Canadian writer Steven Erikson was a guest of “ZmajKON”, a fantasy convention held in Niš for the sixth time, where he received the “Minas Edhel” award for his contribution to the fantasy genre. As an archaeologist and anthropologist, skilled not only in digging up stories, but also in telling them, he recognized an example of Roman culture that “sets a layer down upon the surface of the ground” in the city of Constantine. Erikson also spoke about literature, his writing, world-building and character development, and his impressions of Niš for “Bez limita”.
What is your impression of our city? Did you have a chance to walk through it?
I like the size of it. I think inviting writers to a community of this size is actually more successful than to big cities. In big cities, everybody is very busy with things, so, you cannot be getting as many people concentrated in one place for a particular event. I really appreciated that this is a city you can walk in. It’s not too large, not too intimidating.
How did studying anthropology and archeology help you with world-building?
What anthropology and archeology can give you is a sense of cultures and civilizations as they walk through time. Each culture sets a layer down upon the surface of the ground. The great example is right here. Earlier today we visited Constantine’s palace (Mediana). So we already know that there is Roman stuff sitting underneath the surface here. Quite often fantasy novels don’t really have that deep time that’s underneath the story. But in the “Malazan” stuff that we created, we are both archeologists myself and my co-creator, we wanted that sense of deep time. So doing excavations and studying anthropology and history of classes, really helped us to build up that sense of history in the world that we were creating.
Even if you were working in other fields, not in anthropology or archeology, would that influence your writing?
I think so. I think any other discipline you get into – sociology, psychology, any of the social sciences, especially, humanities, will inform your writing. In many ways, I would always recommend having a different speciality because you can bring that experience to your books.
So your genre would still be fantasy even if you were not an anthropologist?
Absolutely. I don’t think one should ever stop writing. So, even if you never studied anthropology and you want to create fantasy worlds, secondary worlds, you can use a bookstore and find introductory anthropology textbooks for cheap, especially the ones that are out of date, and just read them. Those can be extremely, utterly, helpful.
The characters in your books are very vividly represented as though they were real people. Can you tell us how you approach characterisation?
This is my approach. I need to be able to step into that character’s shoes. I need to see the world from their perspective. In order to do that, in many ways, you have to surrender your own ego and become somebody else. One of the good ways of doing that is just some note-taking. To begin with your characters is to think about their worldview and make it different from your own. So, that character, then, almost engages in kind of a dialog with you, a dialectic even, so they can end up arguing with your own personal point of view. In that way, those characters don’t all sound like the author. They acquire their own voices and they see the world differently. Then you just wear their skin for awhile and that’s where you are.
How do you see the future of literature in general?
I think we are in trouble, as literature. I think a lot of communication these days encourages a kind of impatience and so people want to get to the story very quickly, get through it very quickly. But, novels require long-term investment in their reading and I think we are kind of losing track of that kind of thing.
What would you say to aspiring fantasy writers?
I would apply this to not just fantasy writers: read, read, read, read! All kinds of genres, don’t just read fantasy. And finish what you’ve started. That’s the most important. Quite often, beginning writers get excited about the story idea ‒ they start writing and then it starts to slow down, the whole process starts to slow down. By page four you are sweating blood trying to get the sentence down. Basically, what’s that telling you is that, those first four pages – you know how to do it. Your learning process starts on page five and that’s where you got to grind through it until you finish, cause that’s where your learning is probably going to come through. The other stuff you can already do because you have already done it. So, you finish what you started.
Interview conducted and written by: Lana Stanisavljević, Marija Todorović, Nikola Đorđević
Edited by: Aleksandra Božović