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Jack Whyte Interview Part Two 3/2/2013 9:55:24 PM
Best-selling author Jack Whyte discusses the changing face of traditional publishing, his writing process and so much more! LTS: Thank you for joining us for part two of the interview with one of Canada’s best-loved, best-selling author of historical fiction, Jack Whyte!
Here is the next round of questions: With the growing popularity of ebooks and the number of bestselling authors abandoning their contracts with large publishing houses to self-publish ebooks (most notably J.K. Rowlings with her Pottermore website) will there be a time in the near future where your novels will be available as ebooks, too?
JW: That time has already come, but only very recently. My Knights Templar series and my current Guardians series were sold with eBook rights attached, but when I first wrote my Arthurian novels, there was no such thing as an eBook, and so I retained the electronic rights without even knowing what they were. I recently sold them to publishers in the US and the UK, and so all my Arthurian novels are now on sale in eBook format through Amazon.com in the USA, and though they have not yet been released as eBooks here in Canada, they will be available in the very near future. Similarly, they will be released as eBooks in the United Kingdom in the course of this year, 2013, so that particular marketplace is now effectively covered.
I have something to say, though, on that topic of bestselling authors abandoning contracts with publishers in order to self-publish. I would suggest that very few people in the real world can afford to do that. Sure, J.K. Rowlings has done it, but she’s a one-woman empire and one of the richest people in the world, and her Harry Potter holdings are unique in popular fiction. But even Oprah Winfrey is having difficulty keeping her corporate head afloat after launching her own TV network… Look ahead, if you will, and wonder about this: When everyone in the world is self-publishing on-line, who will do the marketing? Who will arbitrate what’s good and what is not; what is critically worthwhile and what isn’t? Who will separate the wheat from the chaff? Should we leave that to companies like Amazon? I don’t think so. Amazon will decide what’s good for Amazon, and anyone who disagrees with Amazon will fall by the wayside—and quickly. But let’s take it one step farther: when there’s a million or two so-called “novels” available on line, how will anyone ever know where or how to start looking for individual new titles or authors?
I believe there will always be a need for the expertise and abilities of traditional publishing houses, if only to provide a network of signposts in an otherwise featureless wilderness of mediocrity and chaos. The individual functions, marketing techniques and strategic thrusts of those publishing houses may change radically—some of them are being massively changed already—but the purposes they serve in bringing literature forward and making it accessible and available to discerning readers will never grow obsolete, and I firmly believe we professional writers will never outgrow the need to have “someone” out there, evaluating, promoting and disseminating our work. The alternative does not bear thinking about, because it involves communism at its lowest common denominator level—millions of so-called books, tracts and diatribes being self-published by anyone and everyone with sufficient dexterity to thumb a smart phone keypad . . . note that I said nothing of skills in handling such a keypad; no standards of literacy or competence are to be expected or enforceable… I’m talking about those faceless, vacuous, uninformed legions whom, before the advent of television and reality TV, used to spend their endless nights twiddling their thumbs and staring mutely into the fireplace… But now they’re twiddling their thumbs and hitting keypads, because they think anybody can write a book and get rich...
LTS: Personally, I love the feel of a book in my hands, but I also recognize about 95% of my books sales are to those with eReaders whether it be Kobo, Kindle, iPod, etc. What do you think of this changing publishing landscape? Do you embrace ebooks?
JW: I think I dealt with much of the answer to this question in the one directly above, so I’ll try to answer what’s left of the question literally here. I’ve always been a lover of Audiobooks, ever since I was a kid and listened to my dad’s library of Talking Books for the Blind—he lost his eyes on D-Day, 1944—but I recently became converted to eBooks, too, and I must admit I’m impressed. They’ll never replace the deliciously tactile heft or satisfaction offered by a real book, as far as I’m concerned anyway, but I must admit they’re portable, convenient and easy to use. I’d always sworn, until very recently, that I’d be the last breathing hold-out in Western Canada, but I recently bought “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s huge, 915-page multiple biography of Abraham Lincoln and his closest colleagues. I was still recovering from surgery at the time, physically weakened and only just beginning to venture back into the world of words, so the damn book was simply too big for me to hold upright for any length of time. Fortunately, though—or perhaps unfortunately—I was so fascinated by it that I didn’t want to set it aside, and so I bought it again, this time in eBook format . . . and I was hooked. I never had any doubt that eBooks is, to a major (but not exclusive) extent, the way of the future, but I did doubt that I would warm to it as easily as I did.
LTS: What is the most important lesson you’ve learned on the road to publication? And do you have a specific time of the day you prefer to write?
JW: The most important lesson: That there’s only one person who can write that book (or those books) you’ve got inside you, and that no one else will ever really know or care, or even wonder, how much of what was in there you were able to get out before you stopped… If your aim is to be published, you have to develop the disciplines that will make it possible, and it’s a solitary and sometimes very lonely way to make a living. Think about that. What other job or career can you imagine in which your loved ones would be completely cut out of your life for most of the time, because simply by talking to you they’ll be distracting you and interfering, perhaps damagingly, with what you do, AKA your creative process?
That’s the main reason for my being a night owl, although I admit I’ve always been a nocturnal creature, more energetic and productive late at night than at any other time of the day. Pragmatically, though, my working lifestyle makes sense and works for me. I deal in themes and ancient societies that have little relevance to today’s world, and so when I immerse myself in my daily work I try, deliberately and methodically, to remove myself from the world I live in. I lead a fairly normal daily life, part of which is spent in editing material I’ve already written—That’s the easy part, printing the sheets off and tackling them with a blue pencil; old schoolteacher stuff I can do standing on my head. It’s a useful exercise, though, because by the time I get to the end of what I’ve written during the previous session, I’ve edited the text and my head is back in the environment of whatever century I’m working in at that time. I have supper with my wife, like a normal human being, and might even watch TV with her for an hour after that. At Prime Time, though, when she settles in to watch her favourite shows, I head downstairs to my office, and I’ll stay there writing until it’s time to go to bed, which might be any time between midnight and 4:00 a.m. depending on how the words are flowing.
It sounds very straightforward and nowadays it is, but it wasn’t an easy schedule to establish in the early days, because of what I mentioned above: distractions. It took me years, quite literally, to teach my friends—and all my wife’s friends—never to call me after eight o’clock at night my time, which is Pacific Standard Time. Why? Because all it takes is one chirp of a phone, to rip you unceremoniously out of 14th-Century Scotland or 5th-Century Roman Britain and dump you back into 21st-Century frustration. And there you are, suddenly awakened, with the mood, the atmosphere and the storyline you might have worked on for hours, completely shattered. Believe me, it is intensely annoying… Same thing goes for early mornings. All my North American editors, agents and publishers are based in either New York or Toronto, three hours ahead of where I live on the West Coast. So they all get into work bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Mondays, after a restful weekend that has left them all fired up and full of great ideas. And so they get on the phone right away, at 8.30 or 9.00 a.m., flushed with delusions of adequacy and insight. And sometimes they used to phone me, oblivious to the fact that it was only 5.30 or 6.00 a.m. in BC and that I might only have been in bed for an hour or two. They stopped that quite quickly, though, once they discovered that they had a Tyrannosaur on the other end of the line… Nobody ever called back that early a second time, but there were quite a lot of callers who had to be dealt with during the teaching process.
LTS: Are you a plotter or pantser? The readers would like to know if you tend to plot out your story in great detail or if your writing is more organic with the characters and events unfolding as you write.
JW: I’m not a plotter; never have been and I don’t think I ever could be, but my own opinion on what I am has changed quite radically over the past few years. I used to say I was a linear writer; that I’d start with an ending I wanted to achieve, and from there I’d go looking for a beginning that offered me at least a chance of connecting logically to where I wanted to end up. When I had found that starting point, I’d take a character or two, an idea and a situation, and I’d go on from there. And for a lot of years I was quite happy with that explanation. It felt right, and I could defend it by quoting examples, chapter and verse. Since then, though, I’ve revised my thinking on this whole subject, and now I think my explanation of how I work is truer and more accurate.
Everything comes down to research and to characters. People often ask me who does my research, and the question always makes me smile, because I can’t imagine not doing my own research… It’s the personal involvement in research that often produces the most exciting results and breakthroughs for me, when two completely separate elements from two entirely different research expeditions come together suddenly and unexpectedly in a flash of astounding but logically solid serendipity. That could never happen if someone else were doing the research and simply reporting results. And so I do all my own research, and I do it all in the context of the fictionalized life and experience (and most often through the imagined eyes) of the person or the people most involved in whatever element of the story I’m working on. And so I end up spending as much time on the development of my characters, protagonists and antagonists, major and minor, as I do on the accuracy and relevance of the historical details involved.
As a direct consequence of that, of course, by the time I find my starting point and start the actual writing of the novel, I’m already pretty well steeped in the personalities and the characters of the people with whom I’m dealing, which makes imponderable (to me) things like plot, story details and disparate narrative descriptions all flow more smoothly and quickly, and removes much of the guesswork (involving how to get from point A to point Z) that used to bother me in my original explanation. Because, of course, everyone knows that if an author creates a character properly, that character becomes a living being and can be relied upon to behave just as convincingly and infuriatingly as a living, breathing person will . . . and once you find yourself dealing with a few of those on an ongoing basis, (given that you have even a vestigial framework within which to set your tale,) you’ll find the events of the story adapt themselves very easily and convincingly to the needs and requirements of those bustling, fascinating and all-too-often infuriating characters.
That’s what I now believe, and it has worked often enough for me to know it’s true. The writing is an organic process, but it thrives on the preliminary work involved in the research of the period and the development of the major and minor characters in the story.
LTS: Some authors meditate, others need to fuel up on coffee or listen to music. Do you have any rituals, ones that can be shared with the readers, that you must do before you hunker down for a writing session?
JW: Only one. I re-read every word I wrote in my last session and, if I feel the urge, I make whatever changes suggest themselves. By the time I’ve finished that, my mind is back in the scene I’m working on.
LTS: At one time or another, most writers hit the wall and their work stalls because of the dreaded writer’s block. Rumour has it you never experience writer’s block, but when the writing slows right down, how do to get around or over this mental wall to resume writing?
JW: I grinned at your report of rumours to the effect that I never suffer from writer’s block, but it’s true. I did though, at one point, when I was bogged down with the novel “Uther”, which related a story I’d already told, though from a radically different viewpoint. I had worked on it for about 18 months and had 500 pages (about 120,000 words) of manuscript, give or take a few, with which I was singularly unhappy. Then someone sent me a tip: to read a book called “On Writer’s Block” by a woman called Victoria Nelson…
I bought and read the book, understood precisely what Ms Nelson was telling me, and threw out everything I had written in the previous year and a half . . . “Throwing out,” being, of course, a relative term, since no writer should ever completely expunge or destroy anything already written. (Mind you, even if you do, you’ll find a lingering “ghost” image, still in your memory, of what was there. The fact that you wrote it once means it’s engraved permanently in your memory banks, somewhere, and so it can be resurrected, regurgitated and reformatted for use somewhere else.) Anyway, within three months I had reconstituted everything I had previously done—but more strongly and with total confidence this time—and was in the process of adding the 75,000 to 100,000 words I needed to complete the novel. That novel, Uther is the only one in the nine-book Arthurian cycle that was not written in the 1st-person narrative voice, and over the years I’ve had literally hundreds of people writie to me to tell me that it’s their favourite novel out of all the Camulod Chronicles. But after reading that book On Writer’s Block, I rewrote and restructured the entire thing in the space of eight months, and I’ve never been blocked since.
The secret is simple and eminently sensible: when you are “blocked”, Ms. Nelson says, it is invariably because you are attempting to go against your own principles—trying to cheat yourself in the most essential, fundamental way—and your own subconscious mind, that infallible computer within each of us, won’t allow you to do it. So basically, if you are genuinely “blocked”—and there’s no doubt of it in your mind when you are—then what you have to do is walk away from what you’ve written, think it over honestly and analytically until you decide what it is about it that’s killing you, creatively, and identify where and how you went wrong, got distracted, or otherwise wandered away from your original path. Then, once you’ve identified the point where the grit got into the Vaseline, you go back and start over, from another direction.
LTS: If you could have one of your novels adapted for a big screen movie, which one would it be and why?
JW: I used to wonder about that, until I came to realize and accept that it’s a pointless thing to fret over. If it happens, it will happen, and there will probably be nothing I can do to influence anything that occurs. I have neither the time nor the inclination to try and change that… The most encouraging elements of that question, though, have come to me piecemeal, in the form of certain similar approaches from a number of people who see great potential for the Camulod/Dream of Eagles series to be adapted as an ongoing, Prime Time television series, along the lines of “Game of Thrones” and other, similarly epic treatments of large themes. I’m reasonably confident that will happen, eventually, but I don’t expect to be around by then, to agonize over what’s done to the work in the process of bringing it to life.
LTS: Thank you so much for taking the time from your hectic schedule to share in your knowledge and wisdom, Jack! Looking forward to seeing you again at the Surrey International Writers Conference in 2013.
For more information about Jack Whyte’s and his novels, check out:
Website: http://www.camulod.com Follow Jack on Twitter: .authorJackWhyte
