Author Interview: C. A. Fletcher

One of the books coming out this month which we at the Nerd Daily had the delight of reviewing is A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World by C A Fletcher.

Charlie Fletcher is the author of Stoneheart Trilogy (first book published in 2006); an urban fantasy for younger readers, and the adult urban fantasy Oversight trilogy (first book published in 2014). Additionally, he a screenwriter who has worked on Taggart, Wire in the Blood, and upcoming series, Sanctuary. Charlie was kind enough to agree to an interview for The Nerd Daily to discuss his writing process, his latest work, and even video games.

I noticed that you’ve written A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World under a different name to your previous books – is that because it’s a genre change to your earlier work?

Yes. This is my first non-fantasy book, so Orbit though it’d be a good idea to mark that by adopting a cunning  – and clearly almost impenetrable –  disguise, so as not to disappoint people who might come expecting dragons or statues that move (the two Stoneheart trilogies) or more of the hidden supernatural history of the world (the Oversight books).

A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World (Contains no dragons!! Guaranteed 100% magic free!!™) takes place further along our own reality-based timeline, long after the human part of the world has all but died off in a soft apocalypse. I suppose if we’re looking for a genre hook to hang it on, it’s speculative fiction, based on an imagined future of our real world.  But – being by nature a bit contrary – I find any genre category a bit uncomfortable the moment I notice I’m in it. I suppose it’s a weird version of the Groucho effect– I certainly never go to work thinking “hmm, I’m a fantasy writer’, odd as that may seem for someone whose work HAS contained dragons and magic etc… disingenuous as it sounds, I really just tell the story in my head. I definitely hope ABAHD@TEOTW appeals across a range of genres and ages… maybe it’s general fiction with a speculative bent?

What was the initial core inspiration for A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World?

I think as with all story ideas it comes from lots of points of inspiration that you don’t really recognise when you start off on the damn thing, but which only become clear in retrospect. The actual moment of inspiration was the very first line (see below) which arrived in my head unheralded but fully formed, but in more general, ideational terms it was three main things.

First off, there is an old road that leads out of our village that used to be two-lane blacktop, but which was closed off to traffic maybe twenty-five years ago, when they put in a new road by-passing it. Nature’s swiftly taken it right back, spreading grass and saplings and moss from either side so that it’s now a very narrow footpath barely wider than the centre-line that’s only kept open by dogwalkers like me. I’ve always found this kind of cheering, that tenaciousness of a life other than – and often in spite of – our own. Reading two non-fiction books (that I initially mistook for each other) really weaponised that sense in me and inspired a lot of the background of the story: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and The Earth After Us by Jan Zalasiewicz – (who is one of the main proponents  of the idea that we have changed the planet so much that we should rename our epoch the Anthropocene.)

Secondly, everyone has their ‘last good place’. For some people it’s Montana, for me, it’s the Outer Hebrides, the chain of islands off the west coast of Scotland. I’ve always loved their wild emptiness. You can stand on a couple of miles of deserted white shell-sand beach, seeing and hearing nothing that prehistoric man wouldn’t have recognised. People don’t go up there on vacation as much as you might think they would, given the amazing natural beauty of the place (because they have some weird thing about swimming in cold water, I guess. Their loss!) Anyway, my kids have grown up in that landscape, on those beaches every summer, and their dog, Archie, grew up with them. Archie is 100% the model for Jip in the book. And there are a couple of pictures of my son with him that I’ve always loved – a boy, a dog, an empty island landscape.  And then there is a joyful picture of my daughter, caught jumping in mid-air, that I also love which is the inspiration for the polaroid that Griz, the narrator of the book, finds in a deserted house and addresses the whole story to, the loner in our distant future writing to an imaginary friend from the long gone past of their world.

And finally I guess there’s that unique relationship that you have with a dog you’ve grown up with. I’m an only child and when my parents gave me my dog for my fifth birthday, it was just like being given a brother. First thing he did was steal an egg from the larder, so I called him Robber, and he went everywhere with me from dawn ‘til dusk, and then he slept on my bed even though he was absolutely not allowed to. My parents were good at turning a blind eye. He lasted until I was away at university at 22.  He never felt like anything less than that brother to me, and if someone had stolen him…

Can you speak a little to the worldbuilding process for the book, and how it differed from the worldbuilding requirements or process for fantasy?

ABAHD@TEOTW was easier than fantasy (again…Guaranteed 100% magic free!  Contains no dragons!! ™) because in fantasy you have to create the world or adapt our world, and then you have to build a container of rules (how the magic works etc) because if you DON’T have a clear set of rules about how your imaginary world runs then it’s hard to create and maintain dramatic tension and jeopardy as it all gets a bit formless and over-imaginary if ANYTHING can happen. In ABAHD@TEOTW, since the story takes place a few generations further down our realistic, non fantasy timeline – long after a soft apocalypse has all but depopulated the world – the process was not one of world-building at all, but world-erosion.

Beginning with a world where most people were suddenly unable to have children the job became one of subtraction rather than invention. Once you remove electricity and the possibility of a younger generation of workers taking the weight of upholding technological civilisation everything slowly and un-dramatically just comes apart and rots down. It was interesting thinking about what would remain three or four generations later and then taking Griz, the protagonist of the book, through the ruins of our world and seeing it with new, wondering eyes.

Would you mind briefly through down your writing process and routine? It seems to be different for every author (my favourite divergence is the architect/gardener dichotomy; as an ardent architect I have strong feelings…).

(Interesting… that writer/architect combo might be a thing – one of my best mates from film school walks those same parallel lines with great agility)

Once I’ve started, my ‘process’ is basically very boring geography: locate myself in front of a keyboard and remind myself that I’m a professional and start working, whether or not I feel like it (mostly I feel like it). It’s the actual ‘starting’ that varies. It’s usually prefaced by a lot of seemingly aimless mooching around and creative displacement activity. The final trigger always varies:

In this case I woke up on holiday on Lesvos in Greece (i.e. not meant to be working) with the first words of the book in my head, though I didn’t know that’s what they were going to be. I left my wife sleeping and sat out in the early morning sun with a coffee and my notebook to write down the words because I liked them and didn’t want to forget them. I wrote “Dogs were with us from the very beginning.” And then that seemed to require another sentence after it, and then another and then, when my wife woke I had accidentally written the first chapter, about a completely different island, much further north. So then I had no choice other than to see where those words took me.

Actually maybe THAT’S my ‘process’: get myself into trouble, and then the only way I can figure how to escape is to write my way out of it.

My ‘routine’ is deeply boring, but since I’m a world-class procrastinator I have to stick to it to be productive, and now I get itchy if I don’t. For example, in my other screenwriting life I wrote a TV series that was filmed in Europe last year, which has kept me away from home and travelling much more than I usually do, and though of course getting a TV show made is the very definition of a quality problem,  and I clearly have no grounds for complaining about anything, I just get itchy and crabby because I couldn’t maintain my routine which is:

Get up early, swim a mile, breakfast, write, lunch, write, walk the dogs, write some more and try to remember to knock off in time to have dinner at a reasonable hour, chill with a book or a screen, sleep, repeat until novel or script is done. Luckily my wife Domenica is an artist (and a truly quirky and great one) so she lives the same intensely unstructured/structured routine as I do and understands and mirrors a lot of my odder habits, only in a considerably more elegant way.

Over the course of my research, I noticed that you are also a screenwriter. What would you say are the most significant differences between novel and screen writing?

Wide-shot? As a novelist you are king or queen of your own world. As a screenwriter you are, 99% of the time, a gun for-hire. There are different and complementary pleasures in that discrepancy. And I’ve come to enjoy switching hats every few months. Keeps me fresh and less jaded and cynical about each discipline, because I’ve always got an escape tunnel…

Close-up: As a screenwriter you only write what a camera can see or a microphone can record. That’s it.  As a novelist I can go inside the head and tell you what the characters are thinking. Which screenwriter-me thinks is a bit of an easy cheat, since screenwriter-me has to rack his brains for a visual or audible manifestation of that.  (Ever wonder why so many sad movie/TV scenes happen in the rain…?)

I came across an article you wrote in 2007 for The Guardian about videogames. Your central thesis was in essence that the storyline of many videogames is limited by game developers’ desire to keep people playing. In the intervening years the technology and development of videogames has quite dramatically altered. Games such as The Last of Us (of which I was at times very strongly reminded when reading A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World), Horizon Zero Dawn (actually another post-apocalyptic game which also poignantly examines the remnants of the world left behind, even if it’s set a millennia in the future), Bioshock, or Dishonoured, to pick a few of my favourites, all have really strong storylines which are incredibly thought-provoking and as such, arguably stand alongside “big sexy brain-killing thumb-candy”.

Do you think there is now scope in videogames for really interesting and exciting storytelling? – sorry, this was a really long preface to the question!

First off, I don’t think that was the best article I’ve ever written, and reviewing it (prompted by your question) I sympathise with my earlier self but think I got some of it quite wrong…and other parts not nearly right enough!

Bottom line, I think reading is a creative act. You take the black and white words and make Widescreen/3D/Technicolor/ Sensurround/ Holo-Deck images in your head from them – essentially you take the script and make the movie in your head as you go. Your Severus Snape doesn’t look like my Severus Snape (until we both go to the cinema, then he does – and is just a tiny bit less ‘ours’ because of it), your Granny Weatherwax or David Copperfield or Jay Gatsby is different to mine, etc etc. Our brains made the characters and the worlds, prompted only by words.

Part of the very different fun of video games is seeing the extraordinary worlds and characters someone else has created for you. So however great the story is (and they are undoubtedly way better than when I wrote that article, and in ways that I was too blinkered to see as possible) someone’s done all the creative heavy-lifting and the experience of game-play is primarily experiential and not creative in quite the same way.  That’s my gut feeling, and I’ve slain enough orcs (and Big Daddies) and splattered enough zombies to have a bit of a feel for the rightness of it, for me at least.

And yeah, I’m still haunted by reading The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton by Larry Niven when I was younger and more immersed in Sci Fi – a world where people fatally absent themselves from activity in meat-space, plugged directly not a seductive on-line virtuality via a tasp (a plug hardwired into a hole in the back of the head). I reckon even your smartphone screen can be a bit of a stealth tasp if you don’t watch out…

What is the advice you think people don’t really give to writers but should? That relates not only the question of how the words fall on the page, but on the process of having a manuscript which you’re trying to take to publication (or opting to self-publish).

Four pro-tips, in order of importance:

Never come out of a sentence the way you came into it.

Write like a professional, not when the muse takes you.

Get it wrong. If you spend your life hovering in search of the perfect platonic ideal of what’s in your head, you’ll never get it down. Get it wrong but get it down. Then get it right.

Drink lots of water. Keeps you irrigated, flushes the toxins, and guarantees you have to get up regularly and move around on the way to the bathroom.

It can be a very sedentary life.

A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World is available as of April 23rd 2019 at Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.

Have you read anything by Charlie Fletcher? Will you be checking out his new novel? Tell us in the comments below!