It’s obvious upon meeting Colin Greenland that he’s a writer. His soft measured tone, careful choice of words and wide vocabulary are all dead giveaways but the clincher is his eyes, one look at them and you know that this is a man driven to tell stories. The desire to create exudes from him the same way the rest of us require oxygen. It’s something innate, something that is as much part of him as any limb or feature. Another thing that strikes you is how many times you’ve met him before whether as a beguiling character in a Neil Gaiman story or a high magician in a fantasy epic it soon becomes clear that Colin Greenland has had an impact on every writer he’s met.
Dave Hendrick got the chance to interview him at this years excellent Phoenix Convention (the third one) held in Dublin in early March, where he accompanied his wife Susanna Clarke author of the international bestseller Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell. They discussed the art and method of writing, something he bashfully admitted he knew very little about, we think from the evidence of our interview you’ll see he was quite mistaken.
Bibliography : Daybreak on a Different Mountain, The Hour of the Thin Ox, Other Voices, The Plenty Principle, Take Back Plenty, Seasons of Plenty, Mother of Plenty, In The Garden : The Secret Origin of the Zodiac Twins, Harm’s Way, Finding Helen, Losing David
Short Story Anthologies : The Book Of Dreams, Tombs, Pawn Of Chaos
Dave Hendrick (DH): So am I right in thinking there’s nine novels now?
Colin Greenland (CG): Something like that, I never know I have to count up, and the next one is very very late.
DH: Very very late?
CG: Very very very late.
DH: It must be good so?
CG: Yes! That’s why it’s late, although it’s not even finished, I’ve got a draft of it and I’m half way through a second draft and then our lives got taken over by this huge international best-seller.
DH: Those two magicians and their raven king?
CG: Yes exactly.
DH: I was going to come to that later but we may as well get into it now, what kind of impact has that had on your practise, your work?
CG: It has, in the nicest possible way, derailed me totally, what with the size of the phenomenon of the book and the eighteen months tour she did publicising it, a lot of which I accompanied her, and then she’s been unwell for a while. I guess with the ten years of holding down a full time job and writing in the mornings and weekends and having no down time, our friend Wendy Grossman said “ten years’ over work, one years’ over excitement? Of course she’s ill”. So a lot of my time now is spent looking after Susanna. We’re very much at the end of the publicity now there’s this (P-CON III) and Easter con and then we’re going to be unavailable and get back to some writing. The new book’s called Losing David and it’s all complete in my head and there’s a complete very short draft now and I just need some peace and quiet to get it all written down.
DH: So when you say the book’s in your head, ok you might have a draft now, but when do you sit down to write? Once you’ve figure out the main plot or the main character whichever way it’s driven, some writers are very anxious about sitting down to commit their thoughts, because the magic might disappear the idea they have in their head mightn’t translate all that well, so over time and through professionalism I’m sure you’ve come to a point where you’re able to say now is the time, when is that for you?
CG: That’s interesting. To me it’s all a gradual process of accretion as I get an idea, and it’s pretty well always a character. I’ll suddenly get an idea of somebody in my mind, and then I start to see the world they’re living in and at that point I’m sort of magnetised and I notice from then on things that fit, things that ring bells and I’m gradually collecting little bits and pieces of things and I think yes that’s part of it but I’m not quite sure where that goes, that’s another character, that’s development that’s a line of dialogue and stones all around and I’m fitting them together and gradually I start fitting things together and eventually I’m making complete sentences and then I realise I’m writing and have been for some time but I never quite know when I began.
DH: It slightly creeps up on you?
CG: Yes, I welcome that because I have great anxiety about writing and whatever I write the next day I hate it and I’ve got to rewrite it and you do your word count and you look and you’ve 723 and then you work all day the next day and you’ve got 719! It’s terribly demoralising work.
DH: I guess your holding yourself up as the meter stick there, as the master of your own domain, but that’s a double edged sword isn’t it?
CG: The meter stick is a double edged sword!
DH: There I go mixing metaphors all over the place.
CG: Mix your own metaphors! But it is, particularly I feel, Susanna was talking about this yesterday, about not studying English at university. I studied English and I learnt everything about books except how to write one. It was terrifically inhibiting having all this theory and analysis, but no idea about character, plots, story, structure; none of that. I had to unlearn all I’d been taught. Susanna says she’s glad she doesn’t have that hypersensitivity. I certainly have. Other writers talk about flow, the way writing sometimes just flows. I have never flowed in my life. For me it’s always been like making mosaic – putting little bits together into a big picture. I find it very hard to lose myself and my self consciousness. When I surprise myself, that’s real pleasure, when I think, “Ah! That’s good!”. That’s when I know something’s happening, something worthwhile.
DH: Talk me through you’re normal habit of writing, your day.
CG: It’s changed a lot. When I was writing the fantasy and science fiction books I very much closed everything out. I wanted peace and quiet. The answering machine was the worlds greatest invention as far as I was concerned, then the word processor was a great boon. I’d have music on headphones. I’ve always made a lot of fuss about the music I listen to when I’m writing and then I would just shut out the world and I would try to get lost in the work and try to find my way into the head of Tabitha Jute or Gillian Curram, or whoever it was and get into seeing through their eyes and feeling what they feel I would sit and work at that and lose all sense of time.
I had a great time when I was finishing Take Back Plenty. I got myself a nonsense deadline of the 31st of December, because even if you make it nobody’s going to read it, and I was working as a journalist and I was very hot on deadlines, very scrupulous about them, and I was going to make it and I gave up Christmas and I decided I was going to write through Christmas and it was wonderful. Everyone was away Christmasing and I was all alone in my flat. I had no idea what time of day or night it was and I’d get up when I woke up, have breakfast and write until I thought, yeah I’ll eat something, or take a bath or now I’ll sleep again. Apparently if you do sensory deprivation you go into a twenty seven hour day. This happens, people cycle out into a 27 hour day and I did it, that’s exactly what I was doing, and I remember one day I got up and switched on the radio and the broadcaster announced “and that concludes our programme for this Christmas day”.
DH: You missed Christmas?
CG: I did, and I was blissful. I was in this kind of pod of me and my work. I’ve found that living with Susanna, living with another writer, that that’s harder and harder to sustain, and now I’ve gone the other way. I’ve got a laptop and I go to cafes and I sit with everything going on. I’ve gone completely the other way. I don’t want music, I don’t want insulation, I want to be out away from my pod, I want to be open to what’s going on and I feel somehow much more comfortable with that.
DH: So are you connected with the world now or are you looking at the world?
CG: I guess I’m looking at the world and hearing it go by. Things can come and go, but I’m not connected because it’s not my space, it’s not my table, I’m not responsible for it, I’m just in the swim of the world.
DH: You were saying you used to listen to music when you wrote, a lot of writers don’t, they demand silence it’s just them and their own thoughts very plain surroundings nothing to distract them. You find music helps?
CG: I found music essential for fiction and silence for non-fiction. It really just worked out that way, the music was part of the pod, I’d have the soundtrack of the book playing over and over again. A lot of writers work that way. Mary Gentle apparently does the same thing, Susanna plays the same music over and over again, to maintain a consistency of emotion and an atmosphere.
DH: So it’s the same music all the time?
CG: When I was writing Other Voices which is the most obvious one, Other voices is a song by the Cure, and I was playing that album over and over again. I was playing the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance - this very thick dense enveloping atmospheric music over and over again and that was feeding what I was doing that was enabling me to figure out what I was doing.
DH: So it was acting as a mantra almost?
CG: Yes, mantra is good, this very repetitive music, but for non fiction I found I needed to be much more linear much less ambient. I found I had to construct a thought and an argument. So whilst writing an article or a book review, I’d need silence to think my way through it. It was as if I needed to hear my own voice persuading myself.
DH: So you say you start with a character, so does the world that they live in come up around them, but if you’re writing about what you know, you’re writing about human beings, emotion, your own experience, life. So how do you write about things that nobody has experience of as yet, whether alien worlds or interstellar travel?
CG: To me science fiction is always a way of writing about the world. There’s no allegorical or satirical purpose, but to me Plenty in the Plenty books is Britain in those years, in some way it’s Britain. It was built by somebody else who’s gone, who’s not taking responsibility for it anymore and it’s all up for grabs and everything’s in the hands of the shadiest least responsible outfits.
DH: Is that Britain now?
CG: It certainly was the way I felt about it then. I think it’s changed now. I don’t think I’ve really got a handle on the way I’d write about it now, but to me science fiction and fantasy is dream fiction. Dreams are always about yourself and your situation. You may not necessarily be able to decode them but that’s where it comes from because that’s all there is. I have a lot of sympathy for people who say all fiction is autobiographical, although I’m not a twenty something black female space pilot who was born on the moon, but, somehow that is an expression of something I feel about the world, a dream a fantasy a frustration about the world, a feeling that my character at any point is the one through whom I can best articulate what I’m going through. So it was weird writing Finding Helen because I’d written all these space books. I was so tired of having to invent everything. I wanted to write a book that began, “She got out of her car and went into Sainsbury’s.” You can’t write that in a space opera without constructing the car, without constructing Sainsbury’s. What is this “Sainsbury’s”? Does not compute! What is Plenty? You’ve got to be able to get across to the reader what those names mean. Even if it’s just illusory, you’ve got to have some kind of history and geography, a context into which everything fits. The reader has got to have confidence in your references. I wanted to be able to let all that invention and draw on what we have in common, the reader and I: the cultures we share, from what’s in the street and what’s on TV. And to write from something that came from myself. Christopher Gale has my initials. His name refers to me. He’s not me now: He’s the me that didn’t become a writer.
DH: That’s interesting, so this was you exploring your own life if you’d made other choices?
CG: Exactly, he was me up until some day in 1980 probably so I knew him terribly well, but we parted at that point and I hadn’t seen him for a long while. That was me trying to get back in touch with him and drawing on those memories thinking who would that person be and using that for my writing much more directly than I ever could in science fiction about my concerns about the world and my memories.
DH: And did you find that an emotional cathartic experience?
CG: Yes it was cathartic, and exhilarating, there was a lot of my past that I left behind. I was a student hippie at the end, at the very fag end of hippie-dom the roach if you will, and there really wasn’t anything happening anymore. I’d sort of stumbled out of it and I felt that I’d wasted a lot of time. It really didn’t count for anything going into the Thatcher years and I was going back to that and reclaiming it and rediscovering it and putting it in a book. I felt a lot better about all the dope I smoked and the Jefferson Airplane albums I listened to. Suddenly everything was worthwhile. It became more material for the mosaic: material I’d accumulated and abandoned and neglected. Suddenly I had a place for it and made something of it.
DH: So by extension of that thought do you apply the mosaic formula to your own life?
CG: You can’t hang onto everything. You just take what you can and let the rest wash by you. That’s very much how I see life now, instead of trying to hang onto things the way I used to, collecting things and investing in things and labelling things and feeling obligations towards things. Just take what seems worthwhile to you and don’t worry too much about missing things or losing things.
DH: That’s a very freeing philosophy?
CG: It is it is although it helps that I’ve got some money now which I didn’t used to have.
DH: It takes a lot of the stress out of things no doubt, speaking of which conflict tends to drive some writers do you need that?
CG: No I’m quite the opposite I need peace, I still need quiet.
DH: That’s the old hippy coming out.
CG: It is and before that because I was an invalid child I was an asthmatic and stress and exertion, even running around, would make me ill. So the thing to do with an invalid child in the late 50’s - early 60’s was to put him to bed and keep him quiet and give him a book. So reading and writing and drawing pictures, creativity became associated with peace and quiet and not with an expression of stress. The stress probably goes in and comes out years later when it’s all been a bit digested so I can use it.
DH: So the next novel is called Losing David?
CG: Yes, it’s not in anyway connected to Finding Helen but it’s the same sort of slipstream novel set here and now but the world is a little bit weird. Finding Helen is about a woman who may or may not be human andLosing David is about a man who probably isn’t there at all. It’s about a little girl called Niamh, a good Irish name, who has an imaginary friend called David and she grows up and so does he. And he’s still there but nobody else can see him. It all came to me in three early mornings after drinking far too much the night before and waking up to early with all this stuff churning in my head and after a while I thought I really should write all this stuff down. I’m a writer and that’s what I’m supposed to do with stuff that’s churning in my head, so I got up and found a pen and started writing it down and then doing the same thing again the next morning thinking, oh there’s more of this and it’s starting to look like a book maybe I should take responsibility for this. And turning it into a very rough outline shape about this girl and her life and different incidents and it all started looking like the same sort of thing and that lay there for a week or two and then it happened again. One morning in the wee small hours I woke up and thought I know the end! I know the end! So then I thought: Right. Be professional get this written down into proper sentences. And when I’d done that I gave that to my agent.
DH: So did you formally start with the end?
CG: No, no, I didn’t. I started with the beginning but I’ve written enough now to know not to be too specific about the beginning because you always have to throw that away, you have to redo it, it’s very very hard. In the same way I always sidle into writing not really knowing when I began. I just sort of leave the sentence very broken with not much in the way of capital letters in the very beginning until it’s something I’m more sure of. But I haven’t written the end yet. It will probably be the last thing I write, because it’s a surprise, a break from everything that’s come before.
DH: Sounds good! So now I’ll have to buy it.
CG: Well first I have to finish writing it.
DH: There has been a trend lately by the big two comic book publishers to look for established writers from other mediums, have you ever had a comic book project that you’d like to publish?
CG: There’s an embryonic graphic novel Dave McKean and I were going to do. Maybe we still are. Dave still thinks so. It wasn’t my story that Dave was illustrating or his pictures that I was writing text for, it was a genuine collaboration. We were talking about future projects, and each of us had half of an idea, but didn’t know what the other half was going to be. We realised we could put our two halves together and make a whole. This was ten years ago; more. We ran around my dining table spreading out lots of notes on index cards, which is the way he plans everything, and I wrote two drafts; but to this day I’ve never seen a single sketch. He’s always got a dozen other things on the go, and ours was a very expensive project. It wasn’t ever going to be a comic in monthly episodes from DC; nor was it something that a conventional high street publisher would look at. It was very hard to see where we’d get the resources to do it.
DH: Well ten or fifteen years later I would say that there are conventional high street publishers who would look at it, Random House have their own graphic novel department now, and you’ve got Fantagraphics who are always interested in something a bit left of centre?
CG: Never say never, I suppose. I would be so pleased to write a comic. I’ve always loved comics. I wrote about comics in my History of Art A level, and I got an A for that. It was pretentious twaddle, but I must have conveyed something, some of my enthusiasm.
Comics were vitally important to me when I was writing those big science fiction books. There’s no way that Take Back Plenty
would have happened without Moebius. The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius, there were single frames in that that produced whole scenes in Take Back Plenty. I would stare at those pictures, get lost in them the same way I would get lost in the music.And of course you know I discovered Neil Gaiman. I always tell people that. Neil forgives me. Neil never needed discovering. It was never actually possible to find anyone who didn’t know him already! But I did help him sell his first story. This story’s been told hundreds of times before.
DH: Ah tell it anyway I’d love to hear it.
CG: Well, Neil and I were both hungry journalists running around London, going to the same movie previews and interviewing the same writers. I’d already published some fiction, but he hadn’t. I was involved with Interzone in its early days. Neil sent some stories to us and I had the job of rejecting them. I said, this is absolutely not for Interzone but why don’t you send it to - Imagine or White Dwarf, I can’t remember which - a role-playing game magazine that I reviewed for, and that I knew was about to start publishing fiction. And that was Neil’s first published short story. I didn’t even know he was interested in comics in those days; but watching him go out and redefine the whole medium was just wonderful. I wrote a Sandman story in prose for the Book of Dreams and that was huge fun but it would be very nice to write a proper comic, in pictures and captions and speech bubbles. I should be so pleased to do that.
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Dave HendrickHaving misread the Batman origin story he now believes that minimalists are a cowardly and superstitious lot. When he’s not punishing furniture designers and German techno bands he’s busy marketing other media to the world, publishing comics and generally drinking.
He hasn’t called you ‘cos he’s lost your number.