Katherine Roberts interview

This interview with Katherine Roberts was conducted by Kevin Mahoney in the Autumn of 2001.

 

 KPM: You had many short stories published before your first novel.  What did you learn from your years of writing short stories that enabled your success as a novelist?

 Katherine Roberts: Although I don't see myself as a short story writer (my plots always get far too ambitious to contain in a few thousand words!), writing short stories was an invaluable introduction to the different types of market. When I started sending work off, I didn't even realize the difference between "literary" fiction (as in experimental writing, the sort of thing that wins prizes) and more "traditional" fiction (with a beginning, middle and end). I soon decided my work fell firmly in the latter category, and also discovered that I preferred writing fantasy rather than horror or hard SF. The generous feedback from readers and editors of these magazines helped point me in the right direction. It's just a shame there wasn't an equivalent short story magazine aimed at the teenage market - had there been, I might have discovered sooner where my strengths lie.

KPM:  I see that you are now having a great many books published, especially with the launch of The Seven Fabulous Wonders.  From reading Story Cellar, I gathered that you had written several novels.  Many excellent writers, like Joanne Harris, have lots of material stored away that has never been printed.  Were the novels mentioned in Story Cellar the ones you are publishing now, or do you have a stockpile of material that has yet to be published?

Katherine Roberts: I have been writing "novels" since I was 18. My first book was a sprawling space opera typed on blue and yellow paper. No publisher ever saw it, or is likely to! It would have been these early novels that were mentioned in Story Cellar, but they're not the ones I'm publishing now. First of all, I don't believe in digging work out of my "bottom drawer" to give to a publisher, because although it was probably the best I could do at the time, it certainly isn't the best I can do now, and to allow such sub-standard work to be published does nobody any favours - readers, publishers, or the author. Secondly, these unpublished novels were all written for an adult audience, and are therefore unsuitable in form, if not in content, for my current readership.

On the other hand, those early novels have allowed me to hone my skills in private (a luxury not afforded to those writers who experience an early success), and the material in them - ideas, characters, invented worlds, research - provides a solid foundation for new work. For example, Song Quest contained material from an earlier unpublished novel and two published short stories. Spellfall grew from a very short book originally written for a much younger age group, and research done for a short story about Ancient Egypt provided groundwork for The Great Pyramid Robbery. I think of my unpublished work as the unseen foundations... I am currently in the process of building the walls!

 KPM:  I have read Song Quest and Spellfall, both of which are aimed at the early teen market.  Given that any characters you write about in this age group are bound to be developing anyway, what with the onset of adulthood and the rush of hormones, do you think that this is the most fruitful market for a children’s author to aim at?

Katherine Roberts: It is a most interesting market at the moment, with the recent explosion of challenging books for teenagers that just did not exist when I was that age. Back then, you went straight from "Jackie and the Pony Trekkers" to Stephen King in one bound. Now you have Philip Pullman, Melvyn Burgess, Peter Dickinson, Susan Price, to name but a few... all tackle adult themes and put these in a good story so that you have the best of both worlds. My stories have always tended to feature young characters on the brink of adulthood, which is perhaps why I find this age group so exciting to write for.

KPM:   In most of your fiction that I’ve read so far, there seems to be a cabalistic elite that has a troubled relationship with ordinary mortals.  There’s the Spell Lords in Spellfall, the predatory vampires in Rubies, and the mysterious Special Studies group of Oxford in The Fourth Triangle.  Even the Singers of Song Quest were first introduced as villains in Death Singer.  There are communities who prey and hunt in your fiction, like the Casters, and those that need protection.  How important is the idea of community to you?

Katherine Roberts: I think it is the idea of difference, rather than community in itself, that interests me. By inventing a community like the Singers who live on the "outside" in their world, I can explore what happens when they leave their safe haven and meet others of different upbringing, talents and beliefs.  Doing this in a fantasy setting enables me to work freely without running up against real-world prejudices and constraints.

KPM:   There are some quite adult issues beneath the surface in Spellfall, such as alcoholism.  There has been some fuss recently about drugs featuring in children’s books.  How do you, as a children’s author, decide where reality stops and fantasy begins?

Katherine Roberts: See my answer to question 4... I don't think the reality ever stops. Even in fantasy setting, it is important to me that the characters who live there and their world should seem real to the reader. For this reason, I don't particularly like books such as Harry Potter, where you always know deep down that it isn't real, despite the "real" setting. I write fantasy, yes, but only in the fact that I use different props as a background to the same human struggles that we see around us every day. A fantasy setting makes these things easier to digest, and is therefore perhaps more acceptable to the children's market. I suspect that if I put the same characters and plot in a real-world setting, it would be censored far more heavily!

 KPM:   You write about fantastic beasts, such as the Merlee and Unicorns, but also about the cruelty that Man inflicts upon nature.  Yet there seems to be a recent trend to dismiss the harm that man is doing, with Bush letting American polluters regulate themselves, and the recent publication of Bjorn Lomberg’s ‘The Sceptical Environmentalist’.  How fruitful is the topic of the environment and the natural world for you in your writing?

Katherine Roberts: This is something that seems to creep into my work without me noticing. In an early interview with Carousel magazine, I was quite surprised to find the interviewer had me down as some kind of crusader for the Green Party! I think this perceived concern for the natural world arises from my answer to question 4. The half creatures in The Echorium Sequence and the soul trees in Spellfall are simply different/alien cultures and communities exploited by man. Even the Singers (who defend the half creatures), and the Spell Lords (who live in the soul trees) exploit them in some way. This is a very complex question, and in some ways you could say that the self-regulation of American polluters reflects American foreign policy - though I don't want to go into that here. I do seem to have a fondness for fantastic creatures, which seem to have featured in all my novels so far!

KPM:   Given that you seem to write mostly fantasy, how much research do you do?  For instance, how much study did you do on computer viruses for Spellfall?

Katherine Roberts: The amount of research I do depends upon the book I'm writing, though I always end up doing some. Even in Song Quest, which is probably the most imaginative, the original idea came from reading a text on music therapy.

In Spellfall, the idea of the soul trees being like a vast computer system open to attack from viruses dates back to my final year project at University, where I wrote a program for the American Department of Defense using a language called Diana, which had a recursive structure based on nodes and roots called "trees". Since then, I've always thought of a computer system as a tree. Then while I was writing Spellfall, I saw an article in Atlantic Monthly about viruses and the proposed Digital Immune System that equated computer systems to biological systems, and I immediately saw how someone could destroy a soul tree. I checked the feasibility of a nasty substance like the Raven with a friend who works for the MOD, and when my editor expressed doubts about the resolution of the book I was able to produce the evidence!

The Seven Wonders series, of course, involves lots of research into ancient civilizations, which I'm finding quite fascinating.

KPM:   How did The Seven Fabulous Wonders series come about?

Katherine Roberts: I'd written a few short stories and one unpublished novel set in ancient times which fascinate me because of their parallel to fantasy worlds. When you go back far enough, history has lots of holes in it where even the experts don't know what happened. These holes are ripe for filling with magic. Also, the myths and legends of the time provide rich pickings for a fantasy writer. The Seven Fabulous Wonders are essentially fantasy plots set against historical props, one book set around each of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I am determined that the books should be fun and accessible to a young reader, so my characters are "ordinary" youngsters struggling to make sense of their world, rather than princes or princesses.

This approach gives me a freedom with my plots that I would not have if I'd chosen to focus on well-known historical characters, although the kings and emperors, wars and major events still appear in the background. For example, the first in the series - The Great Pyramid Robbery - deals with a fictional plot to rob the Great Pyramid of Khufu, set at the time that the second pyramid is being built on the Giza Plateau. The second book in the series - The Babylon Game - deals with a fictional board-game championship that takes place during the Babylonian/Persian wars.

KPM:  What’s it like working closely with an editor before the publication of a book?  I was enthralled by a recent documentary on BBC2 where Geoff Ryman had several endings for his latest novel rejected by his publishers.  What does it feel like to hand control of your work over to others, and are there benefits as well as downfalls?

Katherine Roberts: An editor's eye is invaluable because they see the things you can't see when you are so close to the story - places where you haven't explained things fully enough, places that slow the story, conflicting character motivation, even silly little things like the fact you've used the word "sick" ten times on page three. All this tidies up the story, and it's surprising how much quite small changes done at the last minute can improve a book. In my experience, an editor does not seek to change major things like the ending, although in Crystal Mask I was asked to add a paragraph at the end to include a major character I'd forgotten to mention.

Mostly, it's a relief to have someone else who is so keen and committed to the book making suggestions for improvements, and all work done at this stage is beneficial. As a children's author, I do however sometimes run against what I call "censorship", which involves taking out issues seen as sensitive, particularly for the American market. If these scenes are not critical to the story, I take them out with no fuss. Otherwise, we have so far been able to agree a compromise. It has to be said, though, that with the recent growth in teenage fiction there seem to be fewer taboo areas than before.

KPM:   What’s been your biggest break as a writer?

Katherine Roberts: I don't think I've had my big break yet! Seriously, though, "big" is a relative term. Seven years ago, it was a big thing for me to have a short story accepted for publication in a magazine that paid only complimentary copies. When the man who discovered JK Rowling made me an offer for Song Quest, that was pretty big at the time - and winning the Branford Boase Award the following year was another big step. But I see all these things as steps rather than gigantic breaks. There is always something bigger to aim for, and I suppose that is part of the reason why I continue to write so industriously. There is always the hope that the next book will be the "big one." Either that, or I'm just too ambitious for my own good! 

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