My Interview with Steven J Pemberton

What is your name and/or pen name? 

Steven J Pemberton 

What genre do you write? 

I mainly write fantasy novels. I’ve also written a science fiction novel, a children’s book and a few short stories. 

What made you want to be a writer? 

My father was a librarian and my mother was a teacher, so it was probably inevitable that I would grow up loving books. My mother wrote short stories and had a few published in magazines, which inspired me. What made me want to write fantasy, specifically, was reading The Hobbit when I was off sick from school. 

What do you use to keep yourself inspired while writing? 

The inspiration for most of my stories comes about over many years. I have a wordprocessor document where I write down anything that I think might be useful in a story – interesting news items, quotations, jokes, character names, “what if?” questions, cool plot twists – anything, really. Every so often (usually when I’m bored or stuck with the story I’m currently writing) I read through this document and comment on entries, or look for connections between entries (which I might have written years apart). Gradually, enough material for a story comes together. 

But inspiration on its own won’t let you write a book, unless your books are much shorter than mine or you write much faster than I do. It is, as the logicians say, necessary but not sufficient. It will get you started, and will sometimes get you out of a tricky situation, but over the longer term, determination and self-discipline are more valuable. What allowed me to write nine books over the last twelve years was firstly, deciding that I would write something every day, then once that had become a habit, setting myself a target for the number of words to write each day. I figured I could spend an hour writing each day, and that when I put my mind to it, I could write 500 words in that hour, so 500 words became my daily target. It doesn’t sound like much (in a paperback, it’s around one-and-a-half to two pages), but over the weeks and months, it adds up. 

How do you feel about the writing community as a whole? 

Most of them are all right ;-) I’m in a couple of writing groups, online and in real life, and I’ve found the members supportive and helpful. My writing improved a lot when I joined a critique group. 

Outside the small worlds of the writing groups, I think there is a sense of community, a sense that “we’re all in this together.” We’re not competitors, or we don’t have to be. A few badly-behaved authors, especially on the indie side, give the rest a bad name, but their tactics usually don’t work over the long term. Any individual misbehaving author tends not to be a problem for very long. 

Have you or will you be willing to collaborate with other authors in the future? 

I take “collaborate” to mean “co-write”, rather than “edit”, “critique” or “toss ideas around”, all of which I willingly do. 

I co-wrote a few radio and film scripts many years ago, but have never co-written a book. I can’t see myself doing it in the future either. Writing one takes too long for me to be confident that someone else will be willing to work with me for the whole time, plus which I like being in control of the process. If I was to co-write a novel, it would have to be one I really wanted to write (!) but which I felt I couldn’t currently do justice to. I’d also need a good reason for not simply putting this one aside until my skills had improved enough to write it on my own and writing another book in the meantime. (Remember that big “ideas” document I mentioned above – if I think I’m not ready to write one book, I have plenty of others I could write.) 

Tell us about your book and if it’s upcoming or already published. 

My most recent novel, The Reluctant Dragonrider, is the second book in my Dragonrider series. It follows on from the first book, The Accidental Dragonrider, but can be read on its own, as it’s not a direct sequel – the protagonist is the daughter of the protagonist of the first book.            

The blurb for The Reluctant Dragonrider is as follows – It’s been forty years since Tiwan’s father Iko convinced a dragon to save their village. Now the dragons are back, and they want Tiwan’s help in a war against an enemy in their world’s oceans. But she’s just a child, so what could she do? The dragons threaten to invade the humans’ world if they lose the war. Tiwan reluctantly agrees to go on a spying mission for them, even though she risks being lost in the dragons’ world forever. 

The Dragonrider series came into existence in a rather roundabout way. Many years ago, a member of a mailing list I was in (remember them?) had a quotation in her signature block, “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.” (This, of course, is a riff on a quotation from Tolkien, “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”) I thought I might be able to get a story out of it. I wrote about 600 words of a man on a hilltop who’d just summoned a dragon and was trying to convince it to help him. After that, I got stuck, because I hadn’t yet learned to wait until I had a few of the story’s key scenes or turning points clear in my head. Those 600 words languished on my hard drive while I wrote many more words and many more stories. One day as I was writing another book (The Mirrors of Elangir), I mentioned in passing that one of the warring nations in it used dragons as airborne cavalry. I immediately realised that if I took my 600-word beginning and set it in the same world as The Mirrors of Elangir (many years later), I would be able to continue the story. I now had a setting, some history, and (most importantly) some motivation for the dragon’s behaviour. 

I initially intended The Accidental Dragonrider to be a standalone book, and gave the ending a definite sense of finality. But I try not to close off options completely, and left a few loose ends and unsolved puzzles to allow myself a sequel if I ever wanted to write one. Then it proved unexpectedly popular, and I decided I should write a sequel. (I swear this never occurred to me when I was writing, but it turns out there are a lot of people who like reading about dragons.) 

Will there be a third Dragonrider book? I have some ideas for it, and I put a few things into The Reluctant Dragonrider that could connect to it, but I have at least two other books I want to write first, so it’ll be a while before I return to Iko and Tiwan and the dragons. 

Is your book or upcoming book an eBook, paperback, or both? 

All my books are available as ebooks and paperbacks. I’m also in the process of releasing them as audiobooks. I’m about halfway through my back catalogue at the moment. 

Is this your first book? 

I’ve published nine books so far. As well as the two Dragonrider books, I’ve published The Barefoot Healer (a series of four young adult fantasy novels), The Mirrors of Elangir (a young adult fantasy novel), Escape Velocity (a science fiction novel for adults) and Simon and the Birthday Wish (a children’s book). 

Are you planning to write more? 

Officially my next book will be a sequel to The Mirrors of Elangir. Then I want to write another science fiction novel, set in a far-future dystopia, then maybe the third Dragonrider book. Somewhere along the way I might write a sequel to Simon and the Birthday Wish. I’ve also got a half-finished book of short stories, though one of those is currently 35,000 words, so I might pull that out into a separate novel or novella. After that… who knows? I don’t think I’m in any danger of using up the entries in my ideas document. 

Is there anything you would say to other writers, that want to write and publish a book? 

There’s a great deal I could say, but I’ll try to keep it brief. 

Firstly, if your main reason for wanting to write isn’t that you love writing, find something else to do with your spare time. It’s not wrong to want to be rich and famous through writing, but so few people achieve it that if it’s your main motive, you’re likely to end up bitter that you wasted years chasing a dream that wasn’t going to come true. If you write because you love to write, then regardless of whether any success comes from it, you’ll have enjoyed the time you spent writing. 

Secondly, read a lot, and not just in your chosen genre(s). Mostly, read good stuff, to learn from it, but read some bad stuff too, so you can be confident of knowing the difference. I can usually tell when a writer doesn’t read enough, because they ask questions whose answers they would naturally soak up if they read a lot. (Questions like “How long should a chapter be?”, “Can I use swearwords?”, “Give me a long list of synonyms for ‘said,’ because I think writing ‘he/she said’ after every line of dialogue is boring.”) 

Thirdly, write a lot, mostly in your chosen genre(s), but don’t be afraid to experiment. If you want to write fiction that you expect strangers to read and enjoy, you need to write, on average, a million words for practice. Finish what you start, even if you stop enjoying writing it. Many writers abandon a piece of writing when it becomes boring, believing that the problem is that they haven’t found the right story to write. And maybe they haven’t, but it’s more likely related to what I said about not being able to stay inspired for a long time. Every story becomes boring to write if you spend long enough working on it. You simply have to trust that if you keep working on it, your mood will improve enough to make the story enjoyable again. 

Fourthly, show what you think is your best work to people you believe are better writers than you. When you’ve finished crying and swearing over how they tore your precious baby to pieces, use what they told you to edit the piece to make it better, and make your next piece better to begin with. I believe there’s a limit to how much you can improve any one piece of writing from where it started – you either reach the current limit of your abilities or stop seeing its flaws. When you reach that point, or perhaps before, it’s time to start a new piece. If everybody you show the story to says it’s wonderful and has no flaws, find some new people to ask about it – not because the current ones are wrong, but because you won’t learn anything from them. 

Not all advice is useful. Many writers, when commenting on your story, will try to turn it into the story they would have written. (This isn’t always intentional, and often they don’t realise they’re doing it.) You should pay the most attention to the advice that will help you to tell the story you want to tell in the best way you can. Also pay attention to problems that more than one person points out. There’s a saying, “What I tell you three times is true.” If three or more people independently point out the same problem, the odds are that they’re right, and you should either fix it or have a good reason not to. (“They don’t understand me” is usually not a good reason...) 

Where can my readers find your book and how they can follow you on social media? Leave only links that you want open to the public. 

The Reluctant Dragonrider is currently available in ebook and paperback, and might also be available as an audiobook by the time you read this. You can find the ebook and paperback on Amazon at these links: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0783HDB8Z (USA) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0783HDB8Z (UK) or your local Amazon store. The ebook is currently exclusive to Amazon. The ISBN for the paperback is 978 197 985 7642, which might help you to find it if you want to look for it at other retailers. 

The best place to find information about my books and where to buy them is my website, http://www.pembers.net. 

You can follow me on Twitter, @sjpemb. 

I have a blog on Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5207105.Steven_J_Pemberton/blog 

I have a YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/pembersbcc, where I post readings, trailers and behind-the-scenes videos about my books. 

I recently started a Facebook author page, which is at https://www.facebook.com/StevenJPembertonAuthor/. 

Thank you for reading this far, and thank you G D Talbot for giving me the opportunity to speak to you.

No thank you, Steven, for sharing with us. I really enjoyed when you pointed out using “What if” questions when writing. I do the same in my writing and I suggest to other fiction authors to do the same.

I hope everyone will check out Steven’s books and follow him on social media.

As Always Happy Reading and Writing Everyone

G. D. Talbot