An Interview with Eddie Robson


                               (Author photo by Sami Kelsh)


An Interview with Eddie Robson


Please tell us everything we need to know about your most new book!

Hearts of Oak is about an architect and teacher called Iona, on the verge of retirement, who lives in a city made entirely of wood. A new student comes to see her, wearing a hat made of a material Iona doesn’t recognise. On the same day she goes to a funeral for a colleague and sees a man climb onto the coffin before it goes into the flames. Things get stranger from then on. Oh and the king of the city has a talking cat called Clarence.



How would you define the genre that your book falls into?

Science fiction.

Why did you fall in love with this genre in the first place, and which books / authors / series would you recommend?

I’ve loved sci-fi for as long as I can remember, back when I was avidly reading Transformers comics as a kid. I didn’t even think of it as sci-fi at the time, I didn’t know what that was. I came to it because I liked cool robots who turned into cars, but then I got into the characters. Simon Furman, who wrote all the best Transformers comics, was a huge influence on my tastes. In my teens it was mostly Doctor Who and Douglas Adams.

My SF and fantasy reading is very scattershot, partly because I’ve been reviewing for SFX for nearly twenty years and so I read whatever they send me! But I’ve discovered some great things while doing that job – Chris Beckett’s novels are wonderful, and I’ve just read Max Barry’s new one Providence, which is hugely impressive. In between those, the ones that have stayed with me most are maybe Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve – which I’d like to read again, as I feel like it might either be incredibly timely or incredibly dated – and Philip K Dick’s Time Out Of Joint. Dick makes being a sci-fi writer seem like the coolest thing you could possibly be. Which it is, of course.

You’ve written for various franchises over the years – you’ve been trusted with some really famous properties. How do you find working with other people’s creations, and making your mark in those worlds?

There’s obviously a degree of responsibility when you’re writing for something that has an existing audience, but provided I’m familiar with the franchise, I think it makes things easier just because a lot of decisions are already made for you. You know who the characters are, and as long as you write them well, people will be interested in them. You know what the tone and the rules of the world are – on an original project I think that’s often the hardest thing, you have a world of choice and you have to pin it down. Lots of my ideas could go in different directions and there’s a terrible fear of doing it the wrong way and wasting the idea. In a franchise you have a narrower range of choice, though of course tone does vary within a franchise.

You also know what the audience expects and what they’ll accept, and that’s very helpful. Often I’ll have an idea that’s set in a recognisable real world, either the contemporary world or the past, but there’s a fantasy or sci-fi element – and I have to introduce that in such a way that the audience doesn’t go ‘What the...?’ Whereas if I’m working in an existing franchise, I know that, for example, the audience for this thing will accept aliens, but won’t accept vampires. The great thing about Doctor Who is that it’s done all those things at some point, so it’s all up for grabs. I revealed a character was a vampire very late in one of my Big Finish Who plays, and there’s no way I could’ve got away with that in Star Trek, for instance. Though I could fancy writing Star Trek.

When I’m writing Doctor Who stuff I feel quite relaxed about it, because the target audience for a Doctor Who spinoff is basically someone like me, so I feel like I can just write for myself. I’m so familiar with the rhythms and storytelling strategies of Doctor Who, it comes much faster than other sorts of writing. I don’t worry about making a mark on it though – the number of licenced Who stories that have been written is huge, you’re always going to be a drop in the ocean.

Is there a franchise you haven’t written for yet that you’d like to?

I’ve always fancied writing a Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy story, but nobody’s ever going to commission me to do one, so I decided to just write it myself and put it out on a blog. I’ve just started it: https://eddierobson.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/this-is-of-course-impossible-chapter-1/

Is there a genre you couldn’t imagine ever writing in..?

I dunno, I’ll have a crack at anything really. Maybe war stories? And generally I don’t think I have the patience to write in-depth historical fiction – that level of research is beyond me, I think. I’m OK writing period settings if they’re after about 1900, because it’s not too far away from the present day and I’ve absorbed quite a lot about that time, but the further back you go, the trickier it gets – when I was writing my Who play The Secret History, which is set in 6th-century Constantinople, I kept getting tripped up by details. Likewise, if there are too many real people and events anchoring a story I get frustrated. I like having the freedom to make stuff up. That’s why I got into being a writer, to make stuff up.

And you’ve written for TV and audio – how different is that, do you find, from writing fiction..?

Massively different. Scripts are so much quicker. There’s been a five-year gap between my first novel and my new one, and it’s not that I ever stopped writing prose, I just keep parking my various prose projects to work on scripts. I didn’t have a publisher for Hearts of Oak when I wrote it, and I didn’t have one for Tomorrow Never Knows either, and these things take months to write even if you’re going quite quickly. Both books took ten years from start of writing to publication, because I kept doing a bit, then running out of steam, or some paid script work would come along. Sinking time into another novel seemed risky when I had no idea if it would get published.



A lot of the time, if I had a free fortnight when I didn’t have any work on, I had the choice of chipping away at the novel, or writing a spec script – and most of the time I’d write a script, because I could easily get a draft together in a fortnight, and I know various TV and radio development people and it’s always good to have a new script to send them. Even if they don’t want to make that script, they might think of you for another project.

But having said all that... after a few years I started getting bored of writing endless spec scripts that did the rounds and never got made and then just sat on my hard drive. And though it’s harder work, writing prose started to feel more enticing, just because I didn’t have to wait for someone to make it. Even if nobody published it, it was its own thing, and I could feel satisfied with that, and I started to feel more motivated. So although scripts are still my bread and butter, in the last couple of years I’ve made more time for writing prose.

It is harder work though – not only the sheer amount of words that go into a book, but it’s harder to wrestle a novel into the shape you want. The defined blocks of a script – action, dialogue, scenes – are easier to move around. Redrafting a script is like playing with Lego. Redrafting a novel is more like restructuring a huge sandcastle.

How did you get into writing in the first place, and how did you first get published..? Has it been a long and difficult road, or has it been relatively straightforward?

I have a clear memory, from when I was about 12, of walking home from school and thinking ‘I could be a writer’ and from then on that was all I really wanted to do. Having said that, I did very little writing in my teens. I started some pretty bad bits of Doctor Who fanfic but never finished them. When I was a student I started writing more seriously, and wrote for fanzines, and that was my way into writing for various magazines and Big Finish. For a few years I did lots of journalism, but that work started to tail off when magazines started closing in the 2000s and I felt it was drawing time away from my creative work anyway, which was what I really wanted to do.

I did an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, using money I’d saved up from a job at London Buses and redundancy money from a job I’d had as a computer games journalist. That MA was a great experience, but I was torn between writing contemporary fiction and sci-fi. I tried both, and neither really came off, and for several years I saw myself as a scriptwriter, writing for Big Finish and BBC Radio and Hollyoaks, and I got myself a scripts agent. I did finally finish off the sci-fi novel I’d started, and sent it to dozens of book agents – but nothing happened. I’d given up on selling it and was on the verge of self-publishing when Snowbooks picked it up. Which was great – I’m glad it’s out there – but it sold really poorly and that knocked my confidence. I kept writing novels but found it hard to get over that hump around 30,000 words when the initial enthusiasm has worn off and you’ve got loads of words to go and it’s not as good as it was in your head before you started.

Weirdly in late 2018, when I roused myself for another go at writing novels instead of endless spec scripts, everything went much better. I’d started writing Hearts of Oak years earlier but thought ‘This is stupid. Why am I writing this? There’s no market for it.’ But I had a window to send it to Tor.com and they felt there was a market for it. And within months an entirely different novel I’d written got me an agent. So suddenly I was thinking of myself as a novelist again.

My career has been very odd and shapeless because I write in so many different genres and media. Sometimes I think I should have focused on one or two genres or media and then I’d be doing better in those fields, but then I might have closed off avenues that have led to good things. At one point I didn’t think my writing was funny enough and I should focus on drama, but then I started to get work in radio comedy and my sitcom Welcome To Our Village, Please Invade Carefully happened.



These days writers are meant to have a clear personal brand, and I don’t have that at all because I’m writing oddball SF novels and children’s TV and comedy and lots of other things. But I don’t know what to do about it, because I like doing all those things and if people are willing to pay me to do them, why would I say no? The truth is you have bizarrely little control over your career, because the projects that happen are just the ones that landed on the right desk at the right time. If the work keeps coming in and you’re enjoying the work and getting to put something of yourself into it, you’re doing well.

What are you going to write next..? Are you going to be working in the same vein? What can we expect to read.?

I’ve got four different novels in various states of completion. There’s the novel that got me my agent, which is a total departure, not sci-fi or fantasy – it’s about being a teenager in the 90s and being in long-distance relationships, and it’s semi-autobiographical, which I’ve never done before. I’d never thought about writing about that stuff but I was lying in bed one morning reading Sally Rooney’s Normal People and enjoying her evocation of teenage relationships and remembering my own teenage years and suddenly this book unfolded in my head within minutes. I even had the title, it’s called She Goes To Another School. We’re still looking for a publisher for that.

In addition I’m working on a contemporary novel which is a sort of romance, and an SF novel which is a murder mystery about telepathy. And then there’s something I’ve been wanting to write for years, a time travel story set in Manchester in 1966 and 1989, which I did 10,000 words of before realising it’s a huge story and is going to take a long time to write, so I’ve decided to work on that in bits between other projects. Ideally the non-SF novels will get picked up and I’ll keep doing my SF and this book will be the one that ties those two strands of my career together! But as I say you have bizarrely little control over your career, so I doubt it’ll work out like that.

Script-wise I have more stuff on the way – my kids’ audio series The Space Programme will be airing weekly episodes well into the summer, there’s three animated shows I’ve worked on that haven’t aired yet, and I wrote for the Chinese version of Humans, which is coming sometime this year. And I’ve got another Big Finish audio out in April, the first of the Susan’s War boxset. I’m trying to get more projects off the ground now, I rarely feel like I’m working at capacity.



Finally… tell us something surprising about yourself that your readers might not already know..!

I have never been beaten on the two-player VS mode on Sonic The Hedgehog 2. Once my friend Tom drew with me, but that’s the closest I’ve come to losing.




Comments

  1. A fascinating and inspiring interview. It is reassuring to know that even successful and prolific writers have projects that they struggle to complete and some things simply do not resonate with publishers and agents. But it is encouraging to note that some books and scripts that take time (maybe years) to find the right home. Patience is key.

    Like Eddie, I thought as a youngster, "I could be a writer," and slowly set about realising the dream. I have published with a number of small presses, I co-own a small press company myself, and I'm now writing a talking book for BBC Audio. I would love to be a scriptwriter. Maybe that will come next.

    Some years ago I interviewed Red Dwarf writer Doug Naylor for a semi-pro magazine. His advice for would-be authors was, "Black on white, you gotta write." Sitting there moaning that you never get anywhere, when you've not even completed a piece, is crazy. I took that to heart.

    I am encouraged by Eddie's comments here. Thank you for taking the time to share.

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