Babel Clash

I think Angry Robot’s statement is pretty accurate in terms of intent, Morgan: they are ambitiously and enthusiastically pursuing some great material that would be hard to pigeon-hole in traditional ways. I think a cocky mission statement like AR’s simply serves to remind everyone how excitingly broad the possibilities contained within the category “SF and F” really are. And I think that genre writers have always been prepared to take those giant risks, but it’s a lonely life at the keyboard, and sometimes you want your ground to be safe rather than new. It’s energising to find an imprint like Angry Robot that happily wears its awareness of those risks on its sleeve, and is eager to see them being taken. It’s about attitude.

Big’s comments yesterday about Triumff were very nice to hear. Tsar Boris asked about ongoing series versus finite stories: some things (like Gaunt) have always been open-ended, in that I’ve always felt that I’d recognise when it was time to stop when I got there. Others (like Eisenhorn) were going to be finite trilogies from the get go. I think I try to govern how these things grow using a mix of flexibility and quality control. I don’t, for example, know how many Triumff books I’d like to write, but the number is not set. Right now, I’ve written one and I have a great idea for the sequel. Maybe there’ll be a billionty-one. Maybe there’ll be two. There certainly isn’t a neon rule in my head flashing “Triumff = a maximum of four books.”

The Gaunt’s Ghosts series is planned out in three or four book arcs (each arc has a sub-title). All the while I’ve got fresh and exciting ways of continuing the series, I’ll keep going. The moment, and I mean the very moment, I feel I’m just churning out Gaunt stories for the sake of having a new Gaunt book, I’ll stop. It occurs to me that it may be surprising for some people to hear that tie-in series, which are supposed to be driven more by consciously commercial concerns, have creative discernment involved in their production.

Embedded, my next book for Angry Robot, is a return to the hard combat SF that I’m best known for. Freed from the constraints of someone else’s universe, the combat is going to be harder than usual, and I’ve been having wild fun creating a setting that will be unpredictable yet credible. The premise is this: on the frontline of a future war, a journalist is covering the action ‘chipped’ into the head of a serving trooper. When the soldier is killed, the journo - unable to eject his consciousness - has to take control of the body and get home again, reporting live feed all the way.

See? You want to read it already, don’t you?

Today, I was going to talk a little bit about the other side of the equation: working in your own universe instead of someone else’s. In the spirit of Graham’s excellent advice yesterday, I’m doing that whilst listening to someone singing in French.

I’ve really enjoyed reading what Graham has been writing about this weekend, and I can tell you have too. I agree with everything he said, including the notion that ten different authors will tell you ten different ways. Actually, especially including the notion that ten different authors will tell you ten different ways.

My novel writing process is much more ramshackle: Graham’s work sounds like an organized operation of military precision compared to mine. Blitzspear’s comment about it being a mistake to write notes on the bag of shopping receipts and cigarette papers is news to me. My only professional sophistication of that method is to make sure I collect and sticky-tape (not necessarily in any chronological order) those scraps and notes into the pages of a note book so they’re all in one place.

I’m not suggesting that I’m deliberately lazy or scrappy. Each novel for me is a kind of organic whole that I have to work until it’s the right shape. Like potter’s clay. What concerns me is not so much where it’s going to end, but the over all mass and feel of it.

So each novel has its own notebook or legal pad into which, like a crazed beachcomber, I gather all the ideas, names, words and stuff that feel like they belong to the novel, then I shape the book out of it, constantly dipping back into the notebook for inspiration or atmosphere. Q: Dan, are you, in fact, creating a ‘mood board’ for each novel? A: Get the words ‘mood board’ the hell out of my blog.

Once things feel right, then I shape them into the skeleton I need (the ACTUAL, you know, PLOT that will have been agreed in advance with Black Library etc). My desk is covered with vast, over-stuffed idea scrapbooks, each one a work in progress. I don’t use receipts and cigarette papers so much, but I will admit that I use a lot of American envelopes. I get a lot of mail from the States - from Marvel and DC - and US stationary is just not like UK stuff. I’m always making notes on some because I’ve left some on my desk, unable to throw it away. They get stuck in my notebook.

There are two things they say you should never let people see you make: one is sausages. The other is supposed to be laws, but I think it should be novels. I’m pretty sure I must sound like a Collyer Brothers style compulsive hoarder after the sidebar about envelopes above. This is just the way it works for me. Graham’s shown you the neat and structured plans and diagrams he makes; I’m showing you the mess I make down my apron. Don’t judge me. Once I was a human being, just like you.

Actually, in thinking about the process, I turned up a notion that applies directly to The Thing We Were Supposed To Be Talking About. Remember that? Whether I’m writing in someone else’s universe or one of my own creation, I still gather ideas together and bundle them up in a notebook. Sometimes ideas harvested for one go into the other. The point is, if I’m writing, say, a Black Library book… well, let’s take as an example Titanicus, the novel I published about the huge walking war engines in the 40K universe. I like Titanicus a lot, because it’s a novel about giant war engines (what’s not to like?), but also because it’s about an hive city, about the layers of life in a hive city. I found myself looking for and collecting stuff that I knew would fit that setting: walking down the ideas beach, I’d know pretty quickly what was worth picking up for Titanicus and what wouldn’t fit. In other words, when it’s somebody else’s universe, you look for stuff that will match, that will compliment. You look for the stuff that will decorate it in the places where, perhaps, it needs a little perking up, or in the places where no one’s done more than give it an undercoat of primer.

Last year, I published a novel called Triumff. It’s out from Angry Robot, an imprint of HarperCollins (go check them out at angryrobotbooks.com). It was a big deal for me, because Triumff was my first ‘original‘ novel. I invented it all, universe and all. It was a very satisfying thing to do after thirty six other novels set in other peoples’ back yards. More satisfying? No, differently satisfying.

Just getting on Graham’s theme of ‘how one writes a novel‘ today has made me realise the process for Triumff was virtually identical to the process for any of the others, except for one simple contextual detail: I went idea beachcombing, I hunted and I gathered (note to self: I really should have started out with the image of the ‘idea hunter-gatherer’ instead of the ‘idea beachcomber’… it’s so much more cool writer dude), and I collected everything into a bizarre, ever-growing, disorganized grimoire. The difference is that with 40k projects, I go foraging for ideas fit for purpose. With Triumff, and other universes of my own, I hunt for anything bright and shiny I like the look of, and THEN figure out how they fit together. Not all of them will, but the way that the most promising and interesting do will help determine the shape of the universe they get used it.

Triumff is a fantasy adventure of derring-do and buckled swashes. It’s set in an Elizabethan England. You’ll note the ‘an’ there. This is alternate history. England has ruled the world since Elizabeth Glorianna’s time thanks to the rediscovery of magic. An unbroken line of Elizabeth’s (in the book, we’re on Elizabeth XXX) has dominated the globe as the absolute monarch of a magically-armed super power. Our hero, Rupert Triumff, is a rather wayward, dissolute seafarer, once favorite of old Triple-Ex , who stumbles into the middle of a horrible conspiracy that threatens the security of the realm. There are some rather good sword fights and, though essentially a serious adventure, the book does wander past some jokes here and there. Puns, particularly. I love a good pun. Especially when they’re fresh and fizzling. Current puns (ba-dum! I thank you!).

The universe of Triumff had been in my head for almost twenty years before I got to write it. That’s time for a lot of hunter-gathering. The danger is, you could get too vague and everything-including-the-kitchen-sink. In somebody else’s universe, somebody else has set the rules, and you’ve got to play by them.

In your own universe, the rules are all down to you. And if, like me, you decide those universal rules have to include a magic system, then you’d better make sure they bloody well work.

Next post, I‘ll take a look at Triumff’s universe a little more, and try and figure out if the greater creative liberty of working in your own universe is a bonus or a hindrance. I’ll also be answering questions such as, “Dan, what are you going to write for Angry Robot after Triumff? and “Is it an SF Combat novel called Embedded?” and “Isn’t it handy that you can use a discussion of the contrasting differences between your own and other peoples‘ universes to promote books like Triumff and Embedded?” and “Ow! Dan what’d you just kick me for?”