Authors: Alden Bell
Exit Kingdom (29 page)
How has your outlook on life informed your writing?
I’m a sentimentalist, so my writing always borders on melodrama. On the
other hand, I’ve always been a fan of books and movies that upset my expectations –
stories that make hard left turns and go in entirely different directions than I expected them to. I love a good anticlimax – the moment where the book has built to a spectacularly dramatic
peak, and then the rug is pulled out from under you and everything stumbles to a close. Stories that pander to your every
readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the
simple glow of your approval. I’m a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing. I like a story that makes me work a little, a story that sneers haughtily at me from the
windowsill, that nips at me if I try to get too cosy with it. It’s possible that a little masochism is required to enjoy my books.
How easy do you find writing? If you had to compare yourself to a composer, would you be Mozart, who effortlessly turned out symphonies with little revision, or Beethoven, who
famously agonized over each note, going back and rewriting over and over again until he was eventually happy?
I’m no Mozart – but it’s true that I don’t do much revision in my writing. I tend to start
at the beginning of a book and write it straight through to
the end in scene order – and I almost never look back more than a page or two during the process. It’s not that I feel my words have any kind of holy sanctity but rather that once
I’ve created those scenes, characters, events, it’s hard for me to go back and re-imagine them. They become absolutely real to me, for better or worse. I think
there’s probably a
flaw in my imagination that makes writing akin to glassblowing. You have to work fast and do a decent job the first time, because there’s no reshaping it later – and if it’s no
good, you just end up with a twisted, ugly paperweight. Believe me, I’ve produced plenty of those paperweights.
Do you have a writing routine?
I am very ritualistic about my writing.
I get up at 7.15 in the morning and start writing immediately. I write two pages and then take a break to purge the detritus from my mind
with inane online searches, or Facebook, or computer games. Then I get back to the work at hand and write another two pages. My deadline for completing these four pages is 11.30 a.m. – at
which time I take a walk to get a turkey sandwich for lunch. During
lunch, I read twenty pages of whatever book I’m reading at the time. Then I walk back home and write another two pages in
the early afternoon. That’s it. Six pages a day is my quota. Of course, this kind of rigid adherence to a schedule is easier if you don’t have to worry about the demands of
society
. It’s possible that my constitution (like Moses Todd’s) is better suited to the post-apocalypse.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Write what you want. Don’t try to conform to the fickle tastes of a fickle readership. The best audience you can aim for is yourself: write the book that
you
would
buy, the book that
you
would have trouble putting down, the book that
you
would want to read but that nobody has written yet. That way, no matter what, whether published
or un-, you
will have produced a thing of value.
What was your favourite scene to write?
For all the running around and zombie-killing in this book, my favourite scenes are the quiet ones. The action in the book isn’t the point for me – it’s just
the context. It gives a framework for all the late-night conversations between rough men and holy men and insane men and deceptive
women and even the taciturn dead. All stories, in one way or
another, are about people trying to puzzle through the mysteries of the world around them. The adventurous efforts of humanity to make sense of a chaotic universe, to give order and meaning to the
void – those are the struggles worth writing about. And they happen mostly in the noiseless interstices between action.
By Alden Bell
Exit Kingdom
The Reapers Are The Angels
First published 2012 by TOR
This electronic edition published 2012 by TOR
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-0-230-76674-7
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Copyright © Alden Bell 2012
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