David Gemmell on the Art and Craft of Writing

The late heroic fantasy author David Gemmell needs no introduction for most of the readers of this blog. Morgan Holmes called him “The Man who Saved Sword and Sorcery Fiction,” and Steve Tompkins once referred to him as “our favourite genre’s second wind.” To most of his fans he was, and to many still remains, The King of Heroic Fantasy.

​​Almost a decade ago I went through as many of David Gemmell’s interviews as I could find to collate his advice and commentary on writing, which I organised into categories by topic for my own greater understanding of his perspective on aspects of the art and craft of writing.

​The intent of this article is to share his advice, perspectives and approach to writing fiction in a more compact and focused form than the many interviews in which they first appeared.

​In retrospect I wish that I had tagged each quote and linked it to it’s source interview in a bibliography. When I first compiled this it was simply for my own reference and there didn’t seem a need at the time. Now I am not even sure if all of the original interviews are still available online.

​And so without more ado here is...

​David Gemmell on the Art and Craft of Writing

If you could give one piece of advice to want-to-be writers, what would it be?
Writing is an acquired skill. No one walks into a hospital and says: “I want to be a brain surgeon, so give me a saw and a sick patient.” The skill has to be learned. So… never quit. Just keep writing.

What advice would you give to debut novelists to encourage them?
Anyone who needs constant encouragement just isn’t going to make it. You need stamina, self-belief, and a dogged obstinacy. It also helps to have a thick skin and an ego that makes Everest look like a pimple on a sheep’s bum.

Writing is an acquired skill. You don’t get good at it unless you write and write and write. Many people tell me they'd love to write a book, or that they will one day “when they have the time.” Writing is like marathon running. You don’t just pull on a pair of trainers and run 26 miles. You work at it, building stamina, struggling through cramps and muscle strains. Writing is no different. My advice to writers is don’t talk about it, do it.

I tried to copy my heroes, Tolkien, Louis Lamour, Peter Cheyney, Raymond Chandler and [shrinks in embarrassment] Mickey Spillane. The work was poor. But I persevered. Always strikes me as strange that would-be writers expect to hit the mother lode immediately. Louis Lamour once said: “Writing is like gold mining, you have to dig through a million tons of dirt before you hit the yellow stuff.” In 95% of cases this is true. It certainly was in mine.

I quit quite a few times back in the early days. I wrote my first novel when I was 21. I didn’t publish until I was 35. Which shows the amount of dirt I had to dig through.

When writing a book, do you know how the story will end or do you just let the pen take you?
I start with a character and follow him. The book then springs from the subconscious. I veer all the time. This means that I never know who is going to live or die, and I am just as surprised and excited as – hopefully – the reader will be.

I just go with the flow. Sometimes it works beautifully, sometimes it has me tearing my hair out. I have no plan of action, no story boards. I just invent as I go until the story ends. It’s more fun that way.

I don’t write cynically. When I create a hero and put him in difficult situations the first thing I think is: “What would I WANT to do in this situation? How would I WISH to behave faced with these dangers?”

I never have much of a clue where my books are going. In the present one, I have two characters from the Rigante people and one of them is going to steal that bull, and that is all I know. I need the excitement of not knowing how a scene works out until I write it. The difference between now and my early books is that I rewrite and reshape more. I have to work at a craft that used to be spontaneous.

I rarely have set plans for future novels.

​What style do you prefer?
I like the spartan style of story telling, keeping descriptive prose to a minimum, and making the reader work a little.

I tried a more lyrical style for the story [Echoes of the Great Song]. It did not work for the majority of my fans and I probably won’t try it again.

​Themes

I want the work to speak for itself, implicitly. “He that has ears let him hear.” I don’t like to talk about the ideas of the work too much.

Like most romantics I believe in the values the legends teach. Love, courage, redemption and forgiveness are values to be cherished.

As a journalist, I saw nice guys finishing last; I like to construct histories in which that is not true, at least for a while–in most of my worlds, any triumph by good is going to be temporary.

I tend to concentrate on courage, loyalty, love and redemption. I believe in these things. I refuse to be cynical about the world, and I won’t join the sneerers or the defeatists.

I write about love and honour and courage and the spiritual and I get dismissed as a hack and slay writer. It would be annoying, if I let it be. As it is, I prefer to think of the readers who write in and tell me how my books help them endure life.

Literary Mechanics

Which book was the most pleasurable for you to write and which book was the hardest?
Legend was the most pleasurable. Nothing will ever change that. The hardest is always the latest. With each book I write it gets harder to disguise what SFX magazine calls the “literary mechanics” of the plots. In many ways writing is like comedy – the hit comes with surprise. Without surprise there is no punch line. Problem is the more we see a particular comic the more aware we become of his/her style of delivery. It is the same with writing.

​Does the theology in the novels represent your own views?
I believe in heroes, and the need for people to stand against evil. I don’t evangelise. I don’t want people saying: “Oh yeah, he’s coming from a Christian angle, or a Judaic angle.” To use a line, though, from the Bible, I write for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Everyone needs to find their own route to spiritual enlightenment.

​Social responsibility – author vs. hero

I originally wrote Pagan as a character after a young fan of Legend said to me: “I love your books, mate. You know where it’s at.” I asked him what he meant. He looked at me and smiled and said: “No spades in Legend.” That was a watershed for me. Not until then did I realise what a responsibility an author has. As well as entertaining readers we need to raise awareness and battle the idiocies and evils of prejudice in all its forms.

A hero in a fantasy novel does not have to be nice, or kind, or caring, or–God forbid–politically correct. What he needs is courage and a willingness to fight evil regardless of the cost to himself. His own prejudices are largely irrelevant.

No writer is going to please everyone, and if he attempts to he will only increase his chances of pleasing no one.

You have an interest in real history.
I tend to write about what ought to have been, rather than what was – alternate histories in which things worked differently. The Celts gave the Romans a bloody nose early on. But they were not interested in empire and were doomed by that.

The one thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing. We are not brighter and better than those who came before us; everything that Machiavelli said in the early Renaissance is true today.

​Do you do much research?
I used to write everything out of my own head and now I hire researchers to keep track of what I have already said. What I do research for myself is simple things, like how to steal a bull. I am not someone who does a year of research before writing–that would bore me to tears.

​Revision

Authors always feel they could do better given more time, more money, more praise, more cuddles. The truth is that mostly we can’t. When we’re given too much time most of us over-edit the work, or make it too wordy. Mostly the author is the worst judge of his/her own work. I use a number of test readers, then a professional editor. I rely on them to give me honest criticism. Have you ever noticed how many of your favourite authors start off with a cracker of a book and then slowly slide downhill?

Mostly this is because they become too “big” to accept criticism. Now we’re even beginning to see the “Author’s Cut” of some major works. One fantasy author recently published such a version of his biggest hit. In my opinion he should have remembered the useful adage “Less is more.”

Music as Inspiration

Do you listen to music?
Not when I write, but I do use music to get into the mood for certain scenes. There’s a track at the end of the Titanic movie album which I used when writing the final scene in Sword in the Storm, where Ruathain is sitting watching his sons. Now whenever I hear that track there’s a tear in my eye.​

​Writing Action Heroes

Growing up in West London, I knew my share of gravel-voiced hard men and later on, as a journalist, I interviewed mercenaries and members of the SAS. What they had in common was a sort of focus, a capacity to break a job or a crisis down into the immediate next thing to take care of with no thought about long-term risks. They also had in common a refusal ever to bluff. One of them tossed me a coin once and said to catch it, and I did; he then said to imagine he had a gun to my mother’s head and to catch it, and I said that would be harder. But it would not have been for him. I used that scene in Waylander, of course.

Jon Shannow in The Jerusalem Man is largely based on a friend of mine who ended up in jail for armed robbery. When I was a young journalist, I wrote about a Rachman-style landlord who threatened me; just round the corner from a cafe he owned, I was jumped and beaten and hospitalized. My friend went to his cafe, which was full of his men, checked which one of them was him and then laid into him with a length of pipe, facing down the others. I knew people like that, so I write about them.

You write very good action sequences–do you visualize them in your head in advance?
I used to box and fence and I have a strong sense of fighting as a series of moves. I collect weapons and I work out action sequences with them in my back garden, preferably when the neighbours are not watching.

Your books have a tremendous sense of the heft of weapons, of their physical feel.
That is what is important about them, as often as not. If you want to know how the Romans conquered the known world, the answer is the gladius, the short thrusting sword they used. An 18-inch blade that you push forward is different from a three-foot blade that you slash with–it means that you can stand shoulder to shoulder in a wall, where a slashing glaive keeps you six foot apart from your comrades in each direction. No matter how the Celtic armies outnumbered the Romans, at the point of contact of the lines of battle, it was three to one in the Romans’ favour. You can’t learn to drive by being told about it; you have to get in the seat and have the wheel and the brake to hand: you have to hold a weapon to know how it felt.

​Do you get Writer’s Block?
If I’m really flat when I turn my PC on, I’ll have one of the characters ask a question. It can be something as simple as, “What the hell are we doing?” or “What’s the point of this?” The question isn’t important, it can be edited out later. What matters is that it gets the characters into an argument, and through them I learn where the story’s going. In my early days as a fiction writer there were a lot of changes, until I learnt to trust my characters. Now I’m in the happy position where I don’t have massive amounts of revision or rewriting.

Authenticity

My function as a writer is to entertain. Initially to entertain myself, and in a secondary way to entertain other people.

I have always believed that storytellers have a duty to inspire people to be the best they can be.

I figure that if I do my fans the courtesy of giving a novel every ounce of energy, passion and belief that I possess then they’ll forgive me if an individual tale doesn’t appeal to them. In my experience readers tend to go off authors when the writers start churning out poorly written, cliché ridden novels. As long as the author cares enough about his readers to give them the best he can they’ll stick by him/her.

You have to make yourself believe that what you’re writing is real. You have to believe the characters exist; that the situation they’re in is terrible and they’ve got to get out of it. You can’t sit there thinking, “These are just blips on a computer screen, nothing is really going to happen to them.” To me, it’s real.

As to my own fantasy, I try to retain the purity of the Greek myth, with all its warnings and parables, while creating credible characters that speak to people in the late twentieth century. My ambition with every book is that it will not only entertain but increase the desire of the reader to do good, to be heroic.

In the end the only judgement worth a damn is whether a book appeals on a wide level. Because if it doesn’t it goes out of print. Then nobody reads it.

​Do you think you’ll ever stop writing?
Sure. One day I’ll die.