Interview with: Garth Nix
It’s been 20 years since the release of Garth Nix’s Sabriel – the first book in the worldwide bestselling Old Kingdom series – and now Nix is back with a story to begin it all; a prequel to the Old Kingdom trilogy, entitled Clariel. Gobblefunked was lucky enough to catch up with the award-winning author during his brief visit to Dublin last week and here’s what he had to say about his new book and much, much more!
1. Welcome to Dublin Garth! So there’s been a lot of excitement around the publication of this book. What can fans of the series and new readers, who may not be familiar with your previous work, expect from Clariel?
Thank you! I think what readers can expect is what I always try to do, which is to tell a story that feels real.
I always try to write stories that feel as if they really could happen; happen somewhere else perhaps, but I think a story should grip a reader in the way that a true story does – even though it’s fantastical, even though it takes place in a completed invented place, it should feel real, the people should feel real and the magic should feel real.
I think for anyone who has previously read the Old Kingdom books, what they’ll see in Clariel is a very different view of the Old Kingdom.
In the later books the kingdom has fallen apart – terrible things have happened, free magic has run riot, the dead are all over the place, the whole kingdom is in a shambles, but in Clariel, it’s actually almost the opposite. In this story, which is set 600 years before the events in Sabriel, the kingdom is very settled, the characters have almost forgotten how much trouble free magic can cause, which creates its own problems, but for the most part it’s settled.
Of course, that just means that all of the things that are about to happen in the kingdom are just lurking below the surface, and in many ways, this book marks the beginning of that slide, into the world that we see in Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen.
And for new readers, I hope that it works as a standalone book. In what is now a quartet of Old Kingdom books, a reader should be able to start with Clariel, Sabriel or even Lirael. Not Abhorsen, as Lirael and Abhorsen are essentially two parts of one book, but Clariel and Sabriel are equally good introductions to the quartet.
2. Of course the reason for all of this excitement, is the fact that this is the first time you’ve returned to this world in almost 10 years. Did you always know that there was another book in the Old Kingdom Series; and why publish it now?
I always knew there was going to be quite a few other stories; and in fact I made a note for this book when I was first writing Lirael. It really was just a matter of time, but I was working on other things and while it was always on that mental list of something I was going to come back to, the time just wasn’t right until now.
I mean there are millions of books I’d like to write but you can’t write them all so it’s just about getting some order on the process and often when the book becomes uttermost in your mind that’s when it’s time to write it.
3. Have you found, because it’s been so long and of course many of your original fans have grown up in the intervening years, there was a lot of pressure on you considering how much the rest of the series is loved?
Fortunately not, as my other books in the interim have been well received, so really while people expressed an interest in another Old Kingdom book, I think they were also generally quite happy that I’ve been writing anything
I think if I hadn’t written anything during those ten years, there would have been more pressure, but because I’ve kept writing and published lots of other books it seems to have worked out ok. There’s probably a greater proportion of fans that wanted another Old Kingdom book than anything else so they’re mostly happy that there is another one and there will be another one after that too.
But yes as you said, I mean Sabriel came out 20 years ago, so now I’m encountering second generation fans of Sabriel, which is fantastic, and I’ve also met quite a few children called Sabriel which is nice.
4. Why a prequel with Clariel? Why not a continuation of Sabriel and Lirael’s stories?
I guess just because that was the story that I wanted to tell. Back when I was writing Lirael, I made a little note about Clariel and her story, and that idea just stuck with me. It just so happened that it was the origin story of one of the secondary characters from 600 years earlier. There was no particular reason why it was a prequel, when I sat down to write it I didn’t think ‘I’m going to write a prequel’, it just evolved that way. I’m always led by the story and always think about the story that I want to write, not about the one that I should be writing.
5. I read somewhere that you do also have a sequel in the works, is that correct?
Yeah, that’s actually another book that I got the idea for it whist writing an earlier book in the series. It is a sequel, it actually picks up after the events of Abhorsen, and then there’s also a novella that comes after that called The Creature in the Case which came out in 2005.
So while the next book is a sequel to the existing trilogy, I needed to write Clariel first, because even though the book does fit into the main timeline in the series, it also draws on some of the things that happen in Clariel, so it’s not only a sequel to the existing books, it’s also a sequel to Clariel.
6. What a lot of readers love about your books is the world that you’ve created in this series and of course in the Keys to the Kingdom series. It’s quite impressive. Did you have an idea for the world before you started or did the world just evolve over time?
Yes, it really just evolved.
A lot of the time, fantasy writers fall into two camps, so there are people who develop the world in immense detail and work everything out, and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the classic example of this, so he even invented a language! And then at the other end, there are the fantasy authors who just go for it and work it out as they go along. Again, I’m very story led, so while I will work some things out about the world that my characters live in, I work them out as I’m going along, if and when I need details to progress the story.
When I start writing a book, I generally don’t know that much about the world I’m building. I know a little bit about a character and the situation they’re in, and I know a little bit about the world – in a sense of what I absolutely need right then and there and then I just build it up as I go along. So I write a lot of notes about the setting as I go along but really only a little bit more than what I tell the reader. Generally, by the end of the book I’ve used about 30% of what I needed to find out and I’ve kept the rest for other stories that I might want to tell about this world.
7. There is great depth to your characters in the series, and their personalities are rarely black and white — there are a lot of flaws there. Was this a conscious decision you made when writing the series or again was it something that just evolved?
No, it was absolutely something I thought about. It’s all part of writing a story that feels real.
I want my characters to feel real in the same way that I want everything in this imagined world to feel real to the reader.
I wanted my characters to feel like real people, people you might meet the street and have a conversation with, not just objects to carry a story forward.
Certainly I try to undermine stereotypes in my writing, so sometimes I look at a reaction my character might have to a specific event and think ‘that would be stereotypical so let’s do the opposite or let’s do something different’ — because that’s what makes it interesting, people don’t always react the way you expect them to. I like that my characters are sometimes enigmatic, because people are, you can’t walk up to a stranger in the street and immediately know everything about them, that’s not reality, so why should it be any different when creating characters in books.
For me, authors that try to undermine stereotypes or twist them around a little, write the most interesting stories.
8. You also write a lot of heroines, particularly in the Old Kingdom series. Again was this a conscious decision or what is it about the female voice that you found so appealing?
That was actually kind of a happy accident. So when I first wrote Sabriel, the first thing I wrote was the prologue, where she’s born and dies and goes into death and her father brings her back out of death. Originally, I thought I would write the book about him, but when I finished writing the prologue I thought she was a much more interesting character so I decided to write the story about her.
Really it never even crossed my mind that there was anything particularly unusual about writing a with the female voice. I grew up with lots of strong and interesting women and I have no difficulties whatsoever in translating those real people onto the page.
I’ve written stories with both male and female protagonists and some just seem to suit the female voice better. Again, once I has chosen Sabriel (or Clariel or Lirael) as my heroine, I wanted her to feel as real as possible and not fulfill some kind of gender stereotype, so just because she’s a woman it automatically means she can’t do something that perhaps a male character can. I just think that’s ludicrous, because that’s not true of real life and it shouldn’t be in books or movies or TV shows.
9. Out of all of characters that you have created, do you have a favourite and why?
I could never choose. There are certainly times when I’ve loved writing a particular character, but it’s like an actor choosing a part in a play because it’s a great part for them, but then there might be other great parts.
10. Can you tell me a little bit about the Necromancer’s Bells and where that idea came from?
Again that was another happy accident that worked out really well.
When I was writing Sabriel, I knew I was going to write about these anti-necromancers, so people who could lay the dead to rest. Again this was sort of going against the stereotype, so a necromancer who was not evil, someone who made the natural process of death go the way it’s meant to go.
And I wanted my heroine to have a particular kind of magic, but I didn’t want it to be the typical sort of things where she had a spell book or a wand, I wanted something different.
I was looking into different myths and beliefs at the time about how people dealt with evil spirits and laying the dead to rest, and one of the most famous things I came upon was exorcism by bell, book and candle which I liked the idea of. And while I love magical books I didn’t want her power to just be in a spell book.
The same with candles, it just didn’t seem very dramatic or interesting, I didn’t want her to be looking for matches or a lighter every time an evil spirit was nearby. So then i was left with bells, which to me seem to possess a sort of magic anyway in their ‘voices’. Around that same time I was also reading a murder mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers called The Nine Tailors, I’m a big fan of all of her work but in that particular book she writes about the bells in a country church that all have Latin names and play a major role in the story plot, and I just found it very interesting so I did some more research into the history of bells, naming and baptising bells and the mysticism that’s often associated with bells.
I guess it’s quite a good example of how you can be reading something completely unrelated to what you’re trying to do, and some little spark will just give you an idea for your own work.
11. To mark the release of Clariel, some of the book covers for the trilogy have been reimagined and re-released. Particularly, the new Australian covers are quite striking and mark a break away from the more symbolic original covers. Were you involved in this process of choosing new designs?
I’ve been fortunate in that I get to be quite involved in that side of things, partially because I’ve been doing this for such a long time and also because I worked in the industry, as an editor and agent. So certainly I saw a lot of the early sketches for all the different cover designs across the English language covers, and I have to say I love them all.
I mean they’re all different, but I think they all capture the spirit of the books and it’s great to see the different treatments and the different imaginings of the characters.
I mean it’s really all about what will sell in the different markets, so even though the content of the books is the same and people generally respond to it in the same way, there are some cultural differences between the cover design.
I remember one Chinese editions of Sabriel – which is of course a book about an 18-year-old-young woman – had a bearded wizard on the front cover, he was basically Gandalf, but I guess it’s just saying ‘this is a type A fantasy book’.
12. You mentioned that you spent many years working in publishing, including as a literary agent and editor. How do you find being on the other side of the desk? I must feel a bit like being a surgeon operating on yourself?
And could I take my own appendix out if necessary?
Yes, exactly!
Well I was an author before I worked in publishing and then I did both at the same time for a long time.
I think it’s a good question because yes you can know too much in the sense that you can know a lot of things to be worried about, but I still think it’s better to know what you’re worrying about than to be ignorant about what is happening to your book. I think because I’ve worked in the industry I’m more realistic about things.
But I would certainly advice authors, particularly those starting out, to be informed. You really should know about the industry that you work in. It’s a little bit like being a carpenter who doesn’t know or want to know what happens to his chairs once he’s made them. I mean that’s a bad way to do business and I think that also applies to writing.
That being said, there are lots of writers who really just want to focus on the text and not have anything to do with the business. And I think if you are one of those people you really need to make sure you have a good business partner in your agent, and someone who will look after your interests.
And it’s easier than ever to be informed, there are lots of online and offline writing groups you can join and an abundance of information available.
13. Do you get writers block or what are some of your habits when you’re writing?
I think writers block comes in a very wide range of degrees, because I think very serious writers block is actually a form of depression and needs to be treated as such; it’s bigger than just the writing. And then there’s just the ‘not wanting to do it today’ kind of problem which everybody has and I think the only way to overcome that is to actually force yourself to do it.
14. Do you work to a schedule, do you have 9–5 hours?
I’ve had lots of different schedules but again I think it’s important not to get hung up on the schedule; there are millions of ways to write books and writers find all kinds of different ways – there’s no one right way.
I think finding a routine is good. I wrote my first half a dozen books while I had a very busy day job so I had to write at night and most Sundays, I tried to be reasonably regular. But then when I became a full-time writer for the first time in 1998, I did almost nothing for that whole year because I kept putting things off. So around half way through that year I went back to work part-time to give myself some structure and also so that I could interact with people again. Sitting in a room on your own all day every day isn’t particularly good for anyway. So the first time I decided to write full-time, I just hadn’t thought about the ramifications of not speaking to people regularly and engaging with people socially.
Then the second time I decided to write -full-time, I planned it much better. So now I have a separate office where I write and I structure it so I go to work around 9am and finish at 5pm. During that time I try to spend at least two or three hours actually writing and the rest of the time is taken up with emails, social media and book promotional work.
15. Did you always know you wanted to be an author and specifically a YA author?
Well YA is great category but to be honest I never really thought about it.
Of course I do write books with young protagonists but equally Sabriel has been published as both YA and mainstream fantasy and I think a lot of people that read YA are in fact older adults.
Applying a category to a book is really just about finding out where the book will reach the largest audience first. I think for the most part the category is about how the book is marketing and sold much more than it is about how the book is written.
I write books with an entry level rather than any kind of age range. I think you probably need to be about 13 or 14 to read the books but there’s no limit really. So a 13-year-old reading Clariel, would have a different experience to a 30-year-old or a 50-year-old, but I hope they would all have a good experience.
That being said, I think because the books are typically ‘coming of age’ stories, they can be particularly potent for a 13-year-old who is coming of age so perhaps they find their best resonance with younger ages. Equally, however I think they can also resonate with older readers who can remember what it was like to be that age. I think that’s probably part of the attraction of YA in general and why it’s a hot category at the moment, it’s not just teens reading books that speak to them, it’s older people reading books that remind them about what it was like to be a teenager.
16. As well as fantasy, you’ve also dabbled in sci-fi YA with books like A Confusion of Princes and Shade’s Children. How did you find these experiences?
Well I’ve always read and had an interest in sci-fi and I’ve actually written some short fiction of which a greater proportion is sci-fi.
For me it’s like swimming in the same water as fantasy really, often it’s just some stories feel more like sci-fi.
Certainly I may write more sci-fi if I find the right story, equally I might even write a thriller at some point.
17. You’ve also worked on a collaborative project, the Troubletwisters series, with Sean Williams. Can you tell me about that?
Sean and I are old friends and when we started the series we had been thinking of writing together for many years. Collaborations are again just a different aspect of the craft, and getting it right is really just about finding the right person to work with and to have boundaries.
We have a written an agreement in place which is very important. As a former agent, I would always strongly advice authors thinking of working on a collaborative book or series to have a written agreement. But to be honest, the process is just fun for both of us. We’re both professional writers and we both have our own books. I think that if all we worked on was collaborations then those books might be more difficult to write but it’s more of a fun side project from our own work that we both enjoy and will continue to work on.
18. What’s your favourite thing about being a published author?
The books. I love having written them and I love looking at the finished product. I’ve written over 20 books but I still just love the day that a new book arrives at my door. I can never believe that I’ve written it and I hope I will always have that feeling about my books.
19. There is a lot happening in the literary fantasy sphere at the moment with things like Lord of the Rings and Games of Thrones adapted for screen. I know you’ve written a screenplay for Sabriel, can fans expect adaptations of any of your work any time soon?
Certainly, I would love to see a really good movie adaptation of the Old Kingdom books – I think they’re more suited to film than TV but really it’s dependent on the right time and the right people.
A movie version of Sabriel has, in fact, almost been made twice. At one point it got to the point where it was all agreed and we were about to sign the papers when one lawyer raised a question and everything just began to unravelled. But that’s the classic Hollywood story really and things come back around again so you never know. It would be nice to see a movie version of course, particularly a good version and I would love if someone’s work that I admire wanted to take on the project, but as with all fantasy movies it comes down to funding.
20. You have an extensive list of favourite books on your website but are there any authors writing today that you like or admire?
I’ve actually been reading a lot of older authors and some good books that I might have missed down through the years. So I recently realised that I had never read Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens and I’m a big Dickens fan, but I also read some contemporary authors, including some friends or people that I might know.
The most recent YA books that I’ve read include The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater which I loved. Also The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black. I also just read Scott Westerfeld’s latest book Afterworlds, which is set in the YA publishing scene in New York and was particularly fascinating and Diana Wynne Jones’s final novel, The Islands of Chaldea. Like most people, I’ve got about 30 books stacked on my bedside table just waiting to be read!
Originally published at www.gobblefunked.com on October 2, 2014.
