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Mar
16
Steven Savile on the inaugural Scribe Awards
Posted in: UKSFBN Talks To on 16th March 2007 by UKSFBN admin
This year, the inaugural Scribe Awards will be presented to specifically mark the achievements of writers of media tie-in novelisations; original fiction based on characters and story-lines that have already been developed in other media and other milieu, such as TV shows and comics. We dropped British author Steven Savile - nominated in the 'Best Novel - Adapted' category for his first novel set in the world of 2000AD's Slaine the Barbarian - to ask him about the awards, and what being nominated means to him.
UKSFBN: How pleased are you to have been nominated for this inaugural award?
Steve S: Obviously I am delighted, and I must confess not a little surprised. I tend to work in this air of splendid isolation, just me and the computer, and if I am feeling flush a decent cup of coffee. I've cut back my time on the internet and I no longer have that urge to ego-surf to see if folks are saying good or bad stuff about my work - so while it isn't about validation I would be lying if I didn't admit that it is a very gratifying acknowledgement by my peers that I did something right with this book.
UKSFBN: How difficult (or easy) was it to adapt a character from a mainly graphic medium - particularly one that's often so vividly and intricately illustrated as Slaine has been in recent 2000AD appearances - to an all-prose environment?
Steve S: Slaine the Exile was on many levels an absolute nightmare to adapt because you imagine it ought to be pretty straightforward: take a few strips, tell the story. Unfortunately the reality was thirteen very disjointed mini-adventures that needed fusing into a coherent storyline.
You tend to forget that the original comic was a weekly serial, by its nature exceptionally episodic without the same narrative flow you would expect from a novel. Couple that with the fact that today's fantasy reading audience is more sophisticated in its tastes and demands thanks to the likes of George R.R. Martin and Steven Erikson, and some of these original scripts are quite simplistic and you find yourself facing a few quite different challenges. Do you write the novel so that it is loved by the 2000AD purists? Do you write it so that someone who has never heard of Slaine mac Roth and the Sessair can wrap themselves up completely and utterly in a new world? Do you attempt to hold on to the headlong feel of adventure that comes with the comic scripts or do you try to recreate a more classical Celtic fantasy?
As a writer you obviously want to do right by the original creator, in this case Pat Mills, and the fans, but you know you are going to upset some people no matter what. Some stuff obviously doesn't translate, for instance the character of Ukko is in the comics pretty much a parody of Neil Kinnock, and that is lost with the shift in years. So, from the outset, we decided the novel needed to be a 'reimagining' of the old comics (and yes, certain cynical souls will lambast you for that as well) while very much holding true to the spirit of the material and developing the core stories into a more fluid whole.
"As a writer you obviously want to do right by the original creator ... but you know you are going to upset some people no matter what."And Mills a master of the one-liner - with every single speech bubble being some cool witty remark - but if you write that down on the page without the support of the pictures it falls apart, the words and images are so intrinsically interwoven. So that presents another challenge, creating a lush rich replacement for the artwork of Glen Fabry, Mike McMahon, Simon Bisley, etc. But rather than being daunting that's actually a part of the fun; looking at their visualisations of the world of Slaine, the Sourlands and Tir-nan-Og and writing something evocative from their art.
Sometimes it is actually quite liberating to play in someone else's playground. You are bound by strictures of the intellectual property (because believe me the fans will let you know if you screw up) so it focusses your discipline, making you perform within a given framework, finding reasons for certain events in your story to happen or even be able to occur, and knitting it into the existing rules of this world. The temptation when working on your own work is to simply bluff it or fudge it, or let your imagination go wild. Work tied into someone else's creation forces you to rein in certain urges and forces you to exercise your brain and writing muscles, and if you get it right the results can be excellent - and of course, you take what you learn and apply it to your own universes later. The simple act of writing in and of itself helps improve your writing.
UKSFBN: There's sometimes a stigma attached to tie-in titles; that they're just for the die-hard fans, rather than 'proper' novels in their own right. What 's your answer to that sort of criticism?
"Like any sort of craftsman I want to be proud of my work."Steve S: The intimation is that folks like me just 'phone' the story in. Sit down, hack it out and move on, and you know what, I am sure that some writers do exactly that. What can I tell you? Like any sort of craftsman I want to be proud of my work, so when I sit at the keyboard, be it Slaine, Dr Who, Warhammer, or 'my own' work I am determined to do the very best by my ability. I want to look at my own bookshelves when I am an old guy and feel pride at my entire body of work. Indeed, the day I simply 'phone-in' a story is the day I hang up this aspect of my writing.
Anyone who thinks it is possible to divorce both sides of the storyteller is labouring under a misapprehension; if you don't enjoy my Warhammer novels, you won't enjoy my new non-IP novel either, because the same mind created it, the same linguistic, the same visualiser. It all stems from the same well of creativity, so if you thought Houdini's Last Illusion was excellent, or Angel Road or Inheritance or Dominion or Retribution or what-have-you, that's great, that is what I set out to do, to entertain. That is all any writer ought to do: aim to entertain his readership.
UKSFBN: Do you think these awards are going to help raise the profile and respectability of tie-in novels and boost sales, or is it more of an intra-industry back-slapping exercise?
Steve S: Sorry, I can't help but chuckle at the idea of the awards existing to boost sales when as a general rule of thumb most media tie-ins outsell traditional SF and Fantasy novels quite considerably - and I don't mean one or two thousand more copies, I mean twenty or thirty or fifty thousand copies and often more.
I find it quite interesting, but tie-in writing is often seen as the 'ghetto within the ghetto', which is just absurd when you consider who are actually writing these books. Off the top of my head: Max Allan Collins, Brian Hodge, Christopher Golden, Craig Shaw Gardner, Tom Picirrili, Tim Lebbon, Kevin J Anderson, Keith DeCandido, Eric Nylund, Sean Williams, Terry Brooks, R.A. Salvatore... I mean, these are guys who can write, win those 'traditional back-slapping awards' and more importantly sell from the bookstore shelves.
Thanks to my Warhammer novels I was in a position financially to go full time as a writer two years ago. Whether they want to admit it or not, most genre writers would kill for the sales levels of even average tie-ins. Eric Nylund's recent Halo novel scaled the Giddy Heights of the New York Times Bestsellers list. I remember reading Allan Dean Foster's old media tie-ins and never once did I think of Splinter in the Mind's Eye as disposable fiction; as a young reader it was fantastic.
"As a writer, for me, the most important thing is actually being read."As a writer, for me, the most important thing is actually being read. The idea of sweating over a novel only read by 200 people is a pretty depressing notion. You want your words to reach as many people as possible. The vampire series I have done for Games Workshop has, for instance, sold into Spain, Czech Republic and Russia already, and in terms of readership outstrips anything I have previously written. And the letters show how the work is selling geographically. It is incredibly gratifying and humbling to know your words are making it to Iceland, Finland, even obscure locations like the Faroe Isles, out into Italy and beyond.
And you know, while we're talking openly about back-slapping industry - look at any genre award, be it the Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Awards, the Hugos, the Nebulas, the World Fantasy Awards; they are all equally open to the accusation, surely? I mean they are called 'The Strokers' for a reason, right? I think the credibility of any award is validated by those who are on the ballot - who are you surrounded by? Max Allan Collins, Marv Wolfman, Yvonne Navarro, Stuart Kaminsky, these guys are all very strong novelists with a substantial catalogue of work inside and outside of media tie-ins.
UKSFBN: If there was one tie-in that you were given carte-blanche to write, with a guarantee of publication whatever the subject matter, what would it be?
Steve S: I've been pretty lucky; recently I have written Dr Who stuff, which really did fulfil the fanboy instincts in me. Looking at current tv shows, I think I would like to do something out of my traditional comfort zones, so no SF, no horror, but perhaps something stemming one of the Aaron Sorkin shows like Studio 60. Inside the comfort zone, there are a few fanboy urges still left - Batman for instance, and if I could resurrect a dead show, Quantum Leap - because frankly I refuse to believe that Dr Sam Beckett never did find his way home...
UKSFBN: Have you been commissioned to write any more Slaine novels, or tie-ins for any other comics characters? And if not, what else are you working at the moment?
Steve S: I've just finished (last week) Slaine the Defiler, and there may well be a third in the series, we shall have to wait and see. I have a few new Dr Who projects on the go, including two stories for Paul McGann's Eighth incarnation of the Timelord, and Destination Prague, which I have edited hits the shelves in May. There's a new Warhammer novel on the drawing board at the moment, and Televisionaries, a book about cult sf tv shows from the Twilight Zone through to Torchwood, the Nightfighters, an original series of kids horror novels, a collaborative YA sf novel with Stel Pavlou, and I am currently hard at work on a new fantasy series The Heart of Thera, again original.
The winners of the inaugural Scribe Awards, presented by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, will be announced at a ceremony during Comic-Con in San Diego in July. The full list of nominated writers is available on the Awards page of the website.
You can find out about all of Steven Savile's various and varied flavours of writing at his official website www.stevensavile.com.
Source: Steven Savile / IAMTW press release
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Tagged With: awards | fantasy | film and tv | horror | science fiction | Scribe-Awards | Steven-Savile | tie-in
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