Luke Bellmason Interview, Part Two

Here is part two of M Joseph Murphy's interview with author Luke Bellmason:

You did the cover for Canterbury Tales yourself. It’s very impressive, a rarity for authors. Simple and yet instantly recognizable. Is there a difference, for you, between writing and creating visual art?

Thank you for saying so. I am so critical of my own work and it's almost impossible to judge yourself. I think there is link between all of the creative arts. music, painting and writing and it's aesthetics. It's such a difficult concept to grasp because it's entirely subjective. Two people might agree that something looks beautiful but ten others might not. Who is right? I know when I've done something that looks right image wise, but I can't explain how. I just look at it and say to myself "yes, that's right." When someone else agrees that's very pleasing. I only wish it were that easy with writing, I am never quite sure whether that's good or not. There's a lot less certainty.

I think I must have a visual sort of mind, I tend to visualize everything in the story before I ever write it down. The writing part is the last part, like the events have happened and the words are just the 'reporting' of those events. I did a two year course in visual communications about six years ago and, even though I can't draw that well and have never seriously considered working in the industry professionally, I learned how to present things professionally. How to 'sell' yourself and take a professional attitude to manage deadlines and such. It seems like something so simple now, but before going to college I would start projects and never finish them, or never plan them out to how I would complete them. I'm a lot more workman-like about my writing as a result of that and it's certainly come in very handy to know how to do typesetting and produce stuff for print and all that.

The other great thing I learned at college was to be experimental. You have to do something which will stand out. Everyone has access to Photoshop and computer imaging software these days but they are just tools. There's a great temptation to let the computer do all the work but then you'll simply end up with something which looks exactly like everyone else's.

At college, they would encourage us to go out and photograph 'textures' or to collect unusual objects, or do something else totally random. Then we'd have to incorporate these into our work. It made us think differently and come at things from another direction. I have certainly tried to apply this ethos to my writing.

Like the story I'm working on at the moment, which has the plot line of 'discovery'. The main character discovers something which ends up changing his life and leading him in turn to discover something fundamental about himself. I took the word 'discovery' as a theme and 'discovery' wrote the first draft instead of carefully outlining it like I normally would. The result was a different story to the one I would have written if I'd planned it, probably. I don't actually know this for certain of course. I would be inclined to say I learned 'to think outside of the box' if that phrase wasn't so hideously overused.

Describe your writing process? How often do you write and how long per session?

I write do a lot of my writing at work, in the truck or sitting in the driver's waiting room. I can easily clock up three or four hours of sitting-around-time a night. Having said that, I do have an iPad and waste a huge amount of that time on twitter, or watching TV shows and movies.

I recently set up a very convoluted system for making myself write, which involved writing a text adventure game. Check my blog for more details. It's completely crazy, and I know it's crazy, but it seems to be working. It goes back to what I said about being experimental. Nobody in their right mind would waste time creating a text adventure game to help them write a novel, but doing the obvious and the expected is only a sure route to creating something obvious and expected.

The first four tales took over four years to write, but it allowed me to develop a kind of production line system where I start out with a concept, themes and a plot then go on through drafts on to a final version.

Link: Kurt Vonnegut Explains Drama

So to begin with I draw up (with coloured lines and everything) an outline for each main character. If you've seen that video of Kurt Vonnegut explaining Cinderella and other classic tales, you'll get the idea. That outline forms the basis for the first draft, which is a really free-flowing exploration of all the ideas I've had for the story. I don't hold anything back, I just chuck everything in. Usually the story has been gestating for months and rolling around inside my head. I like it best when the first draft spills onto the screen in a couple of weeks.

Sorting out the mess of the first draft is the task of the second draft, which is where I try and figure out where the scenes are, and each scene has to advance the plot. This is vital with a short story where space is at a premium, but it also keeps the story moving along and I like to switch up locations a lot too, have contrasts between scenes so the mood changes and the reader gets a sense of following the character through their journey.

The third draft is where I edit down, make things clearer, try to cut out scenes which aren't necessary or merge scenes. It's great when you can double up things too, like having dialogue which doesn't just explain the plot, but also describes a character and maybe foreshadows or sets something up for later. The third draft really has to get the story ready for publication, with line-editing to cut down the word count as much as possible. Someone once told me to 'imagine the editor is charging you for each word'.

Then there's the final draft, where I do the last bit of proof-reading and checking for overused words, like 'just' or 'decide' or 'wonder', which I seem to use a hell of a lot!

I am the worst procrastinator in the world and will do anything to avoid writing, but with this new system I'm hoping plan out my time much more carefully and get the next volume out in a year.

The ideal amount of time I've found for writing is about 90 minutes. You have to decide to make those 90 minutes sacred, keep away from Twitter and the internet. Even so, for the first half an hour is just messing about, getting the brain warmed up. Then I'll hopefully be in the zone for a good hour, before I stop. I stop at the end of the time, even unless things are going really well, because I'll go off the boil and stop producing anything any good.

One of the things I like to do at the end of a session like this as well is to set up the thing I'm going to be doing in the next session. Write the first few lines of the next scene or a few lines of dialogue. So I'm not coming to the work completely cold next time.

What do you think is your weak point as a writer? Or, to say that another way, describe something about your writing you would like to improve.

I often worry about my characters and whether they're all the same, or whether they're all just versions of me. I enjoy writing dialogue but it's so hard to get into a character if you're not sympathetic with them or if they're supposed to be the 'bad guy'.

My main gripe though is my lack of output, the procrastination that I mentioned. But then again, I would not be too unhappy to have written only one or two good books by the time I leave this rock by one means or another.

I used to read a lot of books on writing and listen to writing podcasts and go to writing workshops, but in the end I think you can overdo it. One tends to end up with analysis paralysis, where you end up doing nothing because you think everything you're writing is bad. There's a sort of bad writing hypochondria where you recognise every example of bad writing and think 'yes, I do that.' You can easily convince yourself you're writing is shockingly bad and that has the effect of stopping you from writing, which is the opposite of what you should do of course, which is write more and more until you get better.

Or, you could do what I do and just have your story told by a narrator and then blame all the bad writing on him.

Lastly, how many volumes are planned for Canterbury Tales? Have you thought about what you’d like to write after the series is finished?

There will be two more volumes of the tales to come, making up the total of twelve tales. Volume 2 should be out next year, with volume 3 following in 2015. Then I'll probably collect the three volumes together into one book, and I'm thinking that maybe I should add some new stuff for that version.

There could be an infinite number of follow ups, but I'm a big fan of ending things before they go stale. Leave your audience wanting more and all that.

The book after was planned so long ago, well before the Canterbury Tales were even conceived. But it's going to be a better book for the fact that I have honed my story-telling skills on this project first. I'm really aware of learning all I can from this project to build up to writing the next one.

It will also be based on video-games and the culture that surrounds them. It'll have two levels going on, a little like the Canterbury Tales has; firstly the group of players in an online game and also the events and characters they play in the game itself. It will also tie in with what I said about online games and the character's stories emerging from the players themselves, rather than having pre-written and scripted things in the game.

I'd love to explore the iteration between the players and their characters in a system which could potentially generate and manage an entire fictional universe drawn from all the world's literature and culture on the internet. A sort of automated AI storytelling machine which injects new stuff into a video game all the time. Such a game would be endlessly playable (not to mention highly addictive.)

Luke Bellmason Interview, Part One

Here's part one of M Joseph Murphy's interview with Luke Bellmason:

I met Luke Bellmason through our mutual friend Jae Blakney. She posted the preface to Canterbury Tales on her blog. I was immediately impressed by the quality of writing. Thankfully, Luke and I have talked several times and he recently agreed to an in-depth interview. Here is Part 1.

  

In your preface you discuss the process of coming up with Canterbury Tales. I think it’s a valuable story for young writers. Did you have someone give you helpful advice when you started writing? If so, who was it and what did they say?

I can't think of any one person who gave me advice when I started writing because I don't think I told anybody I was doing it! I was one of those writers who was scared to show my work to anyone because they might not like it. I am still like that and I imagine it's a natural thing not to want to hear criticism but I didn't even give my work to my friends to read.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to join a writing group and it covered everything you needed to know from fiction, to writing articles, to how newspaper stories are written, to poetry, to romance, to short stories to novels. I can remember reading out a story I'd written for the first time to the group. It was a ghost story about a submarine and it was quite 'atmospheric'. I read it out to the class and it was the very first time anyone had heard my work. A woman at the front of the class said she had been 'transported away' to the place I was describing and she could see the rolling waves, the rain and the dripping walls. I think that was the moment I realised the power that writing could have. Unfortunately, I had neglected to give the story an ending so she said she was dying to know what happened next!

That was the one experience I'd say that made me realise that being an author gave you a tremendous power to create anything you wanted inside people's heads. After that I was hooked, and even though sometimes I feel like life would be a lot easier if I didn't have this little writing demon nagging at me day and night to "sit down and write", I know I'll never be able to give it up.

Once you become a writer, you can never look at the world the same way again. Wherever you go and whatever you do it gives you a purpose; you're an observer, you get to look at things and think about why they are the way they are, what they would be like if they were different.

One if the other major events in my early writing days was finding Douglas Adams. When I first saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on TV, the old 80s series, I realised that I was Ford Prefect. I'd always suspected that I wasn't originally from this planet, so the idea of being a researcher for some intergalactic guide book really appealed to me. That and the fact that Ford (like his creator) managed to be a writer without actually doing that much writing. For Ford (and Douglas) the experiencing of things was far more important than the writing about them bit.

Sorry, I seem to have drifted somewhat from the original question.

No. That’s a perfect answer. In your introduction you mention a video game called Elite. Have you tried replaying it recently?

Yes, I did play a game called 'Oolite' a few years ago, which is a freeware version of Elite for the Mac. It's been updated and expanded quite a bit and has a great modding community, but it has a mode which lets you play it as the original Elite. What you tend to forget is how boring it was! Compared to modern games, there's really very little going on, so much of the game is in your own imagination. That's also the key to good writing I think. The more you cram into someone's head, the less work the reader, or the player, has to do which means they're less engaged.

I often wonder if playing Elite had an influence on my choice of career because I ended up as a truck driver! I even started learning to fly a helicopter about two years ago and there's a lot of that piloting, trucking kind of vibe going on in the my stories. A lot of the stories involve sitting trapped inside a box, and yet being free to roam the galaxy.

Are you aware that Elite has a sequel coming out (Elite: Dangerous). If so, do you plan on playing it?

Yes! In fact I found out about Elite: Dangerous from Twitter and I saw the Kickstarter page the day after it ended. There was an option on there to buy the rights to publish an official Elite book, but I just missed out! So I could have quite easily made 'The Canterbury Tales' into an Elite book, and it would have been nice to have been part of the big launch next year when the game and all the other books come out. The publicity would have been handy too. In another way though I'm glad I missed the deadline because a) I need the money for flying and b) this way I get total creative control.

From what I read the new game is everything we've been waiting for all these years. I played the original Elite sequel, Frontiers, but found it totally unplayable. They had given it realistic physics and made an astronomically accurate galaxy and solar systems, which was incredibly impressive in its own way, but it totally ruined space combat. The speed of everything was all relative to the nearest planet or star and enemy ships would whip past you at thousands of miles per hour, then circle around and whip back again just as fast. You couldn't even hit them!

So I understand that this new Elite has gone in for more of a classic feel, with much more detailed planetary systems, economics and political systems, and everything is supposed to be tied in with one online persistent universe, so when a system decides to build a new station, it will affect the commodity prices for the construction materials in the surrounding systems and so on. Wars can cause humanitarian disasters which will put the food prices up, all kinds of complex interactions will be going on all the time.

What interests me about all of this is the law of 'unintended consequences' and what happens when you let real people loose on an open world. Emergent behaviour is certain to create new and fascinating things in the game which the designers hadn't anticipated. I love all of that. I played EVE Online for a bit and liked how the stories in the game came purely from the player interactions rather than being put there by the designers.

One of the stories I'm working on now for Volume 2, the Miner's Tale, is based on my brief experiences inEVE Online. If Elite: Dangerous can somehow mix the chaos of an online game with the structure of the old Elite, it will be awesome.

If I remember correctly, you’ve never actually read the original Canterbury Tales.  Do you plan on reading it now?

I fear that the original Canterbury Tales is totally impenetrable to anyone who hasn't studied the medieval period and knows how to read “olde English”. Plus the fact it's poetry. I read somewhere that it wasn't just one of the first books published, but one of the first published in English. At the time, books were in German, French or Latin, and the English people spoke was far removed from what we speak now, it really is another language. Remember also that not many people would have been able to read or write when the Canterbury Tales came out.

I suppose in a way, the world of medieval England is as far removed from us now as the world of starships, faster-than-light travel and aliens, so maybe there's a neat sort of parallel.

I did find an updated version of the Canterbury Tales translated into a more readable kind of English, the Percy Mackaye version if anyone wants to find it. I could see myself reading this at some point, though it's still quite hard going. I actually based the language of the 'story-teller' in my book on the kind of language used in this 19th century version.

LINK: Canterbury Tales Kindle Version Translation by Percy Mackaye

The main problem in understanding the book for me would be not knowing much about that time period. The church was a much more powerful force in people's lives and a few of the characters in the original stories are related to religion. In a way, it would be like reading a science-fiction story with all the exposition removed, which might be an interesting exercise.

History fascinates me and I never took much interest in it at school. One of the hardest things about history is forgetting everything that you know and trying to imagine what it was like for people at the time. It's so easy for us to look at major events, like world war two or the sinking of the titanic for example, and look at them with hindsight. People knew and believed different things in the past and that shaped their actions. It's one of the things that annoys me about 'steampunk'. It's lazy history; it doesn't bother to filter out the modern world, it simply assumes everything was the same then as it is now. All steampunk is basically the 'Flintstones' to me.

 Part Two of the Interview Will Be Posted Thursday

For My Review of Canterbury Tales: Click Here

Purchase Canterbury Tales Now on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

 
 

Guest Post: The Plot

Here's another treat from Luke Bellmason. He has a couple more coming up, too.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”

- Robert Benchley

We are sometimes told that there are two kinds of writing; ‘discovery’ and ‘outline’, and that most authors tend to favour one or the other.

I know I am an outline writer because I love to plan things out, to structure my work around a solid plot and to know the reasons behind every action the characters take. Basically, I like every part of the writing process except for the writing part, which I will do anything to avoid.

I think this obsession with outline and plot comes from how I started out writing in the first place. My first stories were actually attempts to write up Role Playing Game (RPG) sessions. I was fascinated by the stories that could be created in these games, since they were not wholly the creation of one person and the characters were a lot more real for the fact that they were all being played by different people, with their own backstory. Each character reacted to the same situation in different ways and almost everything the characters did was governed by their skills and rules and the fickle fate of dice (dice have a great sense of humour). So no matter how much planning you put into a game scenario nobody could ever predict the outcome. Even running the same scenario several times would create a different story each time.

Of course, in RPGs, plot is very important and the outline aspect is quite hard to get right before the game is run. You don’t want your characters to be too restricted else they will get bored since there’s really no decisions for them to make. On the other hand, if you give them too much freedom they won’t do what you want them to and will kill the princess instead of rescuing her, make friends with the dragon instead of killing it and maybe even kidnap the wizard who sent them on the quest in the first place.

The reason a lot of RPGs are in dungeons, or on derelict spaceships or other in remote places is so there’s some structure that you can plan for. The walls of the dungeon are like the plot. Characters have a little freedom to choose which corridor to go down or how to handle a particular puzzle or trap, but they can’t get out of the dungeon. The players will always surprise you of course, and that’s a good thing, but in the end, hopefully, someone will emerge with the gold.

As an interesting side note, I like to think of outline writing as being plot driven and discovery writing as Character driven. With discovery you come up with characters first and then you let them go, taking you on their journey, making the decisions that they must make. Like in the role-playing game, different characters will want different things, will have different experiences and will go down different paths, which makes it hard for the author to impose plot onto them. The flipside of this is that with outline, the story is already set so the destiny of the characters you put into that plot is set.

There’s always this famous statement that’s thrown around that there are only 7 stories in the world, or sometimes it’s 9, or 1, or 42, or whatever. But the book I most like to consult for plots is 20 Master Plots, by Ronald B. Tobias. I can highly recommend this book as it’s been without doubt the most useful writing book I’ve ever read. This reference guide is really at the heart of my latest project The Canterbury Tales.

“20 Master Plots and how to build them” is a refernce book I use constantly when planning a story. It takes you step by step through plots such as Revenge, Rivalry, Quest, Escape, Underdog, Temptation, Discovery, etc. and gives you examples from popular culture to illustrate them. It breaks down these plots into 3 acts. To give you an example, here’s an outline of how the Rivalry plot works;

Rivalry starts out with Act I being the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Your two main characters, the antagonist and the protagonist are equals, but they might not be evenly matched in certain areas. One might have money but not be wise, the other wise but poor, or it could be something else, but as the story begins there must be equilibrium.

The rivals want the same thing, so there’s a power struggle, conflict. The antagonist initiates against the protagonist, which is the catalyst scene, which should come just after the start of the story where you’ve established the status quo. Now the protagonist is falling while the antagonist is on the rise, with these ‘power curves’ being linked. As one goes up, the other should go down by the same amount. Perhaps the rich man frames the wise man for murder and has him sent to prison so he can no longer achieve the goal, leaving the rich man to work towards it unapposed. When the protagonist is sent on his way down we move into Act II.

This is where the curves bend around and start to level out towards the middle of the story. At first things keep getting worse for the protagonist, and better for the antagonist. (It’s just personal choice, but the midpoint is where I like to put a little twist into my stories and send the plot off in a surprising new direction). At the midpoint a reversal of fortune sees the protagonist start to make a come back. As their power curves are linked, a rise for one means a fall for the other until by the end of Act II the rivals are back on equal terms again. Maybe the protagonist met someone in prison who knows the rich man, and who has information to help the protagonist beat him. The twist could be that this information will cause trouble for the protagonist too, but since he’s a wise man he might be able to figure out a way of making things bad for his rival and good for himself. So now it’s time to settle the score as we move into Act III, the final conflict.

In the final act, the protagonist beats his rival, or maybe he doesn’t if you want to really throw a surprise in there. The events of acts I and II will determine the nature of the confrontation. Maybe the wise man has been studying while he was in prison and has learned to exploit the flaws of the rich man’s elaborate security system. This makes the defeat of the antagonist all the sweeter since he brought it on himself by sending his rival somewhere he could learn from criminals. Finally, at the end of Act III, one of them is defeated and order is restored.

It might all sound very formulaic and you would expect that any story written along such a strict format would be stale and clichéd, maybe even predictible. That is where the skill of the writer comes in, the plots are simply a framework which will allow you to build a story. The author has to come up with the details and there are many ways to throw the plot in surprising new directions. Remember also that the further apart you can throw the curves at the midpoint the greater the rise to victory will be. Alternatively you might decide to play with the curves so they hardly diverge, just to see if you can maintain dramatic tension some other way, maybe by not revealing which is the protagonist. You could even kill your protagonist at the midpoint and yet still have hime somehow achieve the goal and defeat the antagonist, all that limits you is your imagination.

When I first started planning The Canterbury Tales I used “20 Master Plots” to work out which Character was going to have which plot. I didn’t know anything about the characters at this point other than their ‘title’; Merchant, Smuggler, Assassin, etc. Because I didn’t have any strong ideas about the characters or who they were, only what they did, I thought that allowing the plots to guide me would be a good way to come up with the characters.

Writing a series of short stories would also give me an opportunity to try out a lot of different plots, working my way through the book and trying out the ones that interested me. In the event it’s taken me a lot longer to write these simple short stories than I anticipated, but I wanted to become an expert at the mechanics of plotting!

So each of the twelve stories has a different plot from Tobias’ book. I’ll describe each individual plotline in separate posts, and hopefully give you an insight into the agonisingly slow weeks, months and years that some of these plots were developed over.

So watch this space and sign up to follow this blog [That's Luke's blog, of course.] for more information.