Next in line to face some impertinent questions is serial trilogist and friend of the BL forum, ladies and gentlemen I give you Mr. Steven Savile.
Steven's many appearances on the forums were one of the inspirations for these interviews. I noticed how many times on the forum he and other authors are asked questions which are off-topic but which are still interesting (and because of forum rules sometimes left unanswered). So it is a delight to get a chance to learn more about him.
This interview was done in-between the publication of Steven's first two books of Steven's Von Carstein trilogy: Inheritance and Dominion and the third: Retribution (published March 2007 in the UK and April in the rest of the world).
But that's not good enough for Mr. Savile; the opening instalment of his next trilogy was published in December 2006 (in both the UK and US). It is called Slaine: The Exile and is about Pat Mill's hulking, Celtic graphic novel hero Slaine. Oh, and don't forget the vampires and the Dr.Who anthologies, and the . Nuff said, the man is prolific.
1: How did the idea for the Von Carstein series come about? Could you talk us through the process of devising it? Was it a story that grew so big it had to be three books or was that the plan all along?
My introduction to the Black Library was a curious one, to be honest, owing a lot to being in the right place at the right time. I suspect that is how it often is. I certainly didn't go through the traditional route of submitting to Inferno, which was still publishing at the time. It went something like this: I had saved up six months worth of bills and living expenses so that I could quit my job as a teacher in Stockholm and devote myself to the new fantasy series that had been simmering in my head for quite some time. At one time I had loved being a teacher but over the last few years working with petty-minded bureaucrats had really taken the enjoyment out of it. The job was slowly driving me insane, to be honest. I know a lot of friends told me the day I quit it was like a light switch flicked on and all of a sudden I was like the guy I had been years earlier. I suspect that means happy.
The very next day I got into a conversation with Mike Lee, who had also recently begun working for Black Library and had an awful lot of good things to say about the folks there. Mike introduced me to Lindsey Priestley - and there was an immediate chemistry. Lindsey is an amazing lady, very much in love with her job and the worlds of Warhammer and that enthusiasm is infectious. You can't help but want to be a part of it.
We bounced back and forth about seven hundred emails in two weeks without really knowing what I was going to do, discussing titans, space wolves, and vampire counts. It wasn't a difficult decision for me really. I've never played 40k so the thought of a massive learning curve was daunting but I grew up playing WFRP and still have amazingly fond memories of Sundays wrestling with The Enemy Within and the Power Behind The Throne. We then traded another slew of emails working up a trilogy - one novel for each of the dread Counts. I spent several weeks reading everything I could get my hands on that involved Sylvania, throwing out literally five novels worth of ideas in deciding exactly what constituted the core story that needed to be told.
2: Are there problems balancing the sheer size and scale of your trilogy with the desire to stay close to your characters (and stay within the word count)?
Each of the Vampire Counts novels spans an enormous amount of time - very few ninety-five thousand word novels attempt to span over a hundred plus years of history from a static POV. This leads to all sorts of plotting and characterisation issues not least of which is how to keep the plot dynamic and moving while maintaining the narrative drive and excitement AND keeping your readers engaged with the lives of the people involved. Our initial plan had been to tell them from a more human perspective but it became more and more obvious that doing so would be a logistical nightmare. I mean, in terms of a battle scenario we are looking at at least three generations of humanity pitched against Konrad. Mathematically that would have been around one hundred and forty pages of each generation, which wouldn't have been in any way satisfactory. What we ended up doing was looking for a more long-lived core of characters, hence we see Kallad, the dwarf as our main link to the forces of good.
Probably the single most important lesson I ever learned as a writer was that whatever the story, it was always about the characters. What I mean by this is you must create interesting Story People and once you have them, you let them tell you their story, you don't force them to tell yours. Vlad, Konrad and Mannfred were interesting story people, for sure, but in truth I see the series as belonging to two other characters, Jon Skellan and Jerek Krieger/von Carstein. The entire trilogy pivots around the actions of this pair, both representing the depths that humanity can skin to and the heights it is capable of achieving. By letting them tell their stories I found a new way of examining the more familiar IP characters and hopefully breathing life in to them. After all, we all know about Grim Moor and Hel Fenn, so the challenge was to make us care WHY Konrad fell and how much it hurt humanity to hold off Vlad at Altdorf, etc. If we aren't engaged we don't care, if we don't care the book fails. There are tricks that can be employed of course, in terms of pacing and language - but they only go so far. Good characterisation helps us go all the way with the novel, rooting for or hissing at our guides.
I plot fairly tightly which means I tend to know exactly how long any given book is going to run - but every time I get to around the three-quarters mark I send a panicked email warning Lindsey Priestley to expect me to overrun by another hundred pages - it hasn't actually happened yet, but I live in complete dread that one day I'll kill a rain forest.
3: Have you ever become so attached to a character that you've found it hard to kill them (or have them turned into a vampire)?
Hah! I know I shouldn't laugh but this one is a great question considering how many folks bite the dust in Inheritance and Dominion - I was talking to one of the marketing guys at GW a while back and he kept telling me how much he loved Inheritance because of how it defied his expectation. What he meant was that every time he began to empathise with a character and identify with him as our 'hero' I killed him. This was deliberate on my part. I wanted to show how brutal this kind of warfare was, and how unrealistic it can be to have one man striding through the arrows and cannon fire unwounded time after time always managing to save the day. In my vision of the world heroism hurts. It has a price few would be willing to pay, hence they are heroes in a much truer sense of the word. Which is a long winded way of saying yes...
In the original outline of Inheritance Jon Skellan never made it down from that balcony confrontation with Sebastian Aigner and Herman Posner. He did what he set out to do. He avenged his wife and then paid the price with his life. The thing was as I wrote the scene this little voice nagged away in the back of my head saying: I've got an idea... oh boy do I... I wrote Skellan's siring and then banged off an email to my editor saying I'd made a pretty major change to the agreed novel, but trust me, it worked. Skellan didn't want to 'die' you see. There was this element that said look how damaged a man this is, imagine how dangerous a vampire he could be - a much truer, less noble beast than Vlad or Mannfred, with a more distilled madness than Konrad. It also set up that wonderful scene, possibly my favourite in the entire series, where Skellan as a vampire encounters his friend Fischer for that final time...
4: Have you always been a writer? How did it all come about? How much of a struggle was it for you to become one?
I started writing when I was young - when I was nine or ten I was writing Kojak comic scripts and Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk stories. I illustrated them myself as well. They were quite appalling but that's how it should be. When I was eleven, I wrote my first ever short story, Wheels. It was about a young man who goes down on to the underground in London and sees someone in a wheelchair. He takes pity on him and pushes him under the oncoming train. That little gem earned me several visits with the school psychologist and a fair bit of grief with my parents. No one seemed to be able to understand that it was just a story. There was no great significance. I didn't want to kill anyone. It was just a cool little story. Of course, eleven year olds aren't meant to be able to separate fiction and reality so everyone was terrified they had a homicidal maniac in their midst.
I didn't write for a long time after that. Probably until I was eighteen or nineteen. Then I decided I wanted to be a journalist. It was another one of those dumb career decisions I made. Thankfully it led the way to what I am doing now so it wasn't a complete waste. I published my first short story, Coming For to Carry You Home, back in 1991, and won joint first place in the reader's poll as well as some scathing reviews - once it was included in the: and the rest of the stories are so bad they aren't worth mentioning. There was a lesson to be learned there - what critics and readers like is often very, very different. I decided early on I wanted to be read rather than lauded with praise and ignored by the people that mattered.
What followed as a long and tortuous overnight success - I sold my first novel age twenty-one but it never came out because of a weird set of environmental circumstances that caused paper prices to sky rocket. Six years of pretty depressing struggle came and went with nothing to show for it, my agent and I parted ways, I still wrote but I couldn't sell anything. Then a friend put me in touch with a wonderful lady at Hendersons, which were bought out by the giant Dorling Kindersley. I did several projects for them that never saw the light of day, including a kids' guide to the internet and two pre-teen romance novels. These went well and despite never hitting the shelves proved I was capable of pro-level work with minimum fuss, so when DK got the rights to do Star Wars and Jurassic Park they offered me thirteen funfax books to do, including the 'mission book' for Return of the Jedi, which was great fun - novelising the film for a preteen audience. A few of these still pop up on Amazon and Abe but they are so rare it isn't funny. I only have 2 copies.
After this I put together an anthology to raise money for the homeless charity, Shelter, called Redbrick Eden, and sold a few small press books. My career turned around when I won the Writers of the Future Award - which is the biggest award for new writers of SF and Fantasy with thousands of entries every quarter. I've been lucky but more importantly I have also been stubborn and kept on plugging away because writing has always been what I have wanted to do.
5: Dr Who. What have you written, where and when will it be available and how much freedom were you given to write it?
I have always adored WHO and can't believe that I am lucky enough to be adding to the amazing wealth of material out there. I mean I devoured those old Target paperbacks when we went on camping trips as a kid, reading a book a day, and cowered behind the settee growing up. Heck, I even remember being physically ill - throwing up - at the trauma of seeing Tom Baker turn into Peter Davison... how's that for emotional investment in a character!
My first Dr Who story, Falling From Xi'an, about Chinese ghosts and the terracotta army, came out last month in the Big Finish short trips anthology The Centenarian (Ian Farrington ed.). I have stories coming up in Snapshots (Joe Lidster ed.) and The Quality of Leadership (Keith DeCandido ed.) and have edited the next short trips, Destination Prague. There may well be a few more bits and bobs on the way but I can't talk about them just yet.
You have very little freedom in terms of language and story continuity because WHO is such an established universe, you need to be aware of how certain actors sound, and who did or didn't have sonic screwdrivers at which time, for instance. What was interesting was tackling Peter Davison as a Dr. One reviewer commented that my Davison read exactly like David Tennant's tenth Doctor - which made me smile as Xi'an was written before Tennant was even cast! The thing is that both Davison and Tennant are very 'human' Doctors, the difference is merely in the energy of the portrayal, not so much in the manner of speech etc.
6: Sweden. Who or what attracted you there?
It was after the internet book for Hendersons - the guys I corresponded with were based in Stockholm. I came out of a particularly ugly break-up with a long time girlfriend and they decided Sweden was what I needed to take my mind off it. They were right. On my last night in town they threw a party and I met the woman who became my wife. Twas all very romantic. I have stayed there ever since because it is a fantastic city - despite the cold winter and dark nights. I worked as a teacher for nine years there - I always swore I would never do ten. For the last two years I have been a full time writer and where I live has become less important as I am not tied to it by work.
7: Are you now a full-time writer?
Yep, I average about five or six novels a year, plus sundry other projects including short stories, plays, reviews and interviews. The trick is having enough projects on the go to keep life interesting. I've recently been working on the last vampire novel for Warhammer, the second Slaine novel, Slaine: The Defiler (it's been retitled from The Redemption), Dr Who, and a serialised novel, Temple, in an American Magazine, Apex Digest. I've also been gathering material for two new series for GW... no rest for the poor!
8: Who are or were the biggest influences on your writing?
I think that's a very difficult question - I have drawn a lot from everything I have ever seen that I thought worked - in terms of career I am blessed with a few very good friends like Kevin J Anderson and Tim Powers, but in terms of my fantasy writing I think I owe a great deal to David Gemmell. Gemmell was one of my first loves in terms of writers, and while I may not have loved him most, having hot infatuations with Jonathan Carroll and a few others, I have loved him longest - his genius for storytelling endures. His death was a great blow - I hadn't expected it to hit me as hard as it did. I felt like I lost a silent mentor.
9: Why Warhammer? Were or are you a fan or player?
I used to work for Games Workshop when I was sixteen. I played
WFRP and Space Hulk, Adeptus Titanicus and Heroquest. Heck, every week we used to play SOMETHING - AD&D, Runequest, Space Master, Role Master, MERP, you name it, we played it - Paranoia, GURPS, Call of Cthullu... we were gamers to the core. I always loved the grim nature of Warhammer and the shocking sense of humour it exhibited - go read the place names on the map and the character names again...
10: Your highest profile work for BL is in the WFB genre, so do you see yourself as a fantasy author? Would you ever be tempted to write 40K fiction?
It's a tough one - in terms of sales 40k blows the fantasy off the map so it is appealing in terms of money - but let's face it, it isn't just about the money, it is about doing what you enjoy day in and day out - and I am a fantasy fan. My hope is that people will come to realise that this new generation of Fantasy writers in the GW stable is bleeding great and give us a try. I've had so many people come up to me and say I don't normally read the fantasy books but I loved your Von Carstein series. That's what it is all about for me. Connecting with the readers. I have two new series locked in and both are fantasy so I wouldn't hold your breath for the first Savile 40k novel.
11: Slaine. Is it easy to write using an already popular character?
I am drawing on the original Slaine comics to create a cohesive story akin to Conan in a Celtic setting. It's been an interesting experience for sure. There's a lot of expectation doing a novel with someone else's characters. It isn't something I would immediately choose to do again, I have to admit, but I got into Slaine because I loved the original stuff and it was very much a dream job to get to work on the stories. I think it is a case by case thing. Like Dr Who - who wouldn't want to write a Dr Who story?
12: You said that you are a long-term fan of the comics. So was writing this a long held ambition, a commission or both?
Ah, must confess yes I have always had a weakness for the 'big heroes' of fantasy like Conan and Slaine. There's something incredibly appealing about these more traditional heroes that hark back to the Golden Age of fantasy and science fiction. It's a more innocent kind of material, black and white heroes as opposed to the modern shades of grey fantasy that has come over the last couple of decades. In these old stories heroes are most definitely heroes cut from the most heroic of clothes. So, at Games Day in 2005 when Jay Slater and Marc Gascoigne broached the idea of me doing the Black Flame adaptations of Slaine I took all of 20 nano-seconds to bite their hands off. 2000AD was one of those seminal comics when I was growing up so to be a part of it, hopefully making Slaine come alive for a completely new generation of readers who otherwise wouldn't have come across the comics, is very much a dream come true. Of course the challenge was to write something that the existing fans will love just as much as the new readers coming to Slaine for the first time.
13: How much research did you have to do? Did you draw in detail from both Irish myth and archaeology? And how much is from your own imagination?
As with everything I tend to throw myself into the research and then not use three quarters of what I learn - that is to say I read all of the classic Celtic myths, handbooks on the druidic faith and similar stuff, and then tried to weave a path between these and material already laid down in the comics. There's an awful lot of new material in the novels drawn from mythology as opposed to existing episodes of the comic, sprinkled with a dash of Good Ol' Saviley Goodness...
14: How different, if any, was this experience from writing your other books?
The tone and structure, for a start, are completely different to anything I have done before - there is an overt humour about Slaine and Ukko that doesn't exist in the vampire counts, for instance. Ukko was a blast to write. I have nicknamed him my 'inner sarcastic git' in that every time Slaine does something heroic or says one of those blindly clichéd hero lines Ukko says what I think ...
15: What kind of publishing cycle do you have planned for Slaine? You've laid out the villains, the threats that Slaine faces and introduced his sidekick but is the scope of his adventures open-ended or is there a firm plan to do a limited number of books?
One a year for the next three years, released just before Christmas. The first, Slaine: The Exile, hits the streets on Dec 12. I am in the middle of writing Slaine: The Defiler right now before doing my next novel for Black Library. It's a trilogy most definitely, with no plans to go beyond that. That's three hundred thousand words - anything more than that would just be bloat. There's no need to over-inflate the story. This way it stays stripped down and muscular. Book Two very much opens into the classic hero territory culminating in a save the world scenario at the end.
16: I was interested by your use of present-day dialogue for some of your characters but not others. Is that a deliberate ploy to bring some characters closer to the reader than others?
Very much so, but I do get teased by the bosses now and again for letting modern language slip into my fantasy. You see I am a great believer that we should be writing the characters in a way that our readers can relate to them, which means updating a lot of the dialogue into a more modern 'speak'.
17: What other work do you have underway?
I am working on Slaine: The Defiler at the same time as polishing off my first Dr Who anthology, Destination Prague, outlining two brand new Warhammer Fantasy series for Lindsey which are epic in the truest sense of the word, alas I can't say much about them. I am finishing off the Apex serial at the moment, and have my own series under development, the first book of which is called The Heart of Thera. I also have a radio play under development and a few other bits and bobs - my blog is a good place to look for updates.
18: What do you think is the most common misconception of a writer's life?
That we are all as rich as Stephen King and JK Rowling and can immediately quit our day jobs for lives of leisure as soon as we sell that first book. It ain't so. I don't have a yacht in the Caribbean. Yet.
19: Books. Who is your favourite non-BL writer and whom are you reading at the moment?
At the moment I am reading Raymond Fiest's new Nighthawks novel - he's my guilty pleasure as a reader. I always have a lot of fun with his books. He understands the basic tenant - keep it exciting - and often sacrifices style for entertainment, which is a fair swap in my book.
As to a favourite - I used to be an obsessive fan of Jonathan Carroll but that has waned a little. I love Stephen Donaldson for instance. But more and more of late I have been enjoying non-genre novels, Lee Child is a great example of a dynamic action writer.
Who is my favourite now? I have so little time for reading it breaks my heart but I always, always make time for Fiest and Gemmell. I'd also recommend Glen Cook who is just wonderful - if you like the dark fantasy of Warhammer Cook's world of the Black Company will blow your mind.
20: Any practical advice for aspiring BL writers?
Write. It is the stupidest thing to say but so many people talk about wanting to write, and say if only I had the time, and excuses like that - make the time, sit down in the chair and write. Even a badly executed story will teach you something. A perfect story inside your head will teach you nothing. Set aside a little time every day to do a page. In a year you will have a full novel.
21: Do you have an agent? How does that work, how important is it to you?
I've been an agented writer since I was twenty-one. That's sixteen years now. Is it important to me? Yes, actually I think it is. There's a support network in having a good agent, someone who bats your corner and deals with the oddities in life. Writing isn't all roses and happy stuff. I hate negotiating - so I have that covered now.
My agent, John Jarrold, was one of the premier fantasy editors in the UK for years, having worked at Legend and then Simon & Shuster's Earthlight - with writers like Tim Powers, Kevin J Anderson, Terry Brooks, and just about every other household name. I know when I deliver stuff to him I can trust his instincts - this is vital. Choosing an agent is very much like looking for a wife/husband - it's a commitment. You need to find someone you are sympatico with. Someone who understands what you need and can help you achieve. He is your public face as a writer, introducing your work to publishers. You pick someone who makes you look good - not the other way around.
22: When you become Evil Overlord for the day, what rule would you impose on the genre or publishing in general?
Who says I am not the Evil Overlord already?
As to laws or rules - I think I'd like a day when all of my favourite writers unearthed a brilliant lost masterpiece so I could enjoy one last David Gemmell, one last Fritz Lieber, one last ... well you get the idea...
If you want to find out even more abut the man, Steven has an excellent website: The Torments of Steven Savile, then there's a blog plus his own myspace page but sadly he has yet to appear on bebo.com, though that can only be a matter of time.
- Martin Belderson
