As I wrote last time, a few weeks ago I had the immense pleasure and honor of interviewing author Jasper Fforde. The first part of the interview can be found here, and the second part follows:
Part Two
Francesca: In the acknowledgements, you wrote that this book (Shades of Grey) was more difficult to get onto paper than you anticipated. How so?
I’ve been doing that for seven books. And I thought, “Gosh, it would be fun to do some proper noveling for a change. How hard can it be?” Quite hard, as it turns out. I decided [that] I’m going to write my own characters, in my own situation, using my own little world. Still keeping it very Jasper-esque, but play with new ideas, new situations, new ways of telling the stories, in much the same way as I did with The Eyre Affair in 2002. Here is a different way of looking at a crime thriller. … It’s a different way of telling a story. I think essentially, what I do is find different ways of telling perhaps the same story. And here I’m telling a post-apocalyptic, post-catastrophic story as a social satire, but in a different way. And, these things take time. I’m still learning. We’re always still learning, as authors. Over the past two years hopefully I’ve learned some useful new skills about writing that would stand me in good stead, whatever I do in the future. Whether it’s more Thursday, more NCD, or something totally different, or Shades of Grey 2.
F: Has writing this book, and learning those new skills, changed how you’re going to approach the next Thursday or Shades of Grey books?
JF: I don’t think so. Subtly, perhaps it will. But I still approach Thursday in pretty much the same way. I don’t know. Until I write them and then stare at them and think, “Ah, okay, I wouldn’t have probably done it that way.” But it’s difficult to quantify. I’d have to run my life again without writing Shades of Grey and then see how it changes, and you can’t do that, so it’s impossible to say. … I mean, I hope so. I hope it will improve the prose, and make it funnier, and the books will be slightly better. That’s always the hope, isn’t it? With any author: write better books. It’s a good credo to work to.
F: Better than the opposite.
JF: Oh, write worse books. No, don’t want to do that. Write better books.
F: Do you know what the end is going to be? Of Shades of Grey?
JF: I have a vague idea. It’s like the Thursday adventure which went off in an entirely unexpected direction. I don’t actually know, and it’s quite exciting, because I’m having ideas – extra ideas now – for Shades of Grey 2, which take it off in entirely separate directions. But it won’t be in the same way as The Eyre Affair, which was about Jane Eyre being kidnapped. When my publishers asked me for a sequel, they thought they were going to get the same thing, but with Pride & Prejudice. ‘The Pride & Prejudice Affair,’ and then it would be a similar sort of thing. But that’s not how I work. I go off totally on a tangent, just to keep everybody guessing, and to be as unexpected as possible. So, as the series progresses, of Shades of Grey, it will hopefully contain as many twists and turns and unexpected changes and turnabouts as the TN series had.
F: Do you know when little things – for example Friday appearing at the end of the first TN book – do you know when these details will come into play later, as you write them?
JF: When I was writing The Eyre Affair, I thought that I’d introduce this whole notion of the ChronoGuard, and, obviously, I knew that Thursday and Landon were going to eventually have children, and I thought, “Well, why don’t I just put in Friday there? And just pop him in?” Because, even if I never use it, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a throwaway. But if I do use it, then the whole thing has a connectivity and a thread that runs through the entire series that makes it all much more cohesive, as a large body of work. Rather [than] being little separate adventures that are entirely unconnected. Or perhaps only connected by characters.
F: And it must have been a nice moment when you realized ‘A-ha! And this ties back into Friday’...
JF: Yeah. And how else can I get Friday involved? Friday is heavily involved in Book 5 in the series (Thursday Next: First Among Sequels), in a very similar kind of way. You just add these little quips, little gags, throughout the series, and then you can exploit them at a later date. Or not. I just scattered them all around the books. And eventually they make it work. When I’m writing another Thursday book, I go through the series, and have a look at things; If there are any unresolved plot-lines that I’ve started off somewhere, I go, “Oh, OK, I can use that. Yeah, that would work…” and then, all of a sudden we’ve got a little going.
F: Have you ever bumped into any plot points or anything that contradicts what you’ve got coming?
JF: Yeah, there were a couple of points in The Eyre Affair which didn’t work with the rest of the series, and I had to explain them away a bit in Book 2. Hopefully I got away with that. I also did a whole croquet thing I wanted to really make work, but I don’t mention croquet until the second book, and I wanted to mention it in the first book. I think there’s a passage that I had changed, from the paperback version three onward, so that the national sport – which was originally pelota, a very dangerous game played in Basque country, – [was] changed to croquet. So in the paperback, American version, it says croquet now.
And certainly with the new book, I wanted to really change the face of the book world {BookWorld?}, to offer new kinds of dramatic possibilities. So I’ll have to do a little bit of a rework there. But I found that my readership is extraordinarily elastic in what they’ll accept within the framework of a Thursday book, so, I think I’ll get away with it.
F: [Changing gears,] What is your idea of a successful book?
JF: One you can’t put down really. You find it a satisfying read or you’re entertained, or it’s not boring. I think that’s the minimum entry requirement, isn’t it? You read it and you go, “oh this is brilliant!” And you get to the end of the chapter and you go, “I’ve got to read the next chapter!” A little bit of a page turner. I think if you can hit all bases. There are several different markers that you can say are the hallmarks of a good book: it makes you think, it makes you laugh, it’s a page turner, it’s very satisfying, you feel rewarded because you paid attention or you’re just in front of the narrative, because you’re getting it. And if you can hit as many of these markers as possible in a book, then obviously it’s going to increase its interest to readers. Different people like different things. Some people only read books because they want to read fantastically precise English prose, and are not particularly worried about pace or plotting. For those people there’s a whole literary cannon of work out there– modern and classical – which they would find perhaps more interesting than my books, for instance. But, it’s {what people like} And that’s why there’s a billion books published every single year, because lots of people have different tastes.
F: Is that how you gauge your own books? As in, what makes a successful book, as you write it? Or do you have a different way of looking at it?JF: No. I think you’ve just got to listen to your inner ear. And the voice inside that says, “It’s not really working, is it Jasper? Perhaps if you shorten it by 10,000 words, it would work a bit better. Pace seems a bit flabby. There’s not much atmosphere, why couldn’t we just put a bit more description here, add some rain, [etc.]” It’s these sorts of things. It’s very difficult to quantify. It’s stuff that you really work on, on a sense of your own,initiative really. And you just add them [up] and then it looks right.
F: Trust yourself basically.
JF: Yeah, I think the skill is knowing, is having a sense of what’s missing, or a sense that it’s not right. Being a strong critic. Being your own worst critic – or best critic – I think is vitally important to an author. Because if you read it and go, “Mmm, this isn’t working, but I don’t know what. Oh never mind, I’ll just leave it, it’ll be fine…” It won’t be fine. You’ve just got to listen to that voice. And if the voice says, “I know you spent two months working on this chapter, and you really want to use this plot-line,’ [but] if it’s not working, it’s got to go. And that’s it. You just press the delete key and it’s gone. And you have to do that. It gets worse before it gets better.
F: There’s an expression, in film and TV: killing the puppy. It’s something like that…
JF: Yeah, that’s right. You have to kill your babies. It was William Goldman, who wrote Adventures in the Screen Trade. That was one of his favorite ones. You have to kill your babies. And, yeah, you do. Sometimes.
F: Did working in film help the way you look at a story? The way you come up with a story?
JF: I don’t really know. I think seeing films is probably of more value than actually working in films. But the huge value of working in films is that I managed, for twenty years, to work with a very, very bizarre assortment of people. And watch some extremely strange and sometimes aggressive character clashes, and diplomatic spats, and all sorts of coercive ways of people getting to do things. And also travel a lot, and in that respect, it was hugely useful. Because I would think that any self respecting author should obviously see something of life before they try and write about it.
People say, what advice for writers? Well, write, basically. But I’d also say, get a strange job where there’s a lot of strange people. Go work in McDonald’s somewhere in the central part of town, and you’ll share your shift with 7 or 8 very, very strange characters all there for very, very different reasons. And if you did that for three months, you would have a lot of very, very interesting observational skills. Always assuming of course that you have those observational skills, but if you want to be an author, then I think you’ve got to have them, really. Or work for an undertaker. That would be a very interesting one, wouldn’t it?
F: Ooh, slightly disturbing, but interesting. A little macabre.
JF: Yeah, a little macabre, but quite interesting I think.
*****************************
And on that note, end of Part Two! Stay tuned for the final installment, coming very soon.
As always, thanks so much for reading, and a great big ol' Thank You!!! (multiple exclamation points included) to Jasper Fforde, for his time and his words and inspiration.
xoxo :)