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Imaginales 2008 : les interviews !

Par Linaka, le 05/07/2008 à 14:00

Notre entretien avec Tad Williams (en anglais)

When did you start writing ? Who or what brought you to this passion ?

I started writing actually fairly late, considering all the other things I had been doing. So, my first book was published in 1985, and I sent it in to the publishers in 1984, so I was probably writing it for the two years of 83 and 1984 - because there was one of those situations where I would come home from my jobs (and I had usually more than one) and then I would write on my dining-room table before I fell asleep.
But I did not originally think I was going to be a writer, I did a lot of other things first. The thing a bout writing was that it was something I could do on my own, and that I could do in my own time ; whereas playing in a band, or doing radio, or theater, were very much things you have to do with other people and other people schedules. So as I got to be into my middle twenties, it was much easier to do something like writing that I could, you know, squeeze in between twelve o'clock and three o'clock in the morning.

What incited you or pushed you toward imaginary literature ? Why does it attract you ?

Well, one of the reasons, from a practical point of view, that I started with fantasy, was because since I had read a lot of it, growing up, and was very familiar with it, I felt that I would be a better judge of whether I was any good, you know. I felt like I can look at what's out there in the field and say : « I think I can do at least this well. »
But the main reason I had read it in the first place was because I fell in love with it very very early : my favorite books when I was very young were all these things with, among other things, a sort of an element of the fantastic to them, either animal stories like The wind in the Willows, or Winnie the Pooh or things like that, when I was really little. Or, as I got to be older - we have a fantasy English writer called E.Nasbit who wrote a lot of very famous kind of magical books for kids. And then later on I discovered people like Ray Bradbury, and J.R.R Tolkien, and you know, that had a big effect on me. And Tolkien sent me to all kinds of other fantasy, so I began to read older fantasy writers.
So because of that, when I got started to read what was contemporary in the field, I could see that a lot of people didn't have the broad experience of books that I had and I felt : « Ok, so here's something I can bring to this field, is that I have read more than just other fantasy novels. »

What book would you first advise to someone, for him to discover fantasy ?

Oh, it depends on the age of the reader. It used to be in the old days that everybody started with Tolkien, but we have a different readership now. There's much more available in young adult fiction that people can read, which was more limited in those days.
I mean, you know, if it's a young kid, then I would give them The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S Lewis, maybe The Hobbit, or some of Ray Bradbury's more magical type things, like his collection October country or something like that, that has witches and monsters and things in it like that.
But an older reader, who has never read fantasy ... Again it would depend on what they'd already liked – if they liked really well-written intense historical fiction, I might suggest that they start with somebody like George Martin, if they liked more entertaining stuff, I would say : « Oh, read some Terry Pratchett. » You know, I'd say it really depends on what it is that would lead that person into the field, there's so much to choose from.

What book have you read lately ?

I'm reading a lot of stuff always, and only a part of it is fantasy and science-fiction. So for instance, I'm reading a wonderful book by a Chinese writer, Mo Yan, which is called Life and Death are wearing me out, and it's about a guy who's being reincarnated, he's executed by the early Chinese revolution – people of his village (he's a land owner), kick him out and execute him. So he comes back from hell, basically, as a donkey, and he's owned by his former peasants. And then he keeps reincarnating as other animals and we get this huge picture of the cultural revolution in China and all the changes, and communism.
But, in one sense it's a fantasy novel, you know, there's fantastic elements, but nobody else considers it's that – it's something we often talked about. So I mean I'm reading that and I'm really enjoying it.

Some writers need to get completely isolated from the rest of the world to be able to write ; is it the same for you ? How do you work ?

No – it's actually very interesting because my wife and I both work in the same office (we have a big office room in our house, and we both work there). She wants the door closed, she wants, you know, complete silence - I would happily listen to music, I get up and wander in and out, I go and play with the kids, I come back...
Sometimes I don't even do any writing until the end of the day, but I just think about what I'm gonna work on, and then I sit down for maybe an hour, an hour and a half, and spend the whole time « prrrrt », writing really fast. So I'm very flexible, I'm hard to distract, I'm usually capable of writing even if there's noise and things.
But a lot of writers like my wife need silence and solitude.

Do you believe fantasy has its place at university ? Do you think it should be studied in college ?

A qualified, yes. We do have to remember that there's a large portion of our genre that is very formulaic, it's written to fill a market, it's written many times for younger readers who are less discriminating readers, who just want the same kind of story over and over and over. And that unfortunately gives the rest of it a bad name.
The fact is there are a lot of people who consider themselves fantasy writers, who are just as good as the best mainstream writers or really people in any field.
So yes, you could certainly build a course out of excellent fantasy books that would still give you a chance to talk about the field as a whole, and why it appeals to people, and what the tropes are and things like that.

Where does this human fascination for the myth, the fantasy, the imaginary come from ?

I think that myth, and to an extent, fantasy fiction as it draws on that kind of thing, is satisfying to people because it is an objectification, meaning making something real and concrete, that is essentially the workings of the inner self.
In other words, the fact is that the preferred form of the fantasy novel is the quest fantasy. There's a reason : that is a metaphor for life, for the individual life and the need, first of all, to understand things that need to be changed, and then the assembling of different tools and skills and sometimes a circle of people, that can help you, and then moving for then finally confronting the problems in their most severe form and eventually, usually, overcoming them in some way, although not without being changed by them.
This is a classic metaphor and we happen to write those mythological versions of these things, but when we're talking about dragons, you know, we're probably really talking about things that are real life as well. We're talking about, you know : « I have to break away from my parents », or : « I have a crushing case of not feeling I'm good enough » or something.
But let's face it, if you're going to, you can write about that and that what's more mainstream fiction is about, especially literary fiction is about dealing with the complexity of life. But we people in fantasy and science-fiction enjoy what we call « the sense of wonder » of also creating objective things to represent that. That's also fun, because then it becomes also puzzle solving and the wonder of horrifying things and beautiful things that don't exist. So that's our own particular way of dealing with it, but the metaphors are essentially common to everybody in terms of what they represent.

Do you build your imaginary with the real world around you, or mostly with your past readings ?

I try, in this sense I think of myself as being ... in science-fiction, there's a distinction between hard science-fiction - and what they usually mean when they say hard science-fiction they mean science-fiction that is very technical, it's really carefully extrapolated from scientific reality. You don't just have things like time machines without spending the entire book explaining how this is possible and in some cases if it's not, doesn't seem possible, you just don't use it.
I kind of write what I think of sometimes as the fantasy version of hard science-fiction, in the sense that I try to make worlds that really would work, that have the complexity and the confusion of the real world, that not everybody does the same thing, that people don't agree, there are many cultures flowing together and that any contemporary culture is bits and pieces of everything that it's coming to contact with.
I remember one of the things that frustrated me when I first read some of the fantasy writers who came along in the seventies, is that they would create these cultures which were like : everybody lived in a tree and they would all be tree-people and they would do tree-people things, and I would always say : « But how do they make a living, why are they the only tree-people, what about the people who don't want to live in the tree ? where are they going ? »
There's always questions about where are the edges of these things ? how does it flow out into the rest of the society ? Why is this one group of people and that's all they've ever done for thousands of years ? So that kind of stuff. I definitely look to the real world and how complicated human society is in the real world.

Is there a place among all the places you created that you cherish the most, a place where you'd like to live in ? And is there a character that you love more than the others ?

As I've often said, the only fantasy world where I'd like to live in would be the one that would have actual modern plumbing, I don't like the idea of being dirty (laughs), I don't like the idea of, you know, no toilets that flush, no running water.
I'm not a romantic, I'm not one of those people who think : « Oh, it would be lovely to live back in the Middle-Ages. » Yes, you don't mind dying when you're twenty-eight years old from a disease or losing all your teeth by the time you're thirty and things like that.
So I don't have a romantic view of that, there's certainly places that I've invented that have wonderful aspects to them that I feel like : « Yes, I would like to see that in real life », sort of my equivalence of Tolkien's Lothlorien or Rivendell. In the first book of what in French is called L'Arcane des Epées, in that series there is one of the characters who spends time amongst the - we would call them the fairies or the elves, they're called the Sithi - and I just tried to make it as unusual as possible. And I felt like : « Yes, I'd like to see that place, I'd like to be there ». I'm too much a creature of my own environment to probably ever be comfortable living there, but I'd like to visit it.
Now there are places that I invented for the Other Land books, L'Autremonde, like the endless house, which would be great fun to explore. Again, depending on the state of the plumbing ; whether I want to live there or not, I don't know.
So yeah, there's certainly things that appeal to me but as I said I'm also very much a creature of the modern age : I like my conveniences, I like my mp3 player, I like to watch Godzilla movies on television late at night, I like having a car, so I can go visit friends who live four hundred miles away. Although, maybe if we didn't have that, my friends wouldn't live four hundred miles away ! So, again, it's part of the world we live in but, by and large, I've never had the romantic urge to go and live in one of those places I create.
I'm trying to write about them like an anthropologist, saying : « Here's what it's like », for you to observe from the outside so you can understand the lives of these people.
About the character, that's always hard to say because some writers, I think, really identify with their characters, and sometimes their characters are sort of idealised versions of something ; they are either the kind of people they'd like to date or some of them are the kind of people they'd like to be. I think that's sometimes kind of a problem because I know there are instances of authors who lose perspective : they fall in love with their characters and they can't separate themselves to see that maybe the character is not as endearing to the reader as it is to me.
So my favorite characters are usually favorites of mine for different reasons, they're not because I want to be them or because I idealise them but they're more my favorites because they're fun to write. They're often characters that get to do or say funny things, because that's always really fun to do.
When I was doing L'arcane des épées, there was a character named Binabik, the troll, and I really really enjoyed writing him, because he had a way of looking at things and thinking about things that was different than most of the other characters. It forced me to think differently, but also allowed me to try and write him so he was both fascinating, but also funny, without being pathetic - not funny because he was weird or stupid or ridiculous but because he was so different, his sense of humour came out in. So he was a fun character to write.
On the other hand, in the Other Land books, there's a character called Dread who is a serial killer, (who is I hope very far from what I am and what I'd want to be) and what he does is horrifying, so there's no part of me that says : « Oh, this is fun to write ». But it was something that was fascinating to write, because I was really trying to get into the mind of somebody who is that different than most of us, and make him not likeable, at all! but understandable, so that the reader felt like : « Yes, I can believe that this character is real. » So that's a challenge, and that makes a favorite character also.

Now this is a question almost mystical : do you believe in the presence of the fairies, the lutins, in a world which is hidden to us but from where all our legends come from ?

I would say yes and no ; no in the sense that I am a pragmatist, and I don't see evidence of it existing in our modern era, which is not to say that such a thing never was, but I don't see it around me now.
On the other hand, the more that I learn about how the world really works, and how the universe works, the more complex and wonderful and mysterious it becomes.
People who study modern physics, even just amateurs like me, realize that we may never understand how the universe works because everytime we cut it open and think « Ok, this is the biggest or the smallest thing that we can find », there's always something else! We're still trying to figure out if there are other dimensions, and there are mathematical models that talk about ten or twelve dimensions.
So in a world where the most serious rock-solid pragmatists that exist, namely phycisists, who only believe in mathematical proof, are saying : « We have no idea whether we live in the middle of twelve dimensions, or thousands of dimensions, or just the ones we can see », then who am I to say what is real and what is not real ?

What's your feeling about Epinal – the welcome, the festival itself ?

Well, several different things : I have a response to Epinal and I have a response to being back in France in general.
As far as Epinal goes, I really like the fact that it has stayed focused on books, because there's many other places where the conventions – in a desire to make it available and interesting to as many different kinds of people as possible – have really spread out and so - nothing wrong with this, at all, but they're not very much about books anymore, and that's what I love most of all, the books. I mean, I like a good movie like anybody else, my son loves gaming, you know, I've nothing against those things, but what I love is the books, so I really admire the fact that Epinal is about books. That is the focus, yes.
As far as me personally being back in France and being here in Epinal, it also has really underlined something that I've been feeling for a while, which is that I have not been very much in touch with my European readership, until the last few years. In France it's a very good case, (just by the fact that I've been selling books in France for twenty years or more, and that I actually speak a little bit of French), where I've never done any kind of official convention or signing tour or anything here, so I'm much more conscious of that now, and I really want to do something about it.
So it's great fun for me to come here and find people who like my books, and of course people are lovely ; but I always have a very skewed perspective on that anyway, because whenever I'm going somewhere for professional reasons, if people are coming up to talk to me they often know my work, they wouldn't bother to talk to me if they didn't like it, so I see the best of people. It's a really nice thing. So I have all those things going on, I'm having a lovely time, but I'm also saying to myself : « I really have to get back here more often ».

How do you explain your high popularity in Germany, compared with the other European countries ?

Part of that is just due to chance : when we sold the Other Land series there, we went to a new publisher, and that publisher was a well-known literary publisher, so they were very respected by the media. But they also happened to be Tolkien's publisher, which is one of the reasons that I went there - they've been publishing Tolkien since the 1960's - so the combination of those two things meant that they were just starting to think about getting more into fantasy and science-fiction, so I was one of their first. But also all the sudden I was treated like a respectable author, by the mainstream media in Germany; I was doing newspaper interviews, magazine interviews, and some television and radio ; so that was the first thing, that I had a respectable publisher and all of a sudden I must be a pretty good writer, if Klett-Cotta was publishing me.
Then the second thing was that Other Land got made into a radio drama in Germany, which wound up being the longest radio drama in German history, in the history of German radio: twenty-four hours long, two hundred actors, sound effects, music... It was aired, they made a big deal out of it and it was aired as it came out, so it did not come out at once, and then the cds, and this special package went on sale and that did really well as well, because they put so much time and energy into this, they figured we must sell it as a CD as well.
So all of a sudden, it was something to people who didn't even normally read science-fiction, in the same way that if you do a film or television, that people can come across without saying : « Oh I want to read this » but they actually just see something on TV and go and like it.
I think that happened by people who were saying : « Oh, what's this strange thing on the radio? », where people are inside of a computer, but they're going down a river, and they're being attacked by giant insects... It's a very strange stuff, so I think that was the next big thing there - but the combination of all these things has meant that it's become a huge and very important market for me.

What could we be expecting for with the third and last book of Shadowmarch ?

What's been really interesting about it, is that two things are going on in that book, two things that make it a little different maybe than some fantasy novels.
One of them is that at the heart of it, it's a family story and the characters really are finding out who they are, not just themselves but what their family history is, and there's a lot of tension and unhappiness that's been in this family, but a lot of love as well, and so I really made family background and family heritage a big part of it. That is probably in part because of where I'm in my life : I have children now, and my parents are getting older and I'm thinking about the transitions of life. I'm realizing there's stories that I don't know, that I want to hear from them before they're gone and things like that ; but I'm lucky enough that they're still healthy and you know, I can do something about it.
So that's a big part of it ; the other big part is that I wrote the first book and then the second book in the mythology of it, and there are actually several conflicting mythologies that all have a common root. In the first book they just sort of seem to be in the background, it's just like : « That's what the people believe in in this world ».
In the second book you begin to get the feeling that there's something going on, mythologically, that has something to do with what's happening in the present day.
In the third volume, the larger mythological world really is beginning to intrude into the so-called real world so all of that stuff is kind of – we would say in English, the expression is « The chickens are coming home to roost » you know : all these things that were set up before, all these old legends and stories are not just beginning to be important but they're actually beginning to come true in the third volume.
And so the sweep of the last volume is going to be, this isn't literally it, but I mean, say, for instance, if your society believes that you are waiting for a messiah, what actually happens when the messiah is going to come back ? Or if your society believes there are lots of gods, and they're always having wars with each other, what is that like for the humans, and what if they started doing that again ? or things like that. So there's this whole mythological aspects in the last volume that is much more explicit than it was in the first two, you begin to realize « Oh that's really what's going on here. »
That's the best I can say without giving anything away.

Thanks a lot !

My pleasure.

Pages de l'article

1. Notre entretien avec Sean Russell
2. Notre entretien avec Sean Russell (en anglais)
3. Notre entretien avec Michel Robert
4. Notre entretien avec Tad Williams
5. Notre entretien avec Tad Williams (en anglais)
6. Notre entretien avec Robin Hobb
7. Notre entretien avec Robin Hobb (en anglais)