Author’s interview – 2017. Diana talks to a rotund numpty J (His words, not mine!)
Hi, Mr S J A Turney. This sounds a bit formal. May I call you Simon? OK.
First things first I am sure there is a question
that you have always longed to be asked. Now is the chance. Ask your own
question and answer it!
Coming back to this ...
Well, now, there are 4 lead characters,
with a good share of screen time, so let me see… No. I’ve thought about this
for at least half an hour now, and the problem is that I am completely out of
touch with the acting generation. I still picture people like Alan Rickman and
Gary Oldman when people say things like this. I can’t remember the name of a
single actor under 50 at this exact time. Maybe I should have a poll on social
media and see what everyone thinks? Or maybe I should try not to be so out of
date that I still crave a wooden telly that runs on string, cogs and elastic
bands.
What made you choose this genre?
Fantasy is my guilty pleasure. A chance to
escape the bonds of the historical narrative and play around with the way the
world works. But even then, my fantasy is heavily influenced by history because
that’s true of most aspects of my life, from décor to holiday destinations. ‘Invasion’
is tightly linked to the Roman Invasion of Britain, as any even passing student
of the era will quickly recognise. But essentially, yes, it is because I love
to make stuff up. And in fantasy you can make stuff up more than in any other
genre! It’s like a giant box of mental lego.
How do you get ideas for plots and characters?
I am at the mercy of the gremlins in my
head. I have at least a book idea a week. And a shower, a walk, a long drive,
anything that gives me pause for thought means at least one new idea will pop
into my head, be it a character, a situation or a plot. And places? Well,
sometimes I go in search of locations and experience them, photograph them,
walk then, smell them and so on in order to truly communicate them. Other times
I will just be travelling and be struck by how much a place needs to be used in
a book. The upshot is: I really don’t know. I don’t plan it. Inspiration hits
me like a DAF truck every 10 minutes. It can be quite wearing, and I
occasionally get distressed by the realisation that in my life I will only have
time to write a tenth of the stories I want to tell.
If, as a one off, (and you could guarantee
publication!) you could write anything
you wanted, is there another genre you would love to work with and do you
already have a budding plot line in mind?
I keep toying with a horror novel, which,
given my reputation for battle and scenes of violence might not be a huge step,
but that is pie in the sky, I think. There are too many people too much better
at it than me. What I would really love to do is write humour like my heroes Douglas
Adams and Terry Pratchett. And I’ve tried on odd occasions, but it’s really hard. I can pepper my work with
humour, but to anchor a whole book on it? Who can be funny so consistently? One
day, perhaps I’ll do it. I still plan to write the story of my grandfather, too,
which would be full of howlers. Being shot down repeatedly by his own side in
the war. Catching flies with Polish pilots. Walking into windows. Endless
one-liners. He was a character.
Was becoming a writer a conscious decision or
something that you drifted into (or even something so compelling that it could
not be denied?) How old were you when you first started to write seriously.
I wrote (badly, I’m sure) as a kid. And I
used to love writing stories at school and was always deemed ‘more creative
than academic’. In 6th form and higher education, I gained a level
of notoriety with tutors for twisting the meanings of essay titles so that I could
write what I wanted to. I was a master at it. And at Uni I started writing
short stories. Never shown them to anyone as far as I can remember, and since
they were written on a 20mb Amstrad and saved to a 5.25” floppy disk, they’re
now long gone. I remember one was about
the crew of a Klingon Warbird, which labels me a geek more than anything, I
suppose. But I started writing properly partially as an experiment and
partially through boredom. I wanted to know if Caesar’s De Bello Gallico could be made more accessible, and decided to try
turning it into a novel. Marius’ Mules was born from that and has been far more
successful than I ever hoped. At the time I ran a computer network for an
Insurance company. I spent one day a week working like a fruitcake, running
around and firefighting problems, and the other 4 days waiting for another issue
to arise. I filled in my free time by writing, so I was rather lucky, really.
It became a full time career in 2012 following redundancy, which rather forced
my hand.
Marmite? Love it or hate it?
Ooh, I’m a hater. Can’t even eat Twiglets.
‘Orrible. Tastes like monkey rectum. (At least, I have that on good authority from
a marmoset.) (Laughing. Loudly!!)
Do you have any rituals and routines when writing?
Your favourite cup for example or ‘that’ piece of music...?
Too many to mention. Coffee on tap ‘til
lunchtime, then maybe a beer during the afternoon. Used to be always my Picasso
Don Quixote mug until it broke! L Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were
Here or Insomnium’s Winter’s Gate
are currently my listens of choice, but it varies from time to time. There is
always a soundtrack, though. There has to be, or in the quiet my brain works
too hard and I start to accidentally multitask. You have no idea the problems
that causes. I have two screens on my PC and they have to have the appropriate
windows on each one. Everything on my desk needs to be in the right place. I am
one for routine and ritual, you see.
I promise I won’t tell them the answer to this, but
when you are writing, who is more important, your family or your characters?
Ah, simple. Always the family. I’m a
family man foremost. Our family are very tight-knit. My wife’s family have
lived in the same village since her grandparents moved here, and mine came
before the first war. Three generations all in the same village and two more in
the churchyard. Because family is continuity, and continuity is history. It all
ties in. My kids, I hope, will grow up wanting to continue on in the village
and maintain those same values. Hmm. Might have gone off point a little there,
but you get the idea.
Other than writing full time, what would be your
dream job?
I had a friend who was given by a
university the task of cataloguing ancient remains in Turkey. The lake of envy
I found was so deep I almost drowned in it. If I could support the family by
travelling around the world and cataloguing ancient sites, I would even drop
the writing! Travel is one of my greatest loves. Always with home to anchor me
at the end of trips, mind…
Coffee or tea? Red or white?
Usually for me it’s coffee. I love a good
coffee. Preferably half a dozen. Cortados, or Americanos or Turkish, I don’t
mind. I drink coffee every day. Unless I’m ill or dehydrated in which case for
some reason my body craves tea instead and I switch. But only on rare
occasions. And I like both red and white. I started with red, since we used to
caravan round Europe when I was a teenager. I remember the plastic bottles of
French red for 3.5 francs from the supermarkets close to the caravan sites. And
still better than a £5 bottle in the UK. I switched solely to white for about a
decade when for some reason red started to give me awful headaches, but that
has also changed over time and I’m having a bit of a red renaissance again now.
How much of your work is planned before you start?
Do you have a full draft or let it find its way?
I begin with an idea, then stretch it out
to a one page outline. Then that gets chopped into parts and chapters. Then I
expand that out so that I have a full chapter plan with details of what I’m
writing in each chapter. Sometimes the plans can be almost 10k words on their
own! But then, without a detailed careful plan, I’d have nothing from which to
deviate when I get wild, mad epiphanies mid-draft!
If you had free choice over the font your book is
printed in, what font/fonts would you choose?
I am arial, 10 point McBoring. I like to
write my drafts in that. Partially because I find it the easiest and most
relaxing to read, and also because I know the rough word-count of a page in
that font, and now many words in an average line. I can judge things at a
glance. But really with the printed word? I just read it as it comes. Different
publishers like different things. As long as it’s legible and neat, it suits
me.
Imagine that you could get hold of any original
source document. What would it be?
God’s diary. No… err… the dedication page
of the Bible. ‘To my wife Joan…’ In truth there are too many. I would love to
read a number of lost texts. I’m not sure whether it counts, but I would ove to
see an intact copy of the Forma Urbis – the giant marble map of Severan Rome
that now only exists in a thousand broken fragments. That probably tops my
list. And I’m waiting to read the early Roman documents found in London
recently. Once, when my grandfather had his printing shop in Ripon, a local
noble family brought in a document for copying in the 80s and I got to hold that,
which is a high point for me, as it was signed by one of my heroes: Sir Thomas
Fairfax.
Have any of your characters ever shocked you and
gone off on their own adventure leaving you scratching your head??? If so how
did you cope with that!?
Happens all the time. All. The. Time. I
have careful character arcs, but then the characters develop all that
irritating personality as they grow and suddenly they have to do more to fit
their new persona. Only once did it ever change a tale significantly. Usually I
can weave it back in. Sometimes, when it happens and I’m left baffled, I take a
day out and go walking until the answer strikes me. But it always does in the
end. Once I killed off a character far earlier than intended because he just
damn well wouldn’t behave…
How much research do you do and do you ever go on
research trips?
I tend to write in my comfort zone
(Roman/Byzantine) and so I’m confident enough with my knowledge that I don’t do
a lot of preparatory research. A little reading on events and personalities and
so on. But once I’m writing half of every day is research. Because it’s only
when you need to add a bitter fruit that you need to check precisely what
fruits were available in Gaul in 50BC. And it’s only when your character needs
to find a priest that you wonder ‘what did priests do all day when there wasn’t
a festival on?’ Locations, though, I like to experience. I believe the very
best descriptive in books can only come from experience. If you’ve worn the
armour and you’ve climbed the hill fort, then you stand a better chance of
communicating the experience of that to the reader. A location isn’t just
terrain. It’s temperature. Smell. Feel. So I try to visit anywhere I intend to
write about and soak it up.
Fiction authors have to contend with real characters
invading our stories. Are there any ‘real’ characters you have been tempted to
prematurely kill off or ignore because you just don’t like them or they spoil
the plot?
Hmm. Not sure there. Clodius Pulcher was
irritating in Marius’ Mules, but I knew he had a fun end to come, so I relished
that. Actually, Commius. A Gallic leader, whose last screen time I completely
ignored, because it really did not fit in with the flow of the series. He was pootling
around on the edge of things and outside normal campaigning time and I couldn’t
work out how best to tell his tale, so I didn’t. Ya, boo, sucks to you,
Commius. J Actually, with my Ottoman
Cycle, when I came to the fourth and final book and had the circle to close and
all the loose ends to tie up a number of real characters irritated me by either
being in the way or not being there to use.
Are you prepared to go away from the known facts for
the sake of the story and if so how do you get around this?
I do. But I go away from then rather than
against them. I refuse to get history wrong for the sake of a plot. But I will add to it. I did it in Marius’ Mules IX
by throwing in an entire fictional campaign in the Pyrenees because I had a gap
in the timeline to fill, and some backstory to tie in. It was too good an
opportunity. But while there was a whole lot of fictional stuff in there it was
all based at root on historical reality. Because once you start playing with
that you’re no longer writing historical fiction. You’re writing fantasy. And
there is a place for that – see point 2!
Do you find that the lines between fact and fiction
sometimes become blurred?
Have you been peeking at my notes for my
talk at Alderney Literary Festival? Because I touch rather heavily on that
there. There is blurring by nature to my mind, because only half at best of our
knowledge of the past comes from actual evidence (archaeology). The rest is
either the opinion of ancient writers, who could so easily have been mistaken
or making it all up, and from using logic to fill in gaps in the historical
record. Half of history is fiction. Look at the Trojan War for example. So,
most definitely they are blurred lines. J
Have you ever totally hated or fallen in love with
one of your characters?
Once or twice, yes. If you can’t hate your
villain, then there’s a good chance no one else will. If you can’t love your
hero will anyone else? My own emotions are a yardstick for whether I’ve
succeeded with a character. I still have to wipe away a tear when I read the
epilogue to Interregnum, and it’s been over a decade since I wrote that, and
I’ve read it many times. My new villain in Marius’ Mules X is an interesting
one, though. In no way black and white. I think I like him. It is, of course,
fine to be bored with a hero but love the bad guy. Otherwise I’d never have
made it through Dexter.
What do you enjoy reading for pleasure?
I read a lot of Historical Fiction, some
fantasy, a lot of non-fiction, and some humour. But what I’ve recently got
rather a taste for is 20th century murder mysteries and thrillers.
Michael Ridpath’s Traitor’s Gate was the best book I read all that year (2
years ago). And last year I read Luke McCallin’s Inspector Reinhardt
whodunnits.
What drink would you recommend drinking whilst
reading your latest book?
I would never presume… But if I were to, I
think a light, dry red. It’s a fantasy novel, but as I noted fairly heavily
influenced by Rome, so red wine is the most appropriate. You probably wouldn’t
want to mix it with water, though like the Romans did.
Last but not least... favourite author?
An easy one for me. Always Guy Gavriel
Kay. An author who cut his teeth on the original fantasy by helping Christopher
Tolkien gather together his father’s notes and turning them into the
Silmarillion. I read his first solo book when it came out in ’84, and have been
a devoted fan ever since. He writes fantasy that is so closely identified with
historical eras and locations that they are fictional reflections of our own
reality, and he does it with such passion and power that he has yet to write a
work that does not move me to my core.
Thank you Simon. I really enjoyed this!
(He's not that rotund, is he???)
Simon
Turney is an author of Roman and medieval historical fiction, gritty historical
fantasy and rollicking Roman children's books.
He lives with his family and extended menagerie of pets in rural North
Yorkshire. A born and bred Yorkshireman with a love of the country, he divides
his time between staring at a computer screen while surrounded by the natural
glory of the Yorkshire Dales and charging around the world wherever he can find
the breathtaking remains of the classical era.
Since leaving school and University, Simon has tried a great number of careers,
including car sales, insurance, software engineering, computer network management,
civil service and even painting and decorating sales. He has lived in four
counties but never strayed far from his beloved Yorkshire.
While struck with ennui at the corporate world in 2003 Simon, a lover of Roman
history, decided to combine writing and history with a new look at Caesar's
diaries. Marius' Mules was followed two years later by Interregnum - an attempt
to create a new fantasy world with a flavour of Rome. Since then, the success
and popularity of both has spawned sequels to each work. Simon's portfolio has
expanded over the years to include a series set in the medieval era (The
Ottoman Cycle), a series of Roman thrillers (Praetorian), and most recently a
new series of Roman novels for children.
As well as his website at http://www.sjaturney.co.uk, Simon maintains a website
detailing the Roman sites he visits at http://www.roman-sites.com, and a blog
at http://sjat.wordpress.com He can be found on Twitter as @SJATurney and on
Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SJATurney/ (His comments make me laugh on FB every day!) © Diana Milne January 2017 © S.J.A. Turney 2017
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