Fascinating Authors

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Tell us a little bit about your book.

Author: My book is three books, a trilogy, called Friends and Enemies, the first book called simply Friends and Enemies, the second, Beings in a Dream and the third, very recently published, The Fairest Star. The three make up an adventure story and they should just be read for the pleasure of it – I hope it will be a pleasure at any rate! It is based on 15-year old Tommy traveling back in time to France in 1599, meeting a girl of the same age, and their adventures together, their collisions with the customs and beliefs of 1599, including the side effects of Tommy’s mobile telephone coming along for the ride. They soon get into serious trouble, as you may imagine.

Although the story is based on time travel, that is not the point really. It’s not a science fiction story. I suppose it fits into fantasy, but there’s no elves, orcs and wizards! I try to create the feeling of 1599 realistically as far as I can, how people were, what was important to them, real people in an unreal story, exploring how Tommy reacts to the world of 1599 and how the heroine, Eloise, reacts to Tommy’s way of being.  And later on, how Eloise comes to face our modern world and how she copes with that.

1599 in Europe was a bloodthirsty, fanatical period and there was lots of rhetoric about making black puddings from the blood of Protestants or describing the Pope as the anti-Christ, the Devil himself.  Some readers may see some parallels between this and the fanatical words and actions of the 21st century. Tommy and Eloise of course get embroiled in all this: you just couldn’t help it if your devil-object mobile phone goes off in the Bishop’s ear or from inside a coffin!

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What inspired you to create a work of fiction?

Author: Well, you know in real life, so to speak, I’m a professional astronomer and physicist. Like many scientists, I’ve written lots of scientific papers over the years. So my whole life has been writing, writing, writing. Of course it was not fiction or at any rate, not intentional fiction! But I enjoy writing, science or whatever. When I was working in the Observatory of Paris in the early 1990s, I had an hour’s journey time out to the observatory every morning and evening. I got bored on the terminally slow rapid transport system and began to scribble down the stories which I had been telling to my two children the night before. That’s how I started and how I discovered that I really found it fun.

I could be naughty and say what inspired me to start a novel was the fact that the in-laws had come for Christmas and I had to escape somehow. This is only partly true. At any rate I started to write a story for my younger daughter at Christmas time. This was intended to be a short story really.  I used to read new bits to her each evening. She demanded more and more. It grew to fifty pages, I remember. At that point I realized that I ought to start thinking a bit! So that was how it started – unintentionally.

The inspiration for the story actually came some time earlier. We have some friends who have a really lovely château in France, dating from 1580, like the one in the book. In fact the one in the book is completely inspired by it, including the much older ruined château nearby. In the château there hangs an etching of the château gardens as they must have been at some time in the past. I remember looking at that etching and thinking ‘I want to write a story about the people who used to live here and walk in those gardens.’ And so I did, eventually.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What did you do to prepare for writing your book?

Author: Now is the time when I should say that I did lots of historical research and went to the locations and so on. That’s what you are meant to do, I suppose? The trouble is, I didn’t. I did happen to be reading a great book called Food in History. So what’s on the menu in the big banquet near the beginning of the first book is authentic. I also checked lots of things on the internet – what sort of guns they had in 1599 for example. But this was more or less as I went along. I did a fair bit of reading about the Catholic-Protestant confrontation in Toulouse, again as I went along. I must say that things went a bit pear-shaped with the geography because of my negligence. I hadn’t realized how far to the east Toulouse lay – but then perhaps it was a parallel universe that Tommy entered, not quite the same France as ours?

FASCINATING AUTHORS: How did you develop the plot?

Author: I created the start of the story with Tommy with his parents on holiday, in a car in France, going to the château. That just arose naturally enough – though I wonder how in retrospect. Once the characters were defined – which can happen quite suddenly, like the Count, Eloise’s father, being strong from the neck downwards – the people in the book took over. They tell you what to write. Well, I exaggerate a bit, but it’s true that the story writes itself to quite a large degree. People only behave in character or they aren’t real people. I don’t want to give away too much of the story of course, but Tommy and Eloise, especially, are pretty innocent and things develop in their own way. Tommy is basically quite a normal sort of guy. He likes action and wants to do things. Eloise is not a normal sort of girl, by modern standards. She’s more reflective than Tommy but equally able to act when it comes to it. And it comes to it quite often. The skeletons in the cupboard of Eloise’s family have always been there. Tommy just has to open the doors and out fall the skeletons. Okay, I put the skeletons in the cupboard – so I’m responsible for that.

Certainly I used to think a lot about what was going to happen in the story and make up whole passages in my head – even details. I remember thinking of the phrase describing a fly buzzing ‘as though it was frying in its own fat’ as I was driving in to work one morning. I suspect that in the background your brain is working at it all the time without your realizing it – and that is why the story comes so readily when you start to write it down. Sometimes I would arrive at work and spend the first five minutes getting down in some sort of shorthand what I wanted to do next in the book.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Are any of your characters based on anyone – or any type of person – you know?

Author: Yes. This must be true of every author! But there is no one person of whom I could say: that’s him or her. Except perhaps the most improbable character of all: Scrotile the mole man. He really existed, though I never met him, and he really did what it says he does in the book! (although two people have said to me that “I can believe all the characters in the book but I cannot believe him!”).

I know all the people in the book in a way because they are bits of all the people that I have met in real life. Sometimes it’s their appearance, sometimes their character. In my mind, the completely barmy Joncilond, who capers through the books, looks very like a good friend with lots of curly hair – but my friend is not barmy, or only rather barmy since he goes ice-climbing. Perhaps it is because they are both physically very strong, I mean Joncilond in the book and my friend in real life. Tommy’s Dad has to be based a bit on me, Tommy’s Mum a bit on the wife of a friend of mine, but Eloise is also based on my children and my wife. Tommy is straight and logical and reasonable (some of the time) and there is certainly something of a very old friend of mine in him.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: How long did it take you to write the book – (was it longer or less time than you expected)?

Author: I must admit that the length of time it took to write the books never was an issue. I just went on sitting with my laptop in our big comfy chair until I came to the end. I could not enjoy the whooshing sound of deadlines rushing by, because I had no deadlines. It’s taken several years to complete the three books, but that’s just how it panned out.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Did you seek the support of a writer’s group or class?

Author: No, I didn’t. Perhaps I should have, but I didn’t really think of it. I wasn’t really trying to achieve anything, at least at first. After a time I did feel that I had to be able to finish the story. But I didn’t need support psychologically for that. It was never a chore. As I said, I really enjoy writing – that’s why I do it. But I might well have done a better job with advice from other writers and experts.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What surprised you the most about this process?

Author: That’s an interesting question. What happens is this. You sit down and you start. Now Beethoven said that it took him at least half an hour to get back into a composition when he had put it down and wanted to take it up again. So us mortals may take a bit longer. Anyway, once you’ve got over this hump and crossed out what you wrote at first, after a bit the paper becomes transparent  – or you start to see right through the computer screen. You are in a bit of a trance. I was really surprised by this. But in fact it’s what happens when you write scientific papers too. It’s called concentration, I suppose. You certainly need to have it and I must have acquired it without realizing. You probably can get it from practice. Anyway, when something finally distracts you, you realize with astonishment that two hours have gone by and you look back and read through what you have written. Did I really write that? I used to think to myself. (I still do). This is another moment of surprise. Surprise that you could write such stuff (I’m not saying it’s good, just that it is there).

Then there’s the way the story jumps at you: the mobile phone appeared out of thin air, rats under the bed, the revolver. Where does it all come from?  You put your hands on the keyboard and the piano starts to play tunes. That’s what happens. Writing conversation can be crazy sometimes. You overhear your characters talking and you rush to keep up to get it written quickly enough, typing like mad, correcting all the errors afterwards.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What tips would you offer to anyone writing fiction for the first time?

Author: I’m afraid that I am not the one to give advice which isn’t pretty obvious advice, like don’t give your heroine brown hair in chapter one and then red hair in chapter three. I should be getting advice, I think, rather than giving it. Perhaps I could add that you should make sure that you are enjoying yourself if it’s a children’s book. And try hard to remember what it was like being 8 or 12 or 15 years old. What preoccupied you then? If you are writing a serious novel, then I’ve never done it. Ask someone who has!

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What can we look forward to in your next book?

Author: The next book is going to appeal to somewhat older teenagers and also to grownups – as does the present series, it seems. It’s going to be dealing with issues of intolerance, love and hatred, just as Friends and Enemies did, but in a more realistic context. I’ve started it but I’ve not had a great deal of time to develop it. I have a title for it. It’s called Parallel Paris.

Actually I have been writing an number of ezines articles and I was thinking of adapting them to write a satirical book called ‘How to annoy editors’. That won’t be easy to get published, I suppose! There is also a book of short stories in the offing – if I can find a publisher.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Is there anything we haven’t covered that you would like to include?

Author: There are always a lot of interesting things to think about – like what distinguishes a children’s book, or at least, a young adult novel from an adult novel? Is there such a thing as a children’s book really? Treasure Island was one of the first straight adventure stories for children, written for by Stevenson for his son. But Blind Pugh lives on in your memory all your life, tapping on the ground with his stick and it’s only a few lines in the book!

And you can wonder about what makes a great novel. In a Cambridge Finals Examination in English Literature there was a question ‘What makes a great novel?’ Apparently one of the students wrote the answer ‘A great novelist’. The student was right.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Thank you for taking the time to be part of this interview!

To learn more about the Author and his books please visit – http://www.davidfield.co.uk/