Babel Clash

Two weeks gone already?  My thanks to my worthy foe Anton, to Dane for organising this, and to YOU for listening.  I look forward to following my old mate Sam Sykes in his duel to the death with Ari Marmell.

But what’s that you say?  You’re desperate to read some high quality edgy yet humorous unheroic fantasy fiction?  Well may I recommend my latest book, The Heroes, out now from Orbit US in the US and Gollancz in the UK, and available from all reputable (and a few disreputable) purveyors of the printed and digital word.  It’s brilliant, but why take my lying word for it?

Comments from assorted reviewers include:

“The Heroes is an indictment of war and the duplicity that corrupts men striving for total power: bloody and violent, but never gratuitously so, it’s imbued with cutting humour, acute characterisation and world-weary wisdom about the weaknesses of the human race. Brilliant.”
— Eric Brown, The Guardian

“Delivered in Abercrombie’s trademark witty style … This is an action-packed novel full of brutality, black humour and razor-sharp characterisation.”
— Dave Bradley, SFX (5 star review)

“It’s an excellent tale and arguably Abercrombie’s best book yet … Its pace really showcases his talent for differently voiced and realistically motivated characters … any genre fan can enjoy what’s one of the best fantasy books of the past year.”
— SciFi Now (5 star review)

“This blood-drenched, thought-provoking dissection of a three-day battle is set in the same world as Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy (The Blade Itself, etc.), but stands very well alone … Abercrombie never glosses over a moment of the madness, passion, and horror of war, nor the tribulations that turn ordinary people into the titular heroes.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

And that’s just scratching the surface, believe me.  If you look really hard you’ll probably find some mediocre ones too…

You can always catch me over at www.joeabercrombie.com, where I am to be found blogging about games, tv, the writing process, and the occasional badly misguided negative review of my objectively excellent work.

Be seeing ya…

I too am a big lover of video games, and unlike roleplaying games I still get the chance to play them.  I too have to write sometimes, but I’ve still played DragonAge to completion, and I’m very much looking forward to the second one arriving in a couple of days in fact.  It’s all about priorities, you see?  You’ve got to make the time.

It’s pretty amazing how computer games have developed during my lifetime, from things like Rocket Raid and Defender, coded by lone bearded men in garret rooms in the small hours of the night, to a vast industry to rival Hollywood, with games like Modern Warfare raking in hundreds of millions and involving international teams as big or bigger than the biggest of movies.

It’s an interesting area, actually, especially for a writer, that difference between working as one man alone and as part of a big team.  The writer is pretty much your classic loner.  Sure, he or she has some very important and valuable input from artists, editors, and folks at his or her publisher, but the majority of the day is spent alone, staring into space, messing about on the internet…Ahem!  I mean alone, struggling with one’s inner demons, hammering at the keyboard in a frenzy of raw creativity.  Certainly a career as a writer forms a stark contrast with my own previous job as a freelance editor in TV, mostly of documentary and live music, in which you take the part of a very specific cog in a big machine.  You’ve got a creative role to play, potentially a very important one, but ultimately the nature of the show is long established, and your job is to sit there with a director, producer, set of executives, and try to implement their vision from a set of materials you had very little to do with the making of.  It’s a very different kind of challenge, and a very different kind of reward, and although you don’t ultimately have the ownership of your work, there’s a social element to that job that I very much miss when I’m staring into space, er, that is, seeking desperately for my muse among a mist of words.  Or something.

As a writer, looking at the year or more it might take you to write your next book, it can be tough to motivate yourself.  It can be tough to force yourself to sit at the screen and hammer it out, word by word, chapter by chapter.  There’s a lot of pressure in knowing that, ultimately, it’s mostly going to come out of your head, and no one else’s.

Still, in his metaphor of the lone writer, Anton does seem to me to have missed out on one very key collaborator in the process.  Perhaps the most important one, since he or she keeps us all in business.  The reader.  Isn’t it the reader, after all, who really fills in all those blanks between the words that the character artists, and the level designers, and the texture mappers do on a video game project?  In a way, we as the writers are like the writers of the game, perhaps the producers and directors too, we present the plot, the people, the overview, the basics of setting with a few key details here and there, and it’s the readers who put in the hard work of creating the fleshed-out, living, breathing world in their own imaginations. 

Or alternatively they toss the book aside in bored disgust.  You can’t win ‘em all, you know…

For a man who makes no secret of being my evil nemesis, Anton certainly does make some good points about the importance of gaming.  Call of Cthulhu was one I played a little bit myself, gamesmastered by my brother, who’s more in the Chaotic Evil area of the spectrum.  I took the role of a priest whose faith was called into question by mysterious happenings in the village in which—

Then we all died.

One thing that really interested me about Anton’s last post, though, aside from the fond memories it stirred up of going insane then being consumed whole by Cthonians, was that it was his experience as a player that he identifies as the profound influence.  I’d always thought my roleplaying days were a big part of my writerly makeup, but it was the gamesmastering that I’d seen as important.  Acting the puppet master, pulling the strings, sending the story off the way that I wanted it to go, putting on the rubbish accents of my non-player characters, I the performer and the players my audience.  But now I have to wonder.  Was I just … a really bad player?

Gamesmastering focuses on the building of the world, the laying of the plot, the administration of the system, all vital skills for the writer.  But playing, or at least playing well - the kind of playing that earns you those experience points for staying in role that I never got - that’s about becoming the character, putting yourself in their shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, experiencing their emotions.  And that can be even more important as a writer.  Especially as the kind of writer that I aspire to be, one who foregrounds the characters, tries to put the reader uncomfortably close to their thoughts and feelings.  Right inside their heads, if possible.

Perhaps roleplaying offers two different styles of influence, or perhaps you could say preparation, to the writer?  Gamesmastering is the intellectual exercise.  Playing, the emotional…?

Welcome to you all, it’s good to be back and participating once again in Babel Clash.  I and Anton have never met.  And yet I shall still destroy him.  So it must be, when you meet as two mighty champions upon the field of genre literature.

That said, I read his opening post with a haunting sense of familiarity, for I too have been gaming just about as long as I can remember (not that I can always remember that far back…).  My very first introduction to the world of role-playing games was Traveller, the original sci-fi dice and paper game, way back in, I would guess, the very early 80s.  1980s, that is, in case any younger members of the audience are wondering.  I fondly remember the strangely formatted small, black softback books it came in.  It wasn’t until I was exposed to Advanced D&D, though, via my brother, who was in a roleplaying group with the most sadistic Dungeon Master in history – you could get through about five characters in one adventure with this guy – that I started getting hooked, coinciding, as this swords and magic did, with my obsession with The Lord of the Rings.  About age 11, when I moved up to secondary school, I began to make contact with enough maladjusted social misfits of my own age to form our own roleplaying group, and never looked back.

We played ’em all.  Or a lot of ’em, anyway.  Middle-Earth Roleplaying was a favourite, but we had our phases of Runequest, Judge Dredd, Vampire, Harnmaster, Shadow Run, Maelstrom, and many more.  Ah, happy days, hunkered down with my gem d10s behind my Rolemaster GM’s screen.  I must admit that as a player I was never all that sophisticated.  I’m not sure Tolkien would have recognised our happy-go-lucky hack-and-slash Middle Earth but, hey, we were trying.  And all the while I was crunching through supplements and sourcebooks and adventures and rulebooks, poring over maps and charts and breaking out the coloured pencils to draw up my own worlds, castles, dungeons.  Some of those childhood world ideas, some of those names and notions have matured and mutated over time and found expression in my adult work, in one form or another.

It was as a Gamesmaster myself, mostly of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, that I started to get a bit more creative.  The Warhammer world really intrigued me – moving culture and technology forward from the more medieval-ish to the more renaissance-y – and offering a dark and gritty setting full of treason and trickery, where evil was lurking just below the surface and often in the hearts of the supposedly great and good.  I really liked the opportunities, even the encouragement, it gave you to lay twists, to surprise the players.  I started to write my own campaigns, dream up my own non-player characters, experimenting with language as well as with plot and character.  Useful stuff, that, for a writer.  I was never that interested in the rules, though, except insofar as they served dramatic purpose.  Oftentimes I’d set the dice up the way I wanted them behind my screen at a key moment, roll some others with a mighty clatter to give the impression of chance, then dramatically remove the screen to reveal the pre-ordained score in all its glory.  Or horror.  Maybe even then I was treating my cohorts more like readers than like players…

I mean, there was a time I thought I was Chaotic Good.  Now I know I’m Neutral Evil.

Ooh, ooh, a subject on which we can agree (no, not that I look like a male prostitute from Fable) but that the death of Aerith in FF7 was a great moment.  I walked around open-mouthed for hours.  Then I cried, and cried, and cried.  Then the denial.  Then the anger.  Then I cried, and I cried, and I cried again.  Then the denial.  It was a tough couple of years.

Bioshock?  Yeah, meh, I dunno, I liked it, don’t get me wrong, but although it was a beautifully rendered setting and the deco styling and all was very cool, I found it was a bit of a mediocre and rather claustrophobic shooter under the skin, and from all the hype I’d been expecting all kinds of clever moral choices and character advancement, and didn’t really find much of the sort.  You make a good point, actually, about the paucity of games with any kind of genuine moral depth.  I remember when Black & White was hailed as a revolution in gaming, a god-game in which the world would supposedly alter to reflect YOUR personality.  It bore the tagline, “find out who you are”.  But when it came down to it the only real option seemed to be a simple choice between “very bored” and “extremely bored”.  Fable and its sequels, though good games, are others in which I don’t necessarily feel the moral depth.  Likewise inFamous, which I’ve been playing recently, gives you the opportunity to run the entire moral spectrum from really evil to really good, with none of the stages in between, although at least it doesn’t lay claim to any particular sophistication.

Ironically, those games that trumpet their moral complexity often seem to be the simplest of all, and often are the least flexible plot-wise.  Maybe it’s the attempts to somehow ‘quantify’ morality, to reward it or not reward it.  I find the morality is often more interesting in games that are much more open-ended.  You mention Fallout 3.  I was a big fan of the original Fallout games way back in the 17th century and, not being a huge fan of Oblivion (I like it, but find certain elements execrable), I was watching through one eye to see how Bethesda Studios messed up a really innovative and interesting (though long-dead) franchise.  I thought they succeeded brilliantly, and blogged about it at tedious length.  Hugely varied, hugely atmospheric, and with a good sense of humour too (almost as rare in computer games as it is in American fantasy authors - Zing!)

Morgan’s question about what one would like to write a tie-in for brought to mind a game I left out - Thief.  Surely one of the most atmospheric and scary of all first-person games, with a superbly dark and rich fantasy world, and probably the most successful sneaking game ever done.  Stealth in computer games, like morality, is often talked up but very rarely done well…

Ah, Brent, Brent, Brent.  Your parting shots remind me of someone.  Who is it?  Ah, yes, it’s this guy, on the canvas.

But let us set aside our differences (particularly the massive difference between my amazing arguing ability and your frankly quite poor one) and concentrate instead on computer games.  I’ve been a keen gamer for pretty much all my life, from being captivated by big blocks of falling pixels on the black and white tv we had attached to our 2K Acorn Atom to pummelling Medieval Total War on my PC or inFamous on my PS3.  I’d have to say though that even today computer games aren’t always the most interestingly plotted things around, which makes anything surprising or unusual pretty interesting.  Often those that are more or less open-ended (like Elite on the BBC Micro, greatest single game of all time, no doubt, or Sim City or Civilisation, or the aforementioned Total War, all games into which I have poured literally months of my life) and can be played in many different ways are the most interesting.  Ones that actually have good stories tend, for me, to fall into the roleplaying camp.  Casting my mind far back, a game called Legend on the Atari ST blew my mind at the time because it had a very nice twist in the plot.  Probably not spoiling anything if I say the goodly King who sends your adventuring band on their quest turns out to be the villain.  Baldur’s Gate (and its sequels) was a later classic, which was one of the first games I played that really seemed to have a sense of humour in the dialogue options, and felt like a truly huge game world to explore.  Indeed the developer Bioware who were responsible for that, for Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic among many others, have always been some of the best and most interesting storytellers in the gaming business, for me.  Final Fantasy games, though frequently incomprehensible, also manage often to involve me closely, especially number 7, which quite blew my mind when it first came to the UK, and managed to wring quite a lot of raw emotion from some really rubbish sprites…

Man, I could be here all day, but come on, dig up some of your own…

I have been asked to reduce the size of my posts, therefore I shall destroy you briefly.

Talk about frakking straw-men, it seems you’ve now taken to arguing with Neil Gaiman who, last time I checked, was not involved in this grudge match.  You obviously DARE NOT RESPOND TO MY ARGUMENTS BECAUSE THEY ARE SO INCREDIBLY RIGHT.  You imply the most irate readers are getting about Martin’s delays is to say, “that’s nice, but I want more story”?  I didn’t realise you LIVED IN NEVER NEVER LAND AS WELL AS WROTE ABOUT IT.  Let me open your innocent baby-eyes to these irate readers “you’ve never seen“:

You further straw man the straw man by arguing that writers have a moral obligation to finish a series.  But we’re not really talking about people refusing to finish, or abandoning a series - I can’t think of a single notable example of that.  We’re talking about people who take longer than expected doing it.  You say yourself that the most important thing you’ve learned in your impressive 700 days of experience is that you owe your readers “1. The absolute best stories I’m capable of writing”.  I agree with you (for once), but if it takes you longer to write the best story than you hoped, well, what can one do…?  I hope your next book will ABSOLUTELY DEFINITELY BE TURNED IN NOVEMBER because if not I will be leading the PICKET ON YOUR HOUSE.

Looking at your three cardinal rules, are you saying George RR has 1. compromised on quality, 2. been discourteous without severe provocation or 3. dishonest?  If you cannot answer yes to one of these, I demand that we immediately DECLARE ME THE WINNER OF THIS ARGUMENT.

Come now, Brent.  Your name may be WEAKS, but your arguments don’t have to be…

“I know Joe has a persistent need for affirmation”

Everyone knows this, though at least I don’t have an “OFFICIAL NETWORK” FORUM FOR PEOPLE TO TELL ME HOW GREAT I AM, with thread titles like, “High Praise to Brent Weeks,” or “thankyou Mr. Weeks,” or ”We love Brent Weeks so much we’re just going to burst.”  Alright, that last one isn’t true.

“and I’m a nice guy”

So you say…

“bookmark this page.”

Meh.  I bookmark THESE PAGES, to keep me SHARP AND ANGRY.

“I’m taking the high road”

Don’t pretend either one of us knows where the high road is.

“I’d like to broaden this discussion”

Very well, Weeks, I will broaden with you.  What does the reader owe his/her audience?  Well this question brings up first for me the recent and ongoing to-do that Dadawa alludes to in the comments, of readers carping about various series books that are delayed to some extent or other.  My opinion on this basically is that readers have no choice but to suck it up.  A shame, but there it is.  Wait or walk away.  There is no obligation on the reader, after all, to continue buying or reading a series.  Why must there be a corresponding obligation on the writer?

Now, of course, it behooves a writer, strongly behooves, some might say, to do various things, like finish a series once begun.  It probably also behooves him or her to deliver books in a timely manner, as much for the goodwill that it will foster with publisher and booksellers as with readers.  But the fact is no writer is ever going to deliberately delay delivery (check my alliteration, CHECK IT) except when they feel they really have to.  They are the very, very last people who want to upset their readers, defer their royalty cheques and imperil the success of the work into which they have poured years of their valuable time and effort.  But the thing that it most behooves a writer to do is to write good books, and the major reason books get delayed is because the author wants them to be as good as they can be.  And that, I think, is the author’s real responsibility to his or her readers - to write the best books possible.  Usually that means the most truthful, honest, authentic books possible.  No one gives a toss about writers who deliver rubbish books like a metronome.  They care about great books.  If they come regularly, it’s a bonus, but it isn’t one anyone should count on…

Now as far as what an author owes in terms of internet presence, I’d broadly go with what I said in my last post, namely that a writer should pick their level of involvement and stick to it.  There’s nothing wrong with having nothing to do with the internet at all.  I’m sure a writer can still be plenty successful without it, and its easy to forget when you spend a lot of time piddling about on the internet that not everyone does, by any means.  But if you are going to run a website, I think it is pretty useless, if not out-and-out damaging, to run one that’s rubbish and extremely rarely updated.  If you’re going to do something, you should try to do it well.  You wouldn’t turn up to a signing in filthy rags stinking of wee and neat scotch.  Well, I wouldn’t, anyway.  Probably.  Nor should you put your worst foot forward on the internet.  If you’re going to be involved, be involved to the best of your ability (however limited that ability may be, Weeks).

As to the specific websites you mention, the daily word thing is just a big kick in the teeth from Sanderson to every other author in existence.  It would appear the man can write a book with each hand while knocking off a novella with one foot.  He is a MACHINE.  In fact I’m starting to suspect he may be twelve different people, or perhaps he’s got a cellar full of orphans working overtime.

Oh, man, though, I’m glad you brought up that picture of me.  I could look at that picture all DAY.  Look at me SMOULDER.  But yeah, fair point, I guess the old black and white thing is a bit cheesy.  Still, it could be worse.  It could be black and white with A BUNCH OF RED ROSES OVER MY SHOULDER.  As for big authors who don’t need a web page at all, well, of course there are some.  China Mieville, as you point out, would never post on the internet.

On a slightly different but related note, and since I take your point about making you start, I received an email from a reader the other day which went a-little-something-like-this:

“do you think that the nihilistic themes and despicable characters carry a risk of alienating some of your readers? Do you think that even a slightly more moderate tone would broaden your audience? Personally, I feel too depressed to buy any more of your books, no matter how good the reviews.”

Score!  Do writers, then, as this e-mailer would seem to imply, have a responsibility to not alienate their readers?  To moderate tone and broaden audience?  Do writers of epic fantasy, in particular, owe it to their readers to give them the types of stories or endings that they expect?

Brent, I have to violently disagree with you, and not just because we’ve framed this as a literary deathmatch, but also because you’re WRONG, so WRONG.

Your examples are poor. JRR would definitely have blogged had he had the technology available, but he was totally a console guy, played way too much Halo, and wouldn’t allow a PC in his home. Shakespeare? Have you read the sonnets? Obviously primitive blogs. Some of them he even printed out from his Sinclair ZX80, they have some of the original silvery whorls of printer tape in a glass case in the foyer of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. FACT.

I agree with you (grudgingly and with a massive sneer) that not every writer should blog. That writers shouldn’t feel it’s the default position, and that these days publishers are wont to encourage writers to blog/run a website and therefore do some of their own publicity and marketing (although why shouldn’t they?) The thing to avoid is that classic rather rubbish-looking template-based website with a post saying, “yeah! I’m blogging,” and one comment, then three posts the first day, one the next week, and one five months later saying, “yeah! I’m back! Sorry about the break!” Then nothing else ever since 2005. That does no one any good. You should decide your level of involvement and stick to it.

Whether the time a writer spends blogging actually makes sense commercially is a difficult question to answer, and will undoubtedly vary widely from writer to writer. It’s very unlikely you’ll be able to make anything significant from the “monetisation” of a blog (ads or amazon affiliation, that type of thing) even if you have a great deal of traffic. It’s also pretty unlikely you’ll sell huge numbers of extra copies directly because of your web presence – people will generally come to your website having read your books, rather than the other way around. But the benefits of blogging, or, indeed, any level of public involvement like signings, events, and conventions are a lot more subtle than simply how many books you sell directly through them. It’s the goodwill, the feeling of involvement on the part of both writer and readers, and the general raising of profile.

The argument that 1000 words of blog = 1000 words less of novel is a bit silly, frankly beneath even you, and belongs with those guys who say, “how dare George Martin take a crap, he should be spending that wasted crapping time on Dance with Dragons.” Writing a blog and writing a novel are very different activities. For me, blogging often almost serves as a break from the more pressured actual writing, or a way to get the juices flowing a bit when I feel like I can’t face the current book. Rarely will you sit down for two hours of self-flagellation to produce 18.3 words of blog. It allows you to get some involvement from readers and others, to discuss things, to get out of the lonely world of your own brain for a little while. Writing is a lonely business, and that element of social interaction (even via the faceless interweb) is valuable. You can get obsessed with your blogging, of course, with the instant gratification and the rush of getting response from readers who are otherwise endlessly a vague group, as if seen through a mist. But all things in moderation, and there’s no more harm in it than choosing to spend some of your day going for a run, or reading the newspaper. That is, none. Some writers who blog a bit have delayed novels. Some writers who blog an awful lot don’t.

But, you know, every author is different, every blog is different, and we all have to make up our own minds about what’s worthwhile commercially, artistically and, indeed, what we enjoy. Stargate Exec Producer Joe Mallozzi blogs every day about the show, about food, about books, about his responses to spam emails, a lot of it is very funny and he has a big following as a result. Hal Duncan blogs more rarely but at pretty incredible length and level of insight on issues of literature and semantics. I try to blog once or twice a week about what’s happening with the books, about films and video games, about the process of writing and publishing, about getting hit over the head with a banister and anything else of note.  I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now, and I don’t reckon blogging has cost the public a huge amount of published work from me, but I have had a lot of fun doing it.  Who knows, maybe some folks have had just a little bit reading it as well…?

So, yeah, Brent, maybe you just don’t get it. Although that news page you run on your website does look just a little teeny bit like a blog to me.