Interview with Hal Duncan

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Q: What would you say was the hardest part of the entire process involved in the writing of the Book of All Hours? Each new addition reveals yet more depth to a series which has shown just how rich and complex it truly is.

It was definitely that recombination process. Sometimes it would be the simplest thing in the world. As more pieces fitted into place, a lot of the time that would make it utterly obvious where the next piece needed to go, how it needed to be reshaped to fit. But that could also create points where there was this big empty hole, and I'd be looking at it, knowing that something wasn't right but not knowing what.

In Volume Three, for example, "Hinter's Knight", you have these two inter-linked alternate history narrative threads based around Reynard, one where he's a night-club owner in Berlin, another where he's being interviewed by MI6. Most of the links between those and the major narrative threads are thematic though. And the whole volume -- as Winter and Night -- is meant to be, well, this is the depths of the chaos, when the shit has well and truly hit the fan; so it had to be wild, Saturnalian. How these threads fit together becomes as much about the ideas bouncing between the two narratives as it is about the big story that integrates them, because the big story at that point is it's all going pear-shaped.

That means you have to find the right transition point to switch from one thread to another, and that point can be quite abstractly defined if it's a matter of theme more than anything else. It's like a DJ doing a mash-up. You know you can bring together these two songs, the beat from this one, a sample from that, and it'll sound bloody tremendous, but you've got to get the timing right; it's all got to be in synch. And with this type of writing, one scene out of place can throw everything out of whack. So I had some hair-tearing moments particularly with that volume. One narrative thread actually got ripped out and discarded completely.

Q: Characters often take a life of their own. Which of your characters did you find the most unpredictable to write about?

For the most part, in Vellum and Ink, because I based three of the four volumes around existing sources -- Sumerian myths and Greek plays -- the characters were bound into those existing tales. Though Finnan's very much an example of a character coming alive, his voice bursting out of the Somme sequence and becoming, you might well say, the voice of Vellum as a whole, even though that emergence of the character led to me writing the Prometheus Bound narrative from scratch, it wasn't really that he was unpredictable. If anything, it was the opposite. In realising just who he was as a person, the whole story of Prometheus clicked round that identity. It was more like realising his history and just letting him tell it in his own words, rather than creating a character without a future written for him and then having him decide that your plan for that future, for the story, is wrong.

Even the most bolshie and flighty characters like Jack and Puck, who continue to kick their way out of my psyche every so often, (respectively) swaggering and skipping gaily onto the page unbidden, even those tend to burst out with fully-formed stories around them, I find. Which is maybe strange, given that a lot of my characters are basically rebels and refuseniks, and that much of Vellum and Ink is about those characters rejecting the roles "written" for them.