Joe Abercrombie on The Devils and His Best Writing Advice

I was a fan of fantasy as a kid and I’d always dreamed about putting my own take on epic fantasy on the page but drifted away from it in my late teens. Eventually, I came back to have a have a go at it, mostly because I had time on my hands and needed a project. I abandoned my first effort when I ended up working in TV as an editor. 

Later, as a freelance editor, I had time on my hands, so I picked it up again. This was around my late 20s, and the writing just had a very different texture to it. I think I'd read a lot of other things in between, and I’d learned to take myself a lot less seriously. It had this tongue-in-cheek quality to it that straight away I found much more interesting than the sort of pompous trash I had produced the first time around. It became a hobby that I'd do late at night after everyone else was in bed. 

I just started to be fascinated by the craft: things like the way to structure a scene, how to pace things, how to try to make things funny, how to try to make things scary or effective, and how to use the words and pacing to create a sense of action. All that stuff. 

I sort of was bitten by the bug. I’ve been writing ever since. Not every day, but many of them.

Well, routine is perhaps not quite the right word. I mean, the problem I have with writing is that it varies a lot depending on the place I’m at with a book. In the planning period, when I start projects, I’m probably sitting around, maybe reading some stuff, watching some things, making some notes, scribbling away in a pad, and generally trying to get the juices flowing and work out what it is I’m going to do and how I’m going to tackle it. 

Then there's the exciting period where I start trying to plan something more formally. That usually means starting to write a few chapters to get a sense of how it's going to feel. And that's obviously filled with new possibilities and the joy of a new thing, which lasts about five chapters, and then it becomes a horrible grinding toil to get the words out where I scramble my way to 800 words a day. Well, 751 is acceptable, because you always round up, right? Eventually I get to the end of the first draft, and that's when I can start actually writing the book. 

Some days are way better than others in terms of productivity. I do quite a lot of screen work and stuff these days. And that goes more in fits-and-starts, because you’ll talk about working on a project and then it goes away, and then suddenly it gets developed and then it’s got to be done relatively quickly. Or a script will be completed, you send it off, and then six weeks to two months later, you'll hear back with notes or changes. 

It's very up and down, and I tend to write books in between the other things that I'm doing, because the book work is obviously very fluid. I can do that whenever I want to. I tend to alternate the two these days to a degree, although there'll be time when I don't have any film or TV work where I'm totally doing the books. But then also there'll be times when a book comes out and you're touring and doing events and a bit more focused on that side of the job. 

So, it's quite a weird and varied job. I wouldn't say no two days the same, because many of the days are very much the same, but also not the same. 

Weirdly, it first started coming together years ago. I was approached by a young adult editor, Nick Lake at Harper Voyager, who liked my adult stuff, and thought I might have a good young adult novel in me. It put the seed in my head to write something in the young adult vein. My own kids were getting older at that time and starting to read, and it reminded me how the books that you read as a kid really stick with you in a way that adult stuff doesn't—even stuff that you love and admire. There's something fundamental and powerful about the things you read when you were a kid. I thought, I would like to damage young minds, too. 

My first idea was about the pope keeping a set of monsters to deal with the problems the righteous can't tackle, which is on its face an obviously very adult, difficult idea. I don't know what I was thinking, really. And then I had a different thought, which was more a Viking orientated thing, which became Half A King. But the idea for the pope's monsters loitered around. I then pitched it to my editor, and it was a long, complicated pitch. And they said, “Oh, so it's like Papal Suicide Squad.” 

That was the title I wanted, but apparently, there's some trademark issues.

Finishing it. 

It’s actually hard to think of a favorite part. People often ask about your favorite character, your favorite sequence, and I suppose it's a bit like asking an engineer what his favorite bit of the engine is. You know, they only work together to achieve anything. 

I suppose I'm glad it came together as a kind of ensemble piece, because that had very much been the idea. One thing I've always enjoyed is the story about a group of characters on the road. Obvious though it is, it does work very nicely to have mismatched weirdos on the road. For one reason or another when I wrote The Age of Madness series, it didn't have very much of a group of weirdos on the road in it. The characters were a bit less weird, a bit more rational, and they tended to be separated a lot, doing their own thing at different times. 

So, I thought, I'm going to do a big group of people on the road. That back and forth, talking nonsense, weird idiots saying funny things to each other is my favorite stuff. Although, some of the lavish and ludicrous action sequences are a lot of fun, as well. 

Yeah, definitely some parts are easier than others. The more action-based stuff I do find easier to bash out. I often look forward to an action scene, because I feel like, alright, I can smash this down in a couple of days and get something that's roughly right. The excitement of the newness at the start and the excitement of finishing up at the end is good. The middle part is where things tend to stray. But then some scenes will catch fire, and I'll suddenly realize I've been having fun. I've written 1,000 words of dialog, and it's all pretty good. 

Other days, I'll feel like it’s a grind to get a few hundred words out, and that's the most I can bear to manage, so I spend the rest of the time procrastinating. It's a weird business from that point of view. I don't know if there's a secret to just trying to make progress. You’ve just got to sit in the chair and keep at it.

I don't want to say it's like childbirth, because obviously I haven't experienced childbirth myself. I've been in the room, so I feel like I did a lot of work personally. But they say that you forget how horrible it is—you go into the next one with this glossy optimism. Then, suddenly it all comes back in the delivery room. So, I think each book in a way is like that. I think they're almost always equally bad. Some work better than others, and some are easier to get onto the page than others, but they all have their challenges. 

My sophomore series wasn't actually any worse than others, but the experience of writing it was way worse, because I didn't have the experience to know that that happens every time. I didn't realize, while writing that first set of books, that those were actually the good times. That was the easy bit, when you put down all the stuff that's in easy reach, where it's obvious because you've been thinking about for years. Then when you've suddenly got to write something on a schedule with some level of expectation in a limited time, with a contractual expectation, it's a very different feeling. And also, you're working with these new characters, new settings. It's like typing with gloves on; it all feels new and weird, and none of it seems to be working. 

That was just not something I was used to or prepared for. It had been getting easier, and easier, was how I saw it. You know, my first book took two or three years to write. The second one took a year and a half. The third one took a year. I thought, the next one, it'll take six months. Instead, it took ages. I was missing my deadlines. It wasn't coming together, and so that was worrying. 

But then it did come together. Having gone through that experience, I’ve kind of maintained faith that it will continue coming together. And thus far it always, more or less, has. That, and I’ve got great editors who keep me honest. 

That’s a really interesting question. I don't want to say I don't think about it, because obviously readers are hugely important to me. But I suppose I've always felt like I write the book I want to write; I write it for myself. Then the joy of releasing it to the audience is—or the joy and the horror—is the range of reactions I get back, and how it's interpreted in a way I never would have expected. 

People often see things that I never intended to put there. Which isn't to say they're not there, but it's the fact that the act of reading is sort of a creative partnership. People have their own feeling of the characters, their own sense of what their voices are like. The reader has to do a lot of work, a lot of imaginative work, creating what they read. It's like having a partner, you know, a co-writer, in a way, and they bring their own ideas, their own feelings, their own experience, to it. 

I hope that people will have a good time and find it entertaining in the moment. I don't necessarily hope or require that people learn some didactic lesson from the act of reading one of my books, although they are, of course, very profound and full of meaning. Because it’s so varied what readers will take away, it's hard to hope for any one thing. People's reactions to certain styles of writing and people's ideas of what is good writing are so mind-blowingly diverse. 

All you can really do is write what you like and hope some people will agree with you. I think that's the writer's job. If you write to please an imagined audience, I think in the end, you'll please no one—or not very many people, anyway.

Yeah, don't give up the day job. I was lucky in that I could just take a few less jobs and focus on the writing a bit more as I gradually drifted from one profession to another over time. Giving up your day job can also leave you feeling a bit directionless and weird. There's this idea that you’ll suddenly have all day to write, and what you actually end up doing is sitting there flicking paper clips at the corner all day. You can actually end up doing less than you would if you’re writing in that precious time outside of work. So, don't rush to give up the day job. Be realistic from that point of view.

When it comes to the technicalities of writing, the best advice I’ve had is to be honest. Always ask yourself if this feels truthful and authentic and you're really describing the thing as it is, or if you're reaching for an easy cliché. Because sometimes you read those books where it's like everything is a cliche. Every description, metaphor, and line describe something should be unique to the character, unique to the writer. 

It’s that individual voice you want to hear from… at least, that’s what I want when I read a book.