Interview with Richard Williams

Wintermute 13/04/2008 - 08:39 News
WarSeer's very own t-tauri, recently interviewed Black Library author Richard Williams about his time at The Black Library and his new novel Relentless (a preview of which can be found here). The interview follows below and also can be downloaded, in pdf format, from the following link t-tauri's interview with Richard Williams .

t-tauri A little about yourself-struggling reclusive writer? International soldier of fortune?

Richard Williams Ha! I think I missed the chance to be the enigmatic "JD Salinger" type a while ago. And, in my opinion, it's no loss. In March and April I'm trying to get around as many stores as I can, stop off, have a chat, and meet GW fans. I have six formal events planned already and I'm working on another two or three. As much as some 'literary' folk might turn their noses up at this kind of genre fiction, just having the opportunity of going round so may places and meeting GW hobbyists who are actually enthusiastic about reading what you've written is a great thrill.

As for myself, I work a pretty standard 9-6 style job down in London, which is good because it normally leaves my evenings free. Anyone who's read my bio will have seen that I have a keen interest in theatre acting and, now, directing, and London has a huge Fringe circuit for people who don't want to pursue it professionally.

Theatre and television have had a huge influence on the way I approach stories. I'm a great proponent of using dialogue and action, rather than description, to paint characters and power the plot along. You can state in your text that a character is officious, for example, and the reader will get an idea of the character, but it will be very flat, one-dimensional. If you show a character being officious, meanwhile, the reader gets a far more rounded picture of him. I don't always follow it, sometimes you need to sketch a character quickly and have to do it in just a few words, but with your principal leads it's worth taking the time to show and not tell.

Aside from theatre and Games Workshop, I've been a big fan of RTS/TBS style computer games. I lost several months of my life to the Total War series and was heavily into the on-line community. Of course, I've gone through the Dawn of War series and spent a lot of time more recently with Company of Heroes (vital writery inspiration!).

I got into the GW hobby back in '88 at school - my first purchases were some metal human Blood Bowl figures which I painted with oil-based paints (!) and some metal Mark VI marines with Terminator Honours.

t-tauri Still playing? Armies? Any photos you'd be prepared to share?

Richard Williams I still have a 40K pointy eared gits army (both the dark side and the light side) that I dust off on occasion. No photos unless you enjoy the sight of gleaming unpainted metal though!

t-tauri At first glance Relentless seems like a Hornblower style novel, a Napoleonic naval story. Is that a fair assessment?

Richard Williams In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. My overriding goal was to make sure it was a story that fit in with the style of the Imperial Navy, as it is represented in the 40K gaming systems. There, the means by which spaceships operate and fight is steeped in the atmosphere of the heroic Age of Sail and the Napoleonic Wars, even to the point where Admiral Cornelius Ravensburg is a pretty fair facsimile of the Duke of Wellington! I made the Relentless a Lunar-class cruiser for this very reason. Aside from being a widespread design, the standard Lunar has no fighter squadrons or nova cannon, its primary weapons are its broadside batteries and lances, so it was as close as I could come to an Age of Sail ship.

Equally, however, when you're writing a story in the 40K universe, you have to be aware that there are aspects of human experience that are utterly different from anything that we know today. You cannot take an Age of Sail story and just replace brass cannon with energy lances and sails with warp engines and expect it to do the 40K universe justice. Gods and daemons are not metaphors for the inhabitants of the 40K universe, their god is physical and sits upon the Holy Throne at Terra, and the daemons don't haunt your dreams, they burst out of the warp and tear you to pieces!

Additionally, there are simple logistics to take into account as well. HMS Victory had about 800 crew, the Relentless has 10,000. Time, distances, everything is bigger, takes longer. That really changes the type of story that you can tell. While I certainly think that Age of Sail fiction devotees would enjoy reading the book, it is without doubt a story with 40K sensibilities.

t-tauri Relentless, then. The blurb on the BL site isn't exactly detailed. Care to tell us a little more?

Richard Williams What I really wanted to achieve with the novel was to take an Imperial warship, grab a can-opener, open it up and peer inside. Previous novels that have included the Imperial Navy have often focused on big fleets and titanic engagements, I wanted to take a single ship, not even a particularly unique type of ship - it's a Lunar-class, one of the most common there is - and really get into how it worked, what was it was like to serve aboard not only as a bridge officer, but at every level. There were a whole bunch of other questions about how things operated that I wanted to address as well.

I've written some author's notes where I go into the overarching themes that the novel explores in more depth. They're on my website already, and hopefully they should go up on the Black Library website some time before the release, so people who are interested in the literary side can find out more there.

The bare bones of the premise is that its focused almost exclusively on the Imperial Navy, so there are no Space Marines or Imperial Guard or Inquisitors who drop in and cause a fracas. The Arbitrators do make an appearance and, of course, anyone who's seen the front cover can tell that the Dark Eldar are the (very appropriate) antagonists. The Dark Eldar's primary purpose is as a catalyst for the internal events aboard the Relentless so they're not the focus of a lot of the novel. When they do take centre stage, though, they do it with a bang, and there are some neat little background touches about the Dark Eldar that I'm really happy I could fit in.

The whole thing's set in the Bethesba sector within the vastness of the Ultima Segmentum. The Relentless patrols scores of worlds where the Imperium's grip is loose at best. The Relentless was once a name to be feared, but now its star has faded. Decades away from the front-lines has left the officer corps conceited, greedy and less than effective. Their commander, First Officer Ward, maintains his control through political manoeuvring and intimidation rather than discipline and inspirational leadership. Then, of course, everything changes.

A new captain, Becket, is appointed over Ward's head. Becket's former command, the Granicus, was destroyed in a war raging a sector away. The loss of a ship, the shame of losing a piece of living history as well as the human cost, would be a devastating blow to any captain, and Becket has no time for the Relentless's indolence and no desire to make friends. He imposes his will, issuing draconian orders that improve efficiency, but anger the officers, especially Ward who feels his authority and his former position of power has been robbed from him. Worse, Ward concludes that his new captain has no respect for the great traditions of the Relentless, which, to the officer corps, are sacrosanct. And so, the stage is set.

The first few chapters move very quickly. I put a lot of thought into what the Relentless was like, how it functioned, at the beginning of the novel. Inevitably, subsequent events alter the situation. The real core of the story is the captain's journey. So while I thought a lot about how Relentless operated in the past, I couldn't spend too long playing in that world.

That's why it was really great to have the opportunity to write the prequel short story Mortal Fuel which is being released in the Planetkill anthology at the end of June. It was a chance to go back to how the Relentless was before Captain Becket ever arrived. We only catch a glimpse of in the novel, but in Mortal Fuel you can really get the full experience of what life was like when the ship was under the control of Commander Ward.

t-tauri Imperial naval background sources I assume you're mainly talking Battlefleet Gothic?

Richard Williams The BFG rulebook was my constant reference (indeed, some of the scenes described in Relentless are directly inspired by pieces of the artwork in the rulebook), then there's the other background material available on the Specialist Games website (the Dark Eldar and the merchant fleet supplements were especially important for me here), and some other sources of flavour such as Gordon Rennie's Execution Hour.

t-tauri How do you write? Tapping away on a computer or with an ancient Servo Skull taking dictation? How long to produce the novel?

Richard Williams As much as I like the image of a writer hunched over a lectern with a foot-long quill in his hand, the reality is more mundane. I will typically write direct onto a computer, either a laptop or desktop. I will occasionally break out the paper and pen if a computer isn't available, but it would always get rewritten as I typed it up anyway. I also need an area to pace as well, for some reason obstacles which seem insurmountable when you're sitting down can be broken down a lot more easily when you're up and walking.

The first draft of Relentless was written from October 2006 to January 2007, about four months. Rewrites and so forth took a few weeks later in the year, and in between I'd written Mortal Fuel.

I first pitched the idea sometime before April 2005, however, so from pitch to publication took over three years!

I'm hoping the next one will be a bit quicker...

t-tauri Did you present an outline first or were you given a brief to work to?

Richard Williams I'd been pitching 40K novel ideas for a while, pretty much ever since I left the BL back in the summer of 2002. They'd covered everything, from Marines to Exodites to Titans to Skitarii and so on. None of them, however, had been about the Imperial Navy, and it was Lindsey who suggested that I think about proposing something along those lines. I shot back three pitches, of which I knew the Relentless pitch was the best, and that was the one that hooked their interest.

After that I worked up a full synopsis of the entire novel, with bios of some of the major characters. Lindsey, Nick and I had a lot of correspondence hammering out what would work best, from that I then wrote an extended synopsis going into each chapter in detail. And it was based on this that the novel was commissioned.

I found doing the extended synopsis really useful. Another writer I know sits down, starts writing and lets the story take her where it will. That's way too scary for me; having a breakdown, knowing what each chapter had to accomplish, made the whole enterprise a lot more manageable.

t-tauri Who are Nick and Lindsey (Priestley?) just to fill in the gaps.

Richard Williams Nick Kyme is a Black Library editor. BL fans may recognise his name as the author of Oathbreaker, Back from the Dead and co-author of Grudgelore. You can find out all about Nick on his website http://www.nickkyme.com/

Lindsey Priestley is the Black Library senior editor. She's worked for Games Workshop for just about as long as anyone can remember, all the way back to Rogue Trader and the original Realms of Chaos books (and probably even before that!). She transferred to the Black Library as novels editor back in 2000/1 if I recall correctly and has shepherded the BL novel range ever since.

Lindsey was my original point of contact for the early stages of pitching and then at first synopsis. As we got into greater detail, Nick became more and more involved. While the core of the story has stayed pretty much the same from conception, the editors suggested a lot of improvements: the introduction of the Dark Eldar, changing the novel's title, and generally ratcheting up the scale of events to be truly appropriate for a 40K novel.

t-tauri Anything in line for the next novel?

Richard Williams Nothing I can talk about, unfortunately, until it's been formally announced. It's not an Imperial Navy book, however; but I'm hoping that enough people read and enjoy Relentless to convince the BL to let me write another one!

On a serious note, I know there are fans in the community who've talked for a long time about how they want to see novels about other elements of the 40K universe, beyond the mix of tales about Space Marines, Inquisitors and Imperial Guard. I feel, and this is just my personal opinion, that Relentless is perhaps in response to those requests. I think, perhaps, Relentless is testing the ground in this area.

There are loads of stories to tell about the Imperial Navy and the struggle for space between the 40K races, and there are a bunch of authors raring to write them. But the readers have to want them.

So I hope the fans who've asked for a greater scope in their 40K fiction pick Relentless up and give it a try. And if they enjoy it, I hope they let other readers - maybe readers who would normally only ever buy a book if it had a Space Marine on the front cover - know that a book like Relentless is worth their time. Publishers, just like every other business, respond to demand. And if we can show that there is real demand for these kind of 40K stories then I'm certain we'll see a lot more of them.

t-tauri Getting into writing with Black Library is something a lot of our members are interested in-is that down to being in the right place at the right time? Knowing who to contact and which gaps there were to fill?

Richard Williams There's always that aspect to it. The chronology I laid out above of how Relentless came to be written makes it all look straightforward, almost pre-ordained. What it doesn't include is the 16 months of me extremely politely asking the BL if they'd happened to have a glance at the Relentless synopsis yet, it doesn't include the other projects that I got involved in which then never saw the light of day. It doesn't include the 30 short fiction proposals I made prior to the novels, of which only two made it. Yeah, you have to be in the right place at the right time, offering something that the publisher wants to publish, but being in that place at that time, for me, was far more about professionalism and persistence than about luck.

t-tauri You seem to have got in via the lamented Inferno! magazine. What avenues are there for someone wanting to break in now?

Richard Williams I, as many people, was sorry to see Inferno! go. It was the first publication that I'd ever pitched to, I'd helped edit it when I worked for the BL, it had a lot of associations for me. I was glad to see however after it was decommissioned that the BL kept the door open for new writers through the short story anthologies.

While the venue for new writers has changed, in my opinion not much else of real significance has. The standard new writers have to meet, producing work that holds its own alongside some of the BL's most established authors, is still the same. Nick said in an interview about the anthologies that each one will have maybe three to five pieces from new writers in. When I was working on Inferno it was publishing four pieces per issue, bi-monthly. Given that maybe one issue a year was a special - such as on Gaunt's Ghosts or Eisenhorn - that meant there were normally five regular issues a year, and, of course, the established writers were always pitching ideas. During my time, if we'd had as many as a first-time writer in every issue (that would mean only five first-time writers in the year) I would have been surprised.

In my opinion, the Black Library is still pretty exceptional in the publishing market for the opportunity it provides first-time writers. But I think also that new writers should consider how serious they really are about writing. If it's just a bit of fun then that's fine. But if you're serious, then Warhammer and 40K fiction should only be one of the fields that you're trying to get into. You should be going for every opportunity in the sf/fantasy or other genres to try and get published - not just limiting yourself to Warhammer.

t-tauri Black Library editing is something of a bugbear with a lot of our readers. How do silly mistakes in background detail sneak through? Terminators in Razorbacks? C S Goto?

Richard Williams That's a really interesting question, and there's a lot of different aspects to it. Obviously, I can't comment on the details in other writers' work or how they approach the background. I can only speak for myself, someone who's been in the hobby for nearly two decades and still had to go on a desperate internet search to work out what the rough dimensions of an Imperial cruiser are.

I take the background very seriously, and I consider the accuracy of the background detail in the novel to be principally my responsibility rather than the editors. Yeah, their job includes ensuring the fiction is in line with background, but if I thought that excused me from doing my research, I would be like a driver saying that he didn't need any brakes as he had a pretty good airbag!

I was pretty lucky in that the source material for the Imperial Navy is quite contained and manageable, and I sat down with my dice and made sure that it was at least possible for a Lunar class to cause that kind of damage at that range in those circumstances etc etc. And despite all this I still put in something at the end of the book that would make any rules-lawyer light their hair on fire, jump up and down and shout "They can't do that in the game!". That's right, they can't do that in the game (and that's why it will perhaps be unexpected) but it is something that should still be possible. And because it isn't included in the game I made sure that I still respected the background by highlighting what a desperate measure it was, its consequences and thereby why it's not often used.

The game is ultimately a simulation, and its rules are artificial constructs to try and represent in an enjoyable and practical fashion an underlying reality. I'm a big fan of PC games like Company of Heroes and the Total War series, but if you tried to write a WWII or historical novel based only on how battles within those games are fought, it would be ridiculous.

I try to write to this 'underlying reality' of the game universes that I work in. So, I think the first thing a reader should do is with an error in background detail is ask themselves, is this really a mistake, or is it just something that breaches the artificial rules which may nevertheless fit within the game's underlying reality?

The second aspect to this are mistakes that are just wrong, which cannot be reconciled with background detail, and I know from lurking on the message boards that readers have seen some doozies. The BL doesn't take background lightly, throughout the writing of Relentless, Nick and Lindsey's notes always included comments on the background, and where I thought I was right I argued it, and where I was playing fast and loose I put my hands up! When I worked for the BL, I remember having a long argument (sorry, 'conversation') with Alan Merrett simply about the mentality of a Red Scorpion marine. But equally people are human, and mistakes can happen. A wrote a pitch for a short story once, where a key part of it was a squad of Traitor Legionnaires blending in with a group of Imperial pilgrims. Now, I had been a fan of Space Marines for over
ten years at this time, and could even have a fair stab at naming all the implants they receive, and all the time I was working on this pitch it never occurred to me that these guys are eight foot tall and built like sheds, so the chance of them blending in with normal humans was pretty minimal! Fortunately, for my blushes, I never even submitted it, but it underlined to me that even writers raised in the GW hobby can make bonehead mistakes, and equally that a human editor can miss them. After Relentless was written, I proofed it, I had three other people proof it, but the BL proofers still came back with mistakes - and I'm sure that even in the printed copy you'll be able to find some mistake that's been missed by everybody.

We all hope it doesn't happen, but equally we know that sometimes it will. It's not just Warhammer, it's all fiction, just ask my mother what her reaction is when an author puts a waltz into a Regency Romance!

Fortunately, for my blushes, I never even submitted it, but it underlined to me that even writers raised in the GW hobby can make bonehead mistakes, and equally that a human editor can miss them. After Relentless was written, I proofed it, I had three other people proof it, but the BL proofers still came back with mistakes - and I'm sure that even in the printed copy you'll be able to find some mistake that's been missed by everybody.

We all hope it doesn't happen, but equally we know that sometimes it will. It's not just Warhammer, it's all fiction, just ask my mother what her reaction is when an author puts a waltz into a Regency Romance!

For the last aspect, I'll break my earlier rule and talk about specifics, but only to say two words 'Colonel-Commissar'. Before Gaunt there were no such things as Colonel-Commissars, sure commissars took control of Guard units in the absence (or execution) of their commanding officer, but the idea of a Commissar with a line command completely flew in the face of established background. Dan himself has happily admitted in interview that the rank was a misunderstanding on his part about the role Commissars played in 40K.

Colonel-Commissar Gaunt has now appeared in eleven novels and Gaunt's Ghosts is one of the Black Library's most popular properties. Go figure

t-tauri Liber Chaotica Khorne was very well received. Certainly a very different style of book to a conventional novel. How difficult was that to produce?

Richard Williams Liber Chaotica was a great project and it was a real privilege to be involved in it. I remember that the series was pretty much Marco's idea [Marc Gascoigne - BL Publisher]. I saw the name first on the internal schedule we had back then; no one knew anything about it, it was just the name of it sitting there, and me wondering what the hell it was and when he was going to tell us about it.

The actual physical format wasn't that challenging (for the standard edition, the collector's edition with all those funky covers was a whole other matter!). The Black Library had already cut its teeth on the A4 softback format with artbooks like The Jes Goodwin Sketchbook and The Inquisitor Sketchbook. While there were always bumps along the road in getting these together, the artbooks needed relatively little input from an editorial perspective as, of course, the art spoke for itself. With Insignium Astartes, which was the first background book proper, and subsequently the Liber Chaotica series, that was going to change. My job, which had been a bit of a mish-mash of responsibilities, was going to be focused on the special projects, primarily the background books. Marco briefed me as to what we resources we had available and what the Liber Chaotica series should accomplish; its mandate so to speak.

The first thing we had was the old Realm of Chaos books. The fans had never stopped demanding the old Realm of Chaos books, and I could see why as I had been lucky enough to buy a volume of each when they'd been released. Even though the rules were horribly out of date, they were a wealth of imagery and source material. Part of the mandate for Liber Chaotica was to get as much of the content from Realm of Chaos back out there without too many corporate GW heads exploding.

The second part was everything that had come after. After the release of RoC, Warhammer & 40K Chaos had bloomed, seizing the imagination of both the fans and the game developers. For me, especially for the Khorne book, the introduction of Abaddon and his Black Crusades and the portrayal of the marauder tribes in the Chaos Army Book for 5th Edition WFB, was particularly key. Liber Chaotica had to be something which included goodies from RoC, but which did not blinker itself to all the stuff that had been built since.

The final resource was something quite special. For the release of the Chaos Army Books and 40K Codex, the Studio artists had produced all sorts of weird and warped drawings to brainstorm the Chaos theme which were ultimately never used in the army books themselves. These were all available and we stuffed Liber Chaotica with as many as them as possible. With all that in place, we mapped out how the series should go and I drafted paginations to give a rough idea how the different topics should be divided between the powers.

The real hurdle in writing the lead-off volume, for me, was the tone. We knew it should be an in-universe style, but I went back and forth on the best way to present it. At one point, it was even going to be a travelogue of Richter Kless's personal journey through the Shadowlands, kind of a warpstone-mutated heretical Michael Palin! But that ultimately proved too limiting for the information we wanted to include, and so I settled on the 'compiled report' tone, where Richter's own research is used and then supplemented by additional sources by a mysterious editor, which allowed me to break from Richter and write watch reports, missives from the elves, pseudo-biblical texts and even revisit ol' Furion of Clar Karond (who I'd used as narrator for the Darkblade feature
History of Naggor). GW background, as I've said, is in my blood; so once I was happy with the tone, I surprised how quickly the rest of it flowed.

t-tauri The eBay prices Liber Chaotica was selling for were very quickly silly. What's it like as an author to see your work not only sell out but be in big demand?

Richard Williams I'm sure that every author has a morbid fear that they write a book that no one wants to read. Do you know that scene in I'm Alan Partridge where Alan goes to see all the thousands of copies of his autobiography pulped? That's not made up; that actually happens. If books don't sell then the booksellers rip the covers off, send them back to the publisher for a refund and deliver the rest to the pulping factory.

The background books were a new venture; despite the great potential we all saw in them, there weren't any guarantees that fans would buy background books without rules in. Seeing such interest in them was an immense relief. There wasn't any financial upside for me for the high priced secondary sales, of course, (I think at the top of the market I saw a standard volume of LCK go for about $200), but what you really want as an author is to be read. The high resale prices were indicative of lots of people wanting to read it, but not being able to. So the prices, while gratifying, were also a touch frustrating.

Fortunately, since then the resale market has become a lot more reasonable, and the release of the compiled Liber Chaotica, which is still available to purchase, means that if you're just interested in reading the background, then you can. If you have your heart set on the original steel-plated collector's edition, however, then you'll have to look a bit harder. But on that score, actually, there is some good news. When I was moving recently, I uncovered a couple of copies of the Liber Chaotica Khorne collector's steel-plated edition that I bought back when it was released. Back then I had decided to sell them on, but now, with Relentless being released, I thought it would be a bit of a shame if they both went to whoever had the deepest pockets.

So, to celebrate the release of Relentless, and inspired not a little by Steven Savile's own endeavours, I'm going to be running a competition through my website to win one of them. All a fan will have to do is answer a few questions about the novel, and they may get their collector's edition of Liber Chaotica Khorne direct from the author!

The competition won't kick off for a few weeks to give a chance for people in those countries where the novel's released a month later. I'll make sure to let you guys know when it does.

t-tauri Thanks very much for you time in this interview, Richard. Hope to talk to you about the next novel.

Richard Williams is the author of the forthcoming Black Library novel Relentless. You can find a little more about Richard from his website here- http://www.richard-williams.com/