From the Bookshelf of SpecFic Buddy Reads…

"No. I sat down and wrote it. I had the opening scene in my head for something like ten years. I had only written poetry before so I didn’t think prose was something I could do. I kept trying but I only got to page three, then I threw it away. Then circumstances changed. I was on a plane to Australia on my way to an art residency. Somebody gave me a book to read on the plane by a fairly well known author. After about a third of it, I thought, 'This is fucking awful. I can do better.' Then another part of me said, 'Well prove it, this is just pub talk.' So I started to write and it all came out. There was no world building. There was no structure, it just came out."

"I remember finishing it and thinking, 'My god I’ve done it, I’ve actually done it. That's incredible.' I walked away from the table and went, 'Uh-oh, no you haven’t. There is more.' So I went back and started on the second one... I suddenly realised I didn’t know how many words I had done. So I did a word count and worked out how many pages that was and realised I had no idea how many pages that was. So I went to my bookshelf, to some of my favourites and realised I’d gone past them. I was only a third in. I said, I don’t know what this is, but I can’t stop and think about it.' There was only one thing to do and that was to carry on. I had two friends. One of them was Ian Sinclair who I sent drafts to and I asked, 'Is this ok because I’m not quite sure what is going on here?' and he came back and said, 'Just keep going.'"

"It is a fake plainness. It is not really simple, but flat. It is not really clear, but inexact. Its directness is specious. Its sensory cues—extremely important in imaginative writing—are vague and generalized; the rocks, the wind, the trees are not there, are not felt; the scenery is cardboard, or plastic. The tone as a whole is profoundly inappropriate to the subject."

"My shelter feels like it has not been used for years, the stitched-together sacking that made its rudimentary door falling apart in my hand as I try to unhook it. This crouching space had been scratched out from the soft yellow stone, just big enough for a small man or boy and a few goats. There are still remnants of occupation: a low bed or table blocking the far end; a few tools bearing the labour scars of generations; a car wheel, its tyre worn smooth; dry, sand-encrusted empty bottles; and a few exhausted shotgun cartridges. Hanging on a nail is a fragment of rusted armour, an articulated breastplate of diminutive size. Whether this is a genuine artefact dug up from some unknown battle, or part of a carnival costume from one of the gaudy pageants that once marked the saint’s passage through the year, it is impossible to say. The hot land and the salt wind have etched and cooked it into another time, a time that never stained memory, because it was too ancient to have yet been conceived."

"To what then is it appropriate? To journalism. It is journalistic prose. In journalism, the suppression of the author’s personality and sensibility is deliberate. The goal is an impression of objectivity. The whole thing is meant to be written fast and read faster. This technique is right, for a newspaper. It is wrong for a novel, and dead wrong for a fantasy. A language intended to express the immediate and the trivial is applied to the remote and the elemental. The result, of course, is a mess....

The general assumption is that, if there are dragons or hippogriffs in a book, or if it takes place in a vaguely Keltic or Near Eastern medieval setting, or if magic is done in it, then it’s a fantasy. This is a mistake.

A writer who doesn’t know the West may deploy acres of sagebrush and rimrock without achieving a real Western. A writer may fumble about with spaceships and strains of mutant bacteria and never be anywhere near real science fiction. A writer may even write a five-hundred-page novel about Sigmund Freud which has absolutely nothing to do with Sigmund Freud; it has been done; it was done just a couple of years ago. And in the same way, a writer may use all the trappings of fantasy without ever actually imagining anything.

My argument is that this failure, this fakery, is visible instantly in the style."