because I'd like to be respected more, especially if that involves some sort of financial gain.


Comedy tends to be regarded as unimportant, especially in highbrow literature. The main reason for this, I suspect, is the common belief that, to be good, a book has to be difficult and unenjoyable. Some comedies, of course, don't attempt to comment on real life, even obliquely. P.G. Wodehouse described his comic novels as musical comedy without the music, and they are still very readable.


Comedy with depth

On the other hand, life is sometimes comical, often blackly so, and a good comedy can reveal truths that more "realistic" (ie unamusing) novels will miss. Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim is very funny in places, but also rings true. It depicts a man forced to depend on idiots of higher social standing, and as a portrayal of angry desperation, and of the less flattering aspects of the male outlook, it feels absolutely right.

You could argue that Lucky Jim is also satire. A lot of social satire often feels quite ham-handed, but something like Nice Work by David Lodge is both funny and an accurate dissection of a certain type of person (two certain types, actually). And there's also satire not of the real world but of other fiction: Stella Gibbons' excellent rural comedy Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of "earthy" novels, especially those of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

Comedy is not just empty fun: a full view of the world isn't possible without it. Even in the blackest situations, people make jokes. Not for nothing do we have "gallows humour". I think some of the modern "grimdark" novels miss this in their eagerness to be realistic by throwing as much mud and dung at the reader as they can. "Realistic" also means "humorous".

Cold Comfort Farm, home of the Starkadders

A forbidden viewpoint

Also, comedy allows us to say things that we wouldn't normally be allowed to say. George Orwell (that master of hilarity) once said that every joke was a small rebellion, because it allowed people to look at the world in a naughty, askance sort of way. Because comedy is regarded as unimportant, and because it often involves looking at things from a crooked, wry angle, it's possible to look at things that would be dismissed as "problematic" (ie forbidden) if they were presented seriously.

In my own writing, Space Captain Smith is a proud colonialist and empire-builder - his friend Suruk the Slayer is a homicidal maniac. But because this is a comedy, we don't have to automatically condemn them to demonstrate that we're right-thinking people, as we would elsewhere. And that, I think, allows us to take a more nuanced view of them both. They should be bad people, or morally compromised ones, but maybe there's a good side to this conquering, slaying business... or maybe not.

Conviction

Last week, I had a go at the more arty end of writing, the “in a trance” school. This week, I thought I’d alienate the rest of you by commenting on the other end of the scale, the “sausage factory” method.

The sausage method holds that writing is basically like producing sausages on a machine, except with words instead of dubious pork. You find your target market, you figure out what they like, and then you duplicate that, at a fixed rate of words per day. Bingo, instant bestseller.

Or not...

The trouble with this is that it’s nonsense. First, you will inevitably be writing derivative product. This may not matter to you if you’re just in it for the money (in which case you’re a total fool. You’d probably make much better money working in a shop). 

Second, you probably won’t be writing a bestseller. You’ll be writing the thing that people read when they’re tired of the person you’ve ripped off. It will, at best, be second-best and a second choice, and will have to contend with a lot of similar books written for the same reason.

Third, even authors who have a limited range aren’t cynics or hacks. A colleague once said of Lee Childs that “He writes the same book over and over again, but he writes it really well”. Everything I’ve read and heard suggests that Childs takes his work very seriously and is far from “phoning it in”. That’s probably why, even if he does write the same book over and over again, he makes a good job of it. 

 

Conviction

Which takes us onto a wider point. If you look at great “light” novels, the sort of thing dismissed as “genre” or “entertainment”, there’s always something deeper than the need to make a quick buck. You can’t read ‘Salem’s Lot without feeling that Stephen King cares about the decline of small-town America. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household is full of observations about landscape and social class, as well as being a fast-moving thriller. Tim Willocks’ Green River Rising, a ferociously violent novel about a prison riot, has great sympathy for its heroes, people thrown away by a rotten system.

Perhaps it’s a desire to go slightly beyond the boxes that need to be ticked for the book to work. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of things that the author does care about, and which he is going to make you, the reader, care about even if you didn’t buy the book for that. It's a hard thing to define. The best word I can think to describe it is conviction, and I don’t think a novel can be truly great without it.

"My Characters Surprise Me"

Quite often in fiction writing, I hear someone observe that their characters surprise them. Some writers regularly talk about their characters as if they were independent people, whose actions the writer can't predict.

Personally, I find this slightly annoying: it's rather twee, and gives strength to the false impression that the writer is a sort of conduit through which the story flows, as if the writer's brain isn't controlling the story so much as surrendering to the spirits like a medium. Writing is, I think, a craft, and as such can't be done well by either a mechanical process or subconsciously. The correct method lies somewhere between the two.

(And don't get me started on people who talk endlessly about how awesome/messed up their characters are. First, they're not real, and, second, I don't care.)

However, while I'm never going to like the idea, I can actually see what people mean when they say that their characters surprise them.


Chekov's Gun, In Reverse

Might come in handy later

 

In a novel, it's a pretty basic rule that the characters can't and shouldn't do things that they wouldn't  concievably do. You've probably heard of Chekov's Gun: if the audience are told that there is a gun hanging on the wall, they will expect it to be used. This cuts the other way, too: if the story requires a gun to be produced in Act 3, it should be clear before then that it is possible that this might happen.

So, characters and events shouldn't happen that are completely unexpected, even if that expectation is only one of a number of possible outcomes. In that way, characters are predictable (or at least should operate within a range of predictable outcomes), and shouldn't be surprising the writer by suddenly acquiring abilities and histories that weren't hinted at before.

(I suppose I could imagine a story where a character acted wildly out of character, but I would expect the emphasis of the story to be about discovering why they did that. One example might be a mild-mannered man becoming a terrorist, or a spy being revealed as a double agent.)


A Range of Choices

That said, just because a character behaves in a certain style, that doesn't mean that there's no room for choice. When confronted with a large group of enemies, a veteran soldier might decide to attack, fall back, or just give up: depending on the circumstances, all of these might be decisions that that man might reasonably have made. And sometimes the author decides that one reasonable decision is better to the one that he'd originally planned to use.

Attack!

I think this is what writers mean when they say that their characters surprise them. You reach page 110, when Sergeant Jones is about to die bravely in a hail of bullets, and realise that, actually, it's much more powerful if he decides to surrender and the enemy shoot him anyway.


The Result

Of course, the writer has to be able to deal with the resulting fallout and its effects on the story. The murder of Sergeant Jones means that the enemy now look much more evil to the reader, and the reader is likely to want more payoff as a result. It's important not to lose your grip on the plot or the tone, or to let things done on a whim derail the novel. Because ultimately, no matter what your characters may or may not "decide" to do, it's your book.

How Not To Stop

I wrote a post a while ago about deciding what you were going to write about, and what form that writing was going to take. Even if you're certain that your idea deserves 70,000 words or more, and you're enjoying writing them, there are going to be points where the book feels like a slog, and the writing seems to be something you need to plough through to get to the next interesting bit. Below are some ideas of how you can keep going. As ever, they work for me, but your mileage may vary.


1. Identify the "way points" along the route

A row of peaks, somewhere or other.

If you have any idea of what is going to happen in this novel (which you should have) you'll know that there are certain important scenes that have to be included. Pirates arrive on Danger Island; the dog falls down a ravine; Anne and Julian argue about George. What you're writing isn't a single long slog from A to Z: much of the time you're working towards the next point of excitement - hangliding to the next peak, if you like. If you can break it up like that, it looks like much less of a struggle.


2. Can you skip ahead?

When I wrote Straken, I was working to a time limit. I needed to be producing 500 words a day, if not more (and for someone writing to order, that's a fairly lenient time frame). The option to just stop and wait for inspiration wasn't there.I found the easiest way to keep going was to jump ahead to the next part whenever I got stuck. This worked because I had a pretty good plan from which to work, and was able to resume the story at a later point without worrying that doing so would damage the stuff I'd already written.

Of course, this can leave you with some awkward gaps in the text, which you have to go back and fill. Filling gaps is never the most fun element of writing. But, if you're looking at the book as a set of connected "way points", when you go back, you'll probably be working towards another way point, and hence will have something exciting to aim for. Of course, if it still seems dull, you need to ask yourself...


3. Do you actually need this bit?

And when exactly is this happening?

This can be a very difficult question to answer. Ideally, everything that happens in a novel both moves the plot forward and develops the characters of the protagonists, preferably while upping the stakes. Sometimes it only does one of these things, and it's necessary to make the decision whether or not to keep it in.

Say two characters are going to assassinate a politician. Do we need to learn about the journey they took to the politician's house? Maybe we do, because on that journey they discussed their motives and an important realisation was made. Or perhaps the technicalities of the assassination are very difficult, and so their discussion will give the reader an idea of what needs to happen for the assassination to occur (and which then goes completely wrong). But maybe the journey is just there to pad out the word count. In a way, this is a bit like the question of where you begin a story.

However, too much cutting and the story loses its flow. One of the (many) flaws in Prometheus was that there was no way of knowing how long it was all supposed to be taking. The ship landed on a planet, some things happened to various people, perhaps at the same time, and it all ended. My suspicion is that it was heavily - and unevenly - cut. The best plan, I think, is to cut, but to save what you cut just in case you cut too much.


4. Don't ask for permission to keep writing

I've seen this on forums and in writing groups: a person writes a chunk of their novel, then puts it up for comments before writing the next bit, effectively asking for permission to continue with it. I suspect that this is an easy habit to get into, and it's probably rather comforting to know that nobody you know has told you that it's rubbish yet.

I think this is a bad habit. It risks the writer working for approval of a group that may not represent the world at large and probably doesn't represent the writer himself. At the extreme, it's not much different from saying "I want to write about a wizard: please tell me what to say".

Discovering what you can and can't do is important. If you are going to be original, you need to write about what matters to you, not what a committee approves. Of course, you'll have to write it well, but that's another story (so to speak). The important thing is that you're writing at all.