Reader Question Day 13: of writing and philosophy
It’s Saturday, which means it’s time for Reader Question Day!
Note that mild spoilers for THE GHOSTS series follow.
Danny asks:
I just finished the third book in the demonsouled series and it was brilliant. Raymond e feist has always been my favourite writer but are definetely giving him a run for his money. How do you manage to portray these things as if you are there I always struggle with that when trying to write myself?
Thanks for the kind words about SOUL OF SERPENTS!
As for the writing, I suppose it just boils down to lots and lots of practice – I’ve been writing (or at least attempting to write) since 1998 or so. Hopefully, all that practice has paid off. I’d like to think I’m better at it after fourteen years.
I think life experience is part of it, too. I’m older than I was in 1998, and I’ve had a ton of stuff happen to me in the last fourteen years, some good, some bad, and some of it downright weird. So it gets easier to write as you get older, because you’ve had more practice with it, and you’ve had a bit more stuff happen to you.
Manwe asks:
Do you intentionally write any theological/philosophical themes or ideas into your work? Or is it just happenstance?
Sometimes. The villain in GHOST IN THE FLAMES was based on this particularly unpleasant militant atheist blogger I came across. Not that I have anything against atheists, but there’s a difference between “I find no empirical basis for the existence of God and therefore I cannot definitively commit myself to His existence, thank you very much” and “I want to take a crap in a nativity scene”, and this blogger embraced the “crap in a nativity scene” philosophy with a bit too much gusto. At about the same time, I’d just read a book where yet another cliched Sinister Priest from Central Casting was the villain. The book was so dreadfully trite and predictable that I thought “screw it, let’s do the exact opposite with GHOST IN THE FLAMES.”
Other times it happens by accident. I’m not a particularly deep thinker, mind. When I write a book, I tend not to think “this book needs more theological/philosophical themes.” What I actually think is that “this book needs MORE EXPLOSIONS! And dragons! With lasers strapped to their heads!”
Are there any mythologies out there that have a strong influence on any of your works?
Not really. I usually get more influence from history than from mythology per se. I do think Egyptian mythology is fascinating in a dystopian sort of way, and someday I’d like to write a novel about someone who escapes from the Egyptian afterlife. (Along the lines of Glen Cook’s excellent “Instrumentalities of the Night” series and Norse mythology.)
That said, I do tend to loot our modern 21st century mythologies for book ideas. I suspect a lot of what 21st-century Westerners regard as a rational and enlightened worldview is in fact as mythical as Ra sailing his solar barge over the deserts of Egypt. For instance, the magi in THE GHOSTS series tend to be hardcore rationalists – they never speak of themselves as “practicing sorcery”, but as “studying the arcane sciences”, and they want to see the Empire ruled by an educated elite – namely, themselves. Like the old Soviet nomenklatura, but with more sorcery. The idea for that came from the sort of opinion article one finds every so often where an economist or a sociologist or a biologist argues that what society really needs is to be ruled by more economists or sociologists or biologists, or at least people who will do exactly what economists or sociologists or biologists tell them to do.
Kallinikos asks:
When are you going to start writing Ghost in the Storm!?!?
Thirty seconds after I hit the “Publish” button for this post.
-JM
“So it gets easier to write as you get older, because you’ve had more practice with it, and you’ve had a bit more stuff happen to you.”
Yeah, I have noticed that in my own life as well.
“but there’s a difference between…”
Oh, without question! These ‘new atheist’ types really are unbearable! Mean, nasty, snarky, there are so many adjectives with which to describe them. And for being such a small minority, they are very vocal indeed.
“At about the same time, I’d just read a book where yet another cliched Sinister Priest from Central Casting was the villain”
Do you remember which book it was?
“I usually get more influence from history than from mythology per se.”
History, mythology….it’s all good! I’m both a big history buff, and a big buff on mythology. Since you use history more then myth, is it because you enjoy that subject better, or do you use it more because you find it more helpful to your writing?
“someday I’d like to write a novel about someone who escapes from the Egyptian afterlife.”
That would be interesting to read! I hope you do get a chance to write it someday.
Mythology is a very interesting subject, and it’s interesting that you call the egyptian myth dystopian. Just the other day I was reading a very good by then Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. It was compiled from several homilies he gave years ago, and the theme of the book was a Catholic understanding of the stories of the Creation and the fall. When talking about the ancient Israelites and their capture by the Babylonians, he went on to talk about Babylonian myth. He spoke of their creation myth, which began with the god of light, Marduk, slaying the dragon, and that from this dragon both the earth and man were born. Man and the world he lives in was born from the blood of a dragon. Now that sounds pretty interesting in the sense of fantasy, but B16 looked at the meaning of the myth, not just it’s symbols. Man and the world are the children of the dragon, the children of evil. At the heart of every man IS evil. This is why man could only be ruled by a tyrant like the Babylonian King, who, being the representitive of Marduk, was the only one capable of bringing order to the chaos. A dark view of things indeed. B16 then went on to explain the Hebrew creation story, and what a very different attitude of man and the world came out of it. So while I say that the babylonian creation myth is interesting, I say thank God for the hebrew creation story! 🙂
“Do you remember which book it was?”
I don’t. But the plot of the book was that vampires were the next stage in human evolution, but the Catholic Church, fearful of the change, hunted them without mercy in order to maintain control of society.
If vampires conquered the world, the book was exactly the sort of thing the vampire Ministry of Propaganda would put out to convince the population to support their benevolent rule.
“Mythology is a very interesting subject, and it’s interesting that you call the egyptian myth dystopian.”
I do think it is fairly dystopian. An Egyptian could live forever, but only if his mummy was preserved. If it was destroyed, his spirit was condemned to wander the deserts forever. So if Egyptian myth actually worked, the Egyptians would have to act like Dungeons and Dragons liches, forever obsessively guarding their phylacteries to stay alive. (Or to use a more contemporary example, Lord Voldemort and his horcruxes.)
“If vampires conquered the world…”
Probably. And may I add what a stupid concept for a book.
“An Egyptian could live forever…”
Dystopian may be the right word. Most of what you said in that final paragraph was news to me, I had never heard of that before. It’s funny too, because when I hear mention of the egyptian afterlife, that bit about needing to protect their corpse or else, that is always left out.
You know more about the egyptian myths then I do, and given what I said earlier about the Babylonian myths, which of the two do you think was less dystopian, or rather less meloncholic?
Also you missed my earlier question:
‘Since you use history more then myth, is it because you enjoy that subject better, or do you use it more because you find it more helpful to your writing?’
“Since you use history more then myth, is it because you enjoy that subject better, or do you use it more because you find it more helpful to your writing?”
Both. I was a history major back in my misspent youth, so I may as well put it to some use now.
“You know more about the egyptian myths then I do, and given what I said earlier about the Babylonian myths, which of the two do you think was less dystopian, or rather less meloncholic?”
I think the Egyptian was more dystopian. The Babylonian was straight-up melancholic in a tragic sense – man could do nothing to escape his inevitable fate of death and the netherworld of shadows, so the best thing to do was to face it with resigned courage, much like Gilgamesh at the end of his epic. Much like the Greek and Roman Stoics a few thousand years later. The Egyptians, by contrast, had hope, but it was a very conditional hope – consider the dread of an elderly pharaoh constructing his house of eternity, knowing that almost all the tombs of his predecessors had been robbed.