Interrogation of BRIAN RUCKLEY: PART 2 (At last!)

Here's the second (and final) part of my interview with Brian Ruckley, author of Winterbirth (The Godless World Trilogy). Brian was great, so enjoy!

To see Part 1 click here

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Could you tell us a little about the journey your story undertook to be published? How does it felt now to be a published fantasy author?

A: So far, being a published author is a thoroughly pleasurable experience. It’s the realisation of an ambition that’s been with me – even if only in the background sometimes – ever since I was in my teens. The journey to publication was long, but not excessively painful. The story underwent a lot of rewriting and revising over two or three years, all done in my spare time on evenings and weekends, until I reached the point where I could no longer tell whether the changes I was making were improving it or not. That seemed like as good a point as any to start sending it out to agents.

Then there were more changes once I had an agent and more once I had a publisher – all of which I think improved the text, which just goes to prove how valuable a fresh, experienced set of eyes can be. I went after an agent first, partly because quite a few publishers are only really interested in agented submissions and partly because I just had a preconception that that was what an aspiring author did (I still think it’s a good idea – makes life easier in numerous ways, and there are even fewer publishers around willing to look at unagented submissions now than there were then, I think).

Your novel clearly puts much stock in wordbuilding, but it also has good characterisations that grow and change as the novel progresses. Which would you say was most important—good wordbuilding or good characterisations? (You're going to say both, I can feel it.)

A: Both. Actually no, I just said that to fulfil your prophecy (can’t have unfulfilled prophecies hanging around when you’re dealing with fantasy, after all). World-building is a fun and significant part of a certain type of fantasy book – epic secondary world fantasy, I guess you’d call it – and as you rightly say it’s an activity I embraced in the writing of Winterbirth. But developing good characters is a much more universal and more important requirement, I think. Generally speaking, the world you build is the scenery on the stage, the characters are the actors. It’s perfectly possible to enjoy a play with lousy scenery (or no scenery at all); it’s pretty much impossible to enjoy a play with terrible actors.

Ultimately, all writers of fiction are trying to persuade readers to engage with or immerse themselves in a story, and different genres and sub-genres use different tools to achieve that. Good characters are probably the single most powerful tool available, across a wide range of genres. World-building is just one secondary tool that fantasy writers in particular can also use. It can certainly be taken to nerdish extremes, potentially to the detriment of characters or plot. But at the end of the day most of us are nerdish about something or other (I’m a bit of wildlife nerd, for example) and one person’s nerdism is another’s pleasure.

Slightly linked to the last question—which characters have changed the most from your original idea of them to how they've appeared on the page?

A: That’s an interesting spin on the ‘characters coming to life’ issue. It’s quite hard to remember what you had in mind the very first time you dreamed up a character, because it gets overlaid by what that character became in the final manuscript. As a rule, my characters are quite well-behaved: they do what I tell them to, and on the whole that means they’ve stayed pretty close to the way I originally envisaged them.

That’s not to say nothing ever changes, though. Particularly in writing Bloodheir, Book 2, one or two characters have assumed a slightly larger role in the story than I originally thought. As a result, they’ve expanded as characters, coming to life a bit more. An example is Tara Jerain, the wife of Mordyn the Chancellor, who’s now a viewpoint character in Books 2 and 3. Another is Aewult, the heir to the High Thane, who I’ve had more fun writing than I expected, and partly as a result of that he shows up in more scenes in Bloodheir than I expected back when I was outlining it. He’s ended up being a bit nastier and cockier than I originally intended, but also somewhat more incompetent. He causes a lot of trouble in Bloodheir, and characters like that are always fun to write.

Again to do with your site-- you have a section called The Gazetteer where you post bits of additional background info (such as timelines, ancestry, etc) from the world of your books. When you write, do you have to have all this stuff in front of you to set it all in perspective, or was it just created for your site?

A: I’m actually really bad at the whole making notes thing. I have virtually nothing written down in terms of background information, it’s all just sloshing around in my head. The one exception to that is the timeline, I think. Oh, and I have some lists of Thanes (though I’m not sure I could lay my hands on them quickly) and some rough drafts of various maps. Apart from that, I’m dangerously reliant on my (generally but not invariably reliable) memory, and on what’s contained in the text.

The Gazetteer is there just because some readers might find some of that background stuff interesting. When I want to add something to it, it’s mostly just a matter of organising what’s in my head, though some of it gets expanded and added to as I’m ‘gazetting’ it. None of it’s strictly necessary to understand what’s going on in the books, so it’s more like the extras – deleted scenes or something – you get on a DVD. A bit of light fun for me to do, and hopefully of interest to one or two readers.

I'm sure there are many aspiring fantasy authors out there (most people who run blogs for example!) so are there any precious nuggets of writerly advice that you'd like to share?

A: I’m wary of dispensing advice because my experience is still relatively limited, and what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. Still, there’re some suggestions I think are unlikely ever to be bad advice. Read lots, including stuff outside the genre. Write constantly (and finish at least some of what you write! – the one thing that’s for sure is that you can aspire all you want, but you’ll never be a published novelist if you don’t actually finish a novel).

Patience and practice are at least half the battle: for most of us ordinary mortals it takes time to get the hang of writing, not just because of the requirement for practice, but also because you gradually accumulate more life experience and more reading experience, both of which help. And don’t pay too much attention to the cynics out there who imply there’s some vast unspoken conspiracy amongst agents, publishers and booksellers to prevent new writers from getting published – it’s not impossible, it’s just not easy. I think there were something like six debut fantasy writers, including me, published by major genre publishers in the UK in 2006, which isn’t exactly a huge number but equally it’s definitely not zero.

Thank you for taking time out of your writing to take part in my first (but not last!) ever interview! It's been a pleasure talking to you. Winterbirth is a terrific read, and I wish you all the best for the following two volumes in the Godless World Trilogy. Is there anything you'd like to add before we say adios amigo?!?

A: Nope, we’ve covered plenty of ground for now, I should think. It’s been fun. At moments such as this, I always invite everyone to check out the website at www.brianruckley.com, so consider yourself cordially invited, whoever you are. Adios amigo.