Interview WIth David B. Coe

[sleigh]

First, a bit of full disclosure: I consider David Coe a good friend (though one whom I don't see nearly often enough) and yes, I am unabashedly pimping his new book.

But not just because I know David. It's because I also know David's an excellent and interesting writer, and I'm looking forward to reading his book myself. So I thought maybe you'd like to get to know David a bit yourself...

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Gee, I know you somewhat, David, but let's pretend that we're on a panel together at some con, and I'm the moderator (God help us all!). Here's the inevitable opening statement:   "Ok, let's introduce ourselves..."   So go on, David, introduce yourself to all the nice people out there.  What do we need to know about you?

Introduce myself, eh?  All right.  My name is David B. Coe.  I'm the author of nine published fantasy novels, including the three books of the LonTobyn Chronicle, the five volumes of Winds of the Forelands, and my newest release, THE SORCERERS' PLAGUE, which is the first book in a new trilogy called Blood of the Southlands.  In 1999 I received the Crawford Fantasy Award, given annually to the best new author in fantasy.  I have a Ph.D. in U.S. environmental history from Stanford University.  I live on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, with my wife, who is a professor of biology, and our two daughters.

Here's the question I always *hate* to get from people.  (I like  to share the pain!)  You're in an elevator at a con, and someone  notices your name on the badge.  "Hey," they say loudly, "you're the guy who wrote THE SORCERER'S PLAGUE, right?  So what's the book about,  anyway?" Everyone packed into the car is listening and looking at  you.  And you have to come up with a few lines in the thirty seconds  before the door opens...  So, David, what's the book about?  Quick  now, we're almost at your floor...

The short answer: THE SORCERERS' PLAGUE tells the story of one woman's twisted, cruel attempt to avenge a wrong from her childhood, and the ways in which her vengeance spirals beyond her control, potentially bringing war and ruin to the land in which she lives.  She conjures a plague that she hopes will strike at one group of sorcerers, but it quickly spreads across the land, striking at nearly all those who possess magic.  In essence, the book combines high medieval fantasy with a medical thriller.

Now that last line is especially fascinating. Care to elaborate a little more?

The longer answer is that this book, and indeed the entire series, is about ethnic identity and cultural prejudice, about the ways in which ancient hatreds continue to poison human relationships and the attempts of a few to bridge these divides.  The title of the series -- Blood of the Southlands --  works on several levels.  There is violence in the story; blood is spilled. But also, the one magic immune to this woman's curse is blood magic, and so those who wield this power become the key to the land's survival -- the blood of the land, as it were.  And on yet another level, the history of the land, with its endless blood feuds and ethnic wars, is shaped entirely by people's blood ties to their own kind and their fear and hatred of those whose blood is "different" from their own.

You mentioned something in your blog regarding the book that I  found intriguing.  You said "In many ways, this is the most gratifying  release I've ever had, and I think that's because it was such a  difficult book to write."  As a writer, I know that every new book  presents its own unique (and new, and sometimes terrifying) challenges  to the writer.  What made this one so difficult for you?

There were several things, actually.  First off, it's a follow-up to my Winds of the Forelands series, and it includes several characters from that series who come to the Southlands and become embroiled in the struggles I just described.  So I needed to take elements of my last series and tie them into this new one, without merely recreating the Forelands.  I needed to make this new part of the Forelands universe both familiar to my readers who would come to it from the Forelands books, but also fresh and innovative enough to capture their interest and that of new readers.  And I needed to come up with a narrative that didn't just mirror the political intrigues and slide towards the war of the last series.

I knew from the beginning that I had a story to tell, but I really didn't know how to bring it out, and the more I struggled with it, the more I began to wonder if I'd been wrong even to start the project.  Winds of the Forelands had been such a satisfying writing experience -- I love that series and feel that it represents some of my finest work to date.  I feared that I was ruining it all with the Southlands books.  But about a third of the way into this book, I figured out how to get at the story I wanted to tell and gradually it all came together.  I was pleased when I finished it, if not entirely certain about what I had.  But after putting it away for a while and then reading it through, beginning to end, I realized that what I had created did exactly what I had hoped it would.  That familiarity of the Forelands universe was there, but the story was utterly unlike anything I'd done before.

You were also talking in your blog about this book being  'different' from your other novels.  Care to elaborate on that?

The difference lies, in part, in the medical thriller aspect that I mentioned earlier.  My first two series dealt largely with political intrigues, schemes and plots, betrayals and deceptions.  This story isn't like that.  It begins with the plague, and then it begins to trace the effects of the ethnic conflicts and this history of cultural feuds that is so central to the history of the Southlands.  I began the books while I was living in Australia -- my wife was on sabbatical for the year and we took the kids and spent a year living Down Under.  So in bringing some characters from the Forelands into the Southlands, I was drawing on my own experiences as a foreigner in a land that was both familiar (in terms of language and some aspects of the culture) and alien.

And then, my lead characters are different for me, too.  My villain is an old woman twisted and driven nearly to madness by her quest for vengeance. She's not a scheming noble or a corrupt king, or a power hungry overlord. She's just a sad, bitter woman whose entire life has driven her to this dark place.  My hero is an older man.  He's not a soldier or a young man discovering that he has powers he didn't know about, or any other heroic archetype.  He's just a man who, late in life, is forced by circumstance to embark on a dangerous journey.  He's self-aware; he understands his strengths but also his weaknesses.  He's not powerful, but he's clever; he has a stubborn streak, and he sometimes loses his temper, but he's also compassionate and honorable.  Not your typical fantasy characters, but they are very real.  Readers will be able to sympathize with both of them, even with my villain in her darkest moments.

The creative process fascinates me.  I tell my writing students  that there's no "right" way to write, mostly because every writer  seems to have his or her own unique approach to the craft.  What's  yours?  How do you approach writing?  What are your habits, your  strategies for getting it all down?  What's your usual day look  like... or don't you have 'usual' days?  What's your favorite part of  the writing process?  What's your least favorite part?  (Yeah, yeah, I  know, that's like a half-dozen questions in one.  Sorry...)

My approach to writing, I think, plays to my strengths as a writer.  I'm not the most talented writer out there -- no doubt there are lots of writers who are more skilled with their prose and their style.  But I have a couple of things going for me.  First, I'm disciplined.  I write full-time -- no day job -- and I treat my writing as I would a regular job.  I get up, get the kids to school, work out, and then I write until it's time to get the kids from their various after school activities.  I don't believe in waiting for inspiration, and I don't believe in writer's bloc.  I write every day, no matter my mood.  I don't write quickly, because I tend to edit and polish as I go.  I don't feel that I can move on to a new paragraph until the one I'm working on is at least close to where I want it.  Word choices for me are informed in part by the words I've used previously, so how can I write one section when I don't know exactly what I said in the last section?   Anyway, so I'm not one of these people who can write 5,000 or 10,000 words in a day. 1,500-2,000 is more like it.  But do that five days a week (I give my weekends to my kids, my wife, and myself) and pretty soon you've got a book.

The other thing I have going for me is that I understand people.  I'm a good listener, a good friend.  I sense what lies at the root of people's emotions.  And that allows me to write characters who are believable, whose emotional reactions ring true to my readers.  I love complex plots and richly imagined worlds.  But character is the key to everything I write.  I believe that the best storyline in the world will fall flat if the characters don't reach out of the book and grab the reader by the collar. And, by the same token, I believe that good characters can carry a story even if other aspects of the book aren't as strong.  I'm not saying that the other elements of my storytelling are weak -- not by any means -- but I think that I've been successful over the years because I write good characters.

And I think my approach to writing contributes in other ways to the growth of my characters.  I tend to outline loosely when I plot out a book.  I'll have a general sense of what needs to happen in each chapter, and I'll jot down notes to that effect.  But those notes tend to consist of maybe two sentences for each 20-25 page chapter.  So a lot of my writing is done in the moment.  I prefer to work this way because I find that giving my characters the freedom to express themselves often leads me to places that I hadn't anticipated, places where the story needed to go, even though I didn't know it until I actually wrote the words.

This is a hard idea for some people to understand, but for me it's absolutely essential to the creative process.  My characters may be products of my imagination, but they are very much alive in my mind.  When I write dialog, I actually feel like I'm listening to and transcribing a conversation that I can hear. I often don't know what a character is going to say until I type the words.  Now, of course, sometimes I go back and change things; sometimes I have to exert more control over that creative process.  But when my writing is really flowing well, the words just pour out of me, created in the moment.  You want to know what my favorite part of writing is?  That, right there.  The feeling of creation as a scene comes together right before my eyes.

My least favorite part of writing?  Hmmmm.  Well, I really hate going over copyedits and manuscript proofs.  By that time in the process I've read the manuscript through three or four or five times already and I'm sick to death of the thing.  And, at times, I dislike the business end of it.  But I get paid to do what I love; I get paid to make up stories.  I can hardly complain about that.

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Good answers, David, and thanks for taking the time -- I'm looking forward to reading the book, and I hope others will be as well! For those who are interested (and how could you not be?), you can order THE SORCERER'S PLAGUE here.