Interview | Tom Lloyd

Tom Lloyd is the author of the excellent Twilight Reign series starting with The Stormcaller which we recently reviewed. I was delighted when he agreed to be interviewed and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Your hero in Stormcaller is a white eye, predisposed to unusual size, strength and agression. Is it difficult to balance the neccessary characteristics of a character like that with creating a lead the reader can empathise with? Were you at all concerned that readers simply wouldn't connect with Isak?

Honestly, I didn't think about it much when I started writing - I was teaching myself to write at the time and was years off being published, so there were bigger issues to work on! Isak is different to the average white-eye though, it's the ones with a bit more personality that get elevated because they need some people skills to succeed and most simply don't have that. It is sometimes a tricky balance, but most of the time Isak's not trying to be vicious and I think that's what would have put people off.

Luckily most readers seem to have twigged and accepted what I was aiming for - a teenage boy not so unusual in personality to the rest. The size and strength he's go only highlights his need to control that temper, but most people growing up get a bit more time to realise they can actually hurt someone badly if they don't learn self-control.

The biggest difference is Isak doesn't have a choice between fight or flight, something I wanted to bring to the fore early in the book - once the switch gets flicked in his head he's not running, someone's dead. A normal person gets into a fight outside the pub and the rest mist can easily descend for long enough to kick someone once in the head or knock them down so they hit it on concrete - and that can be enough to kill.

If you were teaching yourself to write at the time, did you already know the shape of the series or were you very focussed on the journey of book 1?

At the time I'd been focused on no. 1 - All I'd sketched out was a very rough idea for a trilogy of books that didn't actually make a whole lot of sense (and would have required a 500,000 word novel at one point I think!). I didn't care though, I wanted the ideas to mix and interact in my mind and let the plot result from that - with a basic idea of the sort of story I wanted to do, I just played with gods and myths etc until pieces clicked into place in my head. Several times those pieces were guided by short stories that I'm only now trying to sell to my publisher, ten years after I wrote the first ones. I wrote a lot on faith that it would make sense later on because it seemed right at the time - the character Legana being a prime example. In book 1 she served a purpose but I knew she was going to reappear, I just didn't know her ultimate place in things until about a year ago when book 4 was mostly complete.

Has your writing method changed a lot since you started then? Are you more of a planner or does it depend on what you are writing at the time?

Reckon it's more a case of, I now have a writing method. There's no getting away from it, I'm a professional writer now and I should act like one, but in between bouts of googling myself and playing xbox like all self-respecting authors, I need to be much more focused on work. The Twilight Reign just isn't a simple series, there's a big cast of characters and variety of factions and interests involved - without planning I'd have been sunk a long time ago. Since starting book 2 I basically have always had the start and the end of a book, and six months of panic until I work out how to get from one to the other. The only way to cope is to break it into manageable chunks and chip away at the problem. I know there are going to be surprises along the way - characters refusing to go in a certain direction and deciding to flirt with/kill another - but half the fun is seeing the story take a life of its own.

The Stormcaller certainly feels as though it's building towards something extrememly complex as the series develops and I am looking forward to seeing those developments. When we were discussing doing this interview you advised me to start with The Stormcaller and not to skip straight to the most recent volume. As a reader do you feel it's important to read a series in order generally, or when might there be a case for arguing each novel should be able to stand alone aswell?

I think it depends what sort of series you're doing! There's absolutely a marketable value in keeping each one as a stand alone, but with world-changing events and plots that's not always the easiest thing to do. Fantasy lends itself well to the large-scale plots and wars and that's sometimes a tough story to tell in one go, but even with books that are more independent of the series, I'd always want to read in order. Whether you're talking about urban fantasy such as Mike Carey or Jim Butcher, or a Discworld novel, I think you'll get more out of a novel if you've read the relevant ones that go before it.

Stormcaller is certainly on the complex side of things, and I'm unashamed about that. My degree is in International Relations and one of my great loves is Cold War spy fiction, I want texture to my stories. Whether or not you've got a polarised East v West type conflict, the nuances are far more complex than that and sides were almost as suspicious of their allies as enemies. The real world isn't simple so why let fiction just being about world-changing events where a barbarian and evil wizard are the only ones who matter?

You said in a previous interview  (Pat's Fantasy Hotlist) you don't think genre fiction is ever likely to overcome the snobbishness of literary fiction. I wondered if you think it should try? Or whether it should stop worrying about how it's percieved and get on with telling stories?

What is it about cold war spy fiction that really gets you going and who would you recommend?

No, I don't think it will throw off the perception of large parts of society, but given the choice is continually whining about it or giving up the genre, I think we just have to ignore it! Some writers do get kudos from the literary world because some critics are willing to accept that guys like Graham Joyce can write beautifully. it's also curious to note that Jeff VanderMeer's new book got a great review from the Guardian, and a terrible one from SFX... I'm never going to be the sort who's cruelly overlooked for the Booker prize, I just don't write that way, so certainly I shouldn't be spending long worrying about it. The slightly pitying looks I get from publishing folk sometimes when they find out I write fantasy are more than made up for by those I get from folk who've just read some of the nasty shit I do to characters, and realise that's going on in my head most days ;0)

As for spy fiction, the cold war stuff often was done by very establishment folk - men like Le Carre or Greene had a certain quiet cadence to their work (and for the same reason I love M R James' stories more than is reasonable), quite aside from the way they wrote with authority. But what I really love is the murky world where everything is a shade of grey - the post-cold war world has career-type spies rather than the dangerous rogues recruited of necessity, it's now run by committees and corporations that take away the vicious charm of the rather chaotic world it once was. Declare, by Tim Powers is a good modern and fantasy cross over, but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the classic everyone should read.

You have intimated that your study of politics and your love of spy novels influences your writing of epic fantasy. Can you expand on that and how we can see those influences at play in the Twilight Reign books? 

Well what I wanted was not two nations fighting, but a more complex background on which the conflict would have to tailor itself. So there are domestic concerns, international positions, more than one enemy for Isak to contend with - all to give it a bit of balance and require a more considered approach. One strong theme in Le Carre or Allbeury spy novels is the moral ambiguity of people, they might have a cause to fight for but they've all done bad things and the only people they have something in common with is their enemy. They live in a separate world to the rest of us and a KGB officer understood them more than their neighbours ever could. In the Twilight Reign, Isak might be the hero but he's no better than Kastan Styrax, just on a different side and you'll see more from the other side as you go through the series.

Tom's preferred view?

Ok, nearly finished so just for fun, as a confessed xbox addict what game character would you most like to be and why?

Game character? Ah, I dunno - none of them have completely grabbed me; give me a ghillie suit and a sniper rifle and I'm happy!

Now the request. When we spoke to Dave Devereux he gave us a superb dessert recipe. He more recently mentioned that you have an excellent recipe for pork. Can we twist your arm to share it?

As for the pork recipe, there isn't really one (if it's what I'm thinking of). I had an idea of what I wanted to eat and chucked it together, but was rather busy that day so didn't write down how it worked! It was pork belly for the guys, pork fillet for the girls - I think I halved the fillet lengthways and cut the belly to be similar dimensions, these them got curled into a circle and roasted on a rack. What made it was the marinade I think, and knowing me that would have contained crushed garlic, olive oil, smoked paprika, ground coriander, maybe a touch of chilli, and lemon juice - possibly anything else I found on the shelf at the time and decided to shove in, that's how I cook most of the time.

Huge thanks to Tom for taking the time to talk to Un:Bound.