By The Way...

It's Day Two in Author Interview Week, and I've got an absolutely fascinating interview for you today with author Karen Traviss. Traviss spans to different worlds in speculative fiction: On one hand she's created her own universe in the "wess'har" series of books, including the latest, Matriarch, featuring human Shan Frankland among many other non-human characters. On the other she's working in the Star Wars universe with a number of best-selling books, the most recent of which is Bloodlines.

In this interview, Traviss goes into detail on what it's like to build one's own universe, how it's like to work in someone else's, and why both present their own set of challenges and rewards.

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and Matriarch.

I'm brand new (despite the flood of books on the shelves and in production) and I'm English. I used to be a journalist: I've even been a spin doc, but I'm clean now. My  areas of professional interest are defence and politics. My first novel was City of Pearl in 2004, the first in a six-book series of which Matriarch is book four: it's a tale of culture clashes and the choices people - alien and human - have to make. I'm a full-time writer, and I'll write anything that pays enough. I became a pro novelist in a not-very-arty way by planning to do it in a set time, carrying out market research, drawing up a business plan, and sticking to it.

No, I'm not vegan. No, I'm not a liberal. No, I am not _any_ of my characters. I've learned to enjoy the shock on folks' faces when they meet me and find that I'm none of my protags.

2. Matriarch is the fourth book in your series featuring the character Shan Frankland. As a writer, what things do you  need to do to keep a series fresh and engaging for the  readers? And what do you need to do to keep the series fresh  for yourself as a writer?

Well, it's not hard, because it's one story in six parts. It's not a case of "What interesting situation shall I place Mr. Bond in this time?"  It's a linear story; it's a big, complex arc, with a big cast - Frankland isn't the main character, by the way, because there are a number of protags, and there aren't any heroes, either - so I planned it out and sawed it into six big chunks. (The other three books I had on the drawing board in the same universe aren't part of that story arc or timeline.)  I hear folks asking what would have happened if I hadn't managed to get the last three published, after selling the first three: well, the story would have hung on the precipice indefinitely.

Thinking about it, I suppose people often latch on to Frankland because there are - so I'm told - not many other really believable hard-case female characters in fiction at the moment. So she's quite conspicuous. But if you look at all the books, and calculate screen time, you'll find she gets much the same as the other main characters. I won't bore anyone with the details of my colour-coded scene list (that's how I check if I've got the right mix of POVs) but I make sure I spread it around a bit.  And I can't take too much of her myself.

So, as it's all one story, the events unfold without repetition. There'll still be stuff that's unresolved at the end of book six, but that's the nature of life. Talking to readers, I'm not convinced that plot is as major a part of freshness for them as writers tend to think. When I did my market research, it was clear to me that fully realized characters are what keep readers hooked, not endless galactic wars and bigger weapons. It's far more interesting and accessible to pick over how characters behave in the smaller picture than to keep churning over the big one. And as plot is simply what the characters do, then as long as you keep the characters three dimensional, freshness tends not to be an issue. The big risk for any writer, I think, is getting bored yourself. If you're bored, or under the editor's cosh to do part 97 of the Golden Orc-Basher Cycle when you really ran out of steam at #96,  it shows.

In effect, I write like a computer model. I create the characters from the ground up, psych profiles and the whole shebang, then place them in an environment or basic one-line scenario, and see where they go and how they interact with each other. That's where my plots come from. I'm not a reader and never have been, so the dynamics of my drama come from the principles of TV, movies and games. (And I don't mean computer games, because I'm way too old to have been raised on that, but yes, I do slot into the gaming world easily now.)

3. One of the interesting things about the wess'har series is that it doesn't view humanity in a particularly positive  light - the humans in your series mess up in a very significant way and are called into account for it. Are you making a comment about humanity that may be applied to the real world? And who will call us into account?

The series doesn't actually view humans in any light: each character sees the others in very different ways, and there's no authorial overview or message. I don't write that way - in fact, I can't. It goes against all my training. I don't know how to do it. But if you mean that it's not the gung-ho humans-kick-arse Independence-Day kind of SF, then you're right. I'd have to suspend logic to write that. In my books, humans do what they're doing now, only they're doing it on other planets as well. Statistical chances are that we aren't the pinnacle of life in the universe, and that we won't change our basic approach to living any time soon.

And again, it's not centred on Frankland, and that's important to bear in mind. It's Aras and Ade and Rayat and Lin and Nevyan and the whole cast, and that's the pivotal mechanism of my fiction: it's the world as a range of characters see it, _exactly_ as they see it, and some are human, some alien. I write very tight third person POV, and with a large cast that means that I "brain-hop" so the reader gets to see the same situation through many different eyes, none of them mine. (Yes, it feels freaky to write that way. It can even be disturbing. The worst was Jacen Solo in my latest Star Wars novel, oddly enough - I wanted to scrub my brain clean afterwards.) So the world looks conflictingly different from scene to scene as the POV changes: the story lies is in the radically divergent ways the characters view events and each other.

I'm a journalist by background, so the only way I know how to write is to report, and that means effectively "interviewing" the characters and letting them all have their say. Then the reader can make up their own mind who they believe, just as they wouldin a news report. (Or as they used to, when journalism was less about partisan infotainment than it seems to be lately...) And I write exactly the same way when I do my Star Wars books. Neither are a comfortable and reassuring read. No answers; no black and white characters; no messages. I know it works too, because of the polar nature of the "I know what you're saying..." mail I get. Everyone takes away their own totally different meaning from my books. That's great - but I wish some folks would recognise that it's their interpretation, not mine. They'll get more out of it that way.

I don't like polemic in fiction. As an old spin doc, I feel it's sloppy propaganda, too. I just pose questions. I get mail from readers, especially in Star Wars, asking who's the good guy and if some character or other is bad, and I have to say: "You tell me. I just don't know." It saddens me to realise that readers have been conditioned in many cases to expect to be told what to think in a novels. I portray people - alien and human - as they are; with the aliens that takes more extrapolation, because I haven't actually met any, but the humans - they're pretty much what I've seen day in day out all my working life.

Who'll call us to account, you ask? I doubt if Q is going to materialise and give us a nice Star Trekkish trial and find that we're really quite loveable after all. We'll just screw our environment and eventually go extinct. It would be nice if we got a grip on ourselves before that happened.

4. Share a piece of advice you've been given about writing.

Don't over-plan; if you know everything that's going to happen in a story, then you'll be bored, and so will the reader. (Thank you, Sean Stewart, for that advice at Clarion.)

My own six penn'th: writing is part of the entertainment industry, so entertain - you're communicating with readers. And writing is only one avenue of story-telling,  no more worthy or valid than movies, TV, games, comics, stage or radio. Finally  - just do it. If you want to write as more than a hobby - although it's a great hobby, a wonderful therapy, and something everyone can have a go at - then just sit down and write: don't spend forever talking about it and treating it as a role-playing fantasy. Finish that damn manuscript, submit it, and get on with the next one right away.

5. You write in the Star Wars universe, and you've also  written a piece ("Sprinting the Marathon") defending the fact  that you write in the Star Wars universe. For the  uninitiated, explain why you felt the need to write that  particular article. On a more practical level, do you think  that writing in the Star Wars universe has helped to bring  some of its fans to the universe you've created in the  Wess'har books (or, possibly, vice-versa)?

The Star Wars offer came out of the blue - before my first novel was published, in fact: Lucasfilm and Del Rey had seen some of my work thanks to a third party who recommended me, and presumably they liked what they saw to take that kind of risk with an unknown. Not only did I not know anything about Star Wars beyond seeing the movies when they first came out, I wasn't even sure what a tie-in was at first. (I don't read, as I said...) But I grabbed the chance. Biggest franchise on the planet, hundreds of thousands of readers, free PR for my other titles...I'd have had to be insane to turn it down.

But there was head-shaking from the literary folk when I took the Lucas shilling.  I was told I'd "ruined" myself - which always struck me as a dog-breeder mentality, like I was some pedigree poodle who'd had an illicit night with the local mongrel - and  was "squandering" my talent. Now, I don't mind folks saying, "I don't care for Dr. Who/ Star Trek/ Buffy..." because that's just a matter of taste, but I do very much mind people making judgements about quality based on media - and, by that token, dissing the readers who buy tie-in stuff as twerps who can't understand "quality."

Personally, I don't believe there's any objective and culturally unbiased test of quality in fiction whatsoever, but I did set out to show that SW readers would get the same level of writing and storytelling from me as my wess'har series audience. Apart from the salty language and slightly more graphic violence in the wess'har books, you could cross from one to the other and not feel a change of gear. Star Wars is good enough raw material to be worked up into truly challenging SF, believe me: the Jedi aren't unalloyed good guys, the clone troops realise they're being screwed over, and maybe the Sith do have a valid point or two. It's got a lot of grey areas to explore.

So all those really hard questions about exploitation, politics, the nature of war and family, and the moral responsibility of the individual are there as strongly in my Star Wars books as in City of Pearl and its sequels. I get a lot of cross-over to the wess'har wars series from the tie-in readership, because the themes are the same: the politics of identity (I have a reader to thank for that observation) and the "Line" - the point at which we decide other creatures (humans, animals, aliens, even droids) as Not Like Us and so we justify doing whatever we want to them. I'm also heartened to see more of my wess'har wars readers going the other way and reading Star Wars, and discovering a whole new world that they hadn't realised they'd enjoy .

I also strive for a plain English kind of style, what I call "invisibility." If anyone consciously notices my style instead of the story as they read, then I've failed. The point about plain English is that I want to reach as many readers as possible - all ages, classes, and also people whose first language isn't English - and I want them to understand what's being said. If you always bear in mind that I'm a journalist, then that context makes all the difference. I believe in mass communication. I want to be understood clearly.

The vast majority of readers, of course, don't draw a distinction between media tie-ins and own-copyright stuff. Quite logically, it's all books to them. Note that I don't use the meaningless phrase "original fiction" because I think a lot of own-copyright fiction might not pass the originality test - whatever originality means. Other than for our accountants, the divide between writing in a universe you created and one that someone else dreamed up -  and how about Wicked or Peter Pan In Scarlet? - is an artificial ghetto, and the preoccupation of a small band of snobs.

People won't buy what they don't want to buy. Lord knows enough companies have tried to create instant fiction franchises through aggressive marketing, and it's never worked; so the idea that mighty tomes of shimmering genius are forced out because the bookstore shelves are taken over by wicked fast-food fiction and trashy SF that the poor oiks devour without knowing any better is...well, patronising garbage that ignores some basic principles of psychology and marketing. But the myth probably comforts those who can't understand why their inaccessible and navel-gazing literary opus isn't flying out of the shops like a greased weasel.

If you know you can reach hundreds of thousands of readers with each and every book, wouldn't any sensible writer want to see what they could do with that? I'm just not interested in being acclaimed by five professors of literature and nobody else. I'm a storyteller. I need an audience, and the bigger the better. There's a kind of communal spirit about shared universes that makes it uniquely enjoyable, and if any writer dismisses it without trying it - well, you can guess the rest. Anyone who talks about it being less creative is just showing an ignorance of the craft skills required. It's actually harder. And, as anyone who's written a long series can tell you, you're as constrained by continuity in your own-copyright series as you are in a shared universe. It takes a few books for someone to work that out, though.

I keep telling my tie-in writer colleagues that we don't need to defend ourselves; all we have to do is look at the best seller lists, think about the reader, and not look at what's being said in arty obscurity. I have no illusions. Own-copyright SF is a tiny market, but tie-ins are huge, and it makes sense to go for broke and do your very best for the big market if you get a chance to play in it. LFL and Del Rey have been incredibly supportive and let me write my own kind of Star Wars - the whole point of hiring me was to have Karen Traviss books, not cookie-cutter novels. Every writer hired for SW brings their own unique style to the franchise, has their own following, and makes it richer each time. All franchises are fertile ground for excellent storytelling and writing if you want to put in the effort.

I'm looking forward to moving into comics. I grew up with comics, and I still enjoy them now. And while they're newly respectable, someone will still say I'm wasting my skills. I couldn't disagree more. Effort expended on your readers is never wasted. It really isn't.

6. In addition to printed work, you've done work specifically in e-book form, including an original novella centered on  everybody's favorite bounty hunter, Boba Fett (A Practical Man). How do you  feel e-books are working for you as a writer of fiction? Are  there advantages (for example, being able to publish  novellas, which are hard to sell in print)? Do you think  e-books are the direction publishing is headed toward, or  will we have the pulpy versions of books around for a while yet?

I admit I was very wary of e-books. I write and edit on screen, and I prefer that to paper most of the time, but electronic media still have a long way to go before they're ergonomically friendly for readers. There are things that screens can't do that paper can. There's the complication of digital rights management - if they download it, can they read it on another device or not? They can't even print it out most of the time. Then there's the whole thing about online purchasing for people without credit cards - which is a big deal if a large chunk of your readership is well under 18. So there are still plenty of physical barriers for readers. But I was genuinely surprised by how well A Practical Man sold, especially as it wasn't promoted at all, and couldn't even be found via Amazon. It was a bestseller, and that made me rethink the whole e-publishing thing.

So I have a few experiments planned to test the market. I often get asked if there's ever going to be a collection of my short fiction published in 2002 and 2003 (before I concentrated on novels) but it doesn't make economic sense as a conventional dead tree edition; an e-book might, though. If I did it myself - anyone can be an e-book or even publish on demand publisher now for minimal outlay -  it would give me the kind of hard data that's hard to extract from publishers. (Yes, this is a business. Let's not forget that.) When I get time to do it, that is - time is very short these days and I have a stack of contracted novels to write before I have the breathing space to try that.

As far as the length goes, I'd never written a novella before, and I would probably never have touched novellas if I hadn't been asked to do it by the publisher. I only write short work to commission now, because writing and submitting shorts on spec doesn't make sense for me as a business.  The SF/F magazine market feels moribund to me, and I don't see any evidence to the contrary online or on the newstands. But for an established writer there seems to be a "second medium" effect, in that people are prepared to pay for e-stories almost as an extra layer to the paper books.That changes the picture quite a lot. My jury is still out on e-publishing, but I'm no longer as wary as I was of the medium. There are three questions, really: do readers know who you are;  do they know you have new titles out there; and is there anything about acquiring that material that'll dissuade them from buying it? It's the last one that makes e-publishing a challenge.

But I still get asked almost daily when the Boba Fett novella - and the shorts I've written for Star Wars Insider magazine, a conventional glossy paper mag - will appear in a "real" book. And that's from young people, not old Jurassic Parkers like me. It'll be a long time before hard copy dies, and even longer before people abandon the love of a nice thick book. I recall the paperless office predictions from thirty years ago, and every place I've worked has produced more and more paper every year, not less. Humans like paper. They also like big portions.

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• #1 Comment from monponsett 
  12/6/06 9:32 AM | Permalink

  I never liked Star Wars myself, but I'm French. I always rooted for Dark Vader when I was a kid, because he had the coolest outfit.