Notre entretien avec Greg Keyes (anglais)

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

I started writing as soon as I understood there was such a thing. Yes, I wrote little stories and my mother read them, that kind of thing. When I started writing seriously, and tried to get published, I was in my early twenties. I had just finished my undergraduate year in college. I was working two jobs to put my wife through college, and I had a night job. So, I took a typewriter to work. I worked first on short stories, and never sold a short story. So I finally decided I couldn't write short stories, and I decided I had to write novels.
So I settled myself and decided to write one book a year. I did that, and fortunately I sold. Since then I've had no problem.

What incited you or pushed you toward imaginary literature?

That's what I always read when I was growing up.

When and with what book did you discover fantasy?

Fantasy I didn't discover until late; I read science-fiction. I read science-fiction from the age of 7... Heinlein, Asimov. At the age of maybe 13 or 14, in the seventies; Tolkien's books had these really crazy covers, like lizards and things like that. And I thought that it was science-fiction: I didn't know what fantasy was. So I picked up actually the third one, in the library.
Once I got home, I started reading it and for some reason I thought... In the beginning of the book they're on a horse, like Gandalf and Pippin or somebody is on a horse. I thought they were on a train, so for the first chapter I was still thinking it was science-fiction. But by the time I realized it wasn't. I was really kind of interested; so that was when I discovered fantasy. And I started reading Ursula Le Guin, then I started exploring fantasy.

Can you tell us more about your working habits? How many hours a day do you spend writing? How do you work? Have you any ritual?

I do have to drink coffee but I don't know if it's a ritual: I just have to have it. My habits have changed; when I was trying to write a book a year, I would only write at night. And then later, when I was back in school, I had to write within a period of time where school wasn't. So I wrote eight hours a day, just like a job. I got up, had some coffee, worked four hours, had lunch, then back to work, that until five.
Now, I got a little lazier, and I also have a two-year-old son. He stays at home with me, and I have to have a nounou to come and watch him, while I'm working. So I work fewer hours in the day now; I work more at night, after my wife gets home. Rituals? No, I can't really think of anything else.

Would you define yourself as a scriptural or a structural writer? I mean, do you write and get carried by the plot, or do you have to design a specific and accurate structure before settling down to writing?

Well, I do both, because now the way that I sell novels is: I write an outline, and say: "This is the book I will write". Then they pay me, then I write it. Well, they pay me partly, and if I don't write it I have to move out of the country or something, cause they have to get the money back and it's already spent.
So I always outline my books: I always write a complete outline and then never follow it. As I start writing, the characters really start doing kind of what they want. In a sense, it's kinda funny. Have you read any of my books?

Yes, I've read The Age of Unreason.

So, Adrienne was not even planned to be in the book. She was not in the outline. See what I mean? First I thought: "I need to put the character in the French court", and it needed to be a woman. First she is to be a minor character and suddenly, you know, she takes over. So that's a good example.
I can remember one time I was with Terry Brooks and Steven Brust (he's kind of a wild man), and we were talking about this. Terry said: "You write your outline, you follow your outline, that's it" and Steven Brust said "God that's crazy, you don't know where you're going when you start writing, it's not fun if you know where everything is going!" You know, I kind of was in the middle, cause I do plan but then my plans... I never follow them. Because I think I'm a better writer than an outliner. Does that make sense? When I start writing, I get better ideas than when I'm doing the outline, cause the characters start talking, etc.

What qualities do you think a writer should have? For example a strong inner will-power, deep motivation, or a special ability to accept the critics' verdicts ...?

First of all, I often tell people that the real difference between people who do write books and people who don't write books, it's not genius, it's not even having a story to tell - because everybody has got a story to tell - but it's the unnatural ability to sit down and do it. So yeah, there's will-power. And this is the thing I find when I'm talking to people who want to write, this is the main thing: "Wow, I've been working on the outline, I wrote the first chapter six times", and the fact is it's not always fun to write.
Sometimes it is, I mean this is visual, but if you saw me writing, most of the day it would be kinda like this: (Greg pretends he is typing on the keyboard with a bored-to-tears look). But every once in a while, it goes: (Greg clenches his fists in sign of excitement and victory and says "Whaaaaow!"). And it's perfect, you know, it feels good and I'm really happy. Sometimes it's feeling weepy or, you know... There's real emotion and excitement when something interesting happens I hadn't expected.
In terms of accepting the critics, I feel lucky, people haven't been too critical of my books. But you know, occasionally, somebody doesn't like it and, you know, there are books that I don't like, and that other people do, so I'm not too sensitive about it. I guess I don't hinge my whole existence on whether people might like, I've got other things, my family ...

It's much easier to accept advice ...

Sure, as a matter of fact I think one of the things that held me back at first when I was writing short stories ... I'd sent short stories out and get back critiques, and didn't realize how unusual that was. Usually they say: "We don't want your story", in a nice way but they say that. And instead, I was getting advice, and my response, when I was twenty-two, was: "These idiots don't understand my genius!"
It was only really when I did start accepting criticisms as a way of improving my writing that I really did improve. It's also important to be able to tell valid criticism from not valid criticism, and that could be the problem.

What book have you read lately?

I've just read two books I loved and neither of them has anything to do with science-fiction or fantasy. One is called Consider the Oyster and it's just a little book about oysters and how to eat them and enjoy them. It's by MFK Fisher, who wrote this book in I think 1945. She's a brilliant writer and you must read that stuff. I think she lived in France for some time - and I've really enjoyed the oysters since I've been here. They're really good.
And then the other book was ... I forgot the author's name (NDT: Douglas.R.Hofstadter). It's called I'm A Strange Loop and he won the Pulitzer Prize back in the seventies for a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach. Basically, it's a meditation on the nature of consciousness. What is it that makes us us?
So I read a lot of non-fiction. I'm trying to think the last; I enjoyed what I read, and it was probably something my publisher sent me to read. I think it was pretty good.
But for a long time, I haven't read much in the genre. I've mostly read some non-fiction, I watch movies, you know but I don't know why ... I used to read a lot of science fiction and fantasy; I think I feel guilty that I'm not writing. So I don't read that much at all, except in the tub.

What do you think of the commercial aspect of fantasy? I mean do you think flashy book covers or high-budget movies can be held responsible for the contempt some people feel or show for the genre?

Well, yes and sometimes, rightly so. Sometimes fantasy isn't good. But I'm not sure that's what really holds back fantasy from being accepted as more literary. I think that's more about prejudice that comes from established literature. Professors of literature and people who will study literature in university, you know, it is always taught that these things are not worth reading.
But what's funny is if you just don't call it fantasy ...

Yes, in the French universities they talk about « merveilleux ».

Yeah, in the States we have « magic realism », which is from the Latin, mostly Spanish authors who wrote it first. Things which are clearly magical and fantastic and yet catch it in a different way, so it's accepted. For that matter a lot of established literature is fantasy. I mean, the fairy queen, Chanson de Roland, any of this stuff. There may be a line somewhere between myth and fantasy, but I'm not sure where it is. So these kind of stories have always been a part of human culture.

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

Yeah, absolutely. I think so. The funny thing is somebody asked me a similar question earlier this week, and he felt that in United States fantasy was accepted but no. It's not, it's still the same thing. Maybe slightly more because I don't know how things are here, but in the States, like in France apparently, fantasy is not considered as a serious genre.

What is the role of imaginary literature in society? Is it some kind of need? I'm thinking of myths, and tales, etc.

Oh, sure! I was just talking about our mythic past, you know, the legends... In English you have Beowulf, in French you've got Chanson de Roland, Perceval and so forth. And I think that a lot of what fantasy does is as we move in the future we're trying to negotiate with the past, we're trying to decide what part of our mythic past we bring with us, and we reinvent it to make it more relevant. It doesn't mean that, you know what some people do, you could use my book as a Bible and you practice your religion.
But I think that, reading this stuff as a kid, I've got a lot of my moral background from reading heroic fantasy. When I was confronted with situations in high school, I think a lot of my role models were these imaginary characters. And in that sense, the literature helped me make it through the tough times and all that. So I think it fills that function.
In terms of literature and imagination, one thing that we got not so good I think in our culture is playing with ideas in our heads; we let the television do it for us. Not that I don't like movies, but special effects don't help you think at all. Sometimes I prefer movies with more primitive effects because then I can imagine what they are trying to portray. You know, my son, he doesn't watch television at home. We read books, and we play games, we pretend we are doing things... and so forth.
Because I actually didn't have television when I was a child, cause I lived in two places: in Arizona, in the northern part of the desert, and also in Mississipi, in a very rural area; there was no television signal, there was no cable, there was no point in having TV. So I didn't watch TV and it was all reading (I read very early) and imagination.
But even I think in school, they try to kind of ... I remember once I colored a pumpkin I had drawn, and I made it purple. And my teacher said "Pumpkins are not purple" and she gave me a F, she gave me a bad mark. So my mum had to come: "If he wants it to be purple, it could be purple!" (Laughs)

Do you think fantasy can be a form of environmental commitment?

I think that any kind of literature really can do that but I think fantasy is ... In fact, actually I would argue that I do something about it in the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone because in these books basically a spiritual ancient sort of forest deity is waking up and realizing what's going wrong; and his reaction is to start killing people. (Laughs)
But I don't want to fill heads with another message, I'm not really that kind of writer. But I do like to introduce certain ideas about balance. I think we can live in accord with nature. And I also grew up in the forest and in the desert, so I really love these places.

Science-fiction writers often write fantasy novels as well, but the reverse is seldom true. Do you think fantasy is the daughter of science-fiction? Or are they two related but distinct genres?

I think they started as very similar. If you go back to the earlier part of the twentieth century, before these things got defined, I think that basically what you had was fantastic literature. But there was no name for early science-fiction or early fantasy, it was just called fantastic fiction. And I think when fantasy became fantasy in the way that we define fantasy... If you look at fantasy before, say, 1978, it's all over the map, with Lord Dunsany, and people like Jack Vance, who wrote things of fantasy and science-fiction. And Roger Zelazny.
And then what happened I think is that Tolkien died and at that moment fantasy cristallized into being the centre of what I call Tolkien copy. You know what I mean? It suddenly became big business too and that's when people started to think that the core of the fantasy is being about swords and princesses and all that. So I'm not sure that really answers your question in terms of lineage, except that I think that they were from the same womb. And one went this way, and one went that way, but it's the same roots, it's just that things went very different in the end.

Do you think Tolkien's races (elves, orcs, dwarves, etc), are still popular or trendy?

I think they became irrelevant. I mean, in what they really tell us. So recently I was asked to write a book based on a video game called Oblivion. And it's a fantasy role-playing video game. It's supposed to be very different from Dungeons and Dragons or whatever. But it also has Orcs and Orcs were a creation of Tolkien, you know, Orcs didn't come from any myth or legend. He made them up.
Now Elves, on the other hand: he just had a different treatment on the Elves you can find in literature before. Dwarves too, but the particular stamp that Tolkien put on Elves and Dwarves remains. It's easy to pick up a book that's gonna have Elves and Dwarves and Orcs just like Tolkien. And I tried to avoid this myself.

If writers use the clichés of fantasy, do they have to parody them to remain original? I'm thinking of Terry Pratchett ...

Well it certainly has happened; to be original, yes. But it may even be that they've been around so long that even parody can't make them original. The whole thing is tired. What I try to do I guess is going back to the original mythology that all this was drawn from. Rather than using Tolkien as my inspiration, I use Beowulf or the north epics as my inspiration, the "Eddas".
You know, when I'm writing something like The Age of Unreason, I do a lot of research about "what kind of shoes they were wearing". When I'm writing books like Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, then I go back in just re-read mythology. To be re-inspired and try to turn it in a different way, in a way that maybe hasn't quite been before.

Are you or have you been a role-playing game fan or player?

I did, when I was a teenager. Me and my brother, and a couple of my friends played Dungeons and Dragons. Once a week, for several years. So yeah, we did do that.

What do you think of the exploitation of fantasy in RPGs?

I think it's sort of a natural thing to do; it's just like it seems natural, once the effects got to a certain point, they started making a lot of fantasy movies. But ... well, did you say video games or just RPGs?

Well, both.

I think that RPGs like pen and paper RPGs, like Dungeons and Dragons (you know we were talking about imagination, before), I think that's good because it requires not just role-playing but imagining, and you have to listen to this person telling stories, or the Dungeon master or whatever, and you have to imagine.
Now when you translate that to video games, somewhat it's more like television again, you don't have to imagine things, you're shown it. So I think that the RPGs, that we do around the table with friends, that's more like reading, and video games it's a lot more like television. But they're both interactive, and so that makes video games better, I think, than television, cause you're not entirely passive.

Do you think that a good RPG scenario can produce a good fantasy novel? I'm thinking for instance of Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, who wrote Dungeons and Dragons and The Death Gate cycle.

I think yes. You know, I worked in - not a RPG universe - but I wrote for Star Wars at first for a television show called Babylon 5, and I worked for it because I loved the show, I thought it was really good. I definitely worked within a paradigm, within a structure, but you are working within a structure if you write a haïku.
So, I mean, if it's from a movie or a RPG, what matters is: can the author tell a story, and present characters that you want to read? So I don't think there is any reason that the story based on the RPG can't be good, or really great. And in fact I may be doing that thing, with The Elder Scrolls Oblivion.

How did you get the idea for The Age of Unreason? In what circumstances did you write it?

The circumstances were that I had just sold my first two novels, The Waterborn and The Blackgod, which were very much based on Indian, native-American mythology and also Asian mythologies. So I was very excited because that was my first books, and then I had a lot of money, which I'd never had before, so I took my wife to Europe.
We went to Florence, and in Florence there's a museum of scientific instruments. And there's just this chamber of things from 16th century, 15th century, 14th century. And then I see all that, and then we went to Prague, which is a kind of mythical city full of history. And some of this was boiling around in my head, along with some of other ideas I had from my anthropological background.
You know, I wanted to write a book, I had an idea for a book set more or less now, in which all these things had happened. So I had this idea, and I just mentioned it to my editor, and I thought we were just talking. I had no idea; I wasn't trying to sell the idea, I just said it's a vague idea, she said "Did you have any ideas when you were in Europe?" and I said "Here's some ideas I had." And she called me back a couple of days later, and said "OK, can you write three books, and can you set it at a point where history changes?". And see, if she had said "Can you go outside, take off all your clothes" I would have said yes because I was really anxious to have another book published. I didn't know if I would or wouldn't, and so I said I could do it. And at the minute I hung up the phone, I asked myself "Can I really do that?". (Laughs)
So I ran to the library, and started doing research; and after a week or so I said to myself "Oh yeah, I can do this". And I started running across things, you know, what Newton had said, what Newton had written. That put me on the vibe, there is loads of ideas on that period of time, the 18th century. After that, it all came together pretty quickly.

It's pretty rare to see a woman in the foreground, or in the limelight, in a fantasy novel, especially when it is written by a man. Could you tell me what kept you from the powerful bearded warrior?

(Laughs)
Well, I think there's been a lot of those written. I enjoy books that have a certain balance, so Adrienne first is a major character but there's also Ben Franklin. I just started writing actually and I fell in love with her I guess, immediately I wanted her in the book. I couldn't have written a book that didn't have at least one fairly strong female character, if not more.
I don't like simple characters, you know, I like them to be complex. You know if you've read the first three books, there's this moment when Adrienne and Ben meet in Venice, there's a fight. And all along if you follow the books you know that these characters are good guys basically and suddenly they fight against each other. You know, there are moments like that in my books too. I'm not comfortable with the idea of just having an evil character and that's that.

So you don't agree with the notion of manicheism?

Oh, no, I think evil is not something people are but something they do. I think evil is the result of an action, and the intentions might have been even good. So I don't think that there's evil embodied in something, I don't believe in Satan.

Sometimes some writers use magic as a kind of crutch, some kind of support, ant it loses its coherence in the process, and problems get solved too easily. Can one consider your magic mixed with sharp and accurate physical phenomenons as an attempt to rationalize and explain magic?

There are two ways of looking at that; I think I've looked at both ways, in a way. You know, there was a famous book called The Golden Bough and this guy, this scholar is trying to work out what the rules of magic are. His assertion was that when people believe in magic, they don't believe it's just random, they believe in certain rules and powers like the law of similarities. So if you put water on the ground with the right words, it may make it rain. Like the law of contagion: if one thing is broken apart, the two parts are somehow always still in contact; which is, you know, something I used in The Age of Unreason.
So I was playing with these ideas in the book, and I worked very hard to build a consistent idea of how this alternate physics worked. The Waterborn, The Blackgod, the first books I wrote, it's a little different in that: magic comes from supernatural beings and what you do, I suppose if you're a magician is that you get these supernatural beings to do things for you. And you offer them bribes.
But I know other writers that would argue that magic, by definition, is a mysterious force that nobody can actually understand. I just try to be consistent in my books. There's a great temptation of "How I am going to get this character out of this situation? - that's just magic". I try not do that; I think I'm successful.

Propos recueillis et mis en forme par Annaïg Houesnard

Pages de l'article

1. Notre entretien avec Erik Lhomme
2. Notre entretien avec Elisabeth Vonarburg
3. Notre entretien avec Xavier Mauméjean
4. Notre entretien avec Greg Keyes
5. Notre entretien avec Greg Keyes (anglais)