BookView Review

Welcome to BookView Interview, a conversation series where BookView talks to authors.

Recently, we talked to Richard Hardland, international bestseller author of YA steampunk novels, Worldshaker, Liberator, Song of the Slums (published by Simon & Schuster in the US) and The Ferren Trilogy, (Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven, the final book in the Ferren Trilogy, comes out globally on February 26 from IFWG Publishing.).

How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?

I had a bad case of writers’ block – like, twenty-five years bad! In all that time, I kept starting novels and short stories, but never managed to finish them. I don’t know why: something about them never lived up to what I was aiming for, and I stopped believing in them. I guess it was manic perfectionism and a kind of pride – I couldn’t bear to let anyone read a novel or story that I wasn’t totally satisfied with myself. There were some other good things going on in my life over those twenty-five years, but writing-wise, it was a wasteland. I was tearing my hair out with frustration.

So now I have a whole wardrobe full of unfinished manuscripts at home! At least 30 novels started, or half-written, or sometimes just a few chapters from completion! And short stories too, a heap of them. A sort of monument to my stupidity (because I was stupid: you have to trial what you write with other people, so that you can learn what you’re doing successfully as well as what you’re falling down on). I’ve never gone back to those writings since, bar a couple of short stories.

But here’s the thing! I still have all the best bits of them stored up in my memory – from scenes and images to whole story lines. And they’re not actually wasted after all.  Because the best bits have been finding their true home in other novels that I’ve written since I managed to start finishing books. Also, in other novels still to write! I won’t be running out of inspiration any time soon.

How many hours a day do you write?

One thing that helped me beat writer’s block was the discovery of regular writing habits. Instead of waiting for inspiration to come, I just start writing, and sooner or later the story, world and characters takes over. Moral: it’s not all about me, it’s about a story, world and characters that have their own bigger life outside of me!

So, I start writing every day after finishing breakfast and keep on writing until about half past one – late lunch time. I used to think my best ideas came at the end of the day, and maybe they still do, but morning’s the best time for motivation, and actually finalising words on the page (iPad screen page) is what I need motivation for. At half past one I stop, even if I’m in the middle of an exciting episode – because then I have something I’m eager and ready to go with next day. That was another thing I learned, not to write myself into exhaustion. The scene will stay, I will get back into it – and all the better for firming up overnight.

That relates to another trick I’ve developed. I’ve never heard of any other writer doing it, perhaps it only works for me and my very visual imagination. But my mornings of putting-words-on-the-page are only one part of my writer’s day – there’s also what I call ‘pre-filming’ in the afternoon. I mull over the episode I’m going to be writing tomorrow, I see it in my mind’s eye, how it unfolds, how it looks and sounds, I live through it like (one of) the characters who are there. Maybe I scribble a few notes, but mainly I’m just watching possible movie scenes!

Then – and here’s the real trick – I sleep on it overnight. I really believe in that phrase ‘sleep on it’! I think the unconscious mind goes to work, firming it up and making it solid. Because, next morning, it’s no longer possible scenes, it’s the one definite episode of story – and as real as if it really happened. All I have to do is record it.

There are other ‘writing’ times too, when ideas for scenes far ahead pop into my head – which can be at any time of day. People ask, where do your ideas come from, but mostly there’s no answer, ideas just appear, no rhyme or reason. But maybe it helps if you have a sense of your story, world and characters always at the back of your mind – like a space held open for ideas to jump into. I don’t know, I don’t think too much about it – I don’t want to think too much about it. That’s one part of the writing process that’s always come easily and naturally to me!

Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly?

That’s a very interesting question! I’ve never thought about it before, but thinking about it now, I’d say, it’s not about feeling emotions strongly, it’s about being able to re-feel them. I mean, someone who’s cold and emotionless in ordinary life will probably never write a genre of fiction that depends on strong emotions like fantasy. But there are plenty of people who feel very strongly in ordinary life who’ll also never write fantasy, because they can’t recreate those feelings in themselves out of nothing – I mean, in terms of a purely fictional situation. I guess it takes an odd quirk of human personality to actively generate a feeling in yourself and your readers, since our ordinary feelings are always responses. 

The oddest part about it is that you’re inside and outside the feeling at the same time. In the last analysis, as author, you are in control. Even when the situation you’re writing about makes you shiver, makes your heart beat faster, makes you want to laugh or rage or cry – I experienced all of that in writing the Ferren Trilogy! – yet you’re not ultimately overwhelmed because you’re still sitting there typing up the words that make it happen. It’s very, very complicated … but yes, for sure, an author of fantasy at least has to be able to re-feel strongly.

One more thing – coming out of that inside and outside paradox. I think the most dishonest thing in the world is setting out to generate a feeling in the reader without feeling it yourself. Or equally, in the movie audience and TV audience – where the creators are calculating ways to produce, say, a tearful scene or a heartwarming glow. It can be done, it can work – short-term – but I hate it! Long-term, we all know when our buttons are being pushed and we’re being manipulated.

I seem to have created a few villains across my books who are all, in some way, artists misusing their special power. The truly evil angel in Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven has that kind of badness: he feels no human emotions whatsoever, yet he likes to toy with a pretence of them – especially love.

Tell us some more about your book.

Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven is Book 3 in a YA fantasy trilogy set in a post-apocalyptic world. But it’s a different, literal sort of apocalypse! The setting draws on angelology, the old Judeo-Christian-Islamic lore about angels, fallen angels, Heaven and Hell. Great fantasy novels have been inspired by Celtic, Norse, Anglo-Saxon and other mythologies – I set out to create a world based on the fascinating lore of angelology, as preserved in the Apocrypha, Gnostic writings and the Kabala. But this is not a religious book, and has no religious message to push.

In a retro-future world, the continents of our planet have been reduced to ruined wastelands after a thousand years of war between Heaven and Earth. The war began ten years on from our present time, when human medical scientists pushed over the boundary between life and death, resuscitated a human brain, discovered the reality of a Heavenly afterlife and ended up fighting against the angels. Now, Earth’s military forces are composed of artificially created Humen, while the original human beings, called Residuals, have been reduced to small, fearful, tribes living in isolation.

In Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven, the Humen launch their ultimate invasion of Heaven. They have the means to climb right up into Heaven’s First Altitude, they have extraordinary secret weapons, and most of all, they have a new leader. The angel Asmodai has turned against his own kind, and now wields not only his knowledge of the angels’ secrets but also special powers he’s developed himself.

Heaven has no answers … but Ferren has been building an alliance of tribes to stand against the Humen. He’s been aided by Miriael, an angel who was shot down, miraculously survived on the Earth and now sides with the Residuals. She’s also acquired human feelings and once fell in love with their new arch-enemy, Asmodai.

The climactic book of the trilogy contains shocks and betrayals, a desperate pursuit, close encounters with the highest archangels, an amazing journey up to Heaven, and the wonders and terrors of terra-celestial warfare. When Ferren and his Residual followers join in the fighting on Heaven’s First Altitude, the battle will decide the outcome of the thousand-year war. And there are still more twists and turns to come …

What inspired the premise of your book?

The inspiration for the trilogy was a single generative spark – it came out of a dream. Seriously! I dreamed I was under a blanket, then peeked out and saw uncanny, moving lights in the night sky and heard ominous, inexplicable sounds. Suddenly I knew – the way you can know things in dreams, as though someone had told you – that this was the great war going on between the armies of Heaven and the armies of Earth.

I was still watching when one of the lights came hurtling down out of the sky straight towards me.

That was the moment I woke up, but I was still in that drowsy, not fully conscious state when you come out of a dream too quickly. And I thought to myself, ‘That must have been an angel shot down and crashing to the Earth. And she must have landed very close by. Perhaps she’s dead or perhaps she’s injured.’

I thought some more about it as I came to full consciousness. One thing I thought was, ‘I’ve been given the start of a novel.’ And so I had! It took me decades to fill out the background behind that first scene, decades of research and story-planning, many, many drafts and versions. But through every draft and version, one thing always stayed the same: the opening scene. With Ferren the protagonist taking my place, the first ten pages of Ferren and the Angel have never varied. They were just handed to me on a plate! Ferren sees Miriael shot down and fall to the Earth; next morning, he goes out to investigate.

The third book, Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven, grew very naturally out of the two before. All the elements were in place for building up to a tremendous Humen invasion of Heaven – yet so many elements hadn’t been planned for that purpose at all. The Morphs, the angel Asmodai and Miriael falling in love with him, the past world history including the Weather Wars and the fallen angels allowed back up into Heaven – I’d never guessed at the role those elements would play. Yet it was if they were just there waiting to play it! It’s a great feeling for a writer when that happens – a feeling of inevitability, as though the story has taken over with a life of its own and is unfolding all by itself.

How many rewrites did you do for this book?

Many, many rewrites! I was still in the depths of writers’ block when I first tried to write Ferren and the Angel as a standalone novel – and as with everything else I tried to write, I made a start but couldn’t finish. When I finally overcame the block, the second novel I wrote was Ferren and the Angel, but as an adult fantasy, and although I finished it, it had some serious flaws. I came back to it three novels further down the track, and gave myself a fresh start by rethinking the story as YA fantasy. This time I was happy with it, and Penguin Australia was happy with it – but just as we were in the final stages of revision, they said they wanted two sequels to make up a trilogy.

Help! I should’ve been prepared but I wasn’t. After my long history of writers’ block, I couldn’t cope with more than one book at a time. I beat my brains and came up with several new ideas – in retrospect, amazingly good ideas. I discovered their potential when I came to write Book 3, and those ideas started building to a great climax. Trouble was, I didn’t have time to make the most of them. By the time I finished the Penguin version of Book 3, I was pleased with the way it had come together at the end – but still with a sense of dissatisfaction, because I hadn’t given those two sequels the impact they deserved.

Anyway, I moved on to write other novels, including the steampunk fantasy Worldshaker, my biggest international success to date. I’d have liked to rewrite the Ferren books, but never expected any publisher to give me the chance. But then it happened! Fans of the books had been frustrated when Penguin let the books go out of print, and they’d been clamoring for a reprint. They wouldn’t let that world and story die! Twenty years after the original version, IFWG Publishing approached me about a reprint – and I said, absolutely, on condition it’s not a reprint but a total rewrite.

Coming back to the world and story after so long was like a dream! I could finally see where the focus should be, and how one part should connect to another and build upon another. Setting it up right this time I really had the sense that the story was taking over. It’s as though I finally discovered the true story as it was always meant to be!

How do you come up with names for your characters?

The names of the angels are all taken from angelology. It’s such a vast (largely forgotten) treasure house of angels and fallen angels that I could always find figures with the characteristics I needed and names that I liked in themselves. Miriael, Asmodai, Metatron, Jehoel, Anaitis, Shemael …  

I spent a long time working on the names of the human characters. I’m always looking for unusual names – since I’m writing fantasy – but also names that seem realistic and have a plausible sound to them. Rhinn, Ethany, Kiet, Pinnet, Heskie, Pedge, Dwinna … When I find that name, it locks into place and the character is right there before me!

Which character was most challenging to create? Why?

Definitely the angel Miriael. She’s the other major character in the trilogy along with Ferren, but I could draw much more on my own experience for him. Miriael is a spiritual being, so she comes from another realm entirely. How do you empathize with that and create it for the reader to experience too?

For other angels in Heaven, I worked on a sense of serenity, but I didn’t have to create them from the inside. I think serenity would be boring for a major character – no change, no development. But Miriael isn’t in Heaven, she’s been shot down, she’s fallen to Earth and she’s been fed mortal food. She’s becoming earthly! That’s the sort of uncomfortable-in-your-own-body, half-and-half existence I could work with. Miriael despises physical life and hates the bodily sensations that she’s feeling for the first time ever – in fact, she feels invaded. Then, later on, she discovers mortal feelings and even person-to-person love for the first time, never quite knowing what she’s experiencing.

I could relate that – distantly but definitely – to real-life experiences for myself, and I think for the reader too. I hope so, anyway. It was the ultimate challenge: to create a character who never ceases to be radically different from us, yet who has enough reality in her to be a living, breathing personality we can share with and care about.

Which scene was most difficult to write? Why?

I think the most difficult chapter was when Miriael goes up through the Altitudes of Heaven in a visionary dream. She’s had such dreams before, where she’s really, presently there as a spiritual consciousness, while her body remains below on the Earth, so I could handle the paradoxes of that. But to create a sequence of different Heavenly scenes, all beautiful and tremendous, while making them so vivid that the reader can actually see them! My imagination works very much with visual effects and sound effects, but I don’t think it’s ever had to work so hard as on that chapter.

I started Miriael off on the Third Altitude, which is where manna is produced according to traditional angelology. I pictured light falling from above like a faint mist, settling and crystallising as manna on the branches of manna-bushes; then the silhouetted figures of angels in the light, carrying baskets and gathering manna. I can’t properly describe it now, but I think I did in Chapter 12. Simple and peaceful … but more and more magnificent as she rises up through the Fourth Altitude, home of the Heavenly Byzantium, then the Fifth Altitude where a vast wall of a thousand angels sing in unison. There’s a thunder of organ music behind the choir, and I hope I created a visual equivalent.

Finally – in Chapter 13 – she ascends into the Hall of the Council, where the boughs of the Tree of Life arch to form a roof and the fluttering Blessed Souls form the leaves. There stand the great archangels in all their radiance …

I don’t know if it was more or less difficult for the fact that Miriael is experiencing emotions of her own at the same time: a desperation to communicate with angels who can’t see her, a sense of loss over the glorious realm she’s left behind, a sort of awestruck dread at venturing into levels of Heaven where she’s never been allowed before.

Which scene, character or plotline changed the most from first draft to published book?

The changes from the old Penguin version run all the way through – almost nothing’s exactly the same. But one part of the story that needed all-new input was the journey up to Heaven. Ferren and his friends ascend on a platform inside an open-frame tower, which the Humen have built to transport their troops to Heaven’s First Altitude. When I originally wrote it, I think I was afraid of that scene: so ambitious, so challenging, so hard to imagine in detail. In the old Penguin version, the ascent goes by very quickly, not exactly a sleight of hand, but definitely a bit skimmed over.

It always seems to happen – the scenes you back away from are the ones that come back to bite you! It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn over my whole career as a spec fic writer: face up to the challenge now or regret it later! Which sounds easy and obvious, but it’s very, very hard when you have to somehow imagine something so big that you can hardly imagine it at all. In the old version, I did the journey up to Heaven well enough to make it work for the story, but it always deserved more than that. It deserved to be truly important and emotionally overwhelming for its own sake. At the back of my mind, I knew I hadn’t done it justice. It needed to be so absolutely real that readers could live through the experience as if they were there with Ferren and his friends. Only it took a twenty-year break before I could come back and create it properly!

In the end, an eight-page journey covering a few hours turned into a fifty-page journey covering two whole days. And it’s solid! I mean, you can experience the platform under your feet bearing you endlessly up into the sky, the wind blowing through the frame, the creaking of the struts, the hiss of cables running through the wheels. Like a train or plane journey carrying you inexorably towards your destination, everything as if suspended and waiting – waiting to arrive at the most exciting yet terrifying destination that ever was.

And in the meanwhile, there’s Ferren’s relationship to Kiet that he needs to work out. With possible death approaching, he just has to tell her his feelings, whether she returns them or not …