To recap (and copy and paste what
I've already said!): At the very tail end of December, I found out that one of my favorite authors was speaking at a local bookstore midway through January. By chance and serendipity, I’d worked with the woman in charge of PR for the owner of said bookstore, and in that completely random way that awesome, genius ideas have of popping into your head when you least expect them to, the thought popped into my head: What if I try and get an interview with him? (Him being the author of course.)
It seemed like a crazy idea, one that most likely wouldn’t lead anywhere, but, why not give it a shot, right? Being the end of the year, I’d been reminiscing about the me I used to be, who was ballsy and blindly went for stuff, without any fear – or even thought – of failure. So, in a huff of gumption and what-the-hell-itis, I sent off an email, along with a little prayer to any gods, faeries or angels that were watching, and I went on my way.
Longish story shorter, one person sent me to another, then another, and by the end of it, I was corresponding with the authors' PR peeps, and, than two weeks after my crazy idea, I got the interview! I got a half hour interview with the awesome, talented, charming, and utterly wonderful Jasper Fforde!!!
There’s a pretty funny
story about how the interview started, and a none-too-interesting
one about dragging my feet with the whole transcription part of the process, but, with only a very small amount of rambling more, I present the complete, very lightly edited – more polished really – interview with the fantastic, delightful, inspiring, and absolutely lovely Jasper Fforde.
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A quick note: any words in the squiggly {brackets} are places where I couldn’t quite understand, in the recording, what was said.(As I may have mentioned here six or seven hundred times, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, last November. One of them any awesome parts of NaNoWriMo, is the section of Pep Talks – new ones every year, and that show up in your emailbox throughout the month. This year – well, technically, last year, Jasper Fforde contributed
an amazing pep talk and I started off the interview by asking him about it…)
Jasper Fforde: It turned out well actually. I was really pleased with that. It’s very rarely that I actually write something that I’m actually pleased with, because I can only see the faults and errors, but the thing about National Novel Writing Month, is that they called me in July and said, “Would you do a thousand words?” and in July you go, “Oh, what, November? That’s {years} ahead!” And you go “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.” So I put it off and I put it off and literally, within the last two days, I went, “Oh, blast, I have to write this,” and I just sat down and wrote it, in half an hour. And I went, “Oh, that kind of makes sense, actually,” and I sent it off and that was it.
So I was quite pleased with that, because it was genuinely how I felt, and one hopes that that comes across. Especially as advice to would-be writers – practical advice – not “Go to the dark place and explore the inner you and expound on how you felt about the relationship with your father, before he left and bla, bla, bla.” And you go, “No, no, no! Just get the words down, for chrssakes! Just get the wordage there, and some of them will be together and they’ll look really good together and remember that! And then just do some more.” And it’s real practical stuff.
I think the National Novel Writing Month is a brilliant idea. I think it absolutely is. Absolutely fantastic.
Francesca: After having completed it, absolutely, I agree. And I kept remembering, in your pep talk, how you said you wrote 60,000 words and only 27 of them in order.JF: –And only 27 of them in the right order, yeah. I’m joking, but, yeah.
F: But when I was sitting there and writing and feeling like what I was writing was the biggest, most steaming pile of crap, I thought of that and, “You know what? So long as two of them are okay, then that’s fine.”JF: Oh yeah. Writing is like any other skill. When people say, “Oh, he has an inherent skill for this,” I think what you actually mean is, he’s actually smart. And smart people pick up skills quicker than people who are not so smart. But the actual inherent skill in a specific walk of life or endeavor, I think is complete nonsense. You just have to put in your hours of practice. And, if you take the 10,000 hour mark as a pretty good rule of thumb, the hours that someone spends writing for that one month, is a good chunk towards those 10,000 hours. And it’s all valuable work.
F: What happened with your novel? The one that you wrote?JF: It’s still around. It’s still gathering electrons on my hard drive. It hasn’t been published. It’s not bad, it could do with a bit of work, but eventually I’ll get it out somewhere.
F: Was that the first big writing thing you did?JF: No. I think it was probably about my fourth. When you have an idea that comes fairly packaged, fully packaged in your head, and you go, “Oh this would work out really well,” then it’s a lot easier to get down. I think I was working on Zorro at the time, and I’d spent 3 to 4 months in Mexico, thinking about writing this book, and when I got home I just went, “Right, okay, off we go,” and {phroom!} that was it.
F: And then it just came out in a big glut?JF: Yeah, like that. I think it was in between starting and finishing
The Eyre Affair.F: So, right in the middle of writing The Eyre Affair, you wrote–JF: I wrote two other books, yeah.
F: Wow! JF: I had a little trouble with
The Eyre Affair, trying to make it all fit together and work. It took a while; it took about three or four years.
F: Three questions just popped into my head with that. Let me go with the first one – when you first come up with, for example Shades of Grey, or the Thursday Next series, there’s so much detail in those worlds. How much do you plan ahead? How much do you know before going into it? JF: It varies from project to project. With the latest Thursday book that I’m writing at the moment -- TN6 I’m calling it – I decided that I wanted to write a plan, because I’ve never been able to write plans in the past. So I spent a month and a half writing out a plan. And that was quite good actually. I quite enjoyed that and a lot of ideas came along. But, even since I wrote the plan, I’ve had other ideas that I know are even better and that I’ll just add on at the writing stage. The way I write is, I start off with the basic principles of what’s going to happen – what is the main thrust of the book – and then it’s a sense of constant improvement. Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly editing, re-editing, and just going through the prose. And still adding little bits here and there and thinking, ‘Oh, that would be fun,” and why not add this and that and the other and before you know it, it all starts to sprout and blossom and all these little ideas firing off this way and that way, and it just comes together in a curious manner.
F: So, just diving in and trusting that it’ll all work out?JF: Yeah. If I built houses in the same way as I build books, I’d put the chimney pot up first, and then I’d do a window on the first floor, and then I’d do a little bit of basement and then I’d paint the spare room, which hadn’t been built yet. It’s that kind of thing: you just sort of {toss} around. And, I don’t generally start right at the very beginning. Often, if I have a really good subplot, I’ll actually write six separate sections of the subplot, and then I’ll start stirring them together or adding little bits on the end. It’s a very eclectic way of writing. And then I’ll suddenly have an idea, in the shower, or driving down the road, and I’ll come back and I’ll write a paragraph – which is about this idea – and then I’ll expound on it all day. I’ll have 3 and a half thousand words, and I’ll go, “Ok, I think that’s around about here in the book,” and I just plant it in there – [though it] might get moved later. So really it’s a very sporadic, sort of time-waste-y way of working and it’s not efficient in the least.
F: But it seems more enjoyable…
JF: It suits my way of thinking and writing. I think probably because I’m a bit impatient. So it suits my firing off in all directions way of writing. But sooner or later I have to actually button down to getting it all hanging together. I’m snipping off all the little extraneous bits, which are very fun, but just detract or drag – start dragging the eyes. Because you can have too much stuff; you can have too much detail. And quite often I will write a book with at least three subplots that it doesn’t need. And I’ll look at it and go, “You know? This is just too much, and it just slows the story. And this chapter is bogging, for this reason and, it’s just got to go.” And then it’ll just be {ripped}out, and that’s it. So quite a few ideas don’t make it into the original book, but I’ll keep them on file, and I’ll put them I later books.
F: Is that how the Thursday Next series – did you know it was going to be a series when you started?JF: No.
The Eyre Affair was a standalone book. There was no sequel to it at all. So the whole notion of the BookWorld which appears in book two was totally unthought-of in the original series. But, as it turned out of course, the BookWorld and the Jurisfiction element of the Thursday Next series is, I think, the best bit about it. This imagined BookWorld that {one} can travel into and move amongst books, is, I think, the main thrust of the entire series. But that was completely unthought-of when I wrote the original book.
F: What about the new one, Shades of Grey – it’s the first in a series. Did you know that going in, or was it the same thing?JF: I think so. It would be a bit of a waste of effort if I were to spend such a huge amount of time inventing this world, and then to abandon it, almost fully formed. And so I thought, “Well, no. There’s a lot more here.” And like the BookWorld and the Thursday Next series, you don’t know where this book is going to go next. And there’s an awful lot that can happen. Eddie’s world is actually quite – although the country is very open and empty and there’s not much going on in it, it’s a very closed community. They can’t do very much. There are rules and regulations to keep them having these very limited, mediocre lives. But there must be something outside. There must be something going on, there must be some reason why this bizarre world has come about. And there are all sorts of little clues that there is a greater world outside Eddie’s immediate environment. And all [of] that can be explored. It takes place in only two live villages and two dead villages in this very large country which is clearly the United Kingdom, but what’s going in the rest of the world? Is everybody like this? What happened? What was the Something That Happened? This is stuff that we can expand on in later books.
F: When you first dove in, was it bits and pieces? A subplot? 
JF: I feel I first dived in to this thing by writing down the basic rules of engagement within this society and the hierarchy. And the rules themselves are actually pretty basic. But they just become more complex because people are subtly trying to subvert them. I think you can have very simple rules, but you can have very complicated, unintended consequences. And it is the complexity that the world becomes once you people it with real, live people with their own problems, incentives and everything else, that it does become massively, massively complex. So, I started off by writing the basic rules, and then those rules led on to other rules, because I started asking questions: If everyone is on the social strata, and if you see purple you’re higher than if you can see red, well, then I think there must be some social strata’s within social strata’s. Class within class. If you see more red, you’re better than someone who can see less red. All of a sudden it becomes more complicated. And if there is a red prefect and you’re a high red, and you have a daughter who sees quite a lot of red, then you would want a red son – a very red son – to get you even higher. And all of a sudden, you have this mechanism for social climbing. Which changes everything. It’s like changing completely re-writing social rules and everything else. But, no matter what you do, it all comes out looking despairingly familiar, which I rather like. The more complex I made it, and the more different from our world I tried to make it, once the people started doing their human thing, it all started looking very, very familiar. And I like that. A lot. But it does come about through a series of experimentation. They’re humans like us, with their usual foibles and everything else.
F: Is there any one character you relate to more?JF: I kind of enjoy Eddie, I must say. I like to think back to myself, being twenty and not being hugely confident. I wasn’t the social climber he was, but all he wants is to be a good citizen. And being a good citizen is embracing mediocrity, and being unambitious, and not causing trouble, and trying to regain the lost hue for his family, by marrying someone who clearly is unsuitable, but whose father runs the Stringworks Factory back in Jade-Under-Lyme, and that’s really where Eddie is at the beginning of the book. He’s no one special at all, although he can see rather a lot of red. But that in itself is not particularly exciting, because reds are at the bottom of the pack anyway. He could make prefect, but then he moves to East Carmine, and he bumps into Jane, and he suddenly falls obviously, hopelessly in love with her, despite her clearly, almost psychotic, tendencies. And he realizes that, perhaps there’s something more, and there are questions that should be asked. He’s always has been a bit of a questioning sort of person – he has an inquiring mind – but I think he’s very much kept it at bay. But here there’s something going on, and before you know it, he’s fallen into a whole series of events that lead him to have to go to High Saffron, on this {recon/trek} And all sorts of things happen to him that lead him to realize that this society is not actually as perfect and wonderful as perhaps he is led to believe.
F: I love all the little details, when Eddie’s describing what makes a good citizen, that to us would not be a good thing – like how sycophantic they are – and yet, they’re good in this society. It’s almost an exaggeration, so clearly not our world, and yet you can still see the parallels.JF: Oh yes, absolutely. But I think, what was nice is that it’s a dystopia novel, but there’s no … armies of darkness. There’s no big computer somewhere, no robotic police force. This is a future dystopia in which the oppressive factors are the very people within the society themselves. And I like that. It is their very incuriosity that is actually, essentially, caging them in this dystopia. But it was very important to make it a bit, icky. And certainly to try and twist the morals that we have today, and not the morals, obviously, in Eddie’s world. They accept things that we find unacceptable. And I think it’s quite important to do that as well. And some things perhaps in the world, you look at and think, “Well it’d be nice if everyone was always polite to one another, and no one shouted, and no one would dare hit anyone, and it’s just a frightful thing to do.” But then of course there are other things in the world that you go, “Well, actually no, that’s really not very pleasant at all,” and people have come and accepted it.
F: Like the dress code. I remember mentioning to someone the other day, living here in Miami, where it’s a somewhat beachier community, “Wouldn’t it be nice if people dressed better?” As in, fancier. And then to see in the book that there are standard outfits.JF: Yeah, dress codes, absolutely. One could argue for hours and hours about whether dress codes should be allowable. We do have dress codes: you wouldn’t go into a restaurant here, [with] dirty shorts and a grubby t-shirt. So, there is a dress code. But as little as 20, 25 years ago, if you tried to go into a restaurant wearing blue jeans, they could say, “Actually, sir, we do require you to wear proper clothes.” I was at Milan Cathedral, and they have a dress code for entry there, that you couldn’t wear shorts or a short skirt, and they were literally turning people away. Like the church police were saying “No, sorry, God doesn’t like you, dressed like that. You’re going to have to go away.” There are dress codes in mosques, very strong dress codes in Mosques, and Japan has a very strong dress code. So it is there – it is with us – it’s just different.
