An Interview with Will Greatwich
A fellow Melbourne author, Will Greatwich has just released his debut novel House of the Rain King.
Will’s writing has appeared in Mysterion, Typebar Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. An avid reader, he also writes a monthly review blog, Paperback Picnic, where he explores curious and forgotten works of fantasy and science fiction.
We had the opportunity to ask Will a few questions about his experience with writing his first novel, and the methods he uses when handling short fiction.
Q: What got you into writing in the first place?
Some of my earliest memories are of my mother sitting at a computer typing up stories that I dictated to her. I think I was seven or eight when I wrote my first “novel” in this manner (it was probably about 10,000 words, and was essentially Age of Empires fanfiction). So my parents really encouraged my writing from an early age. I can remember getting a spare envelope and writing lists of all the novels I planned to write in the future. Not much has changed really.
Q: How has your career influenced your writing?
I used to run an ironing delivery service in Melbourne. I sort of stumbled into the role of small business owner because my boss moved overseas and sold the business to me. It was a lot of work and I didn’t make much money, but it had a big impact on me in terms of taking responsibility for myself. I don’t think I would ever have gotten as far as self-publishing a novel if I hadn’t had that background in small business.
Nowadays I’m a librarian, so the connection to writing is a bit more obvious there.
Q: How do you find time to write?
With difficulty! At the moment my partner and I are juggling work and caring for our infant daughter. I’m very lucky that my partner is proactive about giving me time to write, and I try to do the same for her interests. I often think about a line that Chuck Tingle wrote in an article for Reactor magazine:
“How can I find an appropriate balance between my writing time and my personal life. Turn to love. Harness that.”
If you have someone that loves you and understands how much your creativity means to you, then you can actually get more time by giving than by demanding.
Q: Are there any particular authors you look up to?
I could list a lot of different fantasy authors who’ve influenced my style, but let me take a slightly different approach to this question. One writer who I really aspire to be like is David Mitchell (the author of Cloud Atlas, not the guy from Peep Show).
What I love about Mitchell is that he invents himself anew with each novel. He’s written literary fiction, fantasy-horror, a coming-of-age story, a historical romance, and others. And yet there’s always something uniquely him about every book. For fantasy authors, the standard advice is to write a long series so you can keep your fans on the hook. If I can, I’d like to build a bibliography more like Mitchell’s, where each novel stands alone, yet shares a common voice.
Q: What are you reading, listening to, or watching at the moment?
At the moment I’m reading The West Passage by Jared Pechaček. I think that if the rest of the book is as good as what I’ve read so far, it could be one of the best fantasy novels of the last 10 years. It’s very exciting. I have to keep putting it down after a few pages and just go, “Wow.”
Q: What is your approach to writing short fiction, as opposed to novels? How do you start?
For me, having a strong voice is usually the starting point for a short story. For instance, in my latest story “Another Tide”, some elements of the setting had been kicking around in my head for years, but it was only when I got a few lines of the narrator’s voice that I knew I’d be able to craft it into a story.
The other thing that shapes my short fiction lately is, frankly, the market. I’ve written quite a lot of stories that never found a home because they didn’t fit with the preferences of any of the editors I was submitting to. So now, I’m more likely to commit to writing a piece if I have an editor in mind who I think will like it.
Q: You’ve found some great success through your short fiction, including a recent publication in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. How long do you usually take to draft, edit and polish one of these short stories?
It’s really hard to say. I usually work on short stories in between drafts of a novel, so I might do a week on the story here, then pick it up in a few months’ time.
But I’ll say that for “Another Tide”, the time from writing the first draft to publication was maybe 18 months.
I had a lot of back and forth with Scott Andrews, the editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He asked for a lot of small but important changes to the manuscript, and the end result was a much better piece than I’d originally sent him.
Q: Can you give us a few of your favourite pieces of short fiction that you’ve read over the years?
That’s a pretty big question! I’ll just tell you my favourite of all time and the best one I’ve read recently.
My favourite short story ever would have to be “The Seven Geases” by Clark Ashton Smith. I love pretty much all of Smith’s work, but this one is my favourite for the way it combines horror, myth and absurdity into one strange package.
The most recent story I really enjoyed was “A History of the Avodion Through Five Artists” by Eric Horwitz. It’s a neo-Borgesian fable about a nonsensical new art form without boundaries or definitions. I’d like to see more stories that are clever and playful like this one—if I have one complaint about current trends in short fiction, it’s that a lot of stories feel a bit heavy-handed and moralising, as though the author feels they have to solve all the world’s problems in 5,000 words.
Q: You’ve just released your debut novel, House of the Rain King – what was your journey like with this novel? How long have you been working on it, where did the idea stem from?
The original seed of this novel was actually an adventure scenario for Dungeons & Dragons that I wrote but never managed to get to the table. (For the D&D heads out there, I wrote a more detailed account of this scenario on Reddit).
At some point I felt like the themes and atmosphere of the scenario were compelling enough to turn it into a novel. I think that origin helped to create some of the book’s unique aspects. For instance, readers will notice that the local area where the story takes place, the Tile Valley, is very detailed in its history and geography, but everything beyond that valley is just lightly sketched. That’s typical for D&D modules, which are designed to be slotted in to a variety of different campaign settings. But as a novelist, this helped me avoid the trap of having to construct an entire world before I could begin the actual story.
Q: Were there any characters in HotRK that you absolutely loved writing – and were there any you hated?
Brywna, the mercenary captain of the Sparrows, was always a great pleasure for me to write. Her voice is a mixture of a world-weary soldier and a laid-back Australian. She’s inspired in part by some tough rural women I’ve known.
I’m not sure there was anyone I hated to write. I will say that I was surprised by the Kingfisher girls, Emwort’s sisters. They didn’t appear at all in my original outline. At some point I asked myself, “How can I make this nerdy monk protagonist less of a wet blanket?” and the idea came to give him not just one, but five older sisters. They ended up becoming some of my favourite characters.
Q: As a fellow Australian, it’s fair to say that our landscape and ecology has influenced parts of the worlds you build. Is this something you’re quite intentional about?
Yes, at this point I’m pretty all-in on Australian landscapes in my fiction. I think it started with one of my earlier published stories, “Kill the Witchman”, which was also set in an Australian-inspired fantasy world. I remember an American reader told me the setting was “unrealistic” because the land was colder in the south than in the north. It was just a random internet commenter, but some part of me went, “Fuck you! I’m going to set all my stories in Australia from now on!”
More seriously: I find it much easier to create a rich and detailed setting when I’m drawing on something from my own experience. Some years ago I tried to write a novel set in a fantasy version of the Caribbean, because I was obsessed with pirates. I spent so long researching the ecology and history of that region, and in the end I only created something that felt half authentic, compared to what a local could have written. Sometimes you have to know when to play to your strengths.
Q: Will we see more of the adventures of the Sparrows?
I wouldn’t rule it out. As I said above when I was talking about David Mitchell, I envision my ideal career as a collection of standalones rather than a single series. So the next book I write is going to be something different, though thematically linked. But I do have some ideas about what might happen next for Sparrow Company, and also for Emwort and his sisters. So we’ll see.
Q: How do you beat writer’s block?
I think you have to have a big toolbox of techniques, and try whatever you can to keep your momentum up. Sometimes I go back and revise previous chapters to build confidence in my characters and voice. Other times I skip ahead to the scene I’ve been aching to write. Getting into a new physical environment (like a library or cafe) can be great, and so can switching to hand writing for a while.
I think often about Alexey Guzey’s advice on productivity, where he basically says: every productivity hack works for a little while and then stops working, so you may as well resign yourself to trying different things forever. Once you let go of the idea that one day you’ll find the perfect system, then it’s easier to just sit down and do the work.
Q: How do you handle rejections?
The simplest answer is you just get rejected over and over until you’re used to it. The “rejection callus” is a real thing.
But to improve your mindset, I’d recommend reading Derek Sivers: “Proudly exclude most people“. If you are creating something worthwhile, it won’t appeal to everyone. It won’t even appeal to 1% of all people. So rejection is an unavoidable part of creativity. When you look at it this way, a rejection is not a personal rebuke, it’s more like a failure for two people to connect. Having someone love your writing is a very deep and special connection, and it’s natural that you won’t be able to form that connection with everyone.
Q: Is there any work you have coming up that you would like to speak about?
The past year has been mostly about caring for my family and getting House of the Rain King into the world. I have a couple of projects I’m working on that will continue the themes of HotRK in different ways. But I can’t say much more about them yet. An unfinished manuscript is a bit like a mushroom. If you expose it to too much light it can shrivel up and die.
You can pick up a copy of House of the Rain King here.
A full list of Will’s publications, as well as his other writing and news, can be found on his website, willgreatwich.com.