Guy Gavriel Kay on 'Under Heaven'

Guy Gavriel Kay has the special ability to take history and turn it into a fantasy that makes it a joy to read. I first met him when I interviewed him about 'Tigana' which now seems to be in the mists of time.

Ann has also been a fan of Guy's works and read 'Under Heaven' and so got to ask the questions for this interview - I just added a couple at the end - we hope you the reader will enjoy the result.

Ann: Do you visualize your characters?

Guy: As a rule, more as the books go on and they grow for me. I don't outline, and so there's very much a discovery process in every book.

Ann: How much input do you have into the cover design of your books ?

Guy: This varies from market to market, and is mostly a function of situations where I have longstanding relationships with editors and marketing people. In general by now I certainly get to say my piece and in some cases the covers represent very happy collaborations among a number of us.

Ann: If the filming of your books goes ahead, will you have and/or do you want a say in the casting ?

Guy: In any major studio film the author has next to no control or even input. In smaller budget productions there's more space for such a role. If a project gets greenlighted I'd certainly have an interest in who is cast in any major role, but wouldn't expect that opinion to carry a lot of weight with an established director who has his or her own clear vision by that point.

Ann: While we readers do enjoy the ‘soap opera' aspect of many stories set in the same world (Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey, Stephen Donaldson, Katherine Kurtz to mention but a few favourites), it is also a delight to read and complete a story in one volume. Are there any of your books whose worlds you might revisit in the future ?

Guy: I tend to be very focused on and conscious of the ‘architecture' of a book, a story. The multi-volume sagas have a very different underlying aesthetic, closer, as you say, to soap operas with the chance to ‘hang out' with characters we come to know (and in a world we come to know). So my own artistic impulses aren't - right now - inclined in that direction. This is not to say that things can't change. Indeed, if nothing changes we've dried up creatively.

Ann: I understand that the inspiration for your books comes from places and themes. The Director of the British Museum, in collaboration with BBC Radion 4, is broadcasting a series of talks on the history of the world through 100 objects held in the Museum, which is fascinating. Would an object fire your inspiration ?

Guy: Absolutely, and in many museums and galleries around the world objects have done exactly that. Indeed, take it farther afield: triumphal arches, roofless, round medieval towers, rooms in a chateau, even a picture of a dome have triggered ideas in me.

Ann: When you start researching a book, do you use original sources, academic theses or modern fiction/faction?

Guy: Never the latter, really. I go to original material, chase down the best scholarship, and then the best scholars I can find (the internet helps hugely, not so much for what I find there - though that happens - but more for the people I can end up contacting that way). Sometimes travel plays a role, but for the most part it is reading, exchanging emails, and taking notes. And taking time. Immersion is a part of the process, and that requires time.

Ann: Practically, how do you organise your references and material for a book, and what do you do with it all when you've finished?

Guy: It isn't pretty! I take longhand notes in black notebooks (well, they don't actually have to be black) and at intervals do consolidations, reading over all the notebooks, and fine tuning the first notes into yet another notebook, a kind of ‘greatest hits' ... but the main purpose is to have me reading my original notes again, and again ... because it is easy to forget over time what animated me, say, a year and a half before. One reason I'm grudgingly interested in electronic book media is the prospect of being able to search for a string of text that I know I read somewhere, but can't remember where.

Ann: What do you read for pleasure outside research ?

Guy: Really widely, no readily obvious pattern. I recently discovered Jane Gardam, am reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson right now, and have two or three new books of poetry by the bed. I loved Bel Canto and Out Stealing Horses and fought McCarthy's The Road for 30-40 pages, before surrendering to its power. I read a book on the French Resistance a few weeks ago (Matthew Cobb's), two biographies of Churchill, a book on the Dreyfus Affair (Louis Begley's) and thought Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars was terrific. On tour last month I met Zachary Mason in California, we were interviewed together, and I liked his first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a lot.I also read Kit Whitfield's fantasy, On Great Waters on the road. I just finished a book on stand-up comedy in the 1970s (a lot of cocaine involved ... in the writing, not the reading).

Ann: What do you think are your strengths as a writer ?

Guy: Patience, stubbornness, research, empathy. Trust in my readers.

Ann: You would be of great value to a quiz team - is that something you would do?

Guy: Used to do it, long ago. Various pub-based trivia nights.

Ann: In 'Under Heaven' I really appreciated the follow up on what happened to the minor characters, why did you do this?

Guy: Well, I could be quick and say: to elicit that appreciation! But in fact endings obsess me, always, because as a reader I have too often been disappointed by a book that sets me up and doesn't deliver. This doesn't mean any given ending will work for everyone (that's true of any work of art, of course) but in Under Heaven the gradual establishment of what I sometimes call the ‘long focus' narrative tone that sometimes comes in gave me room, scope, even a responsibility, to cover some of these minor figures in that way ... all figures in a story become ‘smaller' when we see them through the very long lens of history and time.

Ann: Thank you for your books, loving fantasy and history it's the ideal combination for me with the knowledge that a really good read awaits.

Vicky: I remember well Tigana and how it tied up with what was going on in Romania at the time - how did you come to choose history and fantasy as a genre to write in?

Guy: I can bore a whole new slate of readers with a too -long answer here. I have done speeches and essay on this, and some are on brightweavings.com in the ‘GGK's Words' section. I see the fantastic as a tremendous tool in the writer's arsenal, to be used when it suits the story, and for dealing with history I view the ‘quarter turn to the fantastic' (as one reviewer described what I do) as ethically liberating and creatively powerful.

Vicky: How do you relax after a day of writing?

Guy: Family. Friends. Single malt. Films. Baseball games. Good dinners. DVDs of great television ("The Wire", "Deadwood"). Planning travel. Dreaming of the next chance to travel.