Interview | A Conversation with Mark Lawrence, author of PRINCE OF THORNS

Mark Lawrence is the author of Prince of Thorns, the first book in what is named THE BROKEN EMPIRE Trilogy. As I said in my review, his debut “moves at a swift pace” and is one of the best debuts I’ve read so far this year. It releases in August 2011 in both the America and the United Kingdom, so to cap it all off in the last few weeks to its publication,

I did an interview with Mark to talk about the book, who he is, and what’s next in THE BROKEN EMPIRE series.

First of all, who is Mark Lawrence? What makes him tick, what does he do, and what does he like to do?

Socrates (among others) was given to advising ‘know thyself’ but it’s harder to do than to say. I don’t know what makes me tick. I can list some attributes though. I’m a research scientist in my mid forties, born in the States, raised in the UK, D&D addict as a teen, fantasy reader, father of four, beer-aholic. And I guess what I most like doing at the moment is writing. Computer games are good too, and before I had a disabled child I was very partial to skiing when I could afford it.

You wrote an article over at SFFworld.com, called ‘My Route into Publishing’. In it, you used a lottery analogy to describe how sometimes you need a large amount of luck to break into the publishing fold. In quote, “Getting published is a lottery. You need a large dollop of writing talent to enter that lottery but there are a lot of people with sufficient skill to purchase the ticket. Past that, you need a bucket of luck poured over you.”

At which point do they weigh out? How did it work for you: did skill, luck, or simply writing the right thing at the right time help you score a big publishing deal for Prince of Thorns? For example, being associated as the ‘British answer to GRRM’s ASOIAF series’ – with it being in the peak of its prime, with the tremendous triumph of the HBO series and (finally!) the release of ADWD- must help getting readership, surely. How does it make you feel, your work being called that?

I expect a large part of it was that I did write the right thing at the right time, but that was luck rather than judgment. I wasn’t aware of the ‘gritty realism’ movement I’m often told I’m a part of, and I’ve not read any of the authors I’m generally lined up with (Abercrombie, Weeks, etc).

Being compared to GRRM whilst obviously a compliment is more of a burden than anything else. GRRM is my favourite fantasy writer and probably the only fantasy writer I read whilst writing ‘Prince of Thorns’, but my book is nothing like ASOIAF and my style is not like his. In fact we’re quite possibly polar opposites. I’m given to brevity and have used a single first person point of view.

Very true. While I did find both the books in ASOIAF and your debut extremely gritty, it would be a stretch to say that they’re similar. One’s stretching leagues and histories, but the other is focused strongly on one amoral person.

In fact, I call the comparison a burden as I’ve seen on multiple occasions people take it as a personal affront and then be prejudiced against my work because of a marketing statement made by someone I’ve never met – a marketing statement that I only discover once it’s in print. I have no control or input to these things. Seriously . . . bash me because a publisher rolls out the most predictable hype since everything was ‘comparable to Tolkien at his best’ in the 80′s?

I did hear that one bookseller was considering a sticker that read ‘As good as George Martin, or your money back’. I emailed my publisher a ‘please God no’ letter, and fortunately that never happened.

Let’s be real here. The chances are that like most ‘next big things’ I will be gone in a season or two, and that in five or ten years nobody will remember me. That’s fine. I have already vastly exceeded my expectations and at this stage everything is a bonus. I have both feet on the ground and the hyperbole just makes me smile.

You also mentioned in the article that you never “considered yourself a writer, but someone who writes”. Can you tell me what to you makes a difference between them?

I was trying to underscore the artificial nature of the division. Do you become a ‘writer’ the moment you put pen to paper, finger to keyboard, or is it when somebody pays you for your work. Does my first check in 2004 for $31count? Or was it the book deal? I just step away from that and say I’m a person who writes. There are many people who write who are producing better work than ‘writers’.

I think you called yourself the “illegitimate love-child of Tolkien and Martin” over at the Westeros boards. Aside from those two figures, what are your influences?

Heh – I was responding to some joking about the hype rather than laying claim to illustrious heritage! I guess my influences are the authors of the many and varied books I’ve read. Those influences are unconscious though; I don’t try to write like anyone else. I read a lot of fantasy in the 80′s and lot of modern classics more recently, some Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, William Golding, John Irving, Steinbeck, Iris Murdock, John Fowles… all sorts.

You said that Prince of Thorns is the third novel you’ve been sitting on. Would you mind telling us a bit about the first and second projects? Do they have any hope to see the light of day?

Well the first one, certainly not! I had a lot to learn at that point and thankfully had some friends who were prepared to say so rather than leave me hanging in the ‘great, love it, don’t send me any more’ zone. The second book I’m quite fond of and may try to polish up one day. Both were fantasy novels of far more traditional style than ‘Prince of Thorns’, and there’s nothing wrong with traditional fantasy, provided it’s well written. The first one wasn’t.

Back to analogies, George R.R. Martin himself has one he likes to use, that there are two kinds of writers, an architect and a gardener. An architect, he explained, is a writer who crafts in excruciating detail the skeleton of his narrative and the identities of his character. An architect outlines and revises before even putting prose on page, and maps out everything.

Contrarily, a gardener is a writer who begins with a seed, and expands around those ideas naturally on the fly while he writes. Where do you find yourself on that spectrum?

I think I’m the writer who sprinted out the back of the garden and got lost in the jungle. I generally have no plan at all when I write, and I surprise myself each page.

Jorg Ancrath is a pretty twisted character; and when I mean twisted, I mean TWISTED. Even though a lot of his stuff is alluded to and left to the reader’s imagination, he is, frankly, a pretty evil guy. Was there any point where you thought, “Oh shit. This might be stretching it”? We’ve seen amoral characters and gutless cravens in the likes of Abercrombie, Bakker, Cook, and Martin, but Jorg is hard to stomach at times. How hard was he to sell to publishers? Likewise, how do you think this will be to take in for readers? I thought it might be better to be heard straight from the horse’s mouth, you know, an encouraging statement to put a reader’s mind at ease.

Heh – to begin with ‘stretching it’ was the entire point. I certainly wasn’t writing with publishers in mind, I didn’t even really care what my readers would or wouldn’t stomach. I mean I was interested to see how it went down, but not to the point that I would change what I was writing to woo them. I had no real intention of sending the manuscript to a publisher when it was done, and no expectation that if I did it would be taken up. Once you free yourself from those issues then you’re writing for you – there’s a certain freedom that comes with that.

As it turned out ‘Prince of Thorns’ was very easy to sell to publishers. It took six weeks and involved an international bidding war between seven major publishing houses. They tell me when Ace put out for a UK publisher every single fantasy publisher of any size in the country made offers. I would have been very pleased to have one small publisher in one country show some interest…

How hard will it be for readers to take in? Lord, I don’t know. They will or they won’t. So far it seems that they will. I think fantasy readers are more flexible than those of other genres – they have more imagination. Yes, you’re not getting a hero here, no he won’t slay dragons or rescue the princess – I think most fantasy readers will adjust. It’s what we’re good at. And in no way did I write this book to put the reader’s mind at ease!

Was it always like this from the beginning, or did the final result come out later in the writing process?

The book is exactly how I wrote it first draft off the tips of my fingers. Spellings have been corrected, a word swapped with another, commas added or taken away, but no single line was ever removed.

The passages that describe Jorg’s motley ‘brothers’ at the start of the chapter were a good way to inform readers of what they are like outside of the movement of the story. Since this is a trilogy, can we expect more black commentary like that in Books 2 and 3?

A similar device is used in book 2 but to a different end. Book 3 is without such commentary.

A lot of this book is about the goals of Jorg. Will we see him trying to achieve the rest of these in further novels? Will any new POV’s be introduced, or is this firmly Jorg’s story?

It will always be firmly Jorg’s story, but other windows on it will be offered. Jorg’s goals are overtly what the first book is about, but in fact they prove more of a lever to prise up his armour and take a look underneath. The remaining books take us on wider journeying through Jorg’s present world, and through his past. There is a framework of our ambitious young ‘hero’ moving toward his desires, but this isn’t a traditional fantasy tale where defeating the evil overlord is the thrust of the storytelling. There are literary elements in ‘Prince of Thorns’ and its sequels (I’ve striven to make them the non-boring kind) and I hope that whilst many will thrill to the spilled entrails and the gleam of swords, there will be others who appreciate that it’s a story about a man as much as it’s a story about what that man does.

The world creeps up on you slowly but surely, and once I had that “Aha!” moment of realization of where it was set in, it made the book feel a lot more significant. It had loads more weight to it once I reached that point.

Since it’s sketched somewhat vaguely, would you mind telling readers a bit more information on what this world actually is? It seems to have a weird geography.

All I want to say about the location and geography are that they are far from arbitrary and there is plenty to be discovered there. It’s possible someone might find the answers given the information in book 1, but it’s more likely book 2 will resolve the question.

Interesting.

Would it be correct to call your novel a “hybrid fantasy”?

I’m not familiar with the term, but I certainly don’t set myself any boundaries when I’m writing. There’s no fantasy rulebook I consult to see what I can and can’t do. Many (some at the least) fantasy novels mix the ‘real world’ with a secondary world (Narnia, Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, etc), others mix fantasy elements with old technology (McCaffrey’s dragons+sci-fi, Julian May’s faery-types with sci-fi), I don’t think my take is particularly groundbreaking, and yes, those elements feature more in the last two books, but the primary feel is always ‘swords and sorcery’.

There are two specific-content questions I have to ask, but it’s a fair warning to say that the only way to talk about these is to mention some spoilers. Readers that haven’t read the book yet, read at your own risk. And Mark, I hope by asking these I won’t be the subject for an unexplained disappearance later.

The tattoos on the mages: what are they? I find myself strangely reminded of Tron-like neon glowing signs on skin; others have speculated that they reminded them of iPhone OS apps on bare flesh.

I have actually written twenty-five chapters of a book called ‘Tabula Rasa’ all about tattoo-based magic with a definite ‘magic-system’ involved. This isn’t that book though. In ‘Prince of Thorns’ there’s Sageous, a dream-witch, who has the text of many spells tattooed across him and can work those enchantments more potently if he runs his fingers across the correct passages. There’s no caste of magicians per se, just individuals who have found ways to access magic, and none of the others in book 1 are tattooed…

The interaction with the door ‘sentinel’ was funny and brilliant. I just have to ask: did your experience “as a research scientist dealing with the rather intractable problems in the field of artificial intelligence” have anything to do with it? Or is it just because you’re a funny bloke?

Sad to say, I’m just a funny bloke. In reality ‘artificial intelligence’ is an essentially defunct umbrella term, useful for when you want to avoid boring the general public. There was a time when scientists used the phrase in earnest, but then we discovered how far away we were from Robby the Robot and started talking about Bayesian Inference and Gaussian Processes for Automatic Relevance Detection and … stop yawning, you bloody asked!

*Starts*

What? I wasn’t yawning. I was just stretching my… er… jaw muscles.

Recently, Wired published an article on (and I’m paraphrasing here) an MIT professor of computer science and electrical engineering who has attempted to teach a computer how to play Sid Meier’s Civilization. To quote from the Wired.co.uk article:

“In Civilization, the player is asked to guide a nation from the earliest periods of history through to the present day and into the future. It’s complex, and each action doesn’t necessarily have a predetermined outcome, because the game can react randomly to what you do.

Barzilay found that putting a machine-learning system to work on Civ gave it a victory rate of 46 percent, but that when the system was able to use the manual for the game to guide the development of its strategy, it rose dramatically to 79 percent.

It works by word association. Starting completely from scratch, the computer behaves randomly. As it acts, however, it can read words that pop up on the screen, and then search for those words in the manual. As it finds them, it can scan the surrounding text to develop ideas about what action that word corresponds with. Ideas that work well are kept, and those that lead to bad results are discarded.

(…)

The eventual goal is both to develop AIs that can extract useful information from manuals written for humans, allowing them to approach a problem armed with just the instructions, rather than having to be painstakingly taught how to deal with any eventuality. Barzilay has already begun to adapt these systems to work with robots.”

What are your thoughts on this? Do (or since we might not have reached that point, will) A.I. ever reach a point where it can learn context-sensitively, from actual sentences instead of crunched in data? Are there any past experiences of importance you’ve ever had working in this field that you’d mind sharing?

The trouble with asking scientists simple questions is that you get complex answers that sound as though they’ve been carefully engineered to be unhelpful. I will try to avoid that by saying ‘yes’. And I can elaborate with a ‘we do it now and we’re getting better at it all the time – will we ever do it as well or better than people do? … maybe, but don’t hold your breath’. In the package of work I finished this month I was (with help from a professor of mathematics at Oxford university) using machine learning techniques to augment decision-making using free text entered into a database alongside the numeric and categorical data.

In conclusion, do you have any parting words for readers?

Buy my book. Don’t leave it where your granny might read it.

You heard him folks! Buy the damn book!