Scott Lynch email Qs June 2006

Having met a very sick Scott Lynch in June 2006 to do an interview I felt afterwards that there were some questions that I still wanted to ask him from our off the record conversation. Here he has very kindly answered them.

VW Have you based Jean on yourself because I noticed a lot of similarities or is he an alter ego?

SL No, Jean was never consciously based on myself. Jean, I suppose, grew out of the need for Locke to have a foil and a compatriot. To reveal the psychology behind the two as succinctly as possible-- Locke is the way he is (ie, not a total, ruthless, uncaring criminal bastard despite his harsh childhood) because Chains helped him bond into the very tight, very small family of the GBs, particularly Jean.

Jean, on the other hand, is fundamentally a nice, well-educated middle class boy whose life went horribly awry once it was already somewhat developed.

Jean suffers terribly from the loss of his family, and it's this core of grief that makes him, for short periods of time, such a great fighter and such a vicious, lethal killer... the black mood he feels when he's cutting down a room full of foes is the same black mood that's been with him since that fire when he was 10. He just lets it out for a bit, whereas he normally keeps it well bottled up because he
*wants* to have a normal life, as normal as possible at least considering his trade.

I don't have anything like that, I'm afraid. :) My parents are both alive and I had a wonderful chilldhood. No black rages to speak of!

VW When you write is it as though a film is rolling and you put down what you see(this is how James Herbert does his)and do you get emotionally involved with the characters - or do you have to work at getting it down in the right order without tripping over your words?

SL Yes, definitely. Sometimes the writing process involves spending hours choosing the right two or three words and rearranging the endlessly... sometimes, when I build up a real head of steam, it involves 20,000 or so words in a day. There is an eighty-eight page section of TLOLL that I wrote in nineteen straight hours of... well, madness, really. I hope I never do that again.

The revision process is when you can come back and -put- everything in its proper order, and sort of un-trip yourself in spots where you've stumbled. One of the great secrets of writing is that nobody, and I mean nobody, ever has to see your first draft. ;) And thank god for that.

As for the filmic nature of everything, well, it doesn't distract me too much at the keyboard because, um, embarrassing as it sounds, I act an awful lot of scenes out in the shower, or when i'm alone in the car on a long drive...

VW Some of them have played others have watched - in your interview you say you wrote them but which bit?

Did you create the cards, the rules and regulations or the actual game i.e.Dungeons and Dragons as opposed to Star Wars etc.

SL Well, what happened in 2000 was the company that owned (and still owns) the Dungeons & Dragons brand, Wizards of the Coast, sort of re-launched the game in a snazzy new edition that was the first time I actually found I could *enjoy* the game (D&D having been around, in various incarnations, since 1974!).

As part of that promotional effort, they made the core rule system "open to the public," in a sense. With a few minimal usage rules and legal notices, anyone who wanted to could publish 100% congruent and 'official' source material for the Dungeons & Dragons system...thereby making it more enticing to the millions of potential purchasers for the world's oldest, biggest, and best-selling RPG of all time, which D&D certainly is. It was a generous and far-reaching idea... not only did it allow numerous third-party publishers to write and sell game material that stood a good chance of making money, it guaranteed a huge amount of "support products" for D&D with very little further effort from Wizards of the Coast.

I was one of the third-party writers who took advantage of this lovely scheme, and for a while it was even lucrative enough to be my full-time job (not that I was supporting myself in a palatial manner, but it was quite reasonable).

VW I had thought it was something like a medieval re-enactment like jousting or the Boston Tea Party where everyone dresses up in period costume. I had no idea that these RPGs were all about strategy and very complex.

SL Ahhh, but there are different styles of gaming! D&D is what is referred to as a 'tabletop' game, or a 'pen and paper' game, because you play it sitting (generally) at a nice flat surface on which you can roll dice and keep track of papers. Maps and small figurines can be used to diagram the action, but most of the game is imagined in the mind's eye of the participants, who will of course be lounging around in comfortable modern clothes rather than, say, silver chain-mail and wool cloaks.

But there is also something called "live action roleplaying," or "freeform" (in some parts of Europe) where every participant dresses up in costume and takes on a much more active role as a character... live action roleplaying is sometimes called LARPing for short, and it was LARPing that was my primary gaming interest for many years. Still is, I suppose. In a LARP, you face a sort of improvisational theatre challenge... if your character wishes to make conversation, *you* have to make conversation. If your character needs to be witty or threatening, *you* need to conjure those qualities yourself. It has...a sort of spectacle, and an emotional immediacy, that table top can never match for me. While I haven't LARPed in some time, I hope to be able to do it again some day. Jen loves it, too-- a fortunate thing for our future marital harmony!

Some LARPs do have intricate rules, and some are very, very simple--just you, your costume, and your poor naked brain, thrown into the mess to figure it out for yourself.

If any aspect of that has crept into Locke's world, it's that desperate, excited sensation he gets when he *has* to conjure an emotion and do it in three seconds, or risk the failure of his plans. I know *excatly* what that's like, and I know what it's like to deliberately put on another character, whatever my mood or cares might be, and to throw myself into being that person for a short while. I hadn't previously thought about it all that much, but I suppose that whole stable of characters I played over eight years or so of active LARPing really did inform Locke's 'art.' Hmmm, the things you learn when people start to ask you questions...

Does that all make sense? If not, clout me about the ears via e-mail, and I'll blather some more.