The writing prompt for this blog is “Entertain me.” Some writers take that more literally than others. Our next guest submitted a piece he calls, “Entertaining Nathan.” From across the Atlantic, Nathan Lowell Presents…
Steven Savile
Sounds a bit like a poor-man’s version of Educating Rita or Making Plans for Nigel, but that was the remit Nathan offered, so, here I am, I’ve got my juggling balls, my hat with jingly bells and the patter of the well-heeled street entertainer. There’s also the hat that’ll go around later begging for tips…
Actually, all things considered, I think I’ll tell you a story… it’s the story of my big break and how it very nearly wasn’t…
Back around 2005 I had had enough of teaching. I mean REALLY had enough, to the point of saying okay, that’s it, I quit, I don’t need food I just need to get the hell out of Dodge before I end up killing someone. I’d been writing a lot, and failing a lot. Well, for failing read getting really close but not quite making it. I’d shared agents with PD James and Patricia Highsmith when I was 19. I’d had Stephen King’s editor tell me it was one of the most original debut novels they’d read but no they couldn’t buy it because it wasn’t Silence of the Lambs. I’d had the head of Transworld in the UK (Corgi, which became Bantam through various changes of ownership) explain that I’d caused a near riot in the acquisitions meeting because 50% of the people around the table loved my novel, 50% outright hated it and they all agreed they couldn’t quite work out how to sell a book in which a serial killer was a wooden Jesus stepped down from a crucifix in a New York church… I’d been hired to write a dozen Funfax things for kids – these were tiny little fun things that cashed in on the Filofax craze – including a kids guide to the Internet back in 1995 that was pre-Netscape never mind Google, which the publisher very brilliantly set into the publication schedule for 18 months in the future, meaning post-Netscape, post Internet Explorer and well post anything useful in my little book… so it died a death. There was the pre-teen romance series which was canceled before it came out. There was the horror novel which sold to (I think) seven small presses that all went bankrupt before it could ever see the light of day… and so it goes and so it went…
So one fine morning I went mad and decided I’d try to live off the vast income I was earning from my writing – which at the time was about enough to buy a cup of coffee, not Starbucks stuff, but full of caffeine just the same. I marched into the headmaster’s office and quit. It was a very grand exit that involved swearing, threats of ‘You’ll never work in this town again!’ and all the best clichés and I was ENERGISED. I needed to succeed now. It was that or starve. I went home and fired off an email to a friend who’s friend’s husband worked for Games Workshop and said ‘Hey, basically I’m screwed… I just quit my job I need to get a book deal… can you get Mike to put a word in with his editor? I’m going to chase up every avenue I can, something will give… and I don’t mind writing ANYTHING.’
Mike did, introducing me to Lindsay Priestley, who would become my first ever professional editor and one of my biggest champions for years. We traded emails. Lindz said ‘Well we’ve got some openings, we’re relaunching Space Wolves, now that Bil King’s left, so you could do that but it’d be Steve Savile and William King, or there’s Dan Abnett’s Titan, we’d love a Titan novel, but again that’d be Steve Savile and Dan Abnett on the cover… or… well, we’ve not really got this, but we might have. We want to launch a series about the Vampire Counts but the guy meant to be writing it has vanished off the face of the earth… so, do you think you could do that?”
Here’s writing secret number one – the answer to ANY question you’re asked is ‘I can do that.’ And then you go and work out how you can…
So I said ‘I can do that’ and set about writing an outline. I’d never written an outline in my life and suddenly I was supposed to sit down and break down 30 chapters of action from page one to page three hundred and fifty, including EVERYTHING… my brain has never worked like that, so it was a massive shift of gears. It took a week. Now it takes me a month, but I really wanted to impress Lindz. So I wooshed it in via email and within a day we’d changed maybe ten fundamentals, then I’d rewritten it until she nodded and said ‘Fantastic. Okay… look… we still can’t raise the vampire guy… but we can’t make any promises… can you write the first 5,000 words over the weekend, get it to me for Monday, so I can see if you’re a good fit?’
To which I said (repeat with me) ‘I can do that.’ And sat down to hammer out the opening chapter of Inheritance. I went full-on gothic atmosphere, Hammer House of Horror style… bringing my vampire in out of the rain swept night amid a thunder storm, sweeping through ghostly castle halls, up to a room where a man would make a pact with the devil to save his own skin, only to find out the devil in this case was a bigger bastard than he ever could have imagined… and delivered it on Sunday evening, at 5,000 words exactly.
Feeling inordinately happy with myself I waited for the response.
It came that afternoon. ‘Love it, but could you make some changes.’ There were about ten in total… nothing major. Some were good. Some made the chapter much stronger. A couple were clichés, but we were treading very close to clichéland anyway so that wasn’t a problem. I sent a copy of Lindz’s response to my friend who’d put me in touch with Mike who’d done the introductions… because they wanted to be a writer themselves and I figured it was a good introduction to how editing worked. Certainly it was the first time I’d experienced anything remotely as hands on…
We traded a bunch of emails while I worked on the edits, most of them were dissecting the whole why change x for y kind of thing. Now part of me had worked out this was a bit of test to see how easy I’d be to edit once the final book was in, and I was actually attached to it… Games Workshop’s a bit of a special beast in that it’s a huge factory of story and you’re just telling little bits of someone else’s grand narrative. It makes sense they want fast writers who won’t get precious about their ‘art’.
I turned in the revisions within forty-eight hours, again inordinately proud that it was so much better than the first draft, only to receive another email of editorial comments with more than the first email, and some of these changes felt a little like change for change’s sake. There was one I remember which was along the lines of ‘cut this, it’s a cliché, replace it with this much bigger cliché.’ I paraphrase, but you get the picture.
So, I wooshed these comments off to said friend again, and this time they emailed back a pretty scathing email along the lines of ‘By Christ this woman’s an idiot, she’d replacing good original stuff with really hammy clichés.’ But instead of sending it to me, sent it to the editor herself…
Now remember, I’d not signed any contract. Nada. I had no protection for all the work I’d been doing for about six weeks at this point, and no guarantee original vampire boy wouldn’t turn up any day now anyway…
I was mortified. I mean… there were the words moron, idiot, and other juicy ones in there. I had about 6 hours until Lindz would roll up into the office and read the missive. In other words 6 hours for damage limitation. I had to think fast – had I written anything incriminating the in chain of emails? Had I actually said ‘man these edits are killing me, they’re stooopid’ or anything of the like? Because if I hadn’t then maybe I could salvage things…
I am obviously a Machiavellian genius because without missing a beat I emailed Lindz and said ‘hey, do me a favour… could you write a steaming letter back to my friend saying how you just fired me because of them, I mean really lay it on thick and make them feel terrible, I want to wind them up for being an idiot…’
This may sound dumb, but I had a plan… just like Hannibal. Not Lector… the one with Face and BA.
I’m a late riser. Come morning I check my email and there’s a couple of new ones, one from Lindz basically saying ‘You’re a bad man Savile, I could never do that to the poor woman…’ and another from my friend saying they’d been unable to sleep all night, had broken out in hives, felt like utter shit and had just send Lindz a huge hamper of chocolate and begged forgiveness. I was starting to find the whole thing slightly amusing, to be honest, but there was still an underlying panic, I mean way to make a first impression with a prospective employer, right?
So, I phoned up Lindz and kicked off the conversation with ‘Oh, please. Come on, let’s really wind her up about this… she deserves it.’ And laughed about the email faux-pas, knowing at any point she could say ‘Hang on a minute….’ But figuring the bluff had to be worth it, and it was. A few minutes on the phone and Lindz’d rejected my offer of co-conspirators against said friend and actually united with them against me, because I’m a bad bad man.
I was offered the book two days after that.
Oh, and Lindz wrote back to my friend: “Hi, what an interesting way of introducing yourself…’
Obviously we laughed about it later, especially when we all sat down together around a really good curry, face-to-face for the first time, but I thank whatever devil or demon looks after idiot writers in the middle of the night that I hadn’t written anything bad about any of the editorial comments in that email exchange so I could honestly say ‘Ah I’m just helping them out because they want to be a writer and this way they can see what they’ll have to go through, the hoops they’ll have to jump etc, and how while you might not agree with something, your writing isn’t ‘the precious’ when you’re writing for someone else… You’ll notice I never complained once…’ I ended up doing six novels for Games Workshop, four for Warhammer, two for their Black Flame line, Slainé. All of that could so easily have gone down the toilet with that one email. And with it, Dr Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate and all of the other worlds I’ve gone on to work in…
So, for the love of all writers out there… don’t click reply all. Or if you do, have the number of a good chocolatier on speed dial.
Steven Savile has just released his new work, The Moonland Diaries. Learn more about Steven and his work at his website.
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