INTERVIEW: Author Steph Swainston

Castle builder

Steph Swainston digs deep into the Castle world with Matt Chapman...

Who or what are your influences?
Steph Swainston: One major influence is Greek mythology. Also The War of the Worlds for the creeping red weed that follows an invasion, covers everything and makes it into an alien landscape – that’s like the Insects’ Paperlands in my world. I read William Burroughs and a lot of books about drugs. But the Castle world owes much to the novels I read as a kid – Alice in Wonderland – and cartoons I watched, like Battle of the Planets!

All I’ve ever read and experienced has ‘gone deep’ and surfaced in an altered form. I’m also obsessed with natural history, especially birds. I try to have practical experience to make the descriptions authentic, for example, hang gliding and fencing.

How important is your background in archaeology?
Archaeology helps you think about the culture as a whole and its history, so I considered every aspect of the Fourlands’ societies, and they’re all different. For example, Awian culture has never been through a stage that we would recognize as medieval – it evolved from a Romanesque to a Neoclassical 18th Century style and now it looks a bit Art Nouveau. But the Plainslands towns would look medieval to us.

My experiences in digging go into the book as well. Once we had to excavate pits over a whole moor, in bottomless peat that just filled up with water. Every day we were caked in mud and I once got mild hypothermia. It was hell, but it helped me describe torrential rain and gale force winds.

Is it difficult to build a fictional world from scratch?
You can do it two ways. Some authors hint at a world without making it up. That method doesn’t stand the test of time because readers will spot the holes. The second way – the way I built the Castle world – takes years, even decades. First of all you’re building from the outside, looking in, because the fictional world doesn’t yet exist. Then it reaches a size where you can start to live in it, building it from the inside out, from the characters’ points of view. Then you can keep yourself out of the world; it’s a much purer method.

I started to build the Fourlands ‘from the inside out’ when I was at school, and had the advantage of a kid’s incredible imagination. You can keep some ideas, shuffle others, and build more on top. But you have to keep pruning the world like a growing plant.

The protagonist is an angelic-looking figure but he is flawed. Are there no straightforward heroes any more?
If I could find a straightforward hero in the real world I would be happy to put one into a fictional world. But everybody has flaws. For the same reason there is no such thing as magic in the Castle world, and since God is absent, everyone has to stand on their own two feet and help each other. The Castle world is uplifting because I’m saying find your own potential. Make the most of being yourself; be your own hero.

Do you enjoy writing fantasy more than other writing?
Definitely! Fantastical pictures and scene-sequences pop into my head all the time and I write to get them out. The Castle world has always been a forum where I can re-enact characters or test issues and processes to better understand them. It’s more fluid than non-fiction. A fantasy world built to its utmost extreme would be indistinguishable from ordinary fiction. But there’s more fun to be had along the way imagining fantasy.

What’s next for you?
The third Castle novel, I’m enjoying it. Then I’d like to show you the Fourlands from a new point of view. After that, perhaps something completely different.

Buy books written by Steph Swainson at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com