An interview with Stuart Farquhar
Have you always wanted to write a book?
Well, I’ve always wanted to write something. Even at primary school I wrote short stories and poems and they were put on display or read out to the class. One short story I wrote at high school was sent around lots of classes to be read out. And at high school I started acting and writing sketches then at university I decided I wanted to write for TV. At that stage I didn’t see myself as a novelist. In fact I think someone asked me if I’d ever write a book and I said no! And then I did.
How long did it take you?
Years! I first had the idea in 1992 and probably started writing it that year or the next. Then I left it for a long time because there was no urgency, no deadline or anything, and other things were more pressing, particularly a script for a video company that almost got made and then fell through but which I’m hoping to publish later this year as a play. I eventually came back to the book in 2002 and wrote the bulk of it over about eight months. After failing to get taken on by an agent, I let a couple of friends read it and I did some editing based on their comments. Then it languished again until Christmas 2012 when I re-edited it for publication.
Did you experience writer's block?
Not that I remember. That's certainly not why it got left for years, there was just no pressure to finish it. I sometimes get bogged down in trying to work out the mechanics or the logic of a particular scene but I’ve never had that problem of just not being able to think of anything to write. But then I’ve never had a publisher on my back saying I need to write my next book now. I write when I’ve got something I want to write. Maybe if I ever do it full time it’ll be different. But I am very good at procrastinating. Often I’ll sit down to write something and find distractions because I’m not very disciplined. The number of times recently I’ve had a couple of weeks holiday and said I’d try and finish the second book and the most I’ve ever done is reread what I’ve written so far and then go on the internet!
It's a large book for your first novel - was this intentional?
Not at all. In fact, until I prepared the paperback edition, I was worried that it might be a little short! I was amazed at how thick the proof copy was when it first arrived. I just wrote it until the story finished, didn’t think about page count.
It isn’t written in chapters.
That’s because I can’t do them! I tried, honestly. When I first started I thought about chapters and just couldn’t get the hang of them. Why does a chapter end there and a new one start here? It’s weird because I don’t think that about other people’s books but it just felt so arbitrary when I tried to do it myself. I felt that chapters should have either a structural or artistic purpose and I couldn’t think of one. So I just got on with it, thinking I’d probably sort the chapters out later, but then I got used to the idea and didn’t bother. But it always niggled me slightly, particularly because, with books being such a major part of the story, maybe that was the artistic reason. When I came to prepare it for publication I actually did sit and divide it all into chapters but it still felt arbitrary and I wasn’t happy. Phil Scary said if it bothered me so much I should just leave it. So blame him.
You thank someone called Blair for the title.
Blair was a friend I lost contact with years ago. He was a minister and I once heard him preach a sermon... well, it wasn’t really a sermon, more a sort of dramatic reading. His theme was creation and the idea that creationism and the big bang aren’t mutually exclusive because presumably a god would be able to engineer something like that. So he had this spacey music and maybe some slides, I can’t remember, and he basically went through the big bang but as if it was designed by God. Very similar to the first passage in the book. I can’t remember whether I wrote that passage after deciding to use the title or vice versa but anyway, during his sermon or whatever it was, Blair used the phrase “God, the ultimate dreamer”. I always liked it and it stayed with me. When I came up with a book about creation and evolution it seemed like the obvious title. Well, after I’d rejected two rubbish ones. I started with The Great Deception and then Father of Lies but thankfully they didn’t last very long. I always assumed that Blair made the phrase up but more recently I’ve started wondering whether it might have been a quote. I’ve found a couple of websites called Ultimate Dreamer but no clue as to its origins. If anyone knows, I’d be very interested to hear. It’d be cool if it was someone like Einstein cos then I could pretend it was deliberate. But I’d rather that it was just Blair.
What inspired your fictional place?
It’s not all that fictional. When I started, I was thinking of a much more ancient, fantasy cliché setting. There was even a wilderness! But I wasn’t really trying to write a fantasy book. I’ve always been interested in mythology and had noticed that fantasy writers and things like role-playing games always take a mix and match approach to mythology. They’ll have centaurs fighting trolls although one comes from Greek mythology and the other from Scandinavian. There’s nothing wrong with that but I was interested in going back to the original myths rather than the familiar literary versions of them and in putting them back into their original context. That meant a world similar to our own, with roughly the same geography, politics and history. So the Empire is loosely based on the Habsburg Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, which ruled most of central Europe for most of the second millennium. I’ve expanded the territory a bit because Greece was never a part of the real Empire and I’ve altered the electoral system to suit my own ends but they really did elect their emperors. Other countries are mentioned in the book and they all use old names for real world countries or parts of their territories. For instance, Breton is obviously France and Nihon is an ancient name for Japan. I like to think of it as our world with your eyes screwed up.
Why change to a renaissance world? Why not stick with ancient or even go for modern?
A renaissance world was the perfect setting to look at the world starting to move away from superstition to belief in science. Magic and superstition are still very prevalent but rationalism is starting to challenge them. It also allowed for more complex politics and a higher level of technology.
Why dragons?
One of the main themes of the book is the creation/evolution debate and the wider debate between science and religion and science’s origins in things like alchemy. So palaeontology was the obvious science to use. Dinosaur fossils are probably one of the main sources of our dragon myths, as well as other creatures like gryphons. So it was a natural step to make dragons the dinosaurs of this world.
You go to the lengths of explaining how dragons breathe fire. Was that something you particularly wanted to do?
Actually no. I was certainly interested in examining how magic and mythological creatures would work in the real world, which is where all the self-creating matter stuff comes from, but I thought that explaining how dragons breathe fire would be a cliché and so I wasn’t going to do it. And then I came across something in nature that explained it brilliantly and I couldn’t resist. Especially as it was another insect, the bombardier beetle, and that fitted nicely with using aphids to explain the March Cat.
The March Cat’s the Surrey puma, yes?
Yes. We think that we’re too enlightened to believe in myths and magic now but modern culture has loads of mythology of its own. UFOs is the obvious one and it’s often just addressing things that used to be explained by fairies or gods or demons. I got interested in all that stuff as a kid when the Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World series were on TV. I don’t believe in any of it but they make for good stories and I always want to work out the truth behind the mystery. They’re our modern mythology and so, having an interest in mythology, I read a lot of that stuff too. I’d read a book about mystery cats written by some people who had some very, shall we say entertaining theories on their origins. Complete nonsense and I didn’t use any of it but I guess it was rattling around my head and fitted with everything else.
Has any real event inspired you?
Well, history’s very important to these books. I studied two years of history at university and was quite good at it. I was a better historian than I was a psychologist. My history tutor tried to persuade me to change my degree by saying that I’d probably get a 2:1 or even a first if I did history. He was probably right and I only got a 2:2 in psychology so maybe I should have listened! Anyway, the historical background plays a major role and while there aren’t really any specific historical events in this book, the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is really at the heart of it. There aren’t any more recent events or any from my personal life except that Phelan University is based on Stirling University, where I studied. The next book will incorporate some real events though. No, I won’t tell you what they are - you’ll have to wait.
Did you base the characters on anyone real?
Teppec is based on a guy I met once called Norrie. A real ageing rocker type and when he first walked up to us i thought he looked like a bit of a hard man but he turned out to be the nicest guy you could meet. And he grinned all the time. I’ve exaggerated it in the book but that was Teppec. And Brother Gharial was loosely based on a Dominican Friar I met in Alnwick. Most of the wizards are based on actors. Malchus is an actor called Dennis Carey and Garrick Tummelwit is Robert Hardy as Siegfried Farnon in All creatures Great and Small, which is why he speaks in exclamations all the time. Corban Torridon is Roger Lloyd Pack, Pendlebury Truffton is Patrick Troughton because my brother-in-law once mispronounced his surname and I thought it was funny. Merrick Tootlesway is John Leeson, the guy who did the voice of K9 in Doctor Who, and Tapitlaw Credleigh is Michael Derbyshire who played Mr Davenport in Rentaghost. Lazlo Winter is Sam Neill, who’d done a TV version of Merlin. The Palatine and his secretary are based on actors too. Albert Munster is Gordon Kaye and the Palatine is Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards trilogy. He was a politician who was thoroughly evil, blackmailing and murdering his way to the top, but everyone loved him and thought he was a lovely man. I imagined the Palatine as sort of the anti-Francis Urquhart: everyone assumes he must be evil but he’s actually a genuinely nice person and man of the people.
Where did all those ridiculous wizard names come from?
The setting dictated that everyone should have Germanic names but I eventually got fed up trying to think of new ones. When it came to the wizards I decided that they could have different names and just had fun inventing really silly ones. I’d originally envisaged them as more serious characters but the silly names made them more comedic and I could have more fun with them.
You mentioned earlier about science developing from things like alchemy. Are the wizards meant to be proto-scientists?
To an extent but the point is that they don’t really understand it. They use all these devices left by the Skentys and just think they work by magic. But they’re starting to get some of the principles. Malchus and Adam’s illusionism is mostly a combination of psychology and hypnosis. It’s that thing that magic is just science we don’t understand. But more than that, the wizards are academics. The book’s full of contrasts and parallels between the old world and the new. Phelan University is a modern, scientific university, as was Stirling when I was there. The College of Magic represents older institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, particularly as depicted by Douglas Adams and Colin Dexter. I always get the impression from them that the dons, as Oxbridge lecturers are called, see teaching as something of an inconvenience. Even at Stirling a lot of the tutors only taught because that’s what they had to do to get their research grants but Adams and Dexter never seem to show dons teaching at all. They’re always attending faculty dinners or lending books to students who have to come to their chambers to get them. You sometimes see shots of students hurrying across the quad or whatever but there are never any classes. So the wizards resent having to teach because it interferes with their lifestyle.
Who is your favourite author?
It probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that I read a lot of Terry Pratchett. But I don’t actually read that much fiction these days. I used to when I was younger but not so much now. Not sure why. I’m rereading the Sherlock Holmes books at the moment, which I’ve loved since I was about ten.
So you don’t read a lot of fantasy?
Very little apart from Practchett. I’ve read Tolkien and Harry Potter if that counts. One or two others when I was younger - an Alan Garner, a couple of CS Lewis. I was into role-playing games in my teens but not any more. I watch some sci-fi and vaguely fantasy-related stuff on TV but it’s more The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer than Game of Thrones or Xena.
You mentioned the next book. Is it a sequel?
Well, inasmuch as it’s set in the same world and features some of the same characters. The idea was to create a world I could tell stories in. There are various recurring characters but they don’t all have to appear in every one. If I want a political story it might use the Palatine or I could do a detective story with Hammett and Falkon. And there are various backstories running through them but each book will be a complete story on its own. You don’t have to read one to understand the next one. I’ve left some threads unresolved in this one but they’re not central to the story so hopefully you won’t feel cheated. And it’s not, God forbid, a saga. When you sell your book on Amazon they ask if it’s part of a series and what the series name is. Sod that! This isn’t Book 1 of the Darkened Kingdom or any nonsense like that. And definitely no maps! Hopefully I’m as far away from that sort of stuff as it’s possible to get. When there are wizards and a dragon.
Stuart was interviewed by Judith Fullerton
Well, I’ve always wanted to write something. Even at primary school I wrote short stories and poems and they were put on display or read out to the class. One short story I wrote at high school was sent around lots of classes to be read out. And at high school I started acting and writing sketches then at university I decided I wanted to write for TV. At that stage I didn’t see myself as a novelist. In fact I think someone asked me if I’d ever write a book and I said no! And then I did.
How long did it take you?
Years! I first had the idea in 1992 and probably started writing it that year or the next. Then I left it for a long time because there was no urgency, no deadline or anything, and other things were more pressing, particularly a script for a video company that almost got made and then fell through but which I’m hoping to publish later this year as a play. I eventually came back to the book in 2002 and wrote the bulk of it over about eight months. After failing to get taken on by an agent, I let a couple of friends read it and I did some editing based on their comments. Then it languished again until Christmas 2012 when I re-edited it for publication.
Did you experience writer's block?
Not that I remember. That's certainly not why it got left for years, there was just no pressure to finish it. I sometimes get bogged down in trying to work out the mechanics or the logic of a particular scene but I’ve never had that problem of just not being able to think of anything to write. But then I’ve never had a publisher on my back saying I need to write my next book now. I write when I’ve got something I want to write. Maybe if I ever do it full time it’ll be different. But I am very good at procrastinating. Often I’ll sit down to write something and find distractions because I’m not very disciplined. The number of times recently I’ve had a couple of weeks holiday and said I’d try and finish the second book and the most I’ve ever done is reread what I’ve written so far and then go on the internet!
It's a large book for your first novel - was this intentional?
Not at all. In fact, until I prepared the paperback edition, I was worried that it might be a little short! I was amazed at how thick the proof copy was when it first arrived. I just wrote it until the story finished, didn’t think about page count.
It isn’t written in chapters.
That’s because I can’t do them! I tried, honestly. When I first started I thought about chapters and just couldn’t get the hang of them. Why does a chapter end there and a new one start here? It’s weird because I don’t think that about other people’s books but it just felt so arbitrary when I tried to do it myself. I felt that chapters should have either a structural or artistic purpose and I couldn’t think of one. So I just got on with it, thinking I’d probably sort the chapters out later, but then I got used to the idea and didn’t bother. But it always niggled me slightly, particularly because, with books being such a major part of the story, maybe that was the artistic reason. When I came to prepare it for publication I actually did sit and divide it all into chapters but it still felt arbitrary and I wasn’t happy. Phil Scary said if it bothered me so much I should just leave it. So blame him.
You thank someone called Blair for the title.
Blair was a friend I lost contact with years ago. He was a minister and I once heard him preach a sermon... well, it wasn’t really a sermon, more a sort of dramatic reading. His theme was creation and the idea that creationism and the big bang aren’t mutually exclusive because presumably a god would be able to engineer something like that. So he had this spacey music and maybe some slides, I can’t remember, and he basically went through the big bang but as if it was designed by God. Very similar to the first passage in the book. I can’t remember whether I wrote that passage after deciding to use the title or vice versa but anyway, during his sermon or whatever it was, Blair used the phrase “God, the ultimate dreamer”. I always liked it and it stayed with me. When I came up with a book about creation and evolution it seemed like the obvious title. Well, after I’d rejected two rubbish ones. I started with The Great Deception and then Father of Lies but thankfully they didn’t last very long. I always assumed that Blair made the phrase up but more recently I’ve started wondering whether it might have been a quote. I’ve found a couple of websites called Ultimate Dreamer but no clue as to its origins. If anyone knows, I’d be very interested to hear. It’d be cool if it was someone like Einstein cos then I could pretend it was deliberate. But I’d rather that it was just Blair.
What inspired your fictional place?
It’s not all that fictional. When I started, I was thinking of a much more ancient, fantasy cliché setting. There was even a wilderness! But I wasn’t really trying to write a fantasy book. I’ve always been interested in mythology and had noticed that fantasy writers and things like role-playing games always take a mix and match approach to mythology. They’ll have centaurs fighting trolls although one comes from Greek mythology and the other from Scandinavian. There’s nothing wrong with that but I was interested in going back to the original myths rather than the familiar literary versions of them and in putting them back into their original context. That meant a world similar to our own, with roughly the same geography, politics and history. So the Empire is loosely based on the Habsburg Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, which ruled most of central Europe for most of the second millennium. I’ve expanded the territory a bit because Greece was never a part of the real Empire and I’ve altered the electoral system to suit my own ends but they really did elect their emperors. Other countries are mentioned in the book and they all use old names for real world countries or parts of their territories. For instance, Breton is obviously France and Nihon is an ancient name for Japan. I like to think of it as our world with your eyes screwed up.
Why change to a renaissance world? Why not stick with ancient or even go for modern?
A renaissance world was the perfect setting to look at the world starting to move away from superstition to belief in science. Magic and superstition are still very prevalent but rationalism is starting to challenge them. It also allowed for more complex politics and a higher level of technology.
Why dragons?
One of the main themes of the book is the creation/evolution debate and the wider debate between science and religion and science’s origins in things like alchemy. So palaeontology was the obvious science to use. Dinosaur fossils are probably one of the main sources of our dragon myths, as well as other creatures like gryphons. So it was a natural step to make dragons the dinosaurs of this world.
You go to the lengths of explaining how dragons breathe fire. Was that something you particularly wanted to do?
Actually no. I was certainly interested in examining how magic and mythological creatures would work in the real world, which is where all the self-creating matter stuff comes from, but I thought that explaining how dragons breathe fire would be a cliché and so I wasn’t going to do it. And then I came across something in nature that explained it brilliantly and I couldn’t resist. Especially as it was another insect, the bombardier beetle, and that fitted nicely with using aphids to explain the March Cat.
The March Cat’s the Surrey puma, yes?
Yes. We think that we’re too enlightened to believe in myths and magic now but modern culture has loads of mythology of its own. UFOs is the obvious one and it’s often just addressing things that used to be explained by fairies or gods or demons. I got interested in all that stuff as a kid when the Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World series were on TV. I don’t believe in any of it but they make for good stories and I always want to work out the truth behind the mystery. They’re our modern mythology and so, having an interest in mythology, I read a lot of that stuff too. I’d read a book about mystery cats written by some people who had some very, shall we say entertaining theories on their origins. Complete nonsense and I didn’t use any of it but I guess it was rattling around my head and fitted with everything else.
Has any real event inspired you?
Well, history’s very important to these books. I studied two years of history at university and was quite good at it. I was a better historian than I was a psychologist. My history tutor tried to persuade me to change my degree by saying that I’d probably get a 2:1 or even a first if I did history. He was probably right and I only got a 2:2 in psychology so maybe I should have listened! Anyway, the historical background plays a major role and while there aren’t really any specific historical events in this book, the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is really at the heart of it. There aren’t any more recent events or any from my personal life except that Phelan University is based on Stirling University, where I studied. The next book will incorporate some real events though. No, I won’t tell you what they are - you’ll have to wait.
Did you base the characters on anyone real?
Teppec is based on a guy I met once called Norrie. A real ageing rocker type and when he first walked up to us i thought he looked like a bit of a hard man but he turned out to be the nicest guy you could meet. And he grinned all the time. I’ve exaggerated it in the book but that was Teppec. And Brother Gharial was loosely based on a Dominican Friar I met in Alnwick. Most of the wizards are based on actors. Malchus is an actor called Dennis Carey and Garrick Tummelwit is Robert Hardy as Siegfried Farnon in All creatures Great and Small, which is why he speaks in exclamations all the time. Corban Torridon is Roger Lloyd Pack, Pendlebury Truffton is Patrick Troughton because my brother-in-law once mispronounced his surname and I thought it was funny. Merrick Tootlesway is John Leeson, the guy who did the voice of K9 in Doctor Who, and Tapitlaw Credleigh is Michael Derbyshire who played Mr Davenport in Rentaghost. Lazlo Winter is Sam Neill, who’d done a TV version of Merlin. The Palatine and his secretary are based on actors too. Albert Munster is Gordon Kaye and the Palatine is Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards trilogy. He was a politician who was thoroughly evil, blackmailing and murdering his way to the top, but everyone loved him and thought he was a lovely man. I imagined the Palatine as sort of the anti-Francis Urquhart: everyone assumes he must be evil but he’s actually a genuinely nice person and man of the people.
Where did all those ridiculous wizard names come from?
The setting dictated that everyone should have Germanic names but I eventually got fed up trying to think of new ones. When it came to the wizards I decided that they could have different names and just had fun inventing really silly ones. I’d originally envisaged them as more serious characters but the silly names made them more comedic and I could have more fun with them.
You mentioned earlier about science developing from things like alchemy. Are the wizards meant to be proto-scientists?
To an extent but the point is that they don’t really understand it. They use all these devices left by the Skentys and just think they work by magic. But they’re starting to get some of the principles. Malchus and Adam’s illusionism is mostly a combination of psychology and hypnosis. It’s that thing that magic is just science we don’t understand. But more than that, the wizards are academics. The book’s full of contrasts and parallels between the old world and the new. Phelan University is a modern, scientific university, as was Stirling when I was there. The College of Magic represents older institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, particularly as depicted by Douglas Adams and Colin Dexter. I always get the impression from them that the dons, as Oxbridge lecturers are called, see teaching as something of an inconvenience. Even at Stirling a lot of the tutors only taught because that’s what they had to do to get their research grants but Adams and Dexter never seem to show dons teaching at all. They’re always attending faculty dinners or lending books to students who have to come to their chambers to get them. You sometimes see shots of students hurrying across the quad or whatever but there are never any classes. So the wizards resent having to teach because it interferes with their lifestyle.
Who is your favourite author?
It probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that I read a lot of Terry Pratchett. But I don’t actually read that much fiction these days. I used to when I was younger but not so much now. Not sure why. I’m rereading the Sherlock Holmes books at the moment, which I’ve loved since I was about ten.
So you don’t read a lot of fantasy?
Very little apart from Practchett. I’ve read Tolkien and Harry Potter if that counts. One or two others when I was younger - an Alan Garner, a couple of CS Lewis. I was into role-playing games in my teens but not any more. I watch some sci-fi and vaguely fantasy-related stuff on TV but it’s more The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer than Game of Thrones or Xena.
You mentioned the next book. Is it a sequel?
Well, inasmuch as it’s set in the same world and features some of the same characters. The idea was to create a world I could tell stories in. There are various recurring characters but they don’t all have to appear in every one. If I want a political story it might use the Palatine or I could do a detective story with Hammett and Falkon. And there are various backstories running through them but each book will be a complete story on its own. You don’t have to read one to understand the next one. I’ve left some threads unresolved in this one but they’re not central to the story so hopefully you won’t feel cheated. And it’s not, God forbid, a saga. When you sell your book on Amazon they ask if it’s part of a series and what the series name is. Sod that! This isn’t Book 1 of the Darkened Kingdom or any nonsense like that. And definitely no maps! Hopefully I’m as far away from that sort of stuff as it’s possible to get. When there are wizards and a dragon.
Stuart was interviewed by Judith Fullerton