Michael Carroll: The Interview

In the second of our interviews with Octocon guests, we talk to the beautiful and charming writer of The Quantum Prophecy. We ask him about his many days of conventioneering, how technology has affected the craft of writing, and we find out why he gives such long answers!

Octocon: Mr. Carroll, thank you for joining us today. You've been coming to Octocon for a few years now... Has the time spent at panels and talking to other authors at cons changed how you write over the years?

Michael Carroll: I'm pretty sure it has, but I don't think I could point to many specific incidents. At least, none that have directly influenced my writing. I've picked up more from reading the works of fellow guests. I try to read at least one book by each guest with whom I'll be sharing a panel (just in case they ask!) even when said guests don't write in the genres I'd normally read. In fact, that's possibly one of the most important lessons about writing: don't just read the genres in which you write - you'll learn a lot more by reading outside your preferred genre.

I can certainly point to some specific incidents that have show me how to behave at convention. Or, rather, how not to behave... For example: Public readings should be kept short - five or six pages at most! One sure way to turn off potential readers is to bore the pants off them at a reading. There was a certain incident - a very long time ago, and not at a convention - in which an author spectacularly failed to entertain a roomful of people by reading from one of her books for a solid hour. I can remember nothing about the book, but I'll never forget how bored I was.

O: Having generously released a program called "Mike's Name
Generator" on your website this past month (which is really useful!),
do you think that writing has gotten easier with the rise of freely
available computing?

MC: The other day I found a book another author sent me many years ago, and inside was a letter printed in the oddest-looking font... All the lower-case Es had the top bit filled in, and all the Ns were about two millimetres higher than the rest of the characters, plus the spacing was really erratic. Took me a couple of minutes to realise that the letter had been carefully crafted on what we used to call a "typewriter"!

Yep, these days writing is certainly easier in many respects. Word-processors are the greatest gift of a writer's life. They can check our work as we go so that we never again embarrass ourselves by mis-spelling the words in sentences like "I completely except demeaning of everything your saying."

On the other hand... "It looks like you're trying to write a science fiction novel about cybernetically-enhanced bears!" says the animated paper-clip, "Would you like some help?"

And let us not forget everyone's favourite, the pop-up message that reads: "This sentence is written in the passive voice." Yes, thank you for that, but I can't find the button marked "What are you talking about?"

The process of research has also changed: once upon a time a writer had to visit the local library - or even a distant library - to check out esoteric information, a process that could easily take several days. But now we have the internet: in mere seconds, we can go on-line and find exactly what we want. And then get distracted because of attention-demanding things like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, IMDb, Wikipedia... So we probably don't actually save any time in the long run.

Computers allow anyone with the time and patience to write a novel, but then so do typewriters, and pencils... However, computers allow those people to disseminate their novel all over the world without the need for a publisher! This in many respects is a good thing. Somewhat less good is that the same people can also spread their work to everyone without the intervention of an editor.

O: Why do you think that writers need editors?

MC: We need editors for lots of reasons, but I guess the primary reason is that we're not always (or, indeed, hardly ever) the best judge of our own work. Example: It's very easy to become so enamoured with a particular scene or line that you spend a huge amount of much time tweaking it and polishing it and making it the very best it can be. The editor has the advantage of distance: he or she can look at that scene objectively - without the author's clouding pride at having created such a masterpiece - and determine whether the scene actually needs to be there at all.

That's happened to me many times... I had a fantastically brilliant and hilarious line in The Quantum Prophecy that I just knew everyone was going to love, and the first thing my editor did was strike it out. I argued, "But that's a great line! It's really funny and it lifts that scene way up!" His counter-argument: "Yes, it's quite funny. It's also self-indulgent, unnecessary and will be distracting to the readers."

He was right, of course: that oh-so-brilliant line was in the narrative, not the dialogue. It was me showing how clever I thought I was... But a book like that shouldn't be about me, it should be about the characters. They're the ones who should be seen to be clever.

It's for reasons like this that movies are rarely edited by their directors. Sure, the director gets some say in how it's edited, but they shouldn't have the final word.

With books, sometimes a writer becomes extremely popular, and with such popularity comes power. And (as Uncle Ben never actually said in the first Spider-Man story) with great power comes great responsibility. There are quite a few writers out there who have attained so much power that their books are frequently published with very few editorial changes: J.K. Rowling's fifth Harry Potter novel - by far the longest of the series - really needed someone armed with a red pen to edit the heck out of it. Someone not afraid of upsetting Ms Rowling. Someone with the courage to sit her down and say, "Yes, you've written a very big book. Well done. But more isn't always better. Take out about 100,000 words of Harry's annoying whining - 'Oh no! Dumbledore has told me that if something bad happens I should go to him, and now something bad has happened and I mysteriously don't know what to do about it apart from moping!' - and it'll be a much better book."

I'm not blaming Ms Rowling for this, not even slightly: Writers are too close to their own work to be objective, especially when their work has become so successful that everywhere they turn they encounter people telling them how brilliant they are. But - as I've said many times - the success of a book is rarely due to the skills of the writer.

O: What in the writing process actually make you want to write? How
much of it would you see as work versus how much is pure fun?

MC: For the most part, I love the entire process. It's all work, but it's all fun too... Of course it can get frustrating from time to time, especially when I'm in the middle of developing a plot and I've got several dozen bits and pieces floating around my brain, all queued up because I can't quite type fast enough to get them all out - and then the phone rings, and it's some well-intentioned friend or loved one who opens the conversation with "So... Whatcha doin'?"

About eighty per cent of my "writing time" is spent developing plots. That part really is a lot of fun, because it's where all the ideas come together (and break apart, and come together in different patterns...). Once I've nailed down the plot I begin the task of creating the first draft. That part can be tough going, especially at the beginning, because I know that I've got four to six weeks of solid work ahead of me and if I stop for any reason then there's a chance I might not get back into it. But after about the first week I start to pick up speed and then I don't even notice the time passing.

The first ten thousand words or so take about ten days, but by the end I'm generally putting down a minimum of four thousand words a day. Once it's all done, the actually HARD work begins: re-reading, marking, editing, rewriting... And then it goes to the editor for his input. By the time the book gets to the final copy-edit (which is exactly where I am now with next year's book) I find it incredibly tough-going: I know the story inside-out and I really just want to be done with it and move on to something new.

O: Your dialogue is often beautifully structured. Do you spend a lot
of time pouring over it to make it sound right, or are the characters
"living inside your head", as they say?

MC: Well, thank you for the compliment!

I find the dialogue usually comes fully-formed when I'm writing first-draft stuff, but that's only because by that stage I already know the characters inside-out. Their dialogue is shaped by their experience, education, knowledge, intelligence and motivation. People subconsciously adapt their speech patterns depending on their situation: Danny Cooper, for example, is usually fairly placid and almost submissive, more or less content to go with the flow. But if he's pushed too far he will snap: his dialogue becomes sharper, staccato, much more forceful and authorative. This is why he's the real leader of the New Heroes, even though most of the other characters don't realise that.

One of the readers' favourite characters in the New Heroes / Quantum Prophecy series is Razor... When first introduced he's clearly just a thug, but as the series progresses we see that he has absolutely zero self-confidence (a product of his background, which will be clarified in some future book!) so he pushes people around because it's the only way he knows to establish his mark on the world. As the series progresses Razor becomes more at ease with himself and this is reflected in his manner of speaking.

All that said, there are occasions when the dialogue just doesn't come out the way I want it to, and that really slow down the writing process. But almost without exception this happens because I don't quite know what I want to say. In those instances I have to step way back and consider how to get the information across in the simplest way. Simplicity is almost always better, especially with younger characters. An older character might say "I'm not sure I trust that guy - sometimes he says one thing and does another. I know he probably has good reasons for the way he acts, but he still isn't telling us the whole story. Until I know for sure, I guess I'll have to play along." A younger character in the same situation just might say, "That guy's such a jerk," and leave it at that.

O: What was the last great book that you read?

MC: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Every year or so I go on a classics binge and read "proper" novels, you know, the sort that win literary awards... Those books that have a greater amount of text written about them than the books themselves contain. To be honest, most of them are fairly dull. In my opinion - picking up the thread of an answer to an earlier question! - the purpose of a novel is to entertain the reader, not to be a showcase for how clever the author is. It does seem, at times, that the best way to win a literary award is to write a novel with miserable characters and a single plot strand that has a down-beat ending. Y'see, if nothing much happens in your book then the literati will add their own interpretations to it. Of course, that's true of all books: depth is not something the writer puts into a book; it's something the reader takes out of it.

But Heart of Darkness was a good read. Sure, it's got a paper-thin plot and only one real character - and he only appears right at the end - but that's why it works. The presence of Kurtz (the unseen character) is spread throughout the entire tale: long before we get to meet him we're told - and shown - examples of how he has affected not only the other characters but pretty much the whole of the Congo jungle. This is an old trick, but it's one that's tough to pull off with any real success. In my opinion Conrad manages it far more successfully than Beckett does in Waiting for Godot, primarily because in that story it's clear from the beginning that we're never going to meet Godot - he's got "literary conceit" written all over him. In Heart of Darkness it doesn't really matter whether we get to meet Kurtz in person: he's effectively been a ghost standing next to the narrator all the way through (not literally: it's not a ghost story!).

I was most of the way through Heart of Darkness when I realised that the whelming sense of deja vu I was getting wasn't because I'd already read it, but because Copolla nicked the plot for Apocalypse Now. Such cheek!

MC: Cradlegrave, which has just finished its run in 2000 AD. Man, that was disturbing! Hoodies on a council estate in England... That's scary enough, but add in some... No, I won't say. Don't want to spoil it!

Aside from 2000 AD (and the Judge Dredd Megazine, both of which are even better now than they have been in years), I recently re-read The Twelve, vol 1., by J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Weston. Absolute comic-book gold, that one is. Unfortunately the book has been on hiatus for a while now, so it could be years before they get to finish the tale.

For what it's worth: the last really, really bad comic I read was Superman: True Brit. Written by Kim "Howard" Johnson (yes, he really does have punctuation in his name) with the alleged help of John Cleese, it purports to tell the story of Superman if he'd landed in England instead of America. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it lacks jokes and instead relies on tired old stereotypes. It's been a long time since I encountered a graphic novel that was so painful to read.

MC: Epicon, by Globus. You need to buy this album, and you need to buy it right now! Globus are a bunch of people who work for a company that creates music for movie trailers, among other things. You've almost certainly already heard some of their work, even if you don't realise it. The album contains thirteen of the best pieces of music I've ever heard (and one other song I don't care for that much, but that's what playlists are for).

MC: Movies: Well, we watched Changeling yesterday... That was great, even though there are no aliens, monsters, superheroes or robots in it. My favourite movie of recent years is Shoot 'Em Up - no monsters, aliens, superheroes or robots in that one either, but there's an awful lot of gunfire and over the top and completely unbelievable stunts. Sometimes you just have to have a gunfight on a plane and then jump out and have another gunfight on the way down.

TV: I've given up on a lot of TV shows lately... Lost (too confusing), Heroes (meh) and Fringe (seen it all before). It can be hard to follow a show these days because so many of them are cancelled before they get a chance to find their feet.

I'm really enjoying Harper's Island at the moment. It's silly in a Twin Peaks kind of way, and a heck of a lot of fun. The most recent series of Ashes to Ashes was good too, though it doesn't have the same impact as Life on Mars had. Still, I can't help wondering where they're going to go next with the concept (what I'd love to see is a series that opens with Gene Hunt getting shot or something and then waking up in 1950 - how cool would that be?).

Battlestar Galactica was great - despite Iggy Bloody Pop ruining the mood at every ad-break - right up to the very end, when it all went wonky and predictable. Shame. Still, they could have saved it at the very end by having Patrick McNee's voiceover from the original series: "There are those who believe that life here began out there..." But they didn't.

MC: Meeting everyone again - that's the best thing about conventions! That, plus the chance to actually meet people: in the average week I meet maybe three or four people. Which probably explains why I seem to talk a lot.

MC: Nothing new out at the moment... Unless you want to count the latest issue of Zarjaz, the 2000 AD fanzine - I've got a story in there (And so does my fellow Octocon guest Alan Nolan). Plus I created the logo and wasn't credited (sniff!).

Also: Visit my websites and check out all the cool free stuff (and click on my Adsense links so that I earn a few pennies).
www.quantumprophecy.com
http://www.iol.ie/~carrollm
http://www.iol.ie/~carrollm/shs

O: You poor thing! Thank for taking time out of your poor, unacredited schedule to chat with us! See you in October