Author Interview: Tad Williams
By Angela Roberts
Oct. 20, 2010
Tad Williams is the celebrated author of such fantasy and science fiction novels as Tailchaser’s Song, The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, the Otherland series, and the Shadowmarch series, the newest and final book of which, Shadowheart, comes out next month. With his wife, Deborah Beale, he is also working on an All Ages series called Ordinary Farm, of which one book, Dragons of Ordinary Farm, came out last year and the next, Secrets of Ordinary Farm, will be out next year. The Gloaming’s managing editor, Angela Roberts, sat down with Williams to talk about writing, arts, and the writing life.
Angela: You worked at other jobs besides writing. What made you decide to become an author?
Tad Williams: Well, to be honest with you, I never really decided, at least in the early stages, to be an author. Since I was young, I've had a very powerful urge to make things, and to perform, and to create. And as a result, I did a whole lot of different art-like things; I did music, I was in a band (I still am), I did a lot of theatre, I did radio, and I was a visual artist, painting, cartooning, and things like that. And once I was out of high school, and after I had dropped out of university, I continued to do all of these things, but I was also working at least one or two other jobs in order to make a living. And it got more and more difficult to coordinate some of these things with the other people that I would have to collaborate with, so I became more interested in things I could do in my own time. So, at that point writing was kind of a pragmatic choice. And later I realized that it was something I was already gravitating towards because I come from a very book-oriented family; we love books, we love ideas, we’re talkers, we’re people who love to share weird and interesting things. And not only that, but I’m a bit of a control freak, so in the long run, being a writer is probably the best thing for me because I get to be the director, the costume designer, the makeup person, the casting director, the acting coach, as well as the scriptwriter. So, once I’d sold my first novel, and been offered a chance to write three more, I realized that this is what I really have to pursue.
A: Was there a sort of epiphany where you realized that this was your career path?
T: Yes, but after I’d already sold my first book, and I was working on my second one, and I suddenly woke up one day, and realized that I am making a living or at least making money in the arts for the first time. I would get paid for things, but never enough to contemplate quitting a job, and even in books I wasn’t able to quit for another five or six years, and that was very lucky. That’s not normal for most writers.
A: How did you get started writing Ordinary Farm together?
T: Well, how we got started doing it was, Deborah’s always been writing, but in the beginning she was in the business; she was my editor, my British publisher, but she always did writing on the side and it was always something she wanted to do, but unlike me, she hadn’t had the family moral support and all that to just throw herself into it and get out in the world and do crap jobs and try to make a living as a writer. But once we were together, she said, “Well, I’d love to do some stuff with you,” and to make a long story short, what we decided would be good, what we were both interested in, because we had kids of our own now and we were reading a lot of younger persons’ writing, we decided it would be fun to try and write something. I had this idea that had been floating around in my head, so we set to work on that and we’re just finishing the second book of that now.
A: What advantages or disadvantages have you found in the collaborative process?
T: There’s a lot of disadvantages for Deborah, and…
A: (laughs)
T: I mean, it’s funny, but it’s true. One of the disadvantages is; I’ve been making a living in this field for twenty-five years, and I’m a very specific and unusual kind of writer. Deborah’s more the ordinary sort of writer who writes it and then finds it in the rewrite and all that, whereas I’m very kind of obsessive-compulsive about putting everything together in the first draft so it all fits really well, and do two fairly light polishing drafts after that, so my poor wife has to put up with someone who has very distinct ideas about how you do these things. And while I try to be more open-minded about that stuff, on the other hand, I’m also very serious about, “hey, the only way we make a living right now is because we know my name sells books” and if I ever get to the point where people don’t trust my name to mean something in books, which is not because of anything she’s doing wrong, it’s just me being hyper-careful, you know. So she’s had to put up with that, and that’s difficult. We’re still learning how much I can let go without starting to feel panicky, how much she can argue with me about feeling that, and we have been learning all these lessons as we go.
A: You’ve just needed to find that happy medium, to cooperate.
T: Yes. I warned her when we started, and she’s been really brave and really good and smart about the whole thing, so it has been difficult just because I am very set in my ways. I have very strong ideas, I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I’m also really at one extreme, even among people who’ve been working as long as I have. I am way to the extreme as a planner and detail-oriented.
A: Ordinary Farm is categorized as YA fiction, according to Harper Collins anyway…
T: Yes, technically, I think the current term is “All Ages”. It’s what we used to call YA.
A: What differences do you finding in writing that type of fiction as opposed to your usual writing, like Shadowmarch, which isn’t Young Adult?
T: No, it’s not. And although I have young readers…
A: It’s not the target market.
T: Right. First of all, the protagonists are young and remain young in these books. My other protagonists might start young in my other series, but by the time it’s over, they’ll have grown four or five years and they’re adults. But more telling, I would say, is that the books are shorter, more focused, there’s not as much diversion, there’s not as much wandering around, they are not as violent, I think, and because of the age of the characters, there’s sort of (my books don’t have a huge amount of sex in them anyway) but there’s probably even less sex and violence in these books than in my adult books. Mostly things like that.
I suppose there’s also, not writing down to the reader, but certainly if I was to choose between using a word like, for example, “he chose a more discretionary route” to saying, “he chose his own way,” we will always opt for the simpler, more straightforward form. If we do use an unusual word, we use it as part of the story so that the reader feels like they’re learning that word rather than it’s just gone past them. I’ve got a lot of scientific terms that come up and either they’re something that can be safely ignored by the reader because they’re just somebody talking about something that we don’t really need to know, we just need to know that they know what they’re talking about, or they’re something that we’re going to learn about in the story. Our story is about a farm in California that turns out to be full of all kinds of mythical animals and these two kids go to stay with their great-uncle whom they’ve never met. But because of the kind of writers we are, we really worked at making the animals make sense, even though they were mythical animals, the idea is that they were real and that they actually lived. So they have to have some kind of scientific basis, so they could actually work. There’s a lot of that kind of stuff. I think that if the kids are interested, they will pick up a bit of evolutionary stuff because we’ll talk about it, how they develop this way. So, for instance, science found out that the narwhal’s horn is actually a tooth, that it grows out of a tooth-socket and it is an evolutionary change into a tusk. So when we were writing the books, we were saying, “Why do dragons look like this?” “Why do unicorns have a horn? Where did that come from? Why does it have only one horn when mammalian evolution tends to be bilaterally symmetrical, etc.?” And so we thought of narwhals, and the narwhal horn is a sensory organ. They use it to feel currents and changes in water temperature and pressure. So that could make sense. But that wouldn’t be coming out of their forehead, but out of their snout, because it’s a tooth that has re-grown over time in a different direction. So we explain that as basically and understandably for a twelve or thirteen-year-old reader as we can. We’re using big words and big concepts, but we’re making them something that the reader learns about. So that’s a difference from a regular book where you might gloss over that stuff more quickly.
A: You’ve had work published in different forms, i.e. novels, short stories, graphic novels. Do you have a favourite form to work in? Is there a form you find more difficult?
T: I wouldn’t say more difficult, because they’re like different kinds of music for me. So it’s like saying, “what do you like better, the Beatles or a Bach cantata?” They’re so different, but I love them both. And writing is generally the same way. The simplest form of writing is anything where I have control and time entirely to myself, I can make it as long as I want and as short as I want. That kind of thing. So just regular prose on page. As soon as you add other factors, whether that be; now you are going to write in screenplay form, now you’re going to have to keep it to ten pages or less because it’s a short story, or now you’ve got to write it and explain to an illustrator how you want it illustrated, those all add complications. But also all those other things have their own value and interest and they bring something to the project, just in the same way that telling a poet, “write me a sonnet or a haiku,” that takes away options, but also focuses you in a certain way. So it’s never purely negative either. But the easiest thing is no restrictions at all.
A: Is there a genre or sub-genre that you would love to write in but never have?
T: Yes, actually, but it has nothing to do with our field at all. I’d love to do a musical comedy. Seriously, I grew up with musical comedy and theatre in general. I’ve done theatre for years. There’s something about the experience of being in a room with an audience watching people perform something that is different from every other experience and it’s one I happen to like very much. And there have been times when I’ve been in a theatre and had these sort of epiphanies of “it just couldn’t be better than this.” You’re seeing something really good. And I grew up on musicals, all the great Hollywood musicals, Broadway musicals; I love everything, I’m totally sappy. I love Easter Parade and I also like the darker stuff like Sondheim. That’s something I’d very much like to do if I could find the time. The truth is, what I really miss, that I don’t have time for these days, I would like to get back to painting and really work at it. And I would like to find a musical collaborator because I’m not a good enough musician myself, to write a musical but I could write the libretto and I think I could do whatever else the writers do. And I’d like to do that, so yes. That springs to mind.
A: Any advice for young writers?
T: One, is to finish something. That is crucial. And that is one of the things that people usually learn very late into the process, they’ve tinkered with writing for years. But in fact, most writing, especially fiction, is about how do you tell a story? And a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That doesn’t mean that you have to have an ending where everything is resolved, it doesn’t mean a genre ending where the detective explains why everybody did what they did, but it does mean that shaping the entirety of a story and knowing when to start dropping in foreshadowing and when to twist people’s expectations, that’s all as important or more important as the beginning. So, that’s one thing.
Another thing that I think is absolutely crucial is to write regularly. It doesn’t mean you have to write a huge amount. What it also means is that you shouldn’t overbook yourself because you get into a situation of “I was supposed to write x number of pages today and I failed.” But if you sat down and wrote one page or two pages, that’s good. You learn something. You’ve got a rhythm going and you can do that again tomorrow or the day after and then one or two days more … Anything that is regular will make writing and the process that goes with writing a regular part of your thoughts. That’s the only huge advantage that I have over a lot of beginning writers now because that is what I do; I can keep things in my mind and walk around with them, and I’m perfectly entitled to think about those things. But it also helps that I’m doing them all the time. So that’s the second thing.
The third thing that I strongly recommend is that whatever it is that you want to write, whatever kind of fiction or non-fiction you want to write, do not spend most of your time reading that kind of writing because what you will do is narrow down your field of influences. You will wind up being in that derivative loop where you are deriving your material from somebody else who derived theirs from somebody else and you get this very narrow repeating cycle. So I tell people that whatever you do, if you want to write science fiction and fantasy, then yes, read science fiction and fantasy, but not that much of it. Go out and read Huckleberry Finn, read Jane Austen, read the great historical writers of our century and previous centuries. Read everything, read magazine catalogs for art shows you’ve seen, and say to yourself, “Does this give me the same feeling as looking at the pictures or as close as is possible?” If not, why? What are they not grasping? All of these things will help you in the most important way of all, and that’s developing your own voice. Because we writers create our “Writer’s Voice” from the totality of our influences and then concentrating and concentrating and polishing and purifying them until you end up with a hard central thing that is all of our influences made personal. But clearly, to me, if you start with a very narrow field of influences, you’re going to have a very narrow voice. Whereas if you start with reading all kinds of stuff, inflammatory journalism and this and that, and you bring all of those things together, you get a personal voice that is not like anyone else’s because you chose your own interesting set of influences. So that’s the third thing. Please read broadly and frequently. I don’t know any good writer who hasn’t been since childhood a really dedicated reader. That’s why we started writing; we fell in love with the written word and that interaction with the audience.
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