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Jack Whyte Interview Part One 2/23/2013 9:46:19 PM
Best-selling author of Arthurian legend and historical fiction discusses the writing life, what it means to be a best-selling author and the changing landscape of traditional publishing! LTS: If you are a fan of Arthurian legends and great historical fiction, you’ll need no introduction to bestselling Canadian author, Jack Whyte!
I met Jack ten years ago at the Surrey International Writers Conference where this talented and prolific writer is a long-time regular and I’ve had the good fortune of sitting in on some of his workshops and panels. I’ve learned much from this man, but what had always stood out about Jack was that he was always very kind, generous with his knowledge and welcoming even though I had always been an indie author in all these years I’ve known him.
With so many novels, it’s impossible for me to select just one to focus on, so instead, today’s feature will zero in on the writer and the writing process.
I’d like to begin by having you share a little information about yourself with our readers, Jack. What do you enjoy doing when you are not writing?
JW: Knee jerk, one-word answer: reading. It’s my one overriding passion and almost a form of zealotry with me because I really believe that if you don’t read, you can’t expect to be able to write. I’ve been a fanatical reader all my life and I’m omnivorous in my reading tastes, devouring everything from Urban Fantasy to Biography and stopping at all oases in between. Other than reading, though, my first love in leisure activities is golf—I live on a magnificent (i.e. difficult and frequently, infuriatingly unbeatable) golf course and I play about three time a week during the summer months, though I’ve been known to do more than that. And then there’s dining and entertaining. My wife’s a wonderful cook and we enjoy spending our evenings eating and drinking good wine with friends, both at home and elsewhere, for the sheer pleasure of the companionship and the table conversation.
LTS: From real life characters like William Wallace to characters rooted in myth and legend such as those in the Dream of Eagles series, name one character you have yet to write about that you’d love to bring to life in a novel?
JW: There is one character who simply refuses to get out of my mind, and he’s been in there for decades, agitating on his own behalf and being aided and abetted in his efforts by many hundreds of supporters among my readers. He’s not exactly nameless—I know who he is, and his last name’s more than familiar to me—but neither is he a real historical person. He’s the paternal—and fictional—grandfather of the the hero of The Skystone, Publius Varrus, and he is the man who found, and named, the original meteorite from which he made the almost magically perfect, stainless steel dagger that he willed to his grandson Publius. His story—which would be a prequel (though I detest that word) to his grandson’s Dream of Eagles tale—has fascinated me for more years than I can now count, because it’s filled chock-a-block with challenges (to me, as a writer) at every level of development and exposure. The setting, on its own, is just too rich in history and incident to ignore, and it’s a time-frame that I have always loved, set as it is within a society that has always fascinated me, when the imperial Roman way of life was crumbling at the edges and subsiding from within. Add to those the fact that the protagonist, Varrus, is a man of great principle and stubbornness, strong enough in his beliefs to walk away from a wealthy Patrician family and a secure home on the Palatine Hill in the city of Rome to set himself up as an unknown blacksmith and weapons manufacturer in Britain, and you may begin to see how alluring he becomes as a figure around whom one could write a vibrant novel. And of course for me, the clincher is that he is the man who will one day launch the legend of Arthur and Excalibur—a renowned collector of ancient weaponry and a scientist in the true sense of the word, driven by the lifelong need to increase his knowledge of his own fields of study in metallurgy and metal crafting, and destined to pass his vision down to his grandson, whose own grandson will be Arthur Pendragon, High King of Britain.
I don’t know if I ever will get around to writing it, but I find Varrus the Elder’s story growing more and more attractive to me with the passing of time—particularly so since I decided a few years ago that it would be, in effect, a stand-alone novel, predating and uninfluenced by the Dream of Eagles cycle.
LTS: I know for you, research is paramount when you tackle a historical fiction. Can you tell our readers how much time you invest in research before you get down to the business of writing?
JW: I can try, but I don’t know how successfully I (or anyone else) can answer that question. Reduced to absurdity, and on a purely personal, Jack Whyte level, the problem is simply stated: Once I have an idea for a book set in a specific century or era, I accept completely that I know little or nothing of the million-and-one things I would need to understand in order to write about that period intelligibly and intelligently. That acknowledged, I then set out to build up my understanding of that time and of the people who lived in it. But that’s a staggering task, without some kind of GPS technology, and so I have one important proviso, the significance of which can’t be overstated: I start writing immediately, with a key character in a specific situation, and I keep going for the brief time that it takes me to realize I no longer know what I’m talking about.
Sometimes it takes me several hours—occasionally even days—to reach that point, but at other times (most times, truth be told) I’m there in a matter of minutes. The value of the exercise is that it has already given me a specific starting point from which to address the things I don’t know: it might be a straightforward perplexity involving a question like, “how does anyone make an arrow by hand?” or it could be a naïve and utterly uninformed wondering about something as banal as, “Did people drink red wine in Ireland in the Fifth Century?”
Then I go looking for enough information that will allow me to answer that specific, particular question with confidence and authority. I’m not saying it’s always easy—sometimes finding that information can take ages and sometimes it simply can’t be found at all—but it is almost always satisfying and rewarding, and the results are always cumulative . . . as you absorb more and more fragments of knowledge about a time, place and society, you find that the disparate pieces begin to click together, with sometimes astonishing and highly gratifying results. My rule of thumb, though, is always to research in order to provide the answers to specific questions that I can’t answer for myself at that particular time, and which can show up as “holes in my knowledge”, “curiosity about ancient customs and behaviours” or just plain curiosity, triggered by something related even inconsequentially, that I’ve come across by accident.
As for how much of the project from start to end consists of research, I don’t really know. I’m tempted to say, nine months of research, nine months of writing and six months of editing and production, but I suspect that’s too facile an answer. I can only speak about my own work, of course, doing all my own research on the kind of big, 200,000+ word-long books I write, and the research involved is never even remotely the same from project to project… The standard question, “How much research do you do?” deserves the honest and appropriate response, “I don’t know. How long is a piece of string?” And of course, the research never ends because we never stop learning and changing our viewpoints. It does, however, take a back seat to the hard-slog writing and composition, once that part eventually gets under way—and it won’t get under way until the research has provided you the ammunition you’ll require.
LTS: One thing for sure, there is an incredible amount of attention to detail in all the books I’ve read so far! A monumental task, indeed! Now, your 15 novels are sold worldwide. What was that defining moment when you knew you made it as an author?
JW: That one earns a smile because I don’t think I can recall such a defining moment, other than the day in 1996 when I signed the US publication contract for my novels—six of them at that time—and realized that I could now afford to live anywhere I wished, and didn’t need to worry any longer about holding down a day job. I recall very clearly, though, another day, not too long before that, when I had four novels in print and selling well in Canada—all of them bona fide Canadian bestsellers—and the lady who was Publisher of Penguin Books Canada at that time told me, “Being a multiple Canadian Best-selling Author means ‘Don’t give up your day job.’” That was a chastening realization and nothing has changed in the interim. In order to make a decent, full-time living as a writer in Canada, your work has to be published off-shore, as well as in Canada. Five thousand print sales in Canada in the first year of publication constitutes a Canadian bestseller. At 10% of wholesale price on a $35.00 book, that might net you $3.00 a copy, or $15,000 in royalties per 5,000-copy hardcover bestseller… But before you rush out to buy new furniture, you should bear in mind that you have to pay back every penny of your advances before you start earning for yourself.
There is an accepted wisdom, and I don’t know where I first learned of it, that authors are made, not born, and there are statistics—putative statistics, but aren’t all statistics putative?—to back that up. Someone once told me, back in the mid-Nineties, that 85% of first-time-published authors will never publish a second book. Then, of that successful 15%, 85% will not publish a third book. But of those who do, those happy few, more than 60% will go on to write other books. They are perceived to have “paid their Dues” and graduated into Authordom… The cynic in me chooses to believe, though, that what they have in fact achieved is to earn payout on all their advances. They have repaid their publishers’ faith in them by selling enough books to ensure that the publisher does not lose money, and that has kept them alive as Published Authors.
And then, of course, there is the ongoing truism that an author—any author—is only as good and/or successful as his or her last book… That serves to ensure that most of us are too busy working on our next œuvre to take time to look around us and physically enjoy the satisfaction of being an author who has “made it,” here or anywhere else.
LTS: During a Blue Pencil session that left us with time to discuss how we enjoyed the movie “King Arthur”, starring Clive Owen, I remembered that we both appreciated how this man of legend was portrayed with a life grounded in reality.
For me, this is part of the attraction with reading your novels, how you deconstruct the legend and make it as though your characters were once living, breathing people from another time. Was there any great debate in your mind when you started writing that you were going to break away from the myth we are so familiar with to give these characters of legend a life that is more gritty than romantic?
JW: Good question and, again, one I’m not sure I can answer adequately. My first reaction on reading the question was to say, categorically, “No, there was no such thought in my mind.” But I’m not sure now that that is true, because I started writing what I thought of as “this story” (my original Arthurian series) in 1975, and I simply can’t remember much about the formative days of what was to become an ongoing career and commitment… You can lose a lot of little memories over the span of thirty-seven years.
Several months ago, however, I unearthed the original hard-bound, blank-paged notebook that I used back in those earliest, tentative days when I first began probing at and playing with this strange and compelling idea that had suddenly taken over my awareness. It’s a strange experience, looking through that book again, because of course I know and remember everything I read in there today, but the overall reality of the book and my early notes brings back an intensity of focus on that 5th-Century, post-Roman era in Britain that I haven’t felt in years… And with that intensity of focus has also come remembrance and awareness of the passionate belief of my favourite high school teacher, that every myth and every legend contains at its heart a kernel of incontrovertible truth. He spent much of his life expounding that belief to his students, and providing examples of how, over the course of generations and centuries, those elements of truth were embellished and converted into legends and myths. And some of us (alas, very few) listened and heard what he was attempting to tell us. He convinced me, at least, that every great story, every myth and every legend is concerned first, foremost and above all with real people—with who they were and where they sprang from, and with the way they were affected by the circumstances surrounding their lives and the effect their individual natures had on how they reacted to the pressures influencing them. And he did that so well and so effortlessly that I never thought of any of the people he described in his examples as being anything other than real, living, breathing people with all the faults and follies that go hand in hand with being human…
That was long years and decades before I ever thought to turn to writing as a hobby, let alone a livelihood, but it’s clear to me now that the seeds of ideas I would eventually espouse—that the towering heroes of antiquity were ordinary people who responded to extraordinary circumstances in extraordinary ways—were rooted in those teen years and the wonderfully exciting and stimulating hours I spent in that enlightened man’s classroom, learning about literature and history. So in fact, my initial reaction to this question was the correct one: there was never any debate in my mind about breaking away from the familiarity of myth in order to deal with gritty, human people . . . that damage had been done long, long before I ever started writing.
LTS: What is the best advice you can give to an aspiring author dreaming of one day becoming published?
JW: Frankly, Scarlett, none… I have a long-established reluctance to offer advice on anything to anyone, because I believe that every individual recipient’s perspective on advice is governed by the internal, personally-shaped “lenses” through which he or she sees the world in which they live. I also believe that far too many people who go around offering advice should themselves be advised, or even ordered, to Stop! I have no difficulty, however, in laying out some basic and fundamental realities about becoming an author, the truth of which I learned for and by myself along the way to being accepted by publishers and readers…
Don’t expect to be an overnight sensation. You might be, once, but that kind of success brings its own problems, with inflated expectations of what you’ll come up with next. There aren’t too many J.K. Rowlinses around, and even she wasn’t an instantaneous success…
Don’t be impatient and don’t be greedy. I wrote the first four novels of my original series over the course of fifteen years without even thinking about getting published. I simply had this story inside me and I wanted to get it out and onto paper. It was my passion and it became an obsession until my wife suggested one day that perhaps I ought to try and get it published. Until that point, I had barely thought of it—or if I had, I have no recollection of doing so. That’s why I say to young writers nowadays, “Don’t dream of being published. Work to get published.” And then I go on to exhort them to be ruthlessly critical about their own efforts… “Be hyper-aware, all the time, of what you’re writing and how you’re doing it, and be merciless in digging into your own weaknesses—because you can be absolutely sure that everyone else will be.”
When you decide to become a Writer, (and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said this to various groups of wannabe writers,) the English language immediately becomes your stock-in-trade, so learn to use it properly before you start to abuse it. I have learned, almost to the point of despairing, just how many young people (and an alarming number of older people who ought to know better) genuinely believe that writing is easy—that anyone can write a book, and that publication is a given, providing (of course) that you take the time to write something down. It’s all part of that deplorable Sense of Entitlement that you hear so many people talking about nowadays… There really is an entrenched belief out there nowadays that working towards success is for suckers only, and that the smart, “enlightened” up-and-comer will be recognized automatically by the Light of Entitlement that burns about their heads like a halo…
‘T’ain’t so. The truth is sad and stunningly simple, no matter how difficult it might be to accept: if you want to be a successful Writer, you have to work at it and earn your victor’s laurels. That means you have to Learn the Rules of the Language—all of them—so that you know them inside out and upside down; so that you can shuffle them like cards, cutting them and dealing them endlessly in constantly varying patterns, without a hitch or a fumble. Then, once you know all those rules—spelling, punctuation and grammar—you can go ahead and break them any way you choose to. But you have to know them and understand them first, so that when you break them your readers will know beyond a doubt that you’re doing it deliberately and for effect . . . not out of ignorance, smug self-righteousness or a gruesome, embarrassing lack of erudition. Be acutely aware, always, that other people—like publishers, editors, critics and a surprisingly large percentage of your readers—know, understand and are governed by the rules of grammar and punctuation and the rules of spelling in English, Canadian and American, and they won’t be fooled or impressed if they see, or even suspect, that you do not subscribe to those fundamental standards. So learn to use the language. Think of it, if you like, as serving your apprenticeship, or learning your craft, or paying your dues... They’re all honourable, long-accepted and legitimate rites of passage. You should be working every day, too, to increase your vocabulary. And if your eyebrows went up, even mentally, after reading that last sentence, it would be a good idea right now to consider some other means of pursuing fame and fortune, because the odds at this stage of your being a successful author are less than encouraging . . . and that’s me being nice about it.
Contrary to what an alarming number of young, would-be writers seem to believe nowadays, the literary world is not awaiting their (or your) advent with bated breath . . . It’ll be reluctant to recognize you at all, at first, and then probably less than enthusiastic about acknowledging your gifts, if awareness of those gifts ever begins to emerge from the fog of literary No Man’s Land. And never lose sight of the truth that the BIG Question in the publishing world, asked by agents and publishers alike upon first eyeing a new manuscript, is not, “Have I found the next Shakespeare or Victor Hugo?” It is, quite bluntly, “Can I make money off this?”
And how do you know when you’re ready to approach and agent or publisher? That’s easy: When you can really, honestly, honest-to-God, swear to yourself on-your-mother’s-sacred memory, that you can’t improve another sentence. By that time, of course, you’ll be an expert and accomplished rewriter. In all probability, too, you’ll also be much older than you are today, reading this. Don’t con yourself into believing something’s right and completed when you know, deep in your gut, that it’s not. Don’t EVER be afraid to rewrite. You can be reluctant to do it—we all are—but it’s simply something that you’ll know, deep inside yourself, that has to be done. If you dodge it or side-step it, it’ll come back and bite you in the most unpleasant places. So rewrite when you know it needs to be done, and be prepared to repeat the process again and again and again until you get it right. Read difficult pieces into your cel phone or iPod and listen to them while you’re driving, even if you don’t think you’re a good reader—you’ll be stunned by the way the weaknesses and flaws in what you’ve written will jump right out at you.
But above all, above all the setbacks and the negatives and the turndowns, believe in yourself and in your work. I’m not talking about the silly, presumptuous and fatuous kind of belief that says you’ll be a best-seller because you are you—utterly unique and deserving (and after all, you’ve spent hours and hours on this thing already.) I don’t mean that at all. I mean the kind of level-headed belief that comes of knowing that you’ve done the donkey work and you understand your craft and the language in which you are writing; and that you’ve put more effort into your manuscript than you ever believed was possible and it now contains the best work you are capable of producing… And incidentally, if you don’t really believe that it does contain the best work you’re capable of doing, (and you’re the only one who can possibly know that,) then you’d better do it again and get it right before you show it to anyone else. Because believe me, if it’s less than perfect, if it’s sloppily formatted, or under- or over-written, or badly punctuated, or grammatically inconsistent or poorly spelled, or simply pedestrian in its pace and tempo, it will be rejected in an eye-blink, without the slightest hesitation.
Lots of negatives there, you think? Not so, just lots of truth. But if you love your craft and do the work, and you put in the time and polish your final product until you can honestly say you can’t improve it any more, then it will be published sooner or later. The world needs good writers, because there are so many writers out there who are just plain NBG: No. Bloody. Good. And so I say, believe in yourself and believe in your work and be proud of the countless hours you spend perfecting your craft.
LTS: Join us next Sunday for part two of this interview when Jack Whyte discusses the changing landscape of traditional publishing, his own personal writing style and more!
