Guest Post: Steven Savile on Writing Across Genres

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Do you know Steven Savile? Maybe you know his pen name(s)…he has quite a few. Steven took a break from working on his multiple writing projects to guest post about how he balances so many projects at once, his writing process and what inspires him.

 

I suppose I should start by introducing myself. So imagine we’re sitting in a smoky bar in Cuba with the music playing and the far-too toned dancers shaming us slightly out of shape writers as we smoke our cigars and sip a nice single malt in the sweltering heat. What? That’s not how you imagine a writer’s life? Okay how about a garret in Soho with a wire-framed bed and a typewriter straight out of Naked Lunch perched on the windowsill, filthy curtains filtering the sunlight, the pasty-faced writer hunched over the keys bleeding onto the white page? Better or a bit too noir? Depending on how we’re meeting I’m Steve, though I could be Alex, or Aaron, and pretty soon to a whole new generation I’ll be Matt. I tried being Aimee for a while – actually Aimee’s book was a Nook First Look title, Moonlands, you might have caught it last year. It was a bit tough being an Aimee so that one went back to Steve pretty soon after because I had a problem logging onto message boards and pretending to be a woman. It felt a bit… creepy. I mean, it is one thing to be Alex Archer and quite another to be Aimee Carr. So alas poor Aimee, I knew her… but not well.

For the purposes of this blog though, I’m Steve and if you’re likely to find me anywhere it’s in the local coffee shop hunched over my laptop pulling the tiny strands of hair that stubbornly spring from my scalp out in frustration as that damned character just did what?

I’m a writer. I don’t call myself an author, I figure that’s for other people to decide. I write therefore I am. That’s basically it. It’s all I do. The thing is no one told me I had to be one thing or another, I didn’t have to be a science fiction writer, or a thriller writer or a crime writer or even a romance writer. So by not applying these restrictions to the way I approach work, I leave myself open to possibilities.  I read widely, too. In fact my reading habits veer far more than my writing ones. I think that helps, having a healthy interest (or indeed an unhealthy one) in just about everything (though if you stalk me on Facebook you’ll notice I pretty much only talk about football (soccer to you, I suspect) and 80s music, don’t ask me why, I don’t know, that’s just the way it is… and yes I deliberately ended that line with an 80s music reference. I’m bad).

Okay, so what have I written you might know? I have written books for TV shows like Stargate, Primeval, Doctor Who and Torchwood, for roleplaying games like Warhammer, Pathfinder, Fireborn, Arkham Horror, a few computer games like Risen 2: Dark Waters and the storyline for Battlefield 3, I’ve adapted the old British comic strip Slainé into two novels,  I’ve ghostwritten a tell-all as XXXXX XXXX and a bestselling novel for a household name as XXXXX XXXXXXXX (yep, I’m not telling on pain of death), I co-wrote HNIC with the hip hop legend Prodigy from Mobb Deep, and I’ve written a bunch of fairly well received independent novels, including my debut thriller, Silver, which was #2 in the UK for 3 months back in 2011 and the rest of the Ogmios books in the same series. I recently co-wrote with Steve Lockley the first in a (hopefully) series of gritty crime novels, Northern Soul. I’ve also been fairly lucky, and had a few titles feature in Nook First, and London Macabre was picked out as one of the Best 100 Indie Books of last year by B&N. So hopefully that’s a very intense peek into the completely scattergun approach I’ve taken to my career to date, and gives you an idea of why I was asked to try and explain just how I work, how I keep it all separate in my brain and basically don’t go crazy in the process.

One of the biggest influences in my career, one of those pivotal moments, was back in 2001 when I won Writers of the Future. It wasn’t for the award itself, which was incredible validation, it was because I met Kevin J Anderson, who is basically my big brother. I’ve forgotten just about everything I learned at the event apart from Kevin’s 10 Rules of Being a Professional Writer. These things changed my life. Some of them were really obvious, like if you’re going to write a Fluffy Pink Unicorn story write the best damned Fluffy Pink Unicorn story you can, because you never know who is going to read it, others were funny and obviously pertinent, like if you’re going to a con, go as a professional not a fan, don’t be the guy who wears the gaming tee-shirt for 5 days straight and forgets to take a shower. Like I said… obvious, but sometimes you need this stuff spelled out. Bu there was one thing that he said that stood out head and shoulders over everything else, and that was the Popcorn Theory of writing – basically instead of spending all of your energy nurturing this single perfect piece of corn until it pops, you chuck a big heap into a pan and see what pops. Think of it in terms of ideas – you could be the writer who spends 18 months labouring over their magnum opus, or you could put together a dozen proposals for ideas and see which ones catch people’s imaginations.

And that catching the imagination is equally important for me. If a game company or a tv show tie-in comes along and I don’t really like the show, or the game, I won’t do it. Because here’s the thing, I need to really enjoy it and think it’s going to be FUN. It might only take a day or two for someone to read, but writing the book, all the research in getting the characters right etc consume months of my life. I always chuckle when someone posts a ‘hack’ review and says ‘Oh he only did this for the money’ because they think a tv novelisation pays oodles of cash and any fool would do it. Sadly, I was higher paid as a teacher time-wise than for any novel I’ve written apart from Silver. That one broke even. But you don’t do it for the cash. You’d be mad to. You do it because it’s FUN. What is going to set your imagination going? After all you’re looking at writing the best Pink Fluffy Unicorn story you can, remember?

So I need to think I’m going to have a good time hanging around with these characters (there are some I’d kill to write, like Dr Sam Beckett, because believe me, I’m still not satisfied with the notion that he never found his way home…) and that means they need to be great story people. I’m writing a Sherlock Holmes novel for Titan soon, which will be out in 2015. You don’t get a better character than Holmes. He’s so distinctive, with such a unique voice, that the trick to getting him right was a case of buying the BBC audio dramas of the complete Holmes and listening to them solidly for about 6 weeks in any spare time I had, because you get a different response to the words if you hear over see them. Then I read the complete short stories of Conan Doyle, making obsessive notes about dates and times and places. Then I picked up a bunch of Victorian London reference books second hand, and spent ages getting used to stuff like prices for food and drink, purveyors of quality produce, etc. You can see why you need to love something, right? Because the thing is, if you don’t, the fans will know. It’s as simple as that. When I wrote my Stargate novel I watched every single episode back-to-back nonstop for 3 weeks until I knew the characters inside out. MGM wrote me a gorgeous letter about how I’d absolutely captured the voices, but if you look at the reviews it’s the worst Stargate novel ever. Y’see stupidly I made a mistake. I was emailing a buddy, Jonathan Maberry during a break from writing a scene where the team are worrying about what will happen if Maybourne finds out what’s going on… only I called the duplicitous s.o.b. Maberry because Jon’s name was in my brain when I went back to it. That single slip which got through the editors, the proof readers, the approvals set-up at MGM, convinced the more vocal fans of the show I’d never watched a single episode… Funny how it goes sometimes.

Anyway, I’m rambling. I select paying gigs like that based on what will be FUN because I’m actually giving up my allotted lifespan in months on this earth to make it happen. Money never comes into it. I wrote a SPACE 1889 novel with a mate because I used to play the game when I was at university, as had he and his wife, and his wife had tragically died recently so I told the publisher look, I’ll do it, but only if I can do it with David, and only if he gets to write a piece about Janet in the back, explaining why Leviathans in the Clouds had to happen. And if we do that, I’ll do it for free.

I know I can only do so much work in a year, so I divide my schedule up into seasons, and determine that I’m going to write one ‘for the love’ book every year, for me, something that my soul burns for. This year it’s a novel called The Harrowing, by far the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done. Next year, I already have a good idea what it’ll be because the idea is bright and shiny in my head and is refusing to go away. That’s a good sign in the selection process.

With my own work it’s different, but no less obsessive. I mean, if we look at London Macabre, a Victorian fantasy (not Steampunk though… honestly) and Silver, a modern day religious terrorism-thriller my process was identical in that I spent a few months just thinking about the team, even dropping a few cheeky links across the timelines, with Dorian Carruthers appearing in London Macabre and Quentin Carruthers running MI6 in modern London. I’d think okay what’s the very worst thing that can happen to these people? And when I’d worked out what it was I’d say right, so that just happened… and go from there. But it’s always the people first. I like normal people. Slightly damaged ones. I’m not a big fan of the invincible hero when I’m writing, however I freely admit that I love Jack Reacher. I think Lee Child’s created the coolest Lone Ranger rides into town to save the day since, well, the Lone Ranger. But for my own stuff, I want some messed up psyches. I want ordinary people who are stretched in extraordinary circumstances. I like to think there’s a hero in all of us waiting to come out.

As odd as it sounds, I don’t like to make things up. So with London Macabre, a book in which real magic has a pretty prominent place, I badger friend who just happens to be a theoretical physicist and say things like ‘okay, I want to make an entire district of London disappear… scientifically, you know, with real physics, how could I do it?’ and he’ll then come back cursing me for a while before coming up with some brilliant answer that I’ll then turn into ‘magic’ that makes sense.

There are exceptions to all of this, of course. I like to watch people. When I first moved to Stockholm I went into a café with a bunch of friends and everyone’s chatting away, and I’m dead silent. They don’t notice it for a while, and just figure ‘oh Steve’s writing again’ but at the table beside us there’s a really attractive woman and she’s got some of those old yellow Kodak envelopes on the table piled up in front of her. A homeless guy comes in and sits at her table. She doesn’t object, doesn’t say a word, and he starts to go through her photos, takes one, stuffs it into his pocket and walks out. I mean it was that surreal, honestly. So I remembered it. Didn’t do anything with it, just remembered it. A few years later I’m in Burger King in Stockholm and this guy comes running in, looks around, checks his watch and runs out. I’m teaching English at this point and one of my kids is on work experience in the restaurant. He tells me this guy has run in at the exact same time for the last four days, checked his watch and run out again without talking to anyone. My mind goes into over drive obviously, I mean what does this guy want? Who is he looking for? Why come back every day at the same time? I love those ‘what if’ questions that go with making stuff up. It’s another one I file away thinking one day I’ll use this in a story. A while later I’m on a plane back to England and the woman in the seat beside me takes a pair of scissors to the magazine she’s brought to read and cuts out every single advertisement in it. I mean this thing is down to bare bones, a few strips of paper holding it together, nothing more. And suddenly it all comes together, the homeless guy with the photos, the guy running into Burger King every day and the woman on the plane collecting adverts. In that moment the idea coalesces and I start writing it while I’m waiting for the connecting flight. That one’s called Remember Me Yesterday, and it’s probably my favourite short story I’ve ever written, but it’s a close call with one that just appeared in the Gene Wolfe tribute anthology from TOR, Shadows of the New Sun. That one is called Ashes and it’s been in my head for 12 years. I had the weirdest day in Prague when I was on honeymoon. I’m walking over the Charles Bridge towards the castle, and I see an artist who has loads of paintings he’s done on display and right in the middle of one it’s my wife and I, and more surreally, it’s of the day I proposed. I know exactly what was happening in it. So I talked to the artist and he explained how his girlfriend had just called him to say he was going to be a dad, and he’d wanted to capture that moment, so he leaned out of the window and took a photograph. Just so happened we were in that photograph and he’d painted. I knew I was always going to use that in a story too, because it’s one of those magic moments that deserves it, you know?

So, yes, the characters always come first apart from when they don’t.

I’m sure you’re wondering what it’s like to live in my head after that.  How do I keep it all straight, do I work on different things at once, does Alex have a difference voice from Steve, etc? And the truth is yes, a bit. I’ve done four Alex Archer novels for Gold Eagle/Harlequin, the first, Grendel’s Curse comes out in May. It’s a fun experience because there are something like 50 other Alex Archer novels, you’re protected a little by the anonymity of it and can just (and it’s those two words again) have fun. You can take risks with stuff to simply tell a rollicking good story. The trick is, I try to work on a couple of very different things at the same time, so, say, something like Moonlands, which was a young adult urban fantasy novel and Lucifer’s Machine, the fourth of the Ogmios books, two things that couldn’t be more different. It allows my brain to work on one for a while, letting the ideas for the other percolate in the background without crossing over or getting confused. I like to be editing one book whilst writing another, editing in the morning, writing in the afternoon/evening. There’s a sense of order to it, doing it that way. And I’m a fairly meticulous plotter. Don’t look at me that way – I like to know what’s coming up. I learned it with the tie-in novels. You need to get every single scene from the storyline approved for continuity and authenticity to make sure it meets the show/game owner/creator’s vision. That means no surprises. No letting characters get carried away with themselves. You need to know what’s going to happen.

So once I’ve got my characters, I tend to spend two to three weeks ‘not writing’ by which I mean sitting around seemingly doing nothing. This is the important part. This is the ‘genius’ bit where I’m just thinking. At least that’s what I tell the wife when she comes in and asks why I haven’t done the dishes. I’ve been writing. ‘No you haven’t you’ve been sitting around on your backside all day watching tv’ Nope, I’ve been writing, in here –taps temple… That’s about the time I need to weave a storyline. Not always. Sometimes it can take forever. I ended up writing an outline for my agent a couple of years ago that took me three months. She didn’t like it. It was a crusades era novel around the fall of the Templar, lots of knights and sword fights and revenge stuff. She said it was ‘too history-centric, tied to real events’ – I’d made loads of them up but obviously effectively. So I said, hey, I bet if this was a fantasy, you’d not be worried about that. So I spent another month turning it into a fantasy novel outline, to which she said ‘you’re right, that’s all great… this other stuff though, urgh, hate it…’ so in a fit of pique I threw it all out, and in the space of 20 minutes hammered out an outline in an email thinking ‘I dare you to hate this!’ all the time I was writing it. Sent it away. 10 mins later got a response: ‘Now this is more like it! Why didn’t you do this in the first place?’ Heh. What can I say? Sometimes I need battering into shape.

What I hope you’re seeing here – what you’re taking away from this is not only is it different for every writer, for me it’s different for every book. I wrote London Macabre without any sort of outline, deliberately weaving the most intricate plot and daring myself to solve it, writing myself into trap after trap and kinda saying ‘go on, get out of that!’ With Silver, I had something like 10 plot points or anchors I wanted to hit along the way, that was it. With something like Sign of Glaaki, the brand new Arkham Horror novel, I had a 10,000 word outline with my co-writer Steve Lockely that detailed everything that would happen in the 90,000 word book.

2 Comments

  1. Paula Howard says:

    Great article and great author.

  2. Winter Flory says:

    Man, you have accomplished things and changed genders and genre like Carter’s little liver pills! Well, okay, gender once, but genres and names! What are you hiding and who are you really?