Steven Savile

I’ve had a while to think about this essay, and of all the possible things I might want to write – here’s the thing, I don’t blog, I don’t write out the minutia of my life like I expect someone random Joe (okay not YOU Joe, another one) out there to care. I find the notion rather disturbing to be honest, and like some misbegotten disciple of Ned Ludd find myself shying away from all things blogorific… heck I have even started writing my stories out long hand and trying to decipher my dreadful handwriting! And yet here I am, after a two year hiatus from Storytellers Unplugged, back. And I’m still not about to write out the shopping list of my every day, but in those couple of years working day in day out I’ve collected a few useful experiences that might just be worth reading if you’re an aspiring writer or a relatively new pro. Maybe. The thing is, it’s different for everyone. I mean, getting an agent that first time I broke every rule there is, including having an 8,000 word query letter… ahem.

So…

A quick confession before we begin: I’m what some people less than affectionately might call a hack. Indeed, recently Kevin J. Anderson introduced me to a bunch of writers as Hack Jnr. I took huge pride in that, I have to admit. So, I am a hack. By that I mean like the hackney carriage that drives you from one end of London to the other, I do it for the money. It’s my job. It’s the only job I have had since I walked out of the school where I was slowing killing myself teaching 5th Grade pretty dreadfully. I have bills to pay, just like everyone else. I have a mortgage, electricity, water, cable tv, internet, telephone, and erm that pesky one that comes in every day, food… and my only means of paying these bills? Words. Hence the hack comment. I’m a poster boy for the ‘will write for food’ cardboard sign club.

This means day in day out the words have got to flow. I did a mental tally the other day, and I average about 650,000 words a year sold. That’s basically 1,800 words every day including Christmas, birthdays, bouts of flu, migraine, laundry day, allergies, asthma, exercise, chores, you know the rituals of every day life. I write at about 500 words an hour when things are going well, so again, that means setting aside at least 4 hours of every single day, without fail. Of course what that translates to is a couple of bad days and I am up writing at 4am and sleeping until the post man rudely wakes because he insists on ringing twice, the swine. This is a glimpse at my every day, and a fair indicator of why I don’t blog. Entry one, got up, had breakfast, wrote. Entry two, slept in because I wrote late, got up, came up with a cool idea, wrote some more. Didn’t like what I wrote yesterday. Rewrote it. It’d get pretty damn repetitive pretty damn sharpish.

On some projects I am lucky, I get 90 days, on others, as few as 45. That’s for a novel, and has been known to include editing time and the complete approval process for the Intellectual Property Holders as well. This means I need confidence in the words as they go down, I need to plan and think and decide exactly what I want to do. Exactly. Not an approximation.

So… then I read those dreaded words… “this is a missed opportunity…” and I wonder, for whom?
See, this strikes me as interesting. . . . now here be spoilers, but only generic ones, to serve the point.

With my final book for Games Workshop I wrote the story I essentially wanted to write, exactly as I wanted to write it. My hero is a sixty year old warrior on his last legs, heart failing, going out on a mad crusade his body will never let him finish. His companion is a younger man who idolises him and is utterly devoted to him. Their relationship is complicated and at least 50% of the response I’ve had to it has been wondering whether Kasper, the companion, is gay, or whether I see him as gay. The answer of course is screamingly obvious if you read the book, but it is done in a way to allow you to decide for yourself. Now the entire thing is about these two people and about the spirit of an old man who refuses to die. It’s my tribute to David Gemmell who got me into fantasy with his novel Legend, and pretty much changed my life.

Now with that in mind, I consciously sat down to create a world view where for once in Warhammer the monsters didn’t matter. It wasn’t about Mamut of the Nine Souls, a hideous flesh and metal sorcerous golem. It wasn’t about the dracolich, nor even the vampires, mad Radu and his cohorts.
It was about the people and the truth that a man might give his all to save his people while all the great evil plans of the villains can simply and tragically fail to come to fruition… so the dracolich crashes and burns simply because it’s bones have been pickled to preserve them before the magic can bind them – it’s a stupid mistake, but not all evil is genius, and even evil genius can overlook the obvious in the pursuit of the cunning plan. The Nine Souls is crushed underground by collapse as the dracolich rises. See, the henchman building his beautiful monster has no idea that the bone dragon the master is putting together is going to erupt through the earth from beneath the cemetery where their workshop lies, nor what the effects might be… because he’s working in secret and none of them trust each other… all of this allows us to focus on what REALLY matters – the story people. It’s all about the story people, folks. That’s the big secret.

Now, the professional reviews all unanimously say it’s a great book, which is nice, and some have even held it up and said, ‘hey, you worry about quality of tie-in fiction, read this, it’ll blow those worries away,’ which is again nice. But what of the fans who love the monsters? It’s that 50-50 thing, and time and again I’ve read the dreaded line – a missed opportunity…

But what does the fan mean?

He wanted to see the cool monsters?

Surely it’s more than that?

So then perhaps it is the fact that monsters are meant to be uber tough and mankind is the victim here and should be quashed?

Or maybe it’s just plain and simply not the story he wanted to read.

Now, does Charles Stross hear his latest is a missed opportunity? Does Stephen Donaldson read about the Third Chronicles of Thomas Covenant being a missed opportunity?

Can it even BE a missed opportunity if the author has successfully (in their own opinion at least) conveyed exactly what they wanted to convey, including layered meaning?

My feeling on both of these has to be no. But why then does the fan of a media show or game consider something even executed precisely as the writer and publisher want a missed opportunity? Here, I think, we hit the crux of the matter… it’s one of ownership. More than with any normal book this fan feels an ownership with the world, the show, the whole kit and kaboodle… and when it doesn’t play as he wants it then it was a missed opportunity for them to give him exactly what he wants.

That’s my take on it.

And boy do I hate the phrase missed opportunity.

So, while the world may sneer, guys like me face this second layer of criticism where for someone somewhere everything we do is going to be a missed opportunity.

How do I cope with it? The flippant answer would be to get rolling drunk. The smart answer would be to not read the reviews. The honest answer would be, even after all this time, badly.  I’ll sit for a day raging about the house ranting ‘why can’t they see what it’s really about?’ And then I wonder if it’s my fault and I should have given them the monster hack as the farewell…

And then I think ‘No, that more than anything else, would have been a missed opportunity…’

Steven Savile