An Interview with James Tallett

I mostly focus on writing novel-length fantasy. I’m currently writing two trilogies at the same time, both of the set in The Four Part Land. Book one of each trilogy is complete (mostly), and I’m writing book two of the Tarranau series.

I also started a post-apocalyptic fantasy anthology called Splintered Lands. There’s currently five of us on the writing team, and we’re also open for submissions as well. Because of the nature of the project, there’s been a lot of collaborative writing efforts, which is a first for me.

Aside from the fantasy writing, I do the occasional sci-fi or horror story. I also write a lot of flash fiction, most of which gets posted to the blog. The flash fiction ranges all over, but is mostly little vignettes of life. Often a fairly cruel life.

For the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, it’s because I love reading them. I collect large amounts of books in those genres, and usually have at least one on the go at any given time. And the length of most fantasy series means that once I find an author I like, I can get several books in a row and plough right on through.

As for the flash fiction, some of that is just personal therapy. It’s fun to write, but I also seem to do better when all the weird thoughts floating around inside my skull are tucked away inside hard drives. Leaves more room for the next strange idea.

Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and history. I studied history at university, and I pull a lot of little bits and pieces from that into the settings I create to make them more believable. Perhaps the impact of the Alexandrian phalanx on warriors who had never seen it before, perhaps a political or cultural movement. Motive can fit quite nicely inside almost any setting.

Do the sub-genres of the fantasy, science fiction and horror that you write differ from what you read? (Sub-genres being epic, traditional, gothic, steampunk, slipstream, etc.) If so, how do they differ?

I don’t pay attention to sub-genres, nor do I consider them all that relevant to what I read. Authors are what matter to me, whether the teller can weave a tale that keeps me interested or not. If they can, I’ll read almost anything they put out.

I try and spend an hour a day writing. The keyword there is try, because all too often I miss that entirely. And the more I miss it, the more I miss it. It’s a snowballing effect, because I’m then out of the writing rhythm and fighting to get back into it.

As for reading, usually a couple of books a week if I’ve got enough decent ones around. Slower if I’m reading large tomes, which is quite common.

As for making time, well, mornings, evenings and weekends make for my common reading periods. Especially in the winter after skiing.

It used to be more so than it is now, although that’s more because right now I’m working on a longish novel rather than short stories. Shorts get decidedly more affected, and the clearest one I can think of is Breaking an Empire, which was impacted in style and tone by what I was reading at the time. I tend to finish books in between periods of writing, so if it’s a 350 or so page novel, I’ll read that in a day, and then go back to writing the next day without it impacting me too badly.

These days, writing and reading seem to be mutually exclusive to some degree, in that I can only either do one or the other. I either live in my world, or in someone else’s, and I can’t live in two at the same time. Even when it comes to just writing my own work, I tend to be able to focus on only one project at a time, and I need to keep switching to keep the productivity level decent.

Certainly. The truth is stranger than fiction by a long way, and there’s so much intrigue and conflict in the history of small kingdoms (or large nations), that if a history book can’t give you a few story ideas, I’d be rather worried. There’s so many things that could be borrowed from history, and they don’t have to be reused exactly.

Take the field of Agincourt, for an example. It was narrow, long and muddy, between two forests on either side. In a fantasy setting, it would be a great place to mire trolls or giants, slowing an enemy advance enough that the magicians have time to complete an epic spell to devastate the castle that sits at one end of the field.

Every scene in history has actors, actions, tools, setting, and so on, and all of them can be pulled in piecemeal to fantasy. Or, indeed, to any other story setting. David Drake does this rather a lot. Hammer’s Slammers are futuristic sci-fi tales, but they’re recreating Vietnam battles. Or his Reaches trilogy is the story of Sir Francis Drake, but as a conflict between Venus (England) and Earth (Spain), with interstellar flight providing the New World.

Read history books, there’s something to be found in all of them.

My decision to write fantasy was, in some ways, not my own. It’s a tale I’ve repeated several times, but I was challenged by my mum to write a fantasy book. She knew I was a voracious reader, and not a terrible writer, and so she suggested that I should try my hand at fantasy. Well, about seven years later, I’m halfway through my third novel, and with a large wealth of other material outside of that.

As to specific books, there are certainly some that I truly loved reading, but I don’t know how much they coloured my writing. If I had to list them though, the first three would be Lord of the Rings, Eye of the World, and Gardens of the Moon. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy would be another important book to me, but there are so many I’d spend years listing them all.

Not particularly. I always had a good idea of how the world was going to be, and I spent most of the first year in creating the world to a particular note. Did the books change how some of the characters acted within it? Most certainly. But the world itself has stayed fairly stable. I have the very first map of the world that was ever drawn, and it is still recognizably The Four Part Land. From the beginning, I knew that I would be using various Celtic languages to provide the naming and formal language of the setting, and fairly early on I settled down on Welsh, so most of the characters and places have names that mean something in that language.

Not nearly as much. These days, the characters are old friends. I’ve spent seven years on and off with my head wandering around the setting, and sometimes my feet as well. A few of the places in the setting exist in the real world to a greater or lesser degree, so I know exactly what they look like. Now, once I gather the thread of the writing, returning to Bedwar Barthu Dirio is like going to a familiar vacation spot. A few new things crop up here and there, but it’s all more or less as it was left.

I’m primarily a novel reader, and have a large collection in that direction, but I also spend some of my time collecting used anthologies of short stories, and probably have a hundred or more. As for flash, I primarily read those on blogs, although these days I tend to read them less often. I’ve found that as a reader I prefer longer format stories, something where I can get into the characters and spend plenty of time with them.

Your first novel, Tarranau, is scheduled to debut this year. Are you publishing via a traditional house or self-publishing? What influenced your decision to make the choice that you have?

It’s being published through Deepwood Publishing, which is a collaboration between myself and a few others within the fantasy and science fiction genres. We’ve currently got five books under development, and will likely have a six and a seventh fairly soon. It’s a fun project, but it stretches my writing time a little, especially when doing editing work on other people’s material. That’s easier than editing my own, however, since it’s usually a story I haven’t seen before, so I can at least enjoy it somewhat.

The largest reasons for going this route for me was the financial component, and the agency and query model. This way, I have control of both the expenditures on the book, and a much larger share of the income (70% for ebooks). I also don’t have to spend time hunting for agents and submitting the novels, which appeals to keeping the work within my own hands.

Also, because writing isn’t my primary source of income, there’s less pressure on me to make certain the books succeed financially. It would certainly be nice if they sold to that point, but if the first doesn’t, there’s not going to be a dire repercussion on me.

I started them (I think, I’ve actually lost track) seven years ago, in the college summer vacations. I worked on and off on them for the next five years, completing some short stories, and taking my time to finish the first drafts of Tarranau and Chloddio. I finally completed the first draft of Tarranau in August 09 (I also completed first edits that same month). At that point, I started to become more serious about being an author (I’d finished Chloddio earlier, but for some reason it always felt like a secondary project to me), and that was when I started to seriously examine the publishing industry and self-publishing.

As for the writing, well, I’d never inflict my early first draft writing on anyone, because it was a crime against the English language. Well, okay, it wasn’t completely terrible, but there was a large quantity of bloated description and inaction that had to come out when the stories went through edits. Chloddio lost about 25% of its word count in first edits alone. Tarranau was a little better, losing about 15% overall through the editing process.

The biggest problem I had was I started the stories as a panster. I had no plot, no idea of where I wanted to go. I eventually wrote one down for Tarranau when I was working on chapter three or four, but even that didn’t have a great deal of impact on the writing. It was when I had to completely trash chapter five and rewrite it from scratch that I became a great proponent of plotting. That chapter had to set up the main villains for the book, and one of the main villains for the entire series, and it didn’t. They fell flat, they didn’t have motive. They were useless. So I threw the chapter out, sat down, plotted out exactly what I felt needed to be in there, and rewrote the chapter. It works so much better now.

Since that time, I’ve plotted out every chapter I’ve written, and plotted out every story before it was even started (although the longer plots always undergo revision as the story twists and turns during the writing process). I don’t plot anything under about five thousand words, but above that I’ll jot down a plot, even if it’s just a series of bullet points.

Part of answering this is easy, it’s here. I try and post one writing tip a week these days, usually focused around fantasy setting creation for the moment.

There are a few others that I’d add though. Write every day. It makes the writing smoother, easier, and more connected between sections. Letting the writing lead where it must is also important. I have never plotted the death of a main character. But sometimes they die, and that is how the story should be.

Cellphone, MP3 player, laptop, internet tablet, and a big battery. I love my electronic toys.