Books&Buzz Featured Author Interview

Below the cut is a cut-n-paste of part of an interview I did for Books&Buzz Magazine in January 2020. The full interview can be viewed Here

The Gods’ Own Extract: Chapter Seven: The Butterfly Club

Reunited with Mati, Yasha felt rejuvenated. He dropped into the passenger seat and grinned at Ludo in the driver’s seat.

High Brow, Low Brow, No Brow?

If you wish to write, you must read. Where have I heard that before? Oh, everywhere. No matter where I go, or ironically, what source I read, I have come up against the adage that to be a successful writer one must be a voracious reader. Which, y’know, seems like legit advice, right? I mean, if nothing else, reading often and widely increases vocabulary and familiarizes you with the practical application of the grammar rules we love to hate. Also, as a plus, you might learn some nifty fact you didn’t know before that you can  rework in a novel. 🙂

The thing is, the advice is never rooted purely in the technical. There is always an additional element. A couple of paragraphs waxing lyrical about the great works of literature that ignited someone’s love of the written word, or radically changed their worldview at a time when they needed it most. Which, y’know, is awesome. No denying that.

But what if you’re a writer and the greatest source of “inspiration”, that creative narrative that shook you and opened your eyes (figuratively and metaphorically speaking) wasn’t a great work of fiction, or poem by one of the great wordsmiths of literary canon? What if it wasn’t even a “bad” work of fiction? What if, shock and horror, it wasn’t even a novel at all?

Here’s the thing. I have a lot of novels that are dear to me. Some great works, others merely great fun. The first time I read The Maltese Falcon, I was blown away by the cut-glass precision of Hammett’s descriptive prose. How it read more like stage direction than a novella. There was something both immersive and painful about the brutal clarity of his descriptive paragraphs; how he could paint a picture with words that let me see every detail of the process Spade went through to roll his cigarette. As a writer, I read his prose, how it shifts to reflect character, from brutal realist Sam Spade to dilettante detective Nick Charles (The Thin Man) and see a masterclass of technique laid out on the page.

I have been moved to tears by the deaths of characters, wounded by single lines of poetry, had my assumptions knocked all askew by a cheeky throw-away sentence in an otherwise standard narration. So, I understand just how important it is to read. But for me, the single most invigorating and shocking “story” I was ever exposed to wasn’t in a book at all.

It was a videogame.

Final Fantasy VII, released by Japanese Role Playing Games developer Square (now Square Enix) in 1997, on Playstation Two. The story was a sprawling, fantastical, sometimes ridiculous and sometimes heart-wrenching romp that touched on themes of corporate greed, capitalism, environmental terrorism, state repression, militarism, unethical human experimentation, identity, love, life, death and the proper rearing of the mythical Golden Chocobo – a large bird that is a cross between an ostrich and a cockatiel you can ride.

It was intense!

While the structure of the game meant that the story was parcelled out a little unevenly, I remember how intensely immersive it was to play, experiencing all the events of the plot as if I was participant, not separated by the crisp divide of bound pages between my hands. Every button mash, every dialogue option, every random non-playable characters bathroom I invaded, brought the story world alive. So that when the big moments hit, the shocking, dramatic moments, they had all the more resonance because this was a game. A silly game with giant-eyed Japanese chibi characters with infeasibly spiky hair and dumb names like Cloud.

The thing is, the story was ballsy. It didn’t care that it was just a game. That everyone knows Game Over just means re-load from last save. In Final Fantasy VII, the consequences were all too real for the characters, no matter how many times I re-loaded. Not everyone got a happy ending. And there was nothing the player could do about it. The story was fixed. Every player was just running through the narrative like a reader tearing through the pages of a novel, racing toward a denouement they both dread and hunger after.

The game is due to be re-released with a spanking new, no-chibi makeover in April 2020 so I won’t give away spoilers. All I will say is that sometimes the best storytelling isn’t in a book written a hundred years ago. Or a book written five minutes ago. Storytelling transcends medium and I’m looking forward to the day I can walk into a writing class and say, you know what the best story I ever played was? and not feel like a weirdo. 🙂

 

The Gods’ Own Extract: Chapter Six: Holes In Empty Air

Ludo stopped the car at the curb in front of a derelict building site. A broken retaining wall, rubble and a skeletal framework of metal beams was all that remained of whatever building had once stood on this spot.
Yasha looked around. A group of greys huddled in the shadow of the scorched wall, watching him. They were a sorry sight, like a group of shrouded mourners, their red eyes blinking from the depths of naked dome-like heads. They were illuminated from within by the radiance of their souls.

An Emotional Truth?

A while back, when I was studying for a Master’s in Creative Writing, I came across a notion that confused and disturbed me because it struck at core principles I didn’t know I had. I was doing a module of work on creative non-fiction; which is a genre that covers everything from autobiography to article writing (but not journalism) and, I suppose, blogging.

It seemed like an odd genre to me when I studied it; the lines of demarcation between journalistic ‘think piece’ or op-ed and creative non-fiction article were tenuous and seemingly decided on a piece by piece basis, but, y’know whatever, right? Writing is a profession that loves to break its own rules. Most writers love to be rebels, to speak out and expose the limits of “normal” and conventional.

I’m okay with that. Although I’m too busy doing my own thing most of the time to bother much with rebellion. 🙂

But then I ran smack bang into a concept that turned me from a ‘whatever’ sort of girl into a strict No, that is Not Right sort in a way that surprised me.

That concept, as you might have guessed, was “Emotional Truth”, a notion put across by my tutor that espoused the idea that it was okay to fabricate facts –within a NON-fiction genre– so long as the emotion behind the words was true.

At this point my okay-whatever-we’re-all-iconoclasts-here mentality derailed in spectacular fashion, careening into the granite wall of but wait! If you say something happened and it didn’t and you’re not writing fiction –that’s lying! I know that if I’m reading an autobiography I have an expectation that the facts relayed about the what, who, when, how of a person’s life should be verifiable and reflected in objective reality and this concept flew in the face of that assumption.

Reality, to my pedant’s brain, is what I consider a form of “truth” that takes precedence over what I might feel about said reality. For instance, I might feel that it would be cool to float on the breeze like a majestic crisp packet escaped from a landfill, but if I leap off a cliff, gravity is not going to care about my feelings. I will still go splat on the bottom.

Therefore if someone writes that their heart died when their spouse left them, I will translate this to mean they were (justifiably) emotionally devastated. I will be moved by the eloquence and/or unflinching honesty of their prose as they describe the experience of a broken relationship but I will not think they suffered coronary failure and were declared dead at the scene. So, if they go on to write an autobiography of how their poltergeist self haunted their ex, I will be left thinking that this fiction novel has been mislabelled.

This is because, in my narrow bandwidth comprehension of Non-Fiction, there is emotion and there is truth, and the former is not a substitute for the latter (although without the former the latter makes for very boring biographies!). So, imagine my surprise when my tutor said: Not so! What matters veracity when one has Emotional Truth! All is forgiven if the feeling is true!*

My reaction could best be summed up as a mixture of various squinty-eyed emojis and the personification of ‘???!!!!’ followed by keyboard smash of despair/outrage. But, but, But! Everyone has an emotional truth! I thought, my worldview of clearly delineated reality collapsing under the weight of artistic license run wild. If a person’s feelings are more valid than facts, how can anything be true? I wondered. Surely, I thought, truth can only exist where there is also non-truth, but if all feeling is truth, where is the lie?

Where is the lie? Indeed.

The “truth” of the matter is that a highly subjective interpretation of reality was perfectly acceptable and bankable in the genre; people were publishing to acclaim and not being accused of falsehood and deception. I was the one with the problem. It was my emotional truth that was the issue. Because it is my truth that words have meaning and while the English language allows us to play and stretch those meanings, subverting that original meaning completely runs the risk of destroying the power language has to define both reality and emotion.

Fiction frees a writer from the bounds of reality allowing us to make our own rules. The word “fiction” implies that what is written, while holding its own power and meaning, is not a true reflection of what is. Non-fiction implies the opposite, or otherwise, why bother with a suffix in the first place? If we ignore the limits of meaning, don’t we run the risk of devaluing both what is, and what we feel?

 

* In my tutor’s defence, and in the interest of upholding reality, she did not actually talk like that.

P.S: If anyone reading this would like to give their take on the matter, I’d love to hear it. So please do comment. What is your emotional truth? How do you feel about genre and the division between fiction/non-fiction? 🙂

 

The Gods’ Own Extract: Chapter Five: Enter the Vanguard

Krystof arrived back in the city around lunch time. He flashed his credentials at the Raderi checkpoint and made his way to the Cave, otherwise known as Vanguard headquarters in the northern Rodniya suburb of the city.

The Cave, so named because the headquarters was inside a defunct mining facility built into the side of the mountain, was an imposing place to Krystof even now, almost a year into his recruitment.

Nothing New Under The Sun

Blogging. How, what, why, when? These are the questions I ask myself. How, is fairly simple. What is super hard. Why is tricky. When is both more and less tricky. The thing is I want to be a fiction writer, an author, if I’m going to be bold about my aspirations. What this means is, I want to hide behind my stories and keep myself tucked away. I’m boring. Comfortably ordinary. I have opinions, but so does everyone. So, what to write, when writing is what I need to do to be seen and heard?

The Gods’ Own Chapter Extract: Chapter Four – Storage

‘Where to?’ Ludo asked as they hit traffic on the way through the city’s south gate. Two miniature pylons stood on each side of the gate, each emitted a cheerful green-blue light, flaring like a camera flash as each vehicle passed through the barrier.
Yasha sat up, rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t been dozing but he’d let the quiet of the journey lull him all the same.