Mythmakers Season 8 Wrap Up: Top 5 Author's Tips

Hello and welcome to Myth Makers. Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. And we are taking our summer break at the moment so I've compiled together some of the top moments from our last season of interviews with authors. So we have five top tips from our top performing episodes where there are little nuggets about how to be a writer, how to get published, which I'd like to share with you now. So first up, I'm going to start with Darren Simpson. Now, I spoke to Darren about his long road to getting published and how, in his view, the length of time it takes can turn out to be a gift. So, let's talk about the actual process of writing. I know a few people, some of the people listening to this will be trying to write their own novels. Did you have a relatively smooth sailing to being published or was it many, many years of trying? How did it happen for you? Yeah, definitely it wasn't a smooth sailing. So my first published book was Scavengers. I got a sort of crowdfunded sort of indie book before that as well, but very small scale. But yeah, before I actually got published by a traditional publisher, I'd say I was going for nearly a decade. I think I wrote like three or four books that didn't make it anywhere anywhere. So it was a long journey. And whenever I do school visits, I try not to sort of, that question comes up, how long did it take you to get published? And I try not to put young writers off or any writers off because that sounds like a slog. It sounds like a lot of work. But at the same time, sometimes it can be a gift to have to go through that struggle. Because I think if, for example, when I wrote my first novel, if that got published, I wouldn't quite know which author I was yet. I wouldn't really have my writer's voice settled down just yet. And So for me, yes, it was a long slog and I definitely was very close to giving up at times. But I learned so much on the way. There's nothing I would tell kind of writers who are trying to get published that everything, even, you know, every short story, every idea you have that doesn't work out. It's never a waste. It's always practice. It will always feed into what ultimately does become your first success. So, yeah, for me, it was definitely a long slog and hard at the time, but I'm glad on hindsight. And do you enjoy the process of working with an editor? I do, yeah. I remember when I was much more young and a bit more, I don't know, a bit uncompromising. I sort of not liked the idea of someone meddling with my stuff, you know what I mean, which is a bit on hindsight. It's quite a young attitude, I think. But now, having been through it, especially with... It might be that I've been lucky. I'm fairly new to it, so I've only had two editors so far in my experience, but they've both been editors who really get what I do and understand what I do. It might be different if you have an editor who sees your book as being something else to what you imagine it being, but I've been lucky that we've always clicked in that sense. I've always enjoyed the editing experience a lot. I've never been afraid to say if I disagree with something or if I don't understand something, but I am... Basically, so far in my experience, my books have always been better for that kind of fresh self-experienced eye. I mean, how do you find it? Has your view of that sort of thing changed as you've kind of gone on? No, no. I've always really, I always feel it's, it's like, I'm going to go back to C.S. Lewis again. There's that bit, it's meant in a completely different context, but there's a bit where Eustace turns into a dragon and he can't change himself back into a boy. He needs Aslan to take the dragon skin off him. I often feel the editor, and that's got religious sort of application, but I'm thinking about it in terms of me as a writer. Right. That actually sometimes I feel as though I'm stuck in my dragon skin and I need somebody to unpeel those layers which are getting in the way of the story should be. It happens, I find that I still sometimes can get a major edit, particularly if I'm starting the first novel in a new series, for example. Yeah. And it gets less because then you anticipate what someone's going to say and do. So you get less edited in a way as it goes on. But what makes me laugh is possibly because editors do have very sensitive flowers of authors. Always the letters are couched in this sort of... This is really good. And, you know, don't get defended if I tell you that it's not perfect. You know, they don't quite put it like that. But that's the subtext is please don't throw your toys out the pram. Yes. And I always want to say, look, just tell me. Tell me what you think. Because I know that after I've had a think about what you're saying, you've often picked on things which I had in the back of my mind weren't quite right but thought no one would notice. Yeah. Actually, it's really helpful if you tell me. Yeah. So... I think it's great and it's a privilege. So these days, the economics of getting published are really rubbish. It was much better when I started out. So a lot of the joys of editing are like free work or my books for me. I look at it like that. Yeah, because authors don't, people out there are afraid, authors don't make a lot of money unless they happen to hit the big time with a bestseller, but that's a different league. Most of us are just pottering along the way. piecing together a yeah and it's funny how that that kind of idea of right is I mean the amount of schools I go to and do when I do festivals or school visits so many well not just younger readers a lot of adults often assume that if you're a published writer you're rich it's still quite a kind of common cliche in people's minds and it probably hasn't been since maybe the I don't know maybe as far back as the 90s that a lot of published authors did very well for themselves but now you know I still I sort of have a part-time job which I'm very again feel very privileged to sort of have half my income come from writing from doing what I love and that took a long time to get there but yeah a lot of people do still assume that writers are generally must be quite wealthy because their books are in shops when and this doesn't apply just to books obviously it applies to the music industry it's just the way a lot of creative industries are going but um which is sort of partially why you do have to do it obviously not just for the money right yeah yes It's always lovely to talk to Irish writers. And we spoke to Padda O'Gillene earlier in the year. And in our conversation, we talked about the influence of Irish history on his writing and also the role of the Irish tradition of the Fae folk, the Cis, the little people of the Green Hills. So have a listen to what Padda has to say about that. So when you're talking about this sort of history based on the Book of Conquest, was that the? Yeah, or Book of Invasions. Invasions. Yeah, it's got different, yeah. When you are sort of using that as a background, obviously there are strong themes here of history and colonisation and class war and wealth war. Because I'm thinking of the enclosure movement in Scotland and England had a similar thing where basically the poor people always get shafted in all these situations. So in a way there's a kind of very obvious theme mapping on to real history. But also you've got the beautiful imagination of this idea of the magic that goes along with the Fae folk, which gives them power. So it gives them the power they didn't have before. So when you're using it, how much are you thinking, if at all, that you're writing a sort of modern morality tale and how much are you just really sort of enjoying the fantasy and seeing where it takes you? Because there's always this balance between the theme an author might be exploring, which can end up being messaging, which you don't want to do. No, no. So how did you go about it? Well, I didn't deliberately aim for a film. Yeah. But we all have themes in us. They emerge, don't they? They emerge. I mean, it's basically like if you have an apple and you drop it, you expect it to fall. You don't expect it to float there. You expect it to fall. It's just you've grown up in this world. This is your instinct. This is something that you just know to be true. Right. Now, you may be wrong about that. You may just not have seen the apples that float. But as far as you were concerned for your entire life, if you drop an apple, it faults. In the same way you were saying with the enclosures and so on, it's always the poor people will get shafted. Right. Maybe you're wrong about that. But more than likely, you believe that to be completely true. So if you're writing a book and you wanted to have some verisimilitude, you're not going to have the poor people not getting shafted. Most of the time, you know, unless that's that's your story, like the poor people trying to, you know, have a great adventure and finally save themselves from a good shafting or whatever. Right. All right. But you know what I mean? Like if it's just the background to the world that you're writing to your mind, the poor people get shafted. So that's not you making a political theme. That's just something you believe is true of the world. And therefore, when you're writing the world, that's that's what's going to come out. It's the same for me. I grew up on the border with Northern Ireland. The person living next door to me at one point was arrested for being in a terrorist organization. We used to do all our shopping on the other side of the border. We would come in on a Saturday morning and the whole road would be covered in bottles and bricks from a riot. of the night before. Everywhere I lived was covered in graffiti. People had very, very strong opinions. My father was a surgeon who operated on people who were sometimes whisked in under great stress, having been attacked. or whatever um so this is this is going to have an influence you know it's it's it's going to have an influence not not necessarily here's me making a political point but that's just what i grew up with it's just what i saw you know and if i'd grown up somewhere else i'd have seen something different and come out with with something different you know so so so that was definitely in the um also in the background where all of these myths and legends i mean they were they were they were told in every school uh everyone knew these stories in the same way as a lot of people in britain grew up with these kind of ladybird books you know, Rumpelstiltskin and so on and Sleeping Beauty and all of these, you can probably still picture in your head the illustrations from some of them from when you were a kid, I'll bet, you know? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we had those too. But we also had this other set, you know, of stories. And again, they affect you, you know? They're a very different way of looking at the world from... from those ladybird books. They have a very different mentality, but it influences you. I also had a very enjoyable conversation with Marisa Linton. And here we were discussing about the choice to change publishers or whether it is a choice and how, as a writer these days, you have to really just go where the market will take you, where the people will publish you. So have a listen to us being very practical about our publishing choices. So this is your second book, as we mentioned at the beginning. So is this move to Hodescape about the fact that this is an adult book, so it rests nicely to have a different publisher with an adult book because Chicken House is a younger fiction publisher? It wasn't deliberate. Just who will publish me, which is how I do it. Yes. That's my way. Who will have the benefit of my books? Yeah, it wasn't like that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'd written these books and been turned down by just about every agent. And if I have a message for anyone listening who's writing fiction, keep going. Yeah. Keep going. And also find your community. Those are my two messages, really, because it is very tough. I wrote, as I said, I wrote The Booker King that became The Binding Spell, very much in isolation, got turned down by everybody. But then it won this big prize. It won the Times Chicken House Prize. And part of the prize is that they published it. So that was done and dusted. Circle of Shadows then got taken on almost immediately afterwards because publishers had heard of my success story. with the binding spell long before it was published so I actually had two books oh sorry that's really exciting for everybody who's watching this on YouTube because I was warned We've been joined by a most delightful, beautiful cat. She's not very delightful. I might have to move her because, sorry, I will, yeah. We will do a little pause in the proceeding. Do pause just for a second. That's quite funny. We might have to keep the cat in because it was a very pretty cat, even if, yeah. So we're talking about moving from writing for a YA audience, which is very different, well, not very different, but it has different things that you have in mind when you're doing that, to writing The Circle of Shadows for an adult audience. Are you thinking of this as a series, this particular book? It's a two-book deal. Ah, so there's... I am writing the sequel as we speak. That is what I spend my time doing. Fantastic. Have you got a title for it? It probably won't stay the same, though, I've found. I have a title, but I don't know if they'll exist, so I probably shouldn't. Yeah, no, don't. No. No, no. I'll say we'll stop recording. Yeah, people don't realise how little authors have over their own titles. I've had books that have been published under one title in one country and in another a completely different title, both in English. It's very confusing and you worry sometimes that people might, by mistake, buy both and find it's the same book. But it's not the author's fault. It's to do with the market you're in. Yeah. So do you enjoy the process of working with an editor and being edited? Because that's one of the privileges of actually doing a professional route to being published as opposed to self-publishing something or that kind of route. I've loved it. Yes. And when you get an editorial letter, do you always feel, some people feel attacked by it and sort of, you know, clam up and try and defend what they're doing. If only you understood how brilliant I am. Or do you actually sort of say, right, this is my opportunity to make this better? The editors I've worked with have been brilliant. I can imagine what you're saying, that you can imagine a circumstance where somebody wants you to basically shred the book as you've imagined it. And that would be, yes, that would be really, really hard. And you would have to say, at what point do I... dig my heels in and say, this is not my book, this is something else. I certainly could imagine that scenario happening, but it wasn't my experience. My experience with both books has been really positive in that I felt that both editors for The Binding Spell and then for Circle of Shadows wanted the best for the book. really cared for the book. And if you trust the editor and you feel they're engaged with your book and your world and your characters, then you can trust the process. And in neither case did they force me to do anything. There was no kind of get rid of that character. Oh my God. Um, it was, it wasn't like that. And I think if an editor really cares about your book and engages with it, they can help you see things that you've missed. So if there are problems, we all have problems, lots of problems, technical problems along the way. This bit doesn't work so well. How do you get these characters from here to here? Is this motivation quite worked out? Is this backstory working? Those kinds of things. If you trust the editor, they can help you find the best way up the mountain. That's how I see it. They can say, well, have you thought of this path? And it can be quite a shock when you get the editorial letter because you hadn't thought about that path. You didn't even know that path existed. But if they're really engaged with it, then yeah, I would listen to what they say really closely. If they want the best for the book and they really know what they're talking about. And I had that. And yeah, that was brilliant. And I think... both my books are a lot better for that editing process. Yeah. Yeah, I do think so. I do remember right at the beginning of my career back in 2004, something like that. I had a sort of development deal with a publisher, Oxford University Press, for my first set of fiction, fantasy fiction books. And, I did a rewrite after a sort of big edit letter. And the editor said to me after that, when I saw that you would take an edit, that's when I decided to give you a contract. So it's a really good skill to try and learn to be edited. It's really important to not feel attacked, but to think what they're trying to do is make this work. the best book it can be for a market into which it's going. So I never really considered myself writing immortal prose anyway, you know. So I'm quite happy to be told where I can be improved. It's really important to be able to do that. I also spoke with Naomi Ishiguro, who wrote a book called The Rainshadow Orphans, inspired by Japanese culture and history. And we talked about whether or not it's ever plain sailing for a book and what happened during COVID for many writers. So was the journey to writing this a smooth, plain sailing all the way? Or did you have many stops and starts? Was it actually quite a tough write? I don't feel like anything is ever plain sailing in writing. That's a trap, that question. Yeah, with listeners who, if you write, you'll know that it never is. But, yeah, so I published a couple of books in the pandemic and... Just the experience of that was, you know, I mean, there were many, many, many worse things that happened to people in the pandemic. I'm definitely not complaining. But it was just very discombobulating. And I think just being exposed to the industry for the first time was quite stressful. So I wanted to carry on writing, but I actually sort of decided I wasn't going to be like a career writer and trained as a secondary school teacher and was working as a high school teacher. So I was working with teenagers for a couple of years after my first book. Um, and that was, so my agent was, you know, he kept, he kept me on and he was like, you could try writing a different kind of book. Like, what have you wrote about teaching? What have you wrote nonfiction? And then he sort of said, what have you wrote for, for young people? Like, what have you wrote with your students in mind? Like with a different audience? And I was a bit like, yeah, okay. Um... But then I actually thought, like, yeah, what if I did sort of do... Because it's not a YA. It's being published as adult. But it's with the sort of... And I was teaching up to 18-year-olds. But yeah, it's sort of with my students in mind was kind of how it sort of first came into being. And... Yeah, I think once I decided to write it, it was actually quite not easy, but it came quite quickly. And I just found myself very excited by the whole process and I had a great time writing it. And it just sort of like everything kind of seemed to come together in the world. sort of made sense. And I just had like a fan, because with fantasy, you can source ideas from all sorts of different places and people, and it's just such a fun process. So it was actually kind of wonderful once I'd started, but I think that sort of sense of what am I going to write took a while. But I think that's sort of very common with writers, because once you sort of write a novel, you've sort of said everything you have to say. You pour like years of thinking into it, and then you have to sort of spend some time sort of living and gathering more thoughts and observations about the world. Yeah. So the world building, correct me if I'm wrong, but I was seeing it as having a sort of Japanese basis for the culture. But it's not Japan. It's not our own world. I mean, obviously, once you realise there are three moons, you know, you're somewhere else, which sort of frees you up So what kind of world builder are you? Are you the sort who has loads of notebooks where you're, you know, already creating a world and then you go ahead with the story? Or do you create the bit of the world that fits that bit of the narrative? I think it's a difficult one because I love world building just for fun. I think it's just a wonderful, like, it's a great activity. You get stuck there, can't you? And it's something quite different from writing a novel, I think. So you can create a sort of perfect fun world and then you think, oh, it's not really in service to the story and the characters and the themes I really want to explore because writing a novel is really about theme. So I think... Yeah, I mean, for me, like I did say, the sort of land and the sort of politics of the land was very much that came from the themes. But yeah, there's a whole kind of solar magic system that's kind of roughly based on, I guess, sort of ideas of like numinous energy flows through the world or kind of chi. And there are kind of creatures called sun spirits who like I've invented, but are sort of based on just ideas like slightly of sort of Japanese yokai creatures. And like the animism in the Shinto tradition of sort of kami being these sort of spirits, these gods that are sort of physically present in places. Yeah, I think with the world building, with this book, there was bits that were sort of there and they were the ones that were in service to the theme and the character, the characters. Yeah. And then I sort of wrote the draft, sort of getting the story. And then I had sort of three friends who ended up sort of helping a lot. Three kind of beta readers, I guess. One of them was just a sort of amazing literary novelist who read a draft and was sort of questioning some of the politics of it, sort of being like, okay, so how does this island's economy really, really function? You've said that it kind of runs on the labour of these undocumented migrants who are in this sort of like almost refugee camp. But how does that actually work? And what is the role of this gang, the lucky crows that you have? What are the actual mechanics of injustice here? Let's draw that out a bit more. Yeah, and sort of looked at the history of the island and that kind of thing with me. And that sort of solidified that. I have a friend who's a professional theoretical physicist, which is always handy. It's great to have one of those on speed dial. Exactly. So I asked him about the magic system and just being like, so is this logical? Does this make sense in terms of some kind of physics? And sometimes the answer would be yes, and sometimes no, not quite, but what if you did this? And that was really fun just to throw around ideas and to get ideas for future books of things that could happen that may never happen. We did a lot of just kind of co-world building that may never actually end up in the books, but it was really fun as an activity. So that did make me think it's quite dangerous. You can just world build infinitely. And yeah, I have a friend who has an MST in Japanese studies from Oxford, which despite me being half Japanese, I definitely don't have that. So she read through the book and just kind of gave me more advice on the cultural aspects because it does borrow quite a lot from Japanese sort of culture and tradition. Yeah. She was sort of my cultural advisor. So I think with fantasy, it's great because you get to draw on the expertise of the people around you. And yeah, my previous books felt very much like me on my own. Like this is just me. Whereas this has felt like I've written it, but it feels very much like a kind of team effort of me going around and sourcing like interesting people and having interesting conversations. And there's definitely like more like research, experiential research that has gone into building this world. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a friend who is a primary care doctor in the developing world, you know, so he goes into the kind of places that, you know, Yemen and Somalia and, you know, places that you wouldn't go on holiday at the moment. But he's very helpful because if I say, what happens if you get bitten by a cobra? What happens if you get hit by a sword? You know, what really happens as opposed to like fantasy, you know, film violence? Yeah. What kind of infections might you have after? You know, sort of, and unfortunately he knows because of the nature of where he works. So he often gets a dedication and a thanks. Yeah. And finally, I spoke to a friend of the podcast and good friend of mine, Malcolm Geit, who has begun on an epic Arthurian journey in poetry. And we talk about where the inspiration to do something which hasn't been done since probably Tennyson and the ambition that he has set out on to write four cycles of Arthurian themed poetry. What did you feel like answering that call to stop, think, and then start to tell the tale again? And how did you persuade a publisher to go with you? Well, yes, indeed. I mean, well, first of all, I've wanted to do this for years and years and years, ever since my mother told me the stories when I was little. But I was in fact mentioning Charles Williams and those kind of high modernist lyric cycles of Taliesin through Logres, and I was a bit daunted. I knew I didn't want to do the big Tennysonian blank verse thing. I think the problem is, my problem was form, really. I knew I wanted it to be poetry. But Tennyson, A, it had already been done, and B, I think, after Milton, it's almost impossible to write a long blank verse poem without kind of blundering into kind of ponderous sub-Miltonics. It's just been done so well by Milton. You can't get out from under his shadow, as Eliot observed. So I had a problem of form. I mean, I love David Jones, but then again, this is very high modernist prose poetry that's kind of an absolute thicket of footnotes everywhere in four or five languages, and I didn't want it to be recherche like that. Eventually, I realized the answer was staring me in the face. I'd written a long... meditation and reflection on Coleridge's Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in a book called Mariner, in which, of course, I just looked at how he took the common ballad form and turned it into this really delicate instrument. He kept its vividness and its directness and its repetitions and its strong rhythm, but he would occasionally extend the stanza or shorten it or do various things that heighten the effect. And so I just thought, I think I'll have a go in the ballad form and make it much more accessible. My original plan was to do a combination of prose and poetry. I thought I'd do it as a travelogue around Great Britain with a prose narration in the modern day, the surface roundabout, and then invoke each Arthurian place in poetry and have the place set. So the matter of Britain was like literally the matter, the physical matter of Britain. But then I thought that's too tricksy and postmodern and double narrative. I'm really going for a second naivete here. I think I'm done with it. I really think we need wonder and enchantment. And that was the other side of it, of course, because the word chant is inside the word enchantment. And I think I wanted this. I have a little note at the beginning saying, read this aloud, and then you'll get it. So, anyway, persuading a publisher, now there you put your finger on something. Because, I mean, you're right. Tennyson is the last really long treatment of this as an epic poem in 12 books. So we're talking 1850s and 1860s. There is a rather extraordinary little book in between in the 20th century by John Heath Stubbs called Artorias. which is in 12 books in varied metrical forms. But they're little books. I mean, it's one fairly slim volume. And unfortunately, I mean, it's full of brilliant things, but unfortunately, also like T.H. White, he can't resist being satirical or ironic. And I just wanted no satire or irony anywhere in this. I wanted it to be cleansed of that. We've had more than enough of that. So this is the first really big retelling. So, I mean, they say to publishers or anything, you're supposed to have what they call a USP, a unique selling point. So my unique selling point was this hasn't been done for the last 150 years. But I had to point out that might also be the unique sinking point. There might be a reason for that. But I was willing to bet that the time might be right for this kind of retelling again, the sense of the need for re-enchantment, lots of things coming together. And I thought, literally, nobody else is going to do this. I've spent decades... learning the art and craft of metrical writing and use of rhyme without torturing the syntax and that kind of thing. I mastered the sonnet, which is obviously a much shorter form, but I thought, if I don't do it, nobody will. And if I don't do it now, starting, as the thing says, on that Midsummer Morn, when I did indeed walk out one morning, I... I'm not going to finish it because I'm in my 60s, so it was now or never. And I decided to go for it. And unfortunately, Rabbit Room in America totally got what I was doing, and we're going to do it beautifully. I mean, I think they sent you an advanced reader's copy, which is paperback, but the real thing is hardback and glorious. And then, obviously, I didn't want to write a British epic without it being published in Britain as well. So I got Rabbit Room and Canterbury Press into conversation with each other, and then Canterbury Press jumped on board as well. So I ended up with two publishers, you know, taking a chance on me, as ABBA would say. Yeah, I didn't pick up any other ABBA references amongst the network of references. But in that little... ABBA was a reference to the rhyme scheme of In Memoriam, A, B, B, A, but there you go. I hope you enjoyed meeting all our authors during this season. And I look forward to speaking to others when we kick off again with the new season. If you have a favourite fantasy writer, particularly someone who is new or has been neglected, do let me know and I'll see if I can get them to come on and have a chat about their writing process and what they're working on at the moment. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast. Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, In Person Stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.