Interview with Paul Kearney

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What impact would you say has the patronage of a well-known author like Steven Erikson on the sales and awareness of your books?

PK: Certainly Steve's enthusiasm for my books has given them a higher profile - especially in America. We were corresponding for a while a few years back, and I was moaning on about how unhappy I was at Gollancz, so he said I should give Simon Taylor at Bantam a call, and the rest is history. He's a damn fine writer, not to mention a very decent chap.

How many books do you envisage in The Sea-Beggars sequence? And do you hold to your statement in a previous interview that after it is done you may start writing 'mainstream' fiction, possibly instead of fantasy?

PK: At present, the plan is for the series to go to four, but though they are a 'series', they are all stand-alone novels. Certainly, a reading of previous books in the series will be a help, but I intend that readers will be able to start with any one of the four.

As far as the future goes beyond Beggars, I've always wanted to try my hand at a proper historical novel, and also at a 'magical realism' type of story which I've been working on for years. So to be honest, I don't know. There was a time when I intended to give up writing altogether, but I found I just couldn't do it. It would be like losing a limb. So, for better or worse, I guess I'm destined to keep turning them out.

Your books are noted for their brevity, to the point of leaving the reader crying out for more. How do you avoid the pitfalls that seem to dog many writers of letting their stories get out of control and expand across thousands of pages?

PK: It's not a conscious decision. I think it's mainly to do with the fact that my plotting is very rudimentary - I basically make it up as I go along. So as I'm writing, I'm as keen as the reader is to find out what happens next. For that reason, my books tend to run along at a fair old clip. There is also the fact that I hate 'wordiness.' There is no reason whatsoever to have info-dumps every few pages, or to linger lovingly on descriptions of ball-gowns, or even on the appearance of characters. If you cannot get across your intent, or paint a picture, in just a few sentences, then you have not got what you want to say clear in your head yet, and you should step away from the keyboard until you do. Or else write all the purple passages you want, but go back and prune them away afterwards. Stephen King once said that you should lose 10% of the wordcount with every draft, and I couldn't agree more.

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Interview by Patrick
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