Interview with Mark Lawrence (THE BOOK THAT WOULDN’T BURN)
Mark Lawrence is married with four children, one of whom is severely disabled. Before becoming a fulltime writer in 2015 day, his job was as a research scientist focused on various rather intractable problems in the field of artificial intelligence. He has held secret level clearance with both US and UK governments. At one point he was qualified to say ‘this isn’t rocket science … oh wait, it actually is’.
Mark used to have a list of hobbies back when he did science by day. Now his time is really just divided between writing and caring for his disabled daughter. There are occasional forays into computer games too.
T.O.Munro (TOM) Thank you, Mark for joining us at the Fantasy Hive to answer a few questions. Your latest book The Book that Wouldn’t Burn is due for publication 9th May. It’s your sixteenth book and is the start of a sixth trilogy. This one involves a vast underground library and two characters whose lives revolve around the library and the knowledge it contains.
Across all your books so far you’ve written in first and third person perspectives with female and male protagonists, but I think The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is the first time you’ve had a pair of protagonists, Livira, the girl from the dust beyond the library city, and Evar trapped his entire life within one of the library’s chambers.
Why did you choose the two protagonist approach this time, and what did you enjoy about writing in that way?
Mark Lawrence (ML) It’s entirely reasonable to ask me “why” questions and to expect an intelligent answer. I think the truth is that it’s just something I did, and that my explanations for such things are very much ‘after the event’. It may well be that I’d read a two-PoV (Point of View) book recently (Strange The Dreamer springs to mind) and seen the opportunities that such an approach presents.
With each added PoV there are obviously pros and cons. For a vast sprawling tale of nations across continents – like GRRM’s work – a big cast is very useful to bring to life the various factions and colour in far flung portions of the map.
Two PoVs allow stories that spiral together and see the same thing from various angles. It’s engaging to see conflicts of interests and emotions from different perspectives. The book, in addition to a hopefully compelling story about individuals, contains themes that deal with information, truth and such matters. So having two sets of eyes show us the same things in different ways plays into that nicely.
TOM There are many ways in which The Book that Wouldn’t Burn steps away from familiar fantasy tropes. Livira is not a fighter or a mage, her key strength lies in her ‘steel trap’ memory. Evar, is told by one of his sort-of-siblings “You escaped the Mechanism with a super-power – it’s called being ‘nice’” The Library is not a traditional castle and librarians make for atypical fantasy heroes.
What drew you to write about eidetic and nice protagonists in a book filled setting?
ML The simple answer is that I like to change things up. I see most weeks, if not most days, people posting to the effect, “I tried one Mark Lawrence book and didn’t like it, so that’s me finished with him.” I understand that approach. We’re all drowning in things to read and looking for excuses to put a red line through large swathes of it. Additionally, many (or at least some) authors produce variations on the same theme for the whole of their working lives. Some literally stay in the same world dealing with the same characters.
I don’t work that way though, so it is rather sad to be written off as a grimdark writer by people who think my 16th book must be Prince of Thorns #16.
In my previous trilogy the main character, Yaz, wasn’t a fighter either, though she did have considerable magics (of the intuitive rather than learned sort). She was also a nice person. In the Impossible Times trilogy written around the same time the protagonist, Nick Hayes, wasn’t only not a fighter, he was a sick/physically weak individual. His “magic power” was mathematics!
Livira continues my journey through different kinds of characters. She’s not a warrior or a mage, but she is a ‘fighter’ with an irrepressible personality and unkillable curiosity. I don’t feel I’ve yet written any major characters who can be mapped onto each other in any honest assessment. I like to vary the tone, style, and focus of my writing. Otherwise, I get bored.
Evar is similarly not given to violence, though eminently capable of it. He’s both stronger than Livira and more vulnerable.
TOM you have described yourself in terms more of pantster than plotster, although I think you dabbled with the idea of using outlines after The Liar’s Key had swollen to Rothussian proportions. With The Book that Wouldn’t Burn I felt sure I’d seen signs of more rigour in the plotting to explain the very satisfying way the plot threads all came together, but then I said exactly the same thing about Red Sister.
Is it that I am just viewing your pantster writing with my plotster spectacles on, or has there been a development in your drafting and plotting approach with The Book that Wouldn’t Burn?
ML Heh, no. There really wasn’t any real plotting in TBTWB. Which is not to say it doesn’t have a plot, just that it developed organically with the writing. I did have a couple of major points in mind from the start, distant waymarks on the trail as I set off walking over page 1.
TOM In The Book that Wouldn’t Burn you’ve included little epigrams to open each chapter. As you said in your blog here, it’s a slightly old fashioned feature, although Josiah Bancroft used it very effectively in the relatively recent Senlin Ascends.
Which was your favourite of the made-up epigrams?
ML Hmmm. I’m always bad at choosing favourites. Often the question doesn’t make sense to me. When people say, ‘what’s your favourite colour?’ I’m not just stumped for an answer but stumped by the concept. How is one colour better than another? With a lot of context I will have a preference for colouring a thing (wall, car, flower) one colour over another, but I need that context and often the preference is weak.
Anyway… I like this one:
Loss is often remembered in the hands. Fingers recall the feel of a baby’s hair. Touch explores the places where they have lain, still hoping to rediscover a child long after the mind and even the heart have surrendered.
A Study of Infant Mortality, by Tyler Dickerson
TOM You’ve explained in other interviews how you have aphantasia – an inability to picture images in your head (apart from when dreaming), so how do you come up with so many concrete quotable images – such as this one
Strangers, blood, and now a ship. They plodded on, leaving the ribs behind them, still reaching for an uncaring sky.
Does the construction of words in these descriptions spring complete and unbidden into your mind, or do you find you assemble them as you write?
ML I think I could just speak these lines in conversation if you asked me to describe a particular scene. They would assemble on my tongue in the moment, the same way they come off the keyboard when I write. Only self-consciousness would hold me back.
To put it another way, I don’t put the words on the page and then spend ages shuffling them around and exchanging them for others. And I don’t spend long moments staring at the wall trying to come up with a line.
I think many acts of creation in many fields are rather swift. Perhaps learning the skills take years, but the execution – for me – is essentially instantaneous.
TOM In the nature of an infinite library, you can draw on the cultural and religious texts of our own contemporary world as well as any imagined creations.
What drew you to include biblical references to Cain’s grandchildren and the Garden of Eden in the mythology behind the library?
ML I think mostly it was because it was fun to do. Fantasy’s main weakness is also its strength: the fact that it steps away from what we know. Common ground between writer and reader is really important, and stepping too far away from our world diminishes that overlap, robbing the author of the shorthand provided by shared experience in real life. The more alien you make things, the harder you have to work to communicate even simple things to your audience.
Using the bible story (which is not taken seriously within the context of the book – it’s just a way of illustrating a deeper underlying truth) allows me to access some common understanding.
I stumbled into it when asking myself what the first library (in a number of real world cultures) would be. We have the Library of Alexandria of course, but the bible story offers us a first man and woman, then a first murder in the next generation, and in the third generation the first city (Enoch). Which naturally made me think that would be a likely candidate for the first library in one mythology (in context it’s one of many documented mythologies / religions – no offence intended to Christians).
TOM Evar, trapped in the library, has four sort-of-siblings, each expert in particular fields, but early on we find that one of them, Mayland, is missing presumed dead and Mayland’s area of expertise is History.
Why did you choose to excise the historian from the story?
ML I think answering that might stray into mild spoiler territory. But out of that small group it seemed that a historian would be best placed to unravel the mystery of the library, and no author wants a character who can stand up and explain everything on page 1!
TOM After BristolCon a couple of years ago you were telling me about the premise of this trilogy and you described this ‘infinite library – a repository of all knowledge’ as being like the ‘internet.’ That carried the implication of the librarians being the search engines that trawled through it (albeit taking somewhat more time to find a book than Google took to pull up your past online interviews).
Can you tell us more about the ways in which the library stands as an analogue for the internet?
ML It’s definitely a theme of the book – separate from the story (which has healthy doses of blood, sweat, tears, and running away screaming). The library potentially holds all knowledge and this can be delivered into the hands of people who may be unable to understand it, or able to understand it only on particular levels. Moreover this information may be dangerous both to them and to those around them. I look at the difference between knowledge and wisdom, likening free access to the library as handing a razor blade to a toddler and waiting for the bleeding to start.
The book doesn’t preach though – it examines the other side of that debate and makes it the other side of a much higher level conflict that consumes the library. People might not be ready for some knowledge, but does anyone have the right to decide that for them? The question is posed rather than answered.
The search engine analogy is explored too, with the ideas of echo chambers and confirmation bias being realised within the library framework, as well as the control of access and delivery to a wider populace.
In short, the utopian ideal of free access to information being a wonderful thing (as embodied in a library) is explored. It’s found to be neither foolish nor a panacea, but rather a complex question.
I wouldn’t want people to come away with the idea that this is a highbrow literary book though. There’s plenty of action, and hopefully some laughs. Blood is spilled. There’s even some kissing!
TOM In the same way that a bruise sometimes comes out a distance away from the site of an injury, the contemporary factors that season our writing don’t always cast an easily recognised shadow in the final book. You’ve said of your writing of Prince of Thorns
“I wrote those books when I was in the first throes of grief at what my daughter’s condition had taken from her. There’s a strong mix of anger and defiance running through the narrative, and for various reasons it has helped quite a number of people fight their own darkness.”
I know that care for Celyn continues to absorb a great deal of your time and energy, with hospital visits and care arrangements.
To what extent have the emotional drivers of your writing shifted in the decade or so since Prince of Thorns?
ML I feel that I’ve always been cursed with an inability to sign up wholeheartedly to any particular credo, faith, or political ideal. There’s a lot of comfort associated with being entirely sure about something, being part of that tribe, wholly against the awful people who disagree with you. And that’s only got worse over the years. To the point that I struggle to write the pure, focused stories that are so popular in the genre. Even Jorg might be hard for me to write now, and he was never one-note, he understood what he was.
I guess I’m more accepting, more resigned in some ways. And stories are often driven by defiance, a refusal to compromise, a simple focused view on an issue. People often talk about wanting nuance, but it’s not something I see a lot of in fantasy. I think often what is really meant is that the person wants an equally unnuanced view but a different one!
So yes, I think as I’ve got older I’ve become less angry and less certain. If anything that’s driven me towards a lighter hearted take on things and more comedy – not that these things are prevalent in The Library Trilogy. But there is some light relief, and the first book I wrote after the trilogy was flat out comedy. In the end … you’ve got to laugh.
TOM Ian McEwan author of the cli-fi novel Solar noted that “Fiction hates preachiness… Nor do readers like to be hectored” but arguably books like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach had a profound impact in how society saw itself. The world of the library, of the city that surrounds it, and of the dusty desert beyond it is under threat. Invading Sabbers drive refugees towards the city walls, and the city populace fret about borders and treat the refugees with disdain and fear rather than compassion. This gives The Book That Wouldn’t Burn a sharp contemporary resonance.
How far do you think authors can or should reflect current societal issues in their writing?
ML I don’t think there’s any “should” about it. Authors can ignore current societal issues completely and feel fine about it. And I agree entirely with McEwan, nobody wants to be lectured at or educated by a work of fiction. It’s bad enough even if you agree with the message being put forward, even worse when you don’t.
Themes should be subtle things both in terms of their obviousness within the text, but also in their approach. I try to explore ideas and pose questions, not to answer them. Fantasy provides a great many ways to take an indirect look at real world issues, and sometimes that can add insights. At the very least it should be interesting.
Obviously, a book is capable of instructing you on any issue, taking any given stance on it. I would generally avoid those sorts of books. I read to be entertained. I can be entertained by things exploding. I can be entertained by an intellectual discussion of a complex topic. I can be entertained by both together, wrapped around each other. I am not entertained by an author telling me how to behave or think.
TOM I know you are often asked about literary influences on your writing but apart from Clockwork Orange influencing your depiction of Jorg and Flashman bleeding into Jalan, it seems to be more stray images or old D&D campaigns that have inspired stories. However, I am sure I have detected a shadow from C.S.Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew in The Book that Wouldn’t Burn.
Am I right? And are there any other influences you are aware of?
ML That’s correct, there’s an homage to the wood between the worlds from that Narnia book. Lev Grossman did the same – though to a much greater extent – in his Magicians trilogy. I think there’s also some influence from Laini Taylor’s Strange The Dreamer at work too.
TOM Found families are a powerful motif in fantasy fiction, and your books show these too – be it Jorg’s road brothers, Jalan’s bromance with Snorri, Nona’s ninja-nun school mates, Nick Hayes’ D&D groups Yaz’s exiles beneath the ice, and now Evar’s sort-of-siblings and Livira’s fellow refugees and librarians. The online fantasy communities, for example around SPFBO or Bristolcon are themselves a kind of found family.
What are the attractions and opportunities in writing about these flung together groupings of people?
ML I don’t think I was aware of the phrase ‘found family’ until quite recently – certainly no more than a few years. It feels to me to be a nice new name for what we’ve always had in fiction: groups of friends, chance companions, quest members etc. The fellowship of the ring is the same sort of thing: a diverse group (albeit lacking women) put together by circumstance with a large degree of chance mixed in.
What’s the alternative to writing about something that could loosely be termed found family? Billy No-Mates wanders the world?
TOM You have assembled an impressive array of protagonists across sixteen books to date, with Jorg Ancrath, Jalan Kendeth, Nona Grey, Yaz, Nick Hayes, now being joined by Livira and Evar Eventari. While they are all very different, I do think they share one common trait. You might call it tenacity of purpose, sheer bloodmindedness or just plain stubbornness (though in the case of Jalan it’s more a stubborn refusal to die).
However, with your D&D DM hat on would you like to show us what their character sheets would look like by filling in the table below? Who knows, we can maybe make a (small) Top Trumps card set out of them?
Jorg Ancrath | Jalan Kendeth | Nona Grey | Yaz | Nick Hayes | Livira | Evar Eventari | |
Strength | 17 | 14 | 13 | 18 | 6 | 12 | 18 |
Intelligence | 17 | 11 | 13 | 13 | 18 | 18 | 12 |
Wisdom | 7 | 6 | 12 | 15 | 12 | 10 | 16 |
Dexterity | 17 | 15 | 18 | 9 | 8 | 12 | 18 |
Constitution | 17 | 15 | 15 | 18 | 5 | 12 | 14 |
Charisma | 18 | 16 | 10 | 15 | 12 | 13 | 15 |
ML Done without enormous care, and recognising that some of these have fairly nebulous definitions.
TOM And just so we don’t end on thirteen questions. [Editor: thank you Theo]
What question should I have asked but haven’t and how would you have answered it?
ML You could have asked me,
“How come your youtube channel is so excellent?”
And I would have told you that
“I just have a natural talent for youtubing and that my pitifully low number of subscribers is simply proof that people have no taste.”
TOM Ah, that would be this youtube channel Nearly 2000 subscribers doesn’t sound too shabby? Well thanks again for joining us Mark and best of luck with the launch of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn.
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is out 9th May – order your copy HERE