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Your Wednesday Author Interview: Jo Walton
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006
2:24:00 PM EDT
Hearing Jimmy Neutron on the TV
The Wednesday Author Interview is back, and I'm very excited to present you with this week's writer: Jo Walton. A multiple-award winning author (she's got a World Fantasy Award and a john W. Award for Best New Writer award to her credit), Walton's latest is the tremendous new alternative history mystery Farthing (which Publishers Weekly called it "stunningly powerful" in a starred review). She's taken a break to talk about that book, the whole growing alt-history genre, and how the release of a book is a fine excuse for a three day party (and it is!)
1. Quick! Tell us a little bit about yourself and about Farthing.
Well, I'm Welsh, and I aspire to become Canadian. I live in Montreal, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. FARTHING is my fifth novel, and the first one to be SF, all the others are fantasy. It's an alternate-history mystery -- it's a murder mystery set in a country house in a 1949 where Britain made peace with the Nazis in May 1941. It's a book about how good people do bad things. It gave me a chance to play with the detective story format and with things like the unconscious sexism and anti-Semitism that you take for granted in 1930s books, to bring those things into the open.
2. Alternate history seems to be a growing genre. As someone who is speculating how things might be if history turned out just a little differently, what makes it so fascinating? Are the reasons different for a writer than for a reader?
What makes it fascinating for me is the desire to change how things came out. It seems to me that history has a weight of probability, but that there are some pivot places where things could just as easily have gone differently. There are some things in history that seem so unlikely that it's possible to make a case for it being more plausible if it would have gone a different way. Sometimes those other ways are nicer, and sometimes they're considerably nastier. I've always loved reading it -- I think Harry Turtledove, especially in his short stories, is an absolute master of finding those points where history could have swung into another channel. There are two ways in which it's fun to play with, too, the scale of whole societies and the personal scale, the scale of individual lives. I think that's why so many people are drawn to it.
Of course, as a writer you have to work out all the details. There's the change point and everything spreads out from that like ripples in a pond, and you have to track where they all go. As a reader you can just sit back and watch someone else doing all that. You have the mystery thrill of working out as you read what changed and when. It's a genre I've been reading all my life, ever since I read Poul Anderson's GUARDIANS OF TIME when I was a kid and was blown away by the alternate present the time travellers ended up in where Lithuania was a major power and the Roman empire had never been significant.
With FARTHING I took something that actually seems more probable to me than what happened -- the idea that the appeasers, the people who gave way to Hitler again and again through the 1930s, managed to make peace with Hitler rather than fighting on with no way of winning. Britain had no way to win before the US came into the war, and the US was showing no signs of coming in and probably never would have if it hadn't been for the Japanese attack. Churchill himself had no idea how he could win. The appeasers were in his cabinet. Throughout the second half of 1940 and on into 1941, Churchill kept squelching peace offers that were just like the "Farthing Peace" -- offers on the lines of "let's call it a draw". We're really lucky Churchill was so incredibly stubborn, and that the Hess mission didn't succeed.
3. Rumor has it that you wrote Farthing in under three weeks. Why? How exhausted were you afterward?
I was already part-way through writing another couple of things, and I didn't want to be part-way through a third. It would have seemed self-indulgent, so I just got on and finished it. You know how when you're doing what you're not supposed to be doing it always goes much more easily? I think there was some of that. I'd been thinking about the setting for a while, and once I started it all just came pouring out. Also, the mystery structure, the detective novel structure, just pulled me on through it. I had two narrators, too, which also helps me get on, though in HA'PENNY that caused problems, in FARTHING it was all good. I often write quite quickly, but usually it comes in bursts and then I get stuck for a while. With FARTHING it was as if the dam was full and it all came out at once, 5000 word days, 7000 word days. After a while of course, this builds up momentum in itself, the end starts looking near and achievable.
As for exhausted, well, my hands looked like meat, and my brain wasn't much better. I think I spent the *next* three weeks lying on the bed trying to get up the energy to put the kettle on. Then I started doing the research I usually do while I'm writing, which eventually turned into HA'PENNY.
4. Share a piece of writing advice you've been given.
Rumer Godden, a twentieth century Anglo-Indian writer, says in her autobiography A TIME TO DANCE, NO TIME TO WEEP, that when you have small children it is much better to get up in the early morning and write while you're fresh before they wake up than to try to stay awake after they are asleep and write.
Most writing advice doesn't do much for me, but that one has been really useful.
5. Shortly after Farthing came out, you hosted a "convention" for the book. Tell us a little bit about that. What this is business event, and excuse to get friends together, or a little bit of both?
I used the book coming out as an excuse for a three-day party.
I decided I'd do the bits of a convention I knew how to do, which is essentially program, and leave out the bits I didn't. I hoped I could get some of my friends to come up to Montreal for a weekend -- and 47 people came. It was great fun. There were people there from all over -- one friend came from Israel, there were a couple of people from California, Minneapolis, Chicago, DC, lots from New York -- and one person came from the other side of Canada on the bus! There was general SF-con type program, talking about books, which I organised in advance, and there were parties.
I don't think I could define it as business at all -- no, wait, could my accountant read this? It was a promotional event, and thus an entirely tax-deductible expense. I'm probably going to do another one next year, because it was such fun. You should come.
6. You've were awarded the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer for 2002, and a previous novelof yours, Tooth and Claw, was awarded the prestigious World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2004. As a writer, do these awards impact your life? Do they make any part of the writing life easier? Or harder?
Well, they get mentioned on the book jackets, maybe they encourage people to pick them up, I don't know. I suppose in a way they might make it harder because you feel you have something to live up to -- that the next thing is going to be a disappointment. But I don't think like that very much. All my books are very different from each other, so I don't expect people to necessarily like all of them.
I don't know if the Campbell had any effect at all. (They didn't have a crown when I won it -- it's so unfair!)
The real difference the World Fantasy Award made is in foreign sales. TOOTH AND CLAW is published in six languages. That's a quantifiable difference.
When it comes to awards, I'm very fortunate compared to many writers in that I have a high wooden shelf running around my study which we call the tchotchke shelf, and which is full of things like a Klein bottle, a Roman tile, a plaster angel, a toy dragon, a horseshoe -- I can just hide the awards among the other things on that shelf, and they don't stand out too much. If I had a room that was furnished normally, then acquiring a hideous bust of Lovecraft might have caused me terrible decoration problems. As it is, it just looks like another gargoyle.
---
If you're interested in learning more about Jo Walton, you can check out her Web site and her LiveJournal.
Next Week: Author Mark Budz. Tune in then!
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
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2:24:00 PM EDT
Hearing Jimmy Neutron on the TV
Your Wednesday Author Interview: Jo Walton
The Wednesday Author Interview is back, and I'm very excited to present you with this week's writer: Jo Walton. A multiple-award winning author (she's got a World Fantasy Award and a john W. Award for Best New Writer award to her credit), Walton's latest is the tremendous new alternative history mystery Farthing (which Publishers Weekly called it "stunningly powerful" in a starred review). She's taken a break to talk about that book, the whole growing alt-history genre, and how the release of a book is a fine excuse for a three day party (and it is!)
1. Quick! Tell us a little bit about yourself and about Farthing.
Well, I'm Welsh, and I aspire to become Canadian. I live in Montreal, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. FARTHING is my fifth novel, and the first one to be SF, all the others are fantasy. It's an alternate-history mystery -- it's a murder mystery set in a country house in a 1949 where Britain made peace with the Nazis in May 1941. It's a book about how good people do bad things. It gave me a chance to play with the detective story format and with things like the unconscious sexism and anti-Semitism that you take for granted in 1930s books, to bring those things into the open.2. Alternate history seems to be a growing genre. As someone who is speculating how things might be if history turned out just a little differently, what makes it so fascinating? Are the reasons different for a writer than for a reader?
What makes it fascinating for me is the desire to change how things came out. It seems to me that history has a weight of probability, but that there are some pivot places where things could just as easily have gone differently. There are some things in history that seem so unlikely that it's possible to make a case for it being more plausible if it would have gone a different way. Sometimes those other ways are nicer, and sometimes they're considerably nastier. I've always loved reading it -- I think Harry Turtledove, especially in his short stories, is an absolute master of finding those points where history could have swung into another channel. There are two ways in which it's fun to play with, too, the scale of whole societies and the personal scale, the scale of individual lives. I think that's why so many people are drawn to it.
Of course, as a writer you have to work out all the details. There's the change point and everything spreads out from that like ripples in a pond, and you have to track where they all go. As a reader you can just sit back and watch someone else doing all that. You have the mystery thrill of working out as you read what changed and when. It's a genre I've been reading all my life, ever since I read Poul Anderson's GUARDIANS OF TIME when I was a kid and was blown away by the alternate present the time travellers ended up in where Lithuania was a major power and the Roman empire had never been significant.
With FARTHING I took something that actually seems more probable to me than what happened -- the idea that the appeasers, the people who gave way to Hitler again and again through the 1930s, managed to make peace with Hitler rather than fighting on with no way of winning. Britain had no way to win before the US came into the war, and the US was showing no signs of coming in and probably never would have if it hadn't been for the Japanese attack. Churchill himself had no idea how he could win. The appeasers were in his cabinet. Throughout the second half of 1940 and on into 1941, Churchill kept squelching peace offers that were just like the "Farthing Peace" -- offers on the lines of "let's call it a draw". We're really lucky Churchill was so incredibly stubborn, and that the Hess mission didn't succeed.
3. Rumor has it that you wrote Farthing in under three weeks. Why? How exhausted were you afterward?
I was already part-way through writing another couple of things, and I didn't want to be part-way through a third. It would have seemed self-indulgent, so I just got on and finished it. You know how when you're doing what you're not supposed to be doing it always goes much more easily? I think there was some of that. I'd been thinking about the setting for a while, and once I started it all just came pouring out. Also, the mystery structure, the detective novel structure, just pulled me on through it. I had two narrators, too, which also helps me get on, though in HA'PENNY that caused problems, in FARTHING it was all good. I often write quite quickly, but usually it comes in bursts and then I get stuck for a while. With FARTHING it was as if the dam was full and it all came out at once, 5000 word days, 7000 word days. After a while of course, this builds up momentum in itself, the end starts looking near and achievable.
As for exhausted, well, my hands looked like meat, and my brain wasn't much better. I think I spent the *next* three weeks lying on the bed trying to get up the energy to put the kettle on. Then I started doing the research I usually do while I'm writing, which eventually turned into HA'PENNY.
4. Share a piece of writing advice you've been given.
Rumer Godden, a twentieth century Anglo-Indian writer, says in her autobiography A TIME TO DANCE, NO TIME TO WEEP, that when you have small children it is much better to get up in the early morning and write while you're fresh before they wake up than to try to stay awake after they are asleep and write.
Most writing advice doesn't do much for me, but that one has been really useful.
5. Shortly after Farthing came out, you hosted a "convention" for the book. Tell us a little bit about that. What this is business event, and excuse to get friends together, or a little bit of both?
I used the book coming out as an excuse for a three-day party.
I decided I'd do the bits of a convention I knew how to do, which is essentially program, and leave out the bits I didn't. I hoped I could get some of my friends to come up to Montreal for a weekend -- and 47 people came. It was great fun. There were people there from all over -- one friend came from Israel, there were a couple of people from California, Minneapolis, Chicago, DC, lots from New York -- and one person came from the other side of Canada on the bus! There was general SF-con type program, talking about books, which I organised in advance, and there were parties.
I don't think I could define it as business at all -- no, wait, could my accountant read this? It was a promotional event, and thus an entirely tax-deductible expense. I'm probably going to do another one next year, because it was such fun. You should come.
6. You've were awarded the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer for 2002, and a previous novelof yours, Tooth and Claw, was awarded the prestigious World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2004. As a writer, do these awards impact your life? Do they make any part of the writing life easier? Or harder?Well, they get mentioned on the book jackets, maybe they encourage people to pick them up, I don't know. I suppose in a way they might make it harder because you feel you have something to live up to -- that the next thing is going to be a disappointment. But I don't think like that very much. All my books are very different from each other, so I don't expect people to necessarily like all of them.
I don't know if the Campbell had any effect at all. (They didn't have a crown when I won it -- it's so unfair!)
The real difference the World Fantasy Award made is in foreign sales. TOOTH AND CLAW is published in six languages. That's a quantifiable difference.
When it comes to awards, I'm very fortunate compared to many writers in that I have a high wooden shelf running around my study which we call the tchotchke shelf, and which is full of things like a Klein bottle, a Roman tile, a plaster angel, a toy dragon, a horseshoe -- I can just hide the awards among the other things on that shelf, and they don't stand out too much. If I had a room that was furnished normally, then acquiring a hideous bust of Lovecraft might have caused me terrible decoration problems. As it is, it just looks like another gargoyle.
---
If you're interested in learning more about Jo Walton, you can check out her Web site and her LiveJournal.
Next Week: Author Mark Budz. Tune in then!
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 4 comments: (Add your own)
-
Mark Budz has to be a fake name.
-
Thanks John, her books seems awfully interesting to a scifier like me...Sandi
-
Great interview! I'll have to pick up her book. By the way, it's the American Library Association Banned Book Week. http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/ba
nnedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek. htm
What's your take, as a writer?
Kathy http://journals.aol.com/kaydeejay5449/Yadayadayada/
9/28/06 4:42 PM
natalie