INTERVIEWS

What was your first book, and how did you find a publisher for it?

I wrote my first book because of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Well, kind of. It’s a strange story, and you need to understand the circumstances that lead to it. Although I wanted to be a writer from an early age, I found it hard breaking in. So I went into bookselling. I thought that if I couldn’t write books I could still be near them, and have some kind of role in the business. Along with two partners I owned a bookshop called Bookends, in Notting Hill, London. It was a general bookstore that stocked lots of science fiction and comics. That was good fun but not a great success. When we finally gave it up I took a job as manager of a shop called Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, which became very well known. At the time it was Europe’s largest science fiction and comics shop. Eventually I moved from there to join the people who launched the Forbidden Planet book chain. I was the first manager of their original shop in central London. During all those jobs I was writing in my spare time, mostly for fanzines and small semi-professional publications; anywhere that would publish me. After about six years with Forbidden Planet it struck me that time was running out. My life was going by working for other people, and being the manager of a successful shop meant I had less and less time to devote to writing. My dream was beginning to fade. I didn’t want to be one of those people who looked back with regret at the end of their life because they didn’t try to achieve their ambitions. So I quit the bookshop and became a writer. But I still didn’t have the confidence or experience to try making my name with fiction. I went into journalism. Working as a freelance I contributed to many magazines and newspapers. A lot of what I wrote was connected in some way to science fiction, fantasy or comics - reviews and articles, interviews with authors and filmmakers - but you can’t make a living being so specialised, so I did a great deal of general journalism too. In fact, I took any writing job that paid. I wrote for women’s magazines, film magazines, music magazines and trade magazines. I wrote a few scripts for British comics. I did a little bit of copy-writing for the advertising industry, and even wrote the back of cornflake packets! It was a struggle, but journalism paid the bills, and it taught me some valuable lessons. I’d recommend journalism to anyone who wants to write fiction. It teaches you to express yourself clearly and with brevity, and to get on and put those words down on paper. You can’t wait for inspiration when you have a four o’clock deadline. So I was making a living, and working for myself, but apart from a few short stories I was nowhere near achieving my ambition of becoming a fiction writer. Then an editor I knew at one of the major publishing houses asked me if I’d like to be a manuscript reader. My job was to read all the unsolicited sf, fantasy and horror submissions that come in from the public. It’s what the Americans call being a “first reader”. Here in the UK it’s known as a “slush pile reader”. Slush pile sounds unkind, but I’m afraid it’s accurate - most of the books people send in to publishers are terrible. Many are unreadable. I was already a fast reader, which helped, and reading all these manuscripts made me even faster, and soon I was reading submissions from literary agents too, which tend to be of a higher standard. After a while, several other publishers and agents asked me to read for them as well. The money I made from going through the slush piles meant I was able to cut down on the journalism, which had become a bit of a treadmill. When you read a manuscript for a publisher you write the editor a short report. Part of it is a brief synopsis of the plot. The rest is an honest opinion of the quality of the work, and whether you think it has any commercial potential. These reports don’t mince words and are strictly confidential; they shouldn’t be seen by anybody outside the publishing house. Which finally brings us to Schwarzenegger. Remember his film Kindergarten Cop? I was given the novelisation to read. I thought it was a well written book, actually much better than the movie, and said so in my report. But for some reason the publisher decided not to buy it. What I didn’t know was that the editor had accidentally left my confidential report inside the manuscript, and it was sent back to the literary agent who submitted it. A couple of weeks later I got a phone call from the agent concerned. She told me she’d read the secret report, and I thought she was going to blame me because the Kindergarten Cop novel had been rejected. What she actually said was, “Have you ever thought of writing a book?” She’d seen something in that report that made her think I might be able to write a book. Maybe she’d seen some of my journalism too, I don’t know. But as a result of that phone call she became my agent. I was lucky. Most people have a lot of trouble finding an agent. It’s unusual to have one find you! And it happened because of an accident. I was with that agent for six or seven years before I left her and went to the top agent in the fantasy and science fiction field, Howard Morhaim, which was another incredible piece of luck, and probably the best career move I’ve made. Anyway, nothing much happened with my first agent for several months. Then she rang and asked me if I’d like to write a tie-in book for TV show The Gladiators, which was about to be shown on British television. I don’t know if you had this show in Germany. It started in America, as American Gladiators, and we had our own version in the UK. The Gladiators were a bunch of costumed athletes with exotic names like Panther, Hunter and Trojan, who competed in different events. It was fantastically popular and ran for eight years. What I did was a kind of quiz book based on the show. It was called The Gladiators Game Book, and it was published in 1992. I was offered a straight fee of £500 (about 750 Euros) to write it. No royalties, and the publisher had world rights. I think my agent got them to increase the fee to about 1,000 Euros, but they wouldn’t pay royalties. When you’re just starting out and you’re unproven you have no power, and have to accept those kind of terms. I was grateful for the work, so I wrote this book. I had to do it very fast so that they could put it out at the same time as the TV show. It took me just a couple of weeks, if I remember correctly. My experience as a journalist helped; it taught me to get through the book quickly. It was published a couple of months later, alongside the launch of the TV show. About six months later my agent mentioned that it had sold 275,000 copies! If I had royalties it would have made me a lot of money. But you can’t complain about these things. When you’re trying to break into this business you take what you can get. It wasn’t a great book. It wasn’t very long and it was written in too much of a rush. But I have an affection for it because it was my first book, and it started things off for me as an author.

How many books have you written?

At this moment I’m writing my twenty-fifth book. Well, the twenty-fifth book that I’ll admit to, anyway! It’s the second in the new orcs trilogy, Orcs: Bad Blood, and the working title is Army of Shadows. I’ve also written forty or fifty short stories, and I estimate that all the journalism I did amounts to a million words or more. 

How many books have you sold worldwide?

The original orcs trilogy, Orcs: First Blood, has sold around 1.2 million copies. The figure could be higher than that, because some countries are slow reporting sales. And the books have been borrowed something like 50,000 times from British libraries. In all, my books have sold about 2 million copies. The popularity of the orcs boosted my other titles, particularly the Quicksilver and Nightshade trilogies, and some of my early books were film tie-ins and biographies of TV stars that sold well. 

Why are you writing a sequel about Stryke and the Wolverines? Was this planned?

Yes and no. When I wrote the first trilogy I hoped it would be successful enough that I’d be able to write more. I certainly had enough ideas for more. In fact, I originally planned to tell the story of the Wolverines over nine books, in three trilogies. When the books were published in the UK, between 1999 and 2001, they did reasonably well but didn’t sell in spectacular numbers. My publisher was willing to commission another trilogy, but for a smaller advance than the first one, which was perfectly understandable as the books hadn’t sold that well. So I decided to move to another publisher and write the Quicksilver trilogy. While I was doing that, an extraordinary thing happened. The orcs began to take off, particularly in overseas markets, including Germany. They were starting to sell better in the UK, too. It was a classic case of word of mouth. No money was spent on advertising or promoting the books; it was mostly readers recommending them to other people. In 2004 the trilogy was published as an omnibus in Britain and sales went through the roof. There was great demand for more orcs books, and I was happy to return to the series and continue the saga. Though my ideas about how the plot should go have changed quite a lot since I first planned the series. I’m glad to be returning to the orcs. There’s a lot more to say about them. 

What can you tell us about the sequel?

In the UK, volume one is called Weapons of Magical Destruction. It carries on the story of Stryke and the Wolverines, and features many of the characters from the first trilogy, along with new ones. It tells what happened to the warband after they entered the portal and arrived in a world populated only by their fellow orcs. The plot has the Wolverines transported to a number of other dimensions in pursuit of their mission. There’s unfinished business to be cleared up from the first trilogy, mysteries to be solved and fresh enemies to be faced. What I didn’t want to do was simply rewrite the first trilogy. That’s unfair to the readers. It cheats them. So the storyline is quite different, and much more wide-ranging. One thing that’s the same is that there’s a lot of action. A task I set myself with the first trilogy was to see how much action I could cram into the plot and still keep the story coherent. I’ve tried to do that again with the new books. I also delve deeper into the nature of the orcs, and in the new books they have a different relationship with humans.

In the German-speaking countries books about elves, trolls, dwarfs and dragons are very popular. Do you plan to write books with these creatures as central characters?

If you mean in the same way that I write about orcs, as protagonists or heroes, probably not. Though I might use such creatures in some other way. I’m aware of all the books published in Germany following the success of Die Orks, and I’ve seen some of the other books featuring orcs, including one or two that give the impression they’re related to my books. It’s quite flattering in a way, and if it expands the audience for fantasy, and helps other authors break in, that’s great.

In our forum, many users say they prefer Orcs to the Reeth Caldason trilogy. How do you react to such reviews? Is this just a matter of taste?

One of the things you need when you’re an author is a thick skin. You soon learn that even if you were the best writer in the world, which I’m certainly not, there will always be people who don’t like what you do. Sometimes they even hate your books without having read them! This can be a genuine expression of the way they feel about my books, or fantasy in general, and that’s fine. I’ve had some bad reviews that were well argued and actually proved quite helpful in pointing out ways in which I can improve. Then again you get some reviewers, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction community, who’s attitude seems to be, “I can’t get published so I’ll take it out on you, you bastard!” It does amuse me if I come across a review or receive an email criticising my books from someone who can’t spell, punctuate or express themselves grammatically. It’s difficult to take those people seriously. I get good reviews and lots of nice emails from readers, and that balances things out. The thing about writing is that everyone’s got an opinion, and there are a lot of people who believe they can do it better. That’s quite strange when you think about it. I mean, I don’t suppose there are many people who wake up in the morning and say, “I know, I’ll become a brain surgeon! It must be really easy. I’ll go down to the local hospital and start operating on people.” But everybody thinks they can write. I suppose it’s because most people wrote essays in school, or they write shopping lists, or letters to their Aunt Mavis thanking her for the pair of socks she gave them at Christmas, and they think writing a book is like that, only more so. You’ve probably heard the old saying, “Everybody has a book inside them.” Well, in most cases that’s where it should stay. I learnt that reading all the terrible manuscripts that came into the slush pile. Writing is as much of a profession as brain surgery, architecture or defusing bombs. It takes dedication, hard work and years learning the craft. Terry Pratchett once said that the difference between him and aspiring writers is that he finishes the books. When someone tells me they can do better, I say, “Go on, then. Do it.” I’ve taught creative writing in the past, and there are so many people who want to be writers but can’t apply themselves to turn out 200 words in a week. It’s like they’re in love with the idea of being a writer, and what they imagine is the writer’s glamorous life, but they’re not prepared to put in the necessary work. It’s a job you have to stick with, every day. As to some people preferring the orcs to the Quicksilver books, I get mail from people who love the Quicksilvers but aren’t keen on the orcs. So yes, it’s a matter of taste. The thing about the orcs books is that they really polarize opinions. People seem to either love them or hate them. I suppose the way they feel is based on their view of orcs, and they either like the way I see them or they don’t. Something else a writer needs is the confidence to write what they want, the way they want, and hope that enough people agree with them.

How do you write? Do you listen to music while writing, or write in a certain place?

I write in my workroom, which has everything I need to hand, and a window through which I can stare at the garden when I’m pretending to work. I do often listen to music when I write. A lot of people tell me they assume I listen to heavy metal music, which they somehow associate with books like the orcs. But I hardly ever do. I have quite wide musical tastes, but most of the time these days I listen to dance and electronic music. I love anything with rhythm, from reggae to techno. Often I’ll have the radio on when I’m working, and I listen to talk shows; news, current affairs, documentaries, that sort of thing, which some people find hard to understand. They think it must distract me. Actually, I like to have the silence broken by the sound of human voices. It helps the flow somehow. As to how I write - as someone once said, it’s simple. You just stare at a blank screen until blood comes out of your forehead. 

When you write a new book, do you search for a story or wait for a brilliant idea to come to you?

As I said, if you’re a professional writer you can’t sit around waiting for inspiration. You have to get on with it, even if it’s 8.30 on a Monday morning, it’s raining and you have a hangover. You should have sorted out your ideas before you sat down to write. I keep ideas books, in which I write down anything that might be useful in my fiction. It might be a story idea, a character name, a title; any number of things that could lead to a plot. I often say that I have more ideas than I’ll live to write. I like to approach a book in good order, so I do a certain amount of planning beforehand. Although I do less than when I first started writing books because hopefully you gain skill and learn to trust yourself. I start with a very general outline of the plot, which might be just a couple of pages. That gets woven into a much longer synopsis. Next stage is to divide it into chapters, and while you’re doing that you’re thinking about the general shape of the story and its rhythms, its highs and lows. I compile a cast list of characters, with their names, descriptions and brief biographies. I might also have another set of notes that say something about the locations where the story is going to be set, and some thoughts about the world I’m creating. The funny thing is, having done all that, I usually ignore all this preparation and just start writing! Maybe I have to go through the planning stage to get it right in my head, or at least in my subconscious, before I can start. Something else to keep in mind is that when you’re writing you should stay flexible. Books always change from the original outline, they mutate, and you have to be receptive to the ideas that hit you as you’re writing, and incorporate them. I try to write a minimum number of words each day, and I’d work every day and all day if my wife, Anne, didn’t stop me. Fortunately, she’s a writer too, so she understands. There’s a good argument for saying writers should only marry other writers. You can go crazy together. 

Many writers say they have no time to read books. Do you read books?

I’m sorry to say that I read much less than I used to, and I hardly read at all when I’m writing a book, except for light reading like magazines and newspapers. It’s partly because writing is very time consuming and you just don’t have the chance to read much when you’re doing it. And it can be too much of a distraction when you’re trying to think about your own plot. But to be honest it’s also because, like most writers, I’m afraid that I might unconsciously pick up something from somebody else’s novel and use it in mine. Unintentional plagiarism, you might call it. I try to catch up on all the books I want to read between writing my own. 

In this age of computers and videogames, people seem to read less than they did ten years ago. What do you think about this?

Last year we had two workmen fitting new windows in our house. One was probably in his 40’s. His young assistant was around 18 years old. They were here for weeks; so long that they almost stopped noticing us. We have lots of books in our house, as you can imagine, and they seemed to think this was eccentric. One day I was sitting in one of our rooms writing some notes when they walked in. They ignored me, as usual, and they were having a conversation about torture. ‘The worst torture I can imagine,’ the older man said, ‘is having all my fingernails pulled out.’ ‘I can think of a worse one than that,’ the young assistant replied. He pointed at the bookshelves beside me. ‘Having to read one of those. Particularly a big one.’ Then he kind of realised I was there, remembered I was that odd thing, a writer, and said, ‘No offence.’ The worst torture he could imagine was having to read a book. He told me that he never read books. In fact, he proudly boasted that he’d only ever read one book in his life, and that was because they made him read it in school. I asked him what it was. ‘Shakespeare or some such rubbish,’ he told me, shuddering. Sometimes it seems as though the rising generation is going to lose the ability to read. And they’ll all develop enormous thumbs from constantly sending text messages. But it’s easy to get too gloomy about this. People have been predicting the death of the book for decades. It’s true that the book has more competition than ever from all the forms of electronic entertainment now available. But even to play games or use the Internet you have to be able to read, and write. On the other hand it’s a fact that books generally sell less copies now than they did in years gone by. Thirty years ago a book had to sell vast numbers of copies to make it into the bestseller lists. Now it’s possible to be called a bestseller on sales of just a few thousand, particularly as far as hardbacks are concerned. So there do seem to be less people reading. But when I get depressed about the future of reading I remember what Arthur C. Clarke said about books. They are the ultimate portable information storage device. They require no power source and are easy to access. They are quite cheap and in plentiful supply. They have no glaring screen to hurt your eyes. I think the book’s safe for a while yet.

Many fantasy books are being adapted for the screen - Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Eragon ... If Hollywood asked to film one of your books, would you say yes or no?

Having a book turned into a film isn’t always a good idea. If the film turns out poorly it can harm the career of the writer. There have been several cases of this in the science fiction field. A bad film can lead people to think that the book it’s based on is bad too. My friend, the late David Gemmell, would never let any of his books be turned into films because he knew he wouldn’t have any control over how they did it, and he couldn’t bear the thought of his characters and stories being ruined. I’ve had film and TV companies express interest in some of my books, but it’s never come to anything. It’s happened so often that I no longer get excited about it. For example, I wrote a young adult crime novel that was optioned by a major Hollywood studio. They took three years to decide they didn’t want to do it. This happens to writers all the time. Producers get excited about a book, take out an option to film it, then lose interest, or can’t raise the financial backing. Another thing about films is that they’re made by committee. So many people have a say in making a film, from the men in suits, who often don’t understand the creative process, to directors who might have a totally different vision to the author. The script can go through numerous screenwriters, and the original story gets lost. Whereas an author has complete control. With a novel I’m scriptwriter, producer, director … and I have an unlimited special effects budget! I’m not saying I’d say no to a film of my books. The orcs or Quicksilver books would adapt very well, I think, and with the special effects and prosthetics available these days they could look great. But they’d have to be done sympathetically.

The Lord of the Rings is very influential. How important do you think J.R.R. Tolkien is to the fantasy genre?

He’s enormously important. Tolkien casts a long shadow over the fantasy field, for good and for ill. Good because he helped create fantasy as a discrete genre, and he set a very high standard for the rest of us. Bad because every epic fantasy written since The Lord of the Rings tends to be compared to it. Publishers do it. You know, “The greatest fantasy novel since The Lord of the Rings!” Readers and critics do it, by using Tolkien as a yardstick by which to judge all other fantasy. But when you think about it, this is absurd. The Lord of the Rings is unique. No one is ever going to write a book like it, and anybody who tries is crazy. It stands alone. Some of the adverse criticism I get about my orcs books is from people who adore Tolkien and think I’m being disrespectful of him in some way. Well, nobody could admire Tolkien more than I do, and I’m not trying to copy him or rip him off. What people forget, or don’t know, is that Tolkien didn’t create orcs. I’m fond of saying that he didn’t invent orcs any more than Anne McCaffrey invented dragons or Bram Stoker invented vampires. He took an old concept from folklore and adapted it for his own purposes. I’m doing the same thing. Writing about orcs is no different to writing about elves, trolls, werewolves, zombies, demons or any other race of fantastical creatures. Nobody says that Bernhard Hennen shouldn’t write about elves or Christoph Hardebusch shouldn’t write about trolls because Tolkien used them. It’s the same with orcs. If you look at Lord of the Rings you’ll find that Tolkien’s orcs aren’t described in any real detail or depth. They aren’t rounded creatures; they’re arrow fodder. They provided the evil horde he needed. I felt that orcs deserved to have their own culture and mythology. I wanted to give them hopes, fears, aspirations, comradeship, a belief system and a history. It’s the winners who write the history books, and they demonize their enemies. My thought was, suppose that had happened to orcs? Suppose they just had a bad press because they were on the losing side? My orcs are savage and incomparable warriors, but they’re not evil. They’re ferocious creatures - you wouldn’t want to go against them - but they have a code of behaviour, even a certain nobility. I’ve always been interested in championing outsiders in my fiction, and orcs must be the ultimate outcasts. One of the tasks I set myself was to make them sympathetic to some extent, despite their savagery. Making them the heroes, and humans the villains, is actually quite a simple idea, but it’s one that seems to have caught the imaginations of a lot of people.

How popular is fantasy in England?

It’s very popular at the moment. That’s probably got something to do with the revival of interest in Tolkien since Peter Jackson’s films, and the Harry Potter books and films, and the work of authors like Philip Pullman, which appeals to people who wouldn’t normally read fantasy. Fantasy isn’t as popular as crime fiction, but it’s certainly got a bigger audience than science fiction in the UK. There are some great British sf authors, but the genre isn’t too healthy at the moment. I say that with regret because I love science fiction. I see sf, fantasy and supernatural fiction as being related genres and I enjoy and respect all of them. Whether fantasy will be as strong in the marketplace in future remains to be seen.

How long do you want to carry on writing?

I think writers are a bit like actors: they don’t retire. It’s in the blood. I’d like to go on writing as long as I’m able to do it, and as long as publishers and readers want me to.

© 2007 Buecherwahn