Interview with Brian Ruckley

Winterbirth is also being published in a number of non-English speaking countries. How much say so do you get in the new artwork and the translation of character names, titles, etc? Is there anything else you'd like to say on the subject?

A: My experience of the translated editions of the book has so far been pretty much that of a spectator. I love the fact that they’re coming out – there’s something peculiarly surreal and exciting about holding a copy of something you wrote in your hands and not being able to understand a single word of it – but I’ve only had direct contact with one of the translators (for the German edition), and no input at all on the artwork front. Mind you, you don’t get huge amounts of input on artwork anyway: I do get to see early versions of the covers for the UK/US editions, but since I’m a writer not a designer my comments go only slightly further than ‘Oooooh … pretty.’

I’m more than happy not to be heavily involved in the translations, to be honest. There are six or seven deals in place so far, and if I was trying to answer questions for all of them I’d probably be starting to get confused. I’m happy just to sit back and enjoy the experience. The Dutch edition (which was re-titled ‘Swords of Honour’ – another surreal aspect to the experience is seeing titles change before your very eyes …) is the only the only one that’s actually been published so far, I think: it’s a really nicely produced book, so I’m looking forward to seeing any others that emerge.

Could you tell us a little about the journey your story undertook to be published? How does it felt now to be a published fantasy author?

A: So far, being a published author is a thoroughly pleasurable experience. It’s the realisation of an ambition that’s been with me – even if only in the background sometimes – ever since I was in my teens. The journey to publication was long, but not excessively painful. The story underwent a lot of rewriting and revising over two or three years, all done in my spare time on evenings and weekends, until I reached the point where I could no longer tell whether the changes I was making were improving it or not. That seemed like as good a point as any to start sending it out to agents.

Then there were more changes once I had an agent and more once I had a publisher – all of which I think improved the text, which just goes to prove how valuable a fresh, experienced set of eyes can be. I went after an agent first, partly because quite a few publishers are only really interested in agented submissions and partly because I just had a preconception that that was what an aspiring author did (I still think it’s a good idea – makes life easier in numerous ways, and there are even fewer publishers around willing to look at unagented submissions now than there were then, I think).

Your novel clearly puts much stock in wordbuilding, but it also has good characterisations that grow and change as the novel progresses. Which would you say was most important—good wordbuilding or good characterisations? (You're going to say both, I can feel it.)

A: Both. Actually no, I just said that to fulfil your prophecy (can’t have unfulfilled prophecies hanging around when you’re dealing with fantasy, after all). World-building is a fun and significant part of a certain type of fantasy book – epic secondary world fantasy, I guess you’d call it – and as you rightly say it’s an activity I embraced in the writing of Winterbirth. But developing good characters is a much more universal and more important requirement, I think. Generally speaking, the world you build is the scenery on the stage, the characters are the actors. It’s perfectly possible to enjoy a play with lousy scenery (or no scenery at all); it’s pretty much impossible to enjoy a play with terrible actors.

Ultimately, all writers of fiction are trying to persuade readers to engage with or immerse themselves in a story, and different genres and sub-genres use different tools to achieve that. Good characters are probably the single most powerful tool available, across a wide range of genres. World-building is just one secondary tool that fantasy writers in particular can also use. It can certainly be taken to nerdish extremes, potentially to the detriment of characters or plot. But at the end of the day most of us are nerdish about something or other (I’m a bit of wildlife nerd, for example) and one person’s nerdism is another’s pleasure.