I can’t say there’s a single incident that was decisive in making me a writer. I started in a way in primary school, I think. Any child wants to be praised, you want your teachers and your parents to say “Well done, you’re doing well”, and I think this is in the same way as if you’re into sports or something, over time you’ll try all the different sports. You try running, you try swimming, you try pole vaulting, whatever... you try to find whatever you’re best at. In the same way, when you’re a child you try lots of different things and I found that I wasn’t that wonderful at arithmetics or maths or whatever, but I got very good marks writing stories in English, without even trying really, and at the same time enjoying myself doing it.
My teachers were very impressed, my parents thought this was good, and it was great, something I enjoyed doing and people liked it as well! Then I discovered that these people called “writers” actually got paid for this and actually made a living from telling stories and I thought “Great! That’s the job for me!” There was just this glad realisation that this was something, a talent or whatever that I had, that I could develop. And I suppose some stubbornness, that I was determined to try and keep on trying. I still had those five books rejected, but I knew better, I was right and they were wrong! I think partly I was saved by the fact that I do write quickly. If writing took up all my spare time, if I had no social life because I had to work when I was writing, I probably would have given up. The fact that I can write very quickly when I get going means I can write a book and still have a social life at the same time, basically the same as everybody else. That helped a lot, I think. And like I said, being stubborn. Well, I call it “determined,” but my wife says it’s “stubborn.”
From the second and onwards I was sending them off to publishers, but feeling dismally and not getting anything published. There was some interest shown in Player of Games, the original draft of it, and it came fairly close to being published but obviously in the end wasn’t. That’s when I decided to write The Wasp Factory, trying something that wasn’t science fiction just so I could send it to more publishers.
When Player of Games was published, it was a rewrite. It was a lot better. I was quite pleased with the original draft, but the new draft was much better. In the original draft, Gurgeh’s motivation for leaving the Culture was purely because he got bored, there was no sort of blackmail aspect to it, and there was no surprise end, nothing about that Mawhrin-Skel was Flere-Imsaho. Moreover, there was none of this framing stuff there from the beginning. At the start of every section of the book you’re being told, it’s actually Mawhrin-Skel the drone talking to you rather than relating a story. There was none of that, so there was a whole level of the book that was missing in the first draft. My original intention was to become a science fiction writer, but then I had to turn to other motifs to get published. I was down in London and I had never particularily wanted to go to London to live anyway but I just had to, I couldn’t find a job in Scotland. I wasn’t enjoying it that much. It was OK, a lot of my friends were there but I would still rather have been in Scotland. I kind of thought that by the time I was 30 I wanted to find a publisher or else I was going to go home, so it did strike me that the way to basically do that was to write something that wasn’t science fiction, there’s a better chance as there are more publishers of non-sf, of mainstream literature or whatever. I had some terrible arguments there with myself, was I selling out, was I doing the right thing. I thought of myself very much as a science fiction writer, I shouldn’t have to do this.
Oh, I did get one great rejection slip in the early seventies when they said that “Unfortunately, due to the current paper shortage we’re not publishing any novels.” That was back in the day of shortages, you know.
This probably steered me into this dual career. I think if Player of Games had been published I could imagine I might only have written science fiction. It’s very hard to tell. There was at least a 50/50 chance I would have been a science fiction writer and A) would have found it very difficult to break out if I had wanted to and B) wouldn’t really have thought of it. I would have been a science fiction writer, I write science fiction and that’s it. Yeah, I think probably Player of Games not being published might in that sense have been a good thing, or else I’ve never had this luxury of having two different careers. It keeps me interested, it means I’m not writing the same book each time. I think I’m privileged to be writing in two different genres.
Now there’s the question of whether my satisfaction matches the reaction I get from the readers. I think it is fairly close... I suppose I rate The Bridge most highly, and I think that probably more people actually like Complicity and The Wasp Factory. I’m very proud of those as well, but I think The Bridge is technically the best, different voices and all and different matters of style and so on. This is complicated, you know. I like complications, maybe that’s why my favourite of my sf novels is Use of Weapons, because it is complicated. It is very fullfilling when you try something complicated and it works. So I think The Wasp Factory and Complicity are probably the two that people most admire or like best or whatever, but The Bridge is probably my personal favourite. I think there is a fair amount of agreement that Canal Dreams is the least successful. Although whenever I say that in front of a big crowd of people, there is someone at the back, I can always spot them, whose face collapses and they come up to you after when you do the signing and they say “But I’ve read all your books, and that’s my favourite!”
I think also with the science fiction, I feel so protective towards the non-Culture books, Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background, because they’re not Culture and they’re not this popular... But people want book series, don’t they? They’re sf junkies and they want their regular fix. I’m terribly reluctant to provide it, but it is sort of a series I guess, and yet it’s not. People don’t necessarily want a consecutive storyline, but they want a common backgrund.
Well, I think so do I! Not when I’m reading -- I don’t tend to read trilogies very much -- but I love writing within the Culture. It’s very enjoyable for me. I think it shows as well. I’m kind of wary about that, worried about enjoying it too much, it’s suspicious it’s that much fun! It’s supposed to be a hard thing being a writer, struggling in a garret and all that stuff...
I write one book at a time, quite quickly. I usually write from October until December, and sometimes if it’s a short book November–December, so two months and that’s it. I keep going at it. I try to do 15,000 words a week, an 8 hour day and a five day week in theory. In practice it’s not always like that, but I’m going to try to slow it down a bit this year. I’m going to write a book I can normally write in two months over three months. I’m going down to 10,000 words a week and a more relaxed lifestyle. I’m going to give myself more days off, as I’m getting older. We’ll se how it goes. So it’s a fairly intense process and I couldn’t really do two books at the same time.
Everything I’ve written is in print. The Wasp Factory is 15 years old now so, yes, I can certainly afford to slow down, in financial terms. I’m not sure what to do next, I’m just coming to the end of the next science fiction novel, which I’ll be writing at the end of this year, the last of a four-book deal, and obviously my agent’s thinking about the next deal, so I’ve thought maybe I should do a book every two years instead of every year? I don’t know whether it would affect the way I write. It’s hard to say. I’ll wait and see how this experiment this year goes, writing 10,000 words a week over 10 weeks instead of 15,000 words over six or seven. If it goes alright I might just sign another four-book deal or whatever, as has been the case the last two deals, two mainstream and two science fiction. I’m still undecided.
Crow Road was a very fun book to write, it was a good time. I suppose it’s a bit of a relaxed book, too. Some people wonder whether there’s a lot of autobiographical stuff in it, but there isn’t, really. There are very, very small bits of autobiographical stuff, a few tiny things like a friend of mine was out walking at lunch time outside of our school.6 and he trod on a charity flag thing, you know, and this pin went up into his foot. I’ll always remember that! And I did have an aunt who fell through a greenhouse window, through a greenhouse, but recovered! A great-aunt or something, a distant relation, she was about 85 or something and she was out painting the house and fell off the ladder and through the greenhouse, and recovered happily. And Prentice’s life hasn’t got anything to do with my life.
The film based on Crow Road impressed me. I thought it was a good job, very relieved as well. It’s the same people who are going to do Complicity as well, the same writer, Brian Ellesley and Gavin Miller, who did Crow Road for television, have just finished shooting Complicity.
I think A Song of Stone is probably closer to a mainstream novel, but it’s kind of set in not quite a reality, it’s very, very close. It’s Northern Europe in the late 20th century and that’s about it, but there’s nowhere on a map you can point to and say “It’s here.” The landscape is kind of inspired by the area around about Stirling, where I went to university, in Scotland, but it doesn’t happen near either. I tried for a universal feeling for a change, for usually the mainstream books are very centered. Where it takes place and when are very clearly defined, down to exactly what roads the characters are travelling upon and what’s happening in the world at the time and what records are in the shops and this one I thought I would try and make more universal.
My publisher has shown no interest in my keeping my genres separated. I almost get insulted at times. They don’t put any pressure on me at all, ever. Don’t they care about me? I have never had any sort of interference of that sort whatsoever, unless I’m very thick, and don’t take heavy hints! They just let me go on. It’s great, in all seriousness, it’s wonderful. They trust me I suppose.
Well, my editor would tell me in no uncertain terms if the thing wasn’t up to his standards. Once he saw a book, it was a novel called O, the letter O. I had finished it and I wasn’t too sure about it and I gave it to my editor and he said “I think you should actually throw this away, it’s not good enough.” I said “Yeah, you’re probably right”. So I wrote The Bridge instead.
I don’t think I would get away with anything just because what I write sells. My editor.7 would step in. I think I’ve got more critical of my own stuff. I’ve got a very good idea of what I would want to read. A Song of Stone I’m very, very proud of, but I’m not surprised it hasn’t sold quite as well as some of the others have; there’s virtually no humour in it, it’s very, very bleak. It’s even bleaker than Complicity I think.
I think also just having a very unsympathetic central character -- Abel, the narrator of A Song of Stone is not a very nice person -- makes it difficult for people to identify. I enjoyed using the language, I enjoyed this fluorescence of light and using that as a sort of counterpoint to the brutality of the situation. That was good. But it wasn’t a fun book to write. I think Whit and Excession was examples of me having too much fun.
I don’t experience writing science fiction and mainstream as two radically different things. The book is a book, whatever ideas you come up with, and they all gradually fall into place, it’s the one thing you’re working on. You don’t suddenly find yourself writing science fiction in a mainstream novel or vice versa, it’s always perfectly clear. Again, there’s such a long time in between novels, months and months and months, the whole spring and summer and autumn, really, between the last book and the one I’m sitting down to write when the time comes. I have such a short attention span and limited memory so I’ve entirely forgotten what the previous book was. There’s not as if there was going to be some sort of cross-contamination.
I guess that if I typed “The End” to a science fiction novel on a Friday and then on the Monday started on a mainstream novel, maybe it would be hard to expunge all traces of the previous genre away from the new book, but it just doesn’t work that way. To me they are all just books; I am very aware that I’m writing mainstream or science fiction, but that’s very compartmentalised. Basically, whatever I’m bringing to the book it’s just a book, a novel, and then the genres are irrelevant. You’re just trying to tell a story as best you can.
My two audiences are like a Venn diagram, you know, with two intersecting circles, and the intersection is fairly big, I think. Exactly how big I just don’t know, I certainly get depressed about how many science fiction fans will read the mainstream, much more than the other way around, because lots of people just don’t read science fiction at all, just refuse to read it. One of those circles in the Venn diagram is bigger than the other, because the mainstream outsells the science fiction. It used to be by 3 to 1, then 2 to 1, and I think with Excession it came close to being almost as many copies of that sold as a mainstream novel. I’d love to see proper market research done, but I can’t be bothered myself. It’s not my job, actually!
I don’t sell a lot in America, though. The science fiction sells better than the mainstream, certainly, but not as you’d particularly notice. I don’t have American publishers batting down my door, saying “Have lots of money and come over to America and promote your books”. I just don’t write the right sort of stuff for America..8 I think a lot of British writers have a sort of mid-Atlantic field of writing. For several generations now, British writers have grown up with very American influences. In my case it’s relatively trivial, I don’t make that much money out of America at all compared to what I make here. I’m not trying to pander to US audiences at all, that’s not why I want to write. It appeals more to Brits and to Europeans, I guess. I sell pretty well in Canada and Australia, and I think Spain and Italy. The most “exotic” translations I’ve had have been to Hebrew and Japanese, and Russian. That was a fun one.
I write mainstream and sf because I like it. I think I find it slightly more fun to write sf than mainstream, especially the Culture stuff, but as I said, that’s dangerous, potentially. A fun mainstream novel will definitely be easier to write than a uninspired science fiction novel. But as a general rule, especially if it’s the Culture, it’s slightly more fun.
Despite that, it is mainstream. It starts in Scotland and goes to England then the States and Pakistan and then a fictitious Himalayan kingdom that somewhat resembles Bhutan and Nepal but isn’t, and then back to England again. Then Switzerland. It probably most closely resembles something like Espedair Street, or Complicity with all the wireless taken out. A female central character is a bit more like Against a Dark Background, though.
The upcoming science fiction book will probably be the Culture, because I’ll probably won’t be able to think of anything else. Culture is like the default state, if I can’t think of anything else then I’ll write in the Culture. I keep meaning to plan a couple of years ahead. Sometimes I do, but I ignore the plan. I had a four-year plan worked out for this.9 last contract and just ignored it, but it’s nice to know it’s there! So, probably a Culture novel, but it might not be. I’d rather write something that isn’t a Culture novel, a non-Culture sf novel this time, but it would have to be really good, really spectacularly page-turning and wonderful and I might not be able to come up with something that good, so we’ll see.
I don’t always write, as I’ve mentioned. I drive quite a lot, I like driving so I drive around the country quite a lot on my motorbike. And I just loaf. It’s amazing how time flies! I do write letters, I always write back to people who write to me but that doesn’t take up very much of my day. I get a fair few letters. It might be one or two every day. I shop, I’m quite good at shopping. My wife isn’t, though... I read, obviously. I used to play Civilization II far too much, but I threw the computer out. That’s it, really. It doesn’t sound like very much, but the day just tends to pass. We go on holidays quite a lot as well.
I still enjoy science fiction conventions. I always drink too much, and end up feeling delicate, worse than today, but I have a great time! It’s a four-day party! Nobody treats authors any differently, I think. I don’t really take the whole being a famous author thing, and certainly not myself, too seriously. That’s the thing I like about science fiction conventions, that there are pros and fans together. That’s why I don’t go to the World Fantasy Convention, or even the British Fantasy Convention, because it tends to be all pros. I went once or twice when I lived in London, but to me, it’s not a proper convention. The whole strength of sf conventions is that you have the producers of the stuff and also the consumers together, all standing at the bar waiting to be served... which is a great thing! It’s a different sort of fame, it’s not the kind of fame where you can’t live a normal life, the fame associated with movies and music and soap stars or whatever, which I think I’d hate.
I like mountains. The only trouble with going to Norway is that when you come back to Scotland it looks almost flat in comparison! We think we’ve got big mountains, and then you go to Norway and think “Fucking hell!” It’s as if you’ve taken a picture of Scotland and then stretched it vertically. Everything is about five times as steep and ten times as high. So I was very impressed. I also remember the Oslo underground. Most people when they build an underground system they must dig through clay, like in London. But my respect for Norwegian engineers went up when I realised the whole thing was built out of solid rock. Really a mad thing to do!
© Johan Anglemark 1999.