Dave McKean Interview

This is an extract of an interview I did with Dave McKean back in 2010. Dave's work incorporates drawing, painting, photography, collage, found objects, digital art, and sculpture. He has illustrated works by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Heston Blumenthal, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. He has also directed three feature films.

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Can you set the scene for a typical day – do you work from a gothic castle with a moat full of crocodiles – are there images pasted all over your floor and walls?

Yes. Well, okay, not really. I work at home. There are turrets, although they are really the rather more mundane, oast house roundels, and there is a moat, again, rather more mundane fish pond with rickety bridge over to my studio. Some people prefer to be surrounded by their own work, others prefer to look at other people's. I'm in the latter category. I try and keep the place pretty clean and sorted. I find it hard to work, or think, in a mess.

Do you aim to re- interpret the author’s work or provide images that match the text or a mixture of both?

It depends on the book, they all have their own demands. As a general rule I don't really like illustrations that just literally show a selection of scenes from the story. I think the pleasure of a book is seeing those scenes in your own mind. However, if you can find a way to create a mood, a feeling, or emphasise the drama, then that's usually a good start. Even better, if the imagery has its own job to do, then that is the ideal.

Do you think we should be exploring the themes of death more in children’s art and literature as it is often a taboo subject in adult conversation.

Not obsessively, but ultimately all art and writing is about death to a degree. It's the final deadline. It can only do good to open these tough subjects up for discussion and the imagination in young readers. That's what stories and art are for, to deal with these kinds of emotions in a safe place. To see that we do come out the other side of fear, grief, shock - that we can carry on. They are rehearsals for adult life.

Are you fed up with people asking you what Neil Gaiman’s like to work with and how much do they airbrush him these days!?

No, I've had a long working relationship with Neil, so he always comes up. And yes, it is amazing what you can do with photoshop these days.

What’s Neil Gaiman like to work with?

Who?

Pet hates? Things that drive you nuts?

People mostly. Too many of them. Queues. Tourists (why can't they just stay home and send money?). General bigotries and belief systems. Middle men, grey men, money men, marketing departments. Pushy parents. People who drive cars while wearing hats, people who drive in the fast lane all the time, or undertake on the motorway. Just other drivers generally really. I watched The Omega Man, and thought Charlton Heston had a pretty good life.

Can I have a signed photo and picture?

Of what? Neil, I assume.

The Book Thief's Markus Zusak Interview

This is an extract from an interview I did with The Book Thief author Markus Zusak back in 2009....

How did you get your first publishing deal and how did that feel?

I guess I’m what you call a slush-piler. I just sent my manuscripts to the slush pile of publishers and hoped for the best. Over seven years, I was rejected seven times on three different books. The fourth attempt was picked up by a small publisher, and I still have great memories of staying up all night, talking to my brother and sister.

How do people react to you when they find out you’re a writer?

It can go in almost any direction. Some people have no idea what to do with it. Some tell you about the book they would write, if only they had the time. On the whole, though, people are generally very positive and interested, because they haven’t met a writer before. My friends, though, they usually rib me about how I just sleep in and watch Oprah and that I don’t really have a proper job. I’ve given up arguing now, so I just agree with them, even though half the time I’ve started work before they have. Still, it’s best to keep the romantic idea alive. If they call around midday and ask if they woke me, I always say yes.

Any general advice about writing?

Just to not be afraid of failing. Failure has been my best friend as a writer. When I spend months, even years failing over and over again on a book, those failures usually lead me to the more original ideas in the story. Each one brings you a step closer to what will work.

What influences helped form the character of Death in The Book Thief?

I guess working on it was the main influence. Originally I couldn’t get Death’s voice right because it was too typical. He was macabre and he enjoyed his work too much. It was only when the voice became more vulnerable that I started to really enjoy writing the book. I thought it made sense that Death could be afraid of humans, since he’s on hand to see all the terrible things we do to each other. Then it would also make sense that he’s telling the story of the book thief to show that humans can be beautiful and selfless and worthwhile.

Finally have you stolen anything?

Plenty!

Publishing Deal

News!

Full details at a later date but for now I am very happy to say that I signed contracts on my birthday last Sunday with an American publisher for my romantic sci-fi novel The Woman in the Ship - I am super excited and what a present!

Champagne at the weekend with our best friend and all going well the novel should be out in the first half of next year.

Can’t wait for people to see it, I have written a lot of novels - this is my seventh, but it’s my favourite and still spinning around my head now x

From the Archive: Interview with Iain M Banks

In 2008, The Times named Iain Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” Here’s an extract from an interview I did with him in 2010. Sadly he died less than 3 years later of inoperable cancer.

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We’ve just had the Man Booker prize winner announced. How do you feel about book prizes?

I’m not a big believer in prizes, they’ve got a place, they’re good general publicity for whatever it is they’re publicising in the first place but I always think you can’t really tell what the great books are of any sort of time until maybe 10 or 50 years or a hundred years later so I don’t entirely believe in them. But I don’t hate them or resent them or anything. If I was emperor of the universe I certainly wouldn’t ban them. ( laughs ) I don’t understand soap operas either but I wouldn’t ban them as well.

But do you want one?

Well yes, I suppose yeah it would be nice to have something like that but I don’t think it’s very likely to be honest.

Because of the sci-fi?

Well yeah I’m kind of a serial reoffender – I think if maybe I’d written a couple of science fiction novels and then stopped and put it behind me a few years later I might -

Got rid of that fifthly habit?

Yeah kinda, but if you’re trying to promote the idea of English literature and British literature or British commonwealth, whatever, to the world, which in a sense is what it’s really meant to be about, then the knowledge of the person who you’d be honouring, the book you would be honouring to be followed by a science fiction novel – a lot of people are still very down, very snobbish about science fiction. Of course the other alternative explanation of not having won more prizes is the books aren’t good enough. I think one has to at least entertain this idea ( laughs ) Obviously I think they’re all works of outstanding genius, but I may be slightly bias. Actually even I don’t think that.

How do you feel about social media sites?

Kind of neutral at the moment, I can’t be bothered, it’s not for me - I just can’t be bothered with the idea. I don’t want to be too contactable. My phone spends a lot of the time off, I love to have it, it’s good to have it there, but I like to be in complete control. I’m just not that sort of bothered about listening and being in close contact with anyone and everyone. Also I spend so much time – my working life is spent in front of a screen tapping at a keyboard, even though you might be tapping away at a tiny little keyboard or a touch screen on a phone, it still kind off feels like the same thing - it feels like work so I’m just not interested.

You talk about dreaming in Surface Detail and you make this comment about someone being a slightly different person when they wake up in the morning from before they went to sleep. What was your thinking behind that?

 Well I was thinking about that whole thing about, if it’s possible to utterly and completely read someone’s consciousness and then to recreate it in another brain or any other substrate, whatever - is that person the same person? I think that well, in a sense, no there’re not but you still have to treat them in the same way and it’s a copy, that the original is still around and it might get a bit complicated in meeting terms. Does the copy, even if you know it’s a copy, does the copy still have full rights or whatever? Anyway all that stuff is very interesting and I thought that obviously waking up from something traumatic, especially if you’ve died violently and then been brought back to life, that’s going to change you. But as soon as you start thinking about that – it’s something that no one has ever experienced - so I thought it would be a complete step change in human experience. Of course as soon as you think that you automatically think, well is it? Think about this. Well people have been in comas for many years, they must wake up to a different world and they’re physically different, they’ve aged. And you think well carry that on, you think further, you think well in a sense when we go to sleep at night that’s the end of that person as that individual. It’s a very purist kind of thinking, there’s no argument: you are the same person but in a way you have changed slightly. The person who goes to sleep is not exactly the same person that wakes up apart from the even more trivial aspect – you’ve aged by hours or whatever. You might well have had dreams, they might well have been traumatic dreams or extremely pleasant dreams or they could have been inspiring dreams – people have had ideas in their dreams.

 And have you had ideas and inspirations?

 Once or twice, very, very rarely indeed. I have incredibly boring dreams. My explanation for this is I get rid of all my imaginary delusions and stuff in my literature, in my writing. ( laughs )

You work it out of your system.

 Yes, so there’s nothing left so my dreams are dead, dead boring. Very occasionally I’ll have something that’s mildly interesting.

I bet a lot of people would be disappointed to hear that.

 Yeah, there’s a mechanism at work there – most people have a sort of reservoir of disturbing images and most people don’t want to think about them and so they only come out at night when their guard is down. Where as I’m quite happily thinking about them. So I tap the reservoir during the day with my conscious mind, I don’t have to worry about it happening when I’m asleep. So yeah maybe they’d be disappointed but I think they’d see there’s a plausible mechanism at work there.

You talk about disturbing images: one of the things in your books that really stays in my mind is the way you kill people. In Surface Detail you follow Vatueil quite closely and he survives a gas trap in a tunnel and then it takes another page and suddenly he’s dead and been thrown from a giant –

Trebuchet ( laughs ) yeah.

Do you enjoy writing that kind of stuff, because it’s very vivid.

Not particularly. Well certainly not in a sadistic way. But it depends what sort of stuff you’re writing about and giving myself free reign to write about anything at all and if you write about something that involves conflict, especially warfare, then you’ll inevitably going to find yourself writing about grisly stuff. And in a sense you can’t disguise that, you have a responsibility, journalistic anyway, to cover the story. You might be making the story up but once you’ve embarked on that road it’s cheating to turn the camera away and not see what happens next. That’s not fair. That’s kind of sanitising war. That’s like the news channel’s approach to war: you never see the horror of war on television, you just don’t. I think that helps the war to continue. If you saw lots of horrific injuries and so on then perhaps we wouldn’t be so blasé about the heroic work our boys are doing out in Afghanistan or anywhere else. It’s not to criticise them and ultimately it’s to criticise the politicians for putting them there but there is this sort of complicity, the news services in particular television which is where you see the most shocking images – I think it could be much more stomach churning than more a perfectly told piece of journalism that helps to maintain the war. So I think it’s a type of dishonesty. So I think if you’re writing about that sort of stuff you have to be true to it and describe it.

In the Culture money has become irrelevant do you think we’ll ever end up like that?

 I’d love to think so, but not in our present form no. We’d have to …

A) Get to the post scarcity thing.

B) Somehow be nicer people perhaps by genetically modifying yourself and  

C) We’d probably have to invent new AIs that were trusted and were much more intelligent than we are and then give them power that might make a difference.

Once we fulfill all three of those criteria then maybe. ( laughs )

 A breeze then.

 Yeah a breeze, the middle one is the hardest. I don‟t think I could make myself nice.

 Is there a grand plan for the Culture, are you taking it somewhere or just having fun with it?

 No – and yeah it will go on until I stop having fun with it and then I will just sort of leave it to be. There’s no overall strategic plan and in a sense that is the plan, having no plan is the plan. The plot of the Culture is not going to come to some huge climatic end, well unless I come up with an idea that can only work in those terms but I’ll try not to. That is the Culture just keeps on going: it’s this society where by now you might have expected it to sublime, to retire from the normal matter base life of the galaxy and the universe and go off into this magical realm. (Which I may have to deal with as I keep getting asked about it these days, so I’m going to have to explain what the hell it is.) But it’s definitely not doing this, deliberately staying back and surfing the crest instead of going down the wave - it wants to keep on doing good works, it wants to be part of the normal life of the galaxy. So it’s deliberately not doing what it’s expected to do. So that theme of continuance, of sticking around – like passiveness, almost bloody mindedness is why it can’t just all suddenly come to a big crashing stop and I think eventually it will fade away, but it’s going to leave lots of echoes.

You’ve got a good sense of humour which comes out throughout the book, for example you name the ships things like, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints and Wit Amidst Folly. Where do they come from and are there names that didn’t make it through to the novel?

O God - I’ve got a list of about two and a half thousand ship names. It’s been building up for a long time -

Seriously?

O yeah, literally years. Huge document: full of I suppose about forty odd pages of typing - I use quite a small font and out of those there’s probably only about a few per page that have been used. So O God there’s millions, well hundreds and hundreds more to come. It’s just keeping your eyes and your ears open for a good phrase to put in the pages but sometimes I find myself, when I think about it, I’m thinking like a Starship manufacturer. Or the Mind that is in control of it thinking about people like us – a primitive society and culture - attitude to them and what they must feel, so a lot of the ship names come out of that. It’s partly the idea that the Culture is there: it is watching, it might not come and interfere, but it knows what you’re up to. That’s why there’s a ship in Surface Detail called Me I’m Counting. That whole thing about who’s counting? Well your fictitious God isn’t, that doesn’t exist in the first place, but we’re here, we’re counting, ha ha and one day … ( laughs )

You obviously have a lot of fun with it.

A huge amount of fun, I have to stop myself from having too much – yeah it’s one of these sort of perks of the job, what’s this particular starship's name.