STAN NICHOLLS - INTERACTIVE INTERVIEW!
Hi Stan - Many thanks for being our very first WONDERLANDS author interview - a sort of Fantasy guinea-pig, if you will! Here goes...
Many know of your career in writing, but what they may not know are your various careers before becoming a full-time fantasy writer. Would you please outline those?
Everything I’ve done has involved the written word in some way. My very first job was with a book exporting company that supplied mainly American libraries and universities. While I was there the company was made the sole supplier for the Library of Congress in Washington; in effect it housed the Library of Congress’ London office. That was fascinating for a nerdish young book lover because the remit was to supply everything published in the UK. I mean everything. Every book, no matter how obscure the publisher; every newspaper, magazine, poetry pamphlet, even things like telephone directories, and art gallery and auction catalogues. We had to obtain copies of books and newsletters issued by the Scientologists, for example, and what a bizarre experience that was. They saw it as an opportunity to convert us, and we were bombarded with strange letters and spooky phone calls for several years. There was some really rarefied material too. Like an edition of Salvador Dali prints put out by a small, very specialist art publisher. All the prints were signed by Dali and the book’s cover was ivory, embedded with precious and semi-precious gems. The print-run was five copies and they cost several thousand pounds each. But the Library of Congress had to have one. So all this stuff was flowing past me. It was a good education in the ways of publishing.
I left that job to start my own bookshop, Bookends, just on the border of Notting Hill Gate and Bayswater. I say my own bookshop; in fact I owned it in partnership with a friend, a Hatton Garden silversmith, and later the writer Steve Moore joined us. Bookends was a weird kind of hybrid, its stock consisting of a mixture of mainstream and radical books, along with a big selection of sf and fantasy. Our passion for the stock far outstripped our business acumen, and though it was fun, the shop was never very profitable. One day, Steve and I witnessed an assault outside the shop. A young couple we knew were set upon and hauled away by what looked like a bunch of street heavies. The heavies turned out to be plainclothes police officers, members of the then notorious Special Patrol Group that was disbanded a few years later for corruption, and these guys were armed. We weren’t the only witnesses - some customers and the owners of several adjacent shops saw it too - and about half a dozen of us got together to make a formal complaint. We were all visited by a high-ranking officer from Scotland Yard who took our statements. Shortly after we were informed that the investigation had concluded that what we saw didn’t happen, and the Metropolitan Police would take a dim view if we persisted in making “false allegations”. About two weeks later the shop was raided by the Obscene Publications Squad, claiming they’d received a complaint from a member of the public that we were selling porn. Admittedly we did have a large selection of underground comics, though we were always careful not to sell them to minors. The police seized all of them. They also took away a whole range of other stuff that couldn’t possibly offend anyone. That included Tarzan comics, taken on the grounds that they might be “homo-erotic”! We never got any of the stock back, it was all destroyed, and we couldn’t afford to fight a costly legal battle over it. I’m not saying there was a connection between our complaint and the raid, but the timing did seem very significant, and we had good reason to believe the local police weren’t too keen on the radical material we were selling in any event. Nor am I saying that Bookends folded because of the raid - we were pretty much in dire straits financially anyway - but it acted as a final nail in the coffin.
After that an old friend, Derek “Bram” Stokes, offered me a job managing his shop, Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, which went on to be, for a while, Europe’s largest sf and comics store. Derek had built the business from a mail order outfit in a lock-up garage to a shop in Berwick Street, Soho, which is when I joined him. Later we moved to much bigger, plusher premises in St Anne’s Court, a pedestrian way connecting Wardour Street and Dean Street. I stayed in its employ for about five years, as Manager and, later, Company Secretary. Working in DTWAGE was … interesting. Eventually I left there and was asked by the partnership of Mike Lake, Nick Landau and Mike Luckman to manage the shop they wanted to open, which Mike Lake, whose idea it was, suggested calling Forbidden Planet. So that led to me being the first manager of the original FP, in Denmark Street, off Charing Cross Road, and I stayed for something like six years. I also helped set up and run the New York branch during that time.
There’ll be questions afterwards, so I hope you’re paying attention.
The reason I got into all this bookselling activity in the first place was because I wanted to be a writer. That might seem like a strange route, but although I didn’t know much about what it took to be a professional writer, I did know it was a tough way to make a living. I suppose I thought that being near books would inform me in some way, both about the industry and the craft of writing. A kind of osmosis, you might call it. But I was still at Forbidden Planet after six years, and it felt like time was running out. I was working for other people, which I’ve never been keen on, and squandering the energy I should have been devoting to writing. So I took the plunge and quit. Even then I didn’t go straight into trying to sell fiction. I became a journalist. A jobbing freelancer, writing about my interests - science fiction, fantasy and horror - as much as I could, but basically taking on all and any work that paid. I wrote for newspapers, magazines and trade journals. I dabbled a bit in copy-writing for the advertising industry, and even did things like write the text for the back of cornflake packets! Well, somebody has to do it. I wrote for women’s magazines, music magazines, literary magazines - you name it; and I did a small amount of scriptwriting for a couple of British comics.
Four or five years down that line one of the major publishing houses asked me to be a slush pile reader for them - what the Americans call first readers - and I was employed going through the heaps of manuscripts sent in by the public, mostly the sf and fantasy submissions. It got to the point where alongside the journalism I was reading for three or four publishers and a couple of literary agents. Reading the slush pile was an education in itself. Though mostly in how not to succeed as a writer, sadly. Eventually I got to the stage, having taken this very circuitous route, of breaking into authorship.
How did you get started as a professional writer?
That depends on what you mean by professional writing. I was first paid for a piece of writing when I was fourteen. It was a film magazine, and the editor insisted on meeting up personally and paying me in cash - the fee was £12 - probably as some kind of tax dodge. All the time I was working in bookshops I made the occasional small sale like that. Then there was the journalism, which I got into like any other aspiring freelance - by knocking on people’s doors and cold calling. But I guess you mean how did I get into having books published. Actually it was by way of a bizarre set of circumstances. It had to do with the slush-pile reading, and some would say it was quite jammy. The way it works with the slush pile is that you supply the editor with a written report on everything you read. The report consists of a short synopsis of the plot and, the important bit, your assessment of the quality of the writing and the book’s commercial potential, if any. By the way, in something like six years of reading literally thousands of manuscripts, I found around six that were publishable. I think only two or three of those got into print. Anyway, the report you write for the editor is by necessity strictly private. It doesn’t help anybody if you don’t express yourself frankly, so they’re for the editor’s eyes only. Everybody remembers the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Kindergarten Cop, yes? Not one of his best. I was given the novelisation to read. In fact, I thought it was a well written, professional piece of work, and suggested that the publisher concerned considered taking it. In the event they didn’t; I think too much was being asked for the rights. But when the manuscript was returned to the literary agent who submitted it, by mistake my report was left inside. A couple of days later that agent rang me. I thought for a moment that I was going to get an ear-bashing because the book had been rejected. But no. This agent said, ‘Have you ever thought of writing a book?’ These reports aren’t written for publication, remember, they’re more like memos, but she’d seen something in it that made her think I might be able to write a book. She took me on as a client there and then. I didn’t want to blow my first and possibly only shot at authorship so I took my time working up ideas for novels.
But before I got to submit any to her she got in touch and offered me a commission. Thames Television was about to launch a series called Gladiators - the lycra-clad skylarking prog recently revived by Sky - and they had a publisher set to bring out tie-in books. Would I be interested in writing a quiz book based on the series? Oh, and I couldn’t see any of the shows because they were still being edited, and could I write it in ten days? I’m a great believer in taking whatever work you can get when you’re starting out. It doesn’t do to be precious about these things. It was a book, sort of, and it would give me the only real collateral you have in this business, a by-line. The deal was a straight fee of £500, no royalties. If I remember correctly, my agent got that up to £750, but still no royalties. You don’t have any power to negotiate when you’re on the first rung, so I accepted it. About six months later, Gladiators having aired and been a big hit, I was having a conversation with my agent about something or other and she casually mentioned, ‘By the way, I just heard that Gladiators book has sold 275,000 copies.’ Royalties on that number of sales would have been very nice, but it’s pointless regretting these things. If I’d insisted on a percentage I wouldn’t have got the job, and it was an in, for which I was grateful. After that I got a number of film and TV novelisations and tie-ins to write, usually on a fee only basis, though the fees did start to increase.
I also did a few celeb biogs, some as a ghost. Then I was asked to submit proposals for young adult sf and fantasy novels. So I started writing for the children’s/YA market. Original books, based on my own ideas, not somebody else’s, and by now I was getting royalties. But it proved a cul-de-sac for me. I enjoyed writing for younger readers, and the books were reasonably successful, but I came to realise that the restrictions understandably imposed in that category, which I initially saw as an interesting challenge - like, how do you have a character swear without actually swearing - were cramping my style. Which took me to where I always wanted to be: writing speculative fiction for adults. At first I wanted to write science fiction, that genre having been my first and most abiding love, but soon realised that for some reason my temperament was more suited to fantasy. Not smart enough to write sf, maybe. But that’s fine because I adore fantasy too, and I can indulge in the effing and blinding as much as I want. I stayed with that agent for about ten years. But, without wanting to sound unkind, she lost the plot and my career suffered because of it. Thankfully, I’m now with the best set of sf/fantasy agents in the business.
Did you always want to be a writer?
Yes. Which is kind of strange because I come from a very poor background; a household where there were few or no books and everyone else in the family did manual jobs of various kinds. Where the reading and writing impulse came from I’ve no idea. I’ve no educational qualifications of any kind either - I left school at fourteen - and there definitely wasn’t any encouragement to follow a writer’s path at school. Just the opposite. In fact, I was once caned for saying I wanted to be a writer! They thought I was taking the mick. The highest thing you could aspire to at my school, which was a sort of Guantanamo Bay with teachers, was metal-bashing in a factory. But somehow I had this passion for telling stories, specifically in writing. I wrote what I laughingly refer to as my first novel when I was around nine years old. It was about feisty school kids, flying saucers and an alien invasion. I was intrigued by speculative notions even then. I wrote this so-called novel in a reporter’s note book, with coloured felt-tip pens. I knew books had things called chapters, but I didn’t know how long they were supposed to be, so I started a new chapter on each page. Which made for a rather jerky reading experience. I don’t know what happened to that notebook. Another lost masterpiece … I was writing from more or less that point. In my early to mid teens I got together with a bunch of friends who shared my tastes, which were heavily influenced by horror and sf films at that time, and published several fanzines devoted to those genres. And in every moment I could grab when I was a bookseller I tried to write something.
What is your connection to Forbidden Planet?
None whatsoever. As I said, I helped launch the business and I was employed by the owners as their manager for about six years. I had some nice experiences in that period, but in retrospect I wish I’d had the guts to strike out as a writer instead. It feels like time wasted.
Did your bookselling experiences help you with your writing? How important is ‘knowing your market’?
Getting to know the trade proved very important. To slightly contradict what I just said above, remember the old saying, ‘Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.’ If you’re serious about taking a crack at professional writing it’s vital to know what the market wants. Though of course you don’t have to be a bookseller to find out; you can research in all sorts of ways. Entering this particular bear pit without being fully armed means you’re going in blind to some extent. Why make things even more difficult for yourself? I wouldn’t say that having been a bookseller helped with the actual writing, but it was definitely useful in understanding the mechanics of a rather eccentric industry. And its eccentricity - this feeling that publishing’s a huge game of roulette - is one of the things that’s always fascinated me about it. You better the odds of success if you have some understanding of the processes.
Have you always had an interest in fantasy?
Yes, I have. The whole spectrum really, from soft supernatural stories to hard science fiction. Everything in the speculative field is a branch of fantasy in my opinion. I’ve never seen the distinctions people insist on imposing; it’s all a product of the creative imagination as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never been disdainful of mediums either - film, TV, comic books, games; they’re all valid vehicles. Though of course I place the written word at the top of the pile. It’s the highest form, and everything else flows from it. If I were cast away on a desert island it’d be books I’d want with me.
Why is fantasy important? Culturally and/or to you personally?
Good grief, how long have we got? Rather than risk boring everyone rigid with my thoughts on the subject I’ll keep this short. Fantasy’s important culturally because you can argue that all creativity is to some extent fantastical in nature. By that I mean that even a mainstream novel could be called fantasy because all fiction is a construct, an unreal representation of reality. Fantasy’s also important because it’s a vehicle for our dreams, and in its satirical form it can critique the here and now. It’s an amazingly flexible form, capable of embracing virtually any subject. Surely by now most readers must have got over the idea that it’s all standard swords and sorcery? Historically, some of the most important books ever written can be classed as fantasy - The Odyssey, Gulliver’s Travels, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Jekyll and Hyde, Animal Farm, Brave New World, not to mention chunks of Shakespeare, and that’s just off the top of my fevered head. Fantasy can make radical ideas palatable and point out the absurdities of our everyday existence. It can be fun too, which is another reason I like it...
Of your own writing, what are your favourite books/series/ character?
My favourite book is usually the one I’m writing. Or maybe the one I hope to write next. If that’s not the case they’re not worth writing. One thing I will say is that I almost always end up really liking the female characters in my books. Not quite sure why. But I’ve always enjoyed female company more than the company of men. I don’t mean that in any particularly salacious way; I just find women generally more interesting, and at any given time my women friends outnumber the men. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that I was brought up in an almost total matriarchy. So if pressed, I’d say some of my favourite characters are Shani Vanya from the Nightshade trilogy, Coilla from the Orcs books and Serrah Ardacris from the Quicksilver series. They were really nice to write, too. I obviously have a thing about strong-willed females.
Can you read fantasy for entertainment these days, or does the writer/editor take over?
I find it difficult to read any kind of fiction these days. Which is a bit of a bind for someone who’s devoured countless thousands of novels and stories over the years, and who loves the sheer pleasure of reading. I certainly tend to avoid reading fiction when I’m writing it. There are a number of reasons for that. The first is what you imply - the technician, let’s call it, takes over. I can’t avoid automatic deconstruction. You know, ‘He did that well,’ or ‘I think I could have done that better,’ or ‘How did she manage to bring that off?’ It’s analysing all the time. Another thing is that you don’t want to get involved in the intricacies of somebody else’s plot when you’re trying to work out your own. It’s too distracting. Then there’s the question of unconscious plagiarism; I think a lot of writers are a little scared of picking things up from other works without realising it. And I suppose there’s always the possibility that you’re going to read something so good it throws all your inadequacies into sharp focus! It’s not that I don’t read at all. But when I’m writing I’ll usually only read non-fiction, and between books I’ll try to catch up with all those novels I’ve put aside. Though I’ll still be dissecting them, dammit.
Can you ‘write to order’, in a daily set routine, or is it ‘when the muse strikes’?
I’d like to shoot that bloody muse. It’s usually an excuse people make for not getting on with it. The idea of waiting for inspiration is at odds with professional writing. If you’re composing a poem for your own enjoyment or keeping a diary, wait for the muse to call. If you’re trying to write a hundred thousand word book to a publishable standard, forget the little bugger. You’ll find that the very act of writing, even if you don’t feel like it, will bring the inspiration you need. Terry Pratchett had it right when he said, ‘The difference between me and aspiring writers is that I finish the books’. I must say that the time I spent working as a journalist was good in this respect. It teaches you to get on and put the words down.
Do you listen to music while you’re writing - or beforehand, to set the mood?
I often listen to talk radio when I’m writing, which people find inexplicable. But somehow it gets the flow going. I listen to a fair amount of music, too. It’s funny but a lot of readers tell me they assume I’m into heavy metal. The Orcs and my other action-driven fiction seems to lend itself to metal, I suppose. But if I look through the roughly ten thousand tracks I’ve got digitally stored - yes, I’m a music magpie - I’d say about thirty of them are heavy rock. The majority’s electronica, dance, house, reggae, dub, that kind of stuff. I’m a sucker for rhythm. And very little of my music’s more than about ten years old, maximum. I’ve got some old tracks I still have affection for, but I’m more interested in what’s breaking now than what I might have listened to aeons ago. I have friends of my age with the attitude that music after about 1983 has no relevance for them. It’s depressing. I’ve sucked the juice out of that old stuff. I like now, not then. Oh, God. This sounds like Dad dancing at the wedding reception, doesn’t it?
Over time you've not only written books but also adapted tales for graphic novels. How hard has it been to translate ‘Orcs’ into a graphic novel format knowing that you can only get a small amount of the story arc within and what (if anything) do you feel that you'd like to have kept but had to remove?
The story I’ve just written for the Orcs graphic novel isn’t an adaptation of the books. It’s completely original, and designed to accommodate one hundred and thirty illustrated pages. It contains all the same characters from the first trilogy, and the same world, along with the underlying themes, but the actual plot is something new. It’s been written with a visual interpretation in mind, which was an interesting challenge. I know from working in the graphic novel form before that it’ll probably mutate when the artist and others start kicking in their own ideas. Which I welcome. It’s part of the joy of this sort of project.
Tell us one thing we didn’t know about you before we started this interview.
Most of what you don’t know about me I probably want to keep that way! But … Okay, I’ve told some of this once before publicly, but very briefly, so it might be new to people. After I left Forbidden Planet to take a stab at full-time writing things were rocky for a while. I was selling journalism but not enough to pay the bills and I need something to boost my finances. A friend said they knew of a bookshop in Central London that needed a part-time manager. It turned out to be a porn shop in Soho. But I discovered that only about ten minutes before I went in for the interview, and not wanting to let anybody down I kept the appointment. I found myself talking to three very smartly dressed gentlemen in dark glasses. They offered me a rather attractive amount of cash to run their shop for three or four days a week. Despite everything I was really tempted. Then, just as we were getting to the end of the interview, the boss - the only one of us sitting down - said, ‘We have a rule here. This place takes x thousand pounds a week. If the takings fall below that for two weeks we’ll know our manager’s skimming from us. For that we kill you.’ I laughed. They didn’t. It slowly dawned that this wasn’t a figure of speech. I made my excuses and left.
The well-meaning friend who set me up for that ordeal - who had a connection with the, er, adult entertainment industry in Soho, I won’t say what - hadn’t finished being helpful. They knew of another job, just around the corner. Having established that it wasn’t a porn shop again, I went to check it out. This time it was a strip club, and they needed a doorman. That’s the polite term for a bouncer, of course. Having lost the previous two blokes who did the job, while avoiding telling me how exactly, the manager explained that he was desperate to get somebody on the door the next night, and why didn’t I just give it a try? He also explained that good door control had little to do with how proficient you were at punching people’s lights out. It was all to do with good-humoured diplomacy and diffusing awkward situations with charm and a laugh. Something that he could see I was eminently suited for. There wasn’t a wage as such, he added, but what they called a bounty. Part of the job was to entice punters in with silvery-tongued banter, and for each customer I’d get two untaxed pounds. I needed money, badly. I agreed.
The next day, a Saturday, I found out why he was so anxious to have somebody on the door. It was Cup Final day. After the match Soho seethed with jubilant fans of the winning team and their disgruntled opposite numbers. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of football fans looking to celebrate or blot out their sorrows. By this time I’d been inside the club, met the ravaged, hollow-eyed ‘artistes’ and seen the methods they used to part the gullible from their money. So, call me naïve, but when these football mad potential lambs to the slaughter asked me what it was like inside I felt sorry for them. ‘Complete rip-off,’ I told them. ‘They’ll charge you a fiver for a glass of orange juice. I’d go somewhere else if I was you.’ Not a good strategy, I admit. So every seedy club in Soho’s bursting at the seams and my place is deserted. Except for two drunken punters who wouldn’t listen to my warning, barged in anyway and were making a right nuisance of themselves. Eventually the manager came out, fuming, and made it very clear that he expected me to start sending in customers. But no more trouble-makers, he warned. Be very sure you don’t let in any riff-raff. About ten minutes later a Rolls Royce pulled up and a flash character stepped out. He looked dodgy to me. A definite trouble-maker. I refused him entry, and it got quite heated. It turned out he was the owner. They fired me on the spot. I’d made four pounds, which they wouldn’t give me.
LOL!
Thanks, Stan! We're so happy you lived to tell the tale - and all the other tales after it!
Last updated by Mark Aug. 18, 2008.
Welcome to
Wonderlands
About
Badge
© 2009 Created by Deborah J Miller on Ning. Create Your Own Social Network
