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Ian's latest novel
Book 2 of The Gates of Good and Evil. |
Ian – Thank you for agreeing to have a chat.
Tell us briefly what your new book, The
Fatal Gate is about?
It’s Book 2 in my new epic fantasy trilogy called The Gates of Good and Evil. Book 1, The Summon Stone, was published last
year, and began the sequel to my epic fantasy quartet The View from the Mirror which was published almost 20 years ago.
The story begins with Sulien, a nine-year-old girl,
having a nightmare in which she sees the greatest warrior race of all, the
Merdrun, gathering in the void between the worlds to invade her world of
Santhenar. But Sulien has also seen the Merdrun’s one weakness – and they know
it. This innocent child must be killed before she can reveal the secret.
Sulien’s parents, Karan and Llian, have to find a way
to save her – and get that secret before the invasion begins.
In The Fatal
Gate, the invasion has begun but the Merdrun’s gate has gone astray.
They’re desperately trying to regain contact with the deadly summon stone that
brought them to Santhenar, so they can reopen the portal and begin the
slaughter of humanity. And Sulien, who still hasn’t been able to recover the
secret, is lost at the far end of the world, and hunted by enemies and allies
alike.
How does one prepare to write a series?
This series for example.
With a lot of worldbuilding, character creation and
story planning – and this series was particularly difficult because it’s the
sequel to my most greatly loved fantasy story. I was very conscious that few
sequels are as good as the original and I didn’t want to let my readers down. It
was also difficult because the original series was written in an elevated, high
fantasy style and these days I have a simpler and more direct style.
I worked on the idea of The Gates of Good and Evil for about a year, on and off, before I
began detailed planning, then did many drafts of the 60-page outline before I
was ready to start writing.
Once the outline is done I like to write the first
draft very quickly, typically in 4-8 weeks, then do 3-5 more drafts over the
next few months before I send it to my editor for her first look.
Do you have a set method of working? Do
you have a usual time, place or word count to reach?
No, though the way I work is dependent on the deadline
for delivery of the manuscript. If it’s only a few months away I push myself
harder. However I find that when I write the first draft really fast it takes a
lot less revision, I guess because I’m in the heads of the characters all the
time, and the whole plot is in my mind. Typically I would average around 4,000
words a day doing the first draft, though there will usually be a few days in
each book where I’ll write 10,000 words a day or more. Long, hard days, but
exhilarating too, seeing the story being created out of nothing.
Why fantasy? Was it something that you
followed as a child?
Not really, though in primary school I read whole
encyclopaedias full of myths and legends, which I suppose one could see as
fantasy for the readers and listeners of ancient times. I barely read any
fantasy as a kid, though I read a lot of SF in my teens. I discovered fantasy
at uni (The Lord of the Rings, the Earthsea series, Jack Vance particularly
the Dying Earth series, Fritz Lieber’s
Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and others – this was before the great fantasy boom
which began in the mid-70s with Stephen Donaldson, Terry Brooks etc) and fantasy
became the literary love of my life.
You’ve had huge success for an Australian
writer. In many ways, you were at the beginning of the sci-fi/fantasy boom. There
didn’t seem to be any genre writers in the eighties and prior. Yet it still took
14 years to get A Shadow on the Glass published (if I’ve read correctly). How
on earth did you remain so driven? Especially as you seem to have written many
other books during this period.
There were a few genre writers in the eighties though
there was no way for them to be published in Australia by the big publishers
unless they wrote for children, as Isobelle Carmody did with her Obernewtyn series. It wasn’t until the
early-to-mid 90s that the big publishers in Australia were prepared to invest
in Australian speculative fiction writers, and after a few false starts quite a
few writers did very well: Sara Douglass, Traci Harding, Kim Wilkins, Kate
Forsyth and myself, for example – and all did well internationally as well.
From 1995 to 2010 was a true Golden Age for Aussie writers.
It took me 12 years to get published, but I knew it
was going to be difficult when I started. I guess I’m a determined person; but
also, by the time I’d written the first book of The View from the Mirror I knew storytelling was what I wanted to
do with my life. Each rejection was painful for about a day, but I’m an
optimist and after that I just started another draft. I only wrote the 4 books
of The View from the Mirror in that
period, but I did draft after draft, more than 20 of Book 1, A Shadow on the Glass, just learning the
craft of storytelling.
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| Eco-thriller |
After so many books, (31?) how do you
remain enthused? Is getting older influencing your mindset in any way?
I’ve written 32 novels, plus an anthology of fantasy
short stories, and I’m working on the final book of the current series plus a
completely new trilogy – – an alternative history fantasy. Age and experience,
and writing different books for different audiences (13 books for children/YA
and 3 eco-thrillers about catastrophic climate change) has changed and simplified
my style and what I write about, but ultimately I’m still writing big adventure
fantasies. That’s what I like to write and what my readers like to read.
Are people really reading less?
I think people are reading less fiction, certainly.
Partly because there’s so much other stuff they’re reading, social media, for
instance. And partly because there’s so much more of other media available to
be consumed, so cheaply – such as Netflix and its ilk offering all you can
watch for a tiny monthly fee.
But that’s not the real issue for novelists. Publishing
used to be expensive, and distribution required a big organisation to do
successfully, and was costly, expensive and inefficient (often, a third of the
books printed would be returned unsold). The huge changes since 2007 are (1) anyone
can now be a publisher, for little or no cost, and (2) distribution is also
easy and cheap.
Additionally, until a decade ago most books went out
of print in a couple of years, leaving around 300,000 English language titles
available for readers to buy new. But ebooks and print-on-demand books never go
out of print; there’s now 10 million+ titles available to buy and the number is
increasing at a million or more a year.
So every year it’s going to be harder for new authors
to be discovered, and for existing authors to make a living, because each title
is selling less and the price is being pushed ever downwards.
Have you ever been approached to write a
screenplay or someone tried to option your work?
No. I’ve had a few enquiries about options for my
books, but they haven’t come to the contract stage. A few years back I wrote a
screenplay from one of my fantasy novels (Vengeance),
just to understand what makes a screenplay work, but I haven’t sent it
anywhere. It takes years to learn how to write a worthy screenplay.
Is there something, perhaps not even
associated with writing, that you feel you would like to achieve?
I have a number of personal goals, however, my creative
goals really relate to becoming a better storyteller. I’ve been studying the
art of storytelling for 30 years and I’m still staggered at how much I have to
learn.
And writing as many more books as I have in me. Quite
a few, hopefully.
Thanks for the chat. I hope the series
goes well.
Thanks very much, Anthony.
A hell of a lot. I'm
brutally honest and I rarely hold back. I'm more interested in authenticity
and exploring extremes, even if they are everyday, banal ones. Don't get me
wrong, a lot of my poems are complete fictions, but I pour every ounce of
myself into them. Still, my books aren't therapy – I write because I absolutely love it.
