Tad Williams’ debut fantasy series Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sold millions of copies around the world and established him as one of the greatest fantasy writers of modern times. His virtual reality saga, Otherland, and his standalone novel The War of the Flowers were published to similar popular and critical acclaim. The third volume of the Shadowmarch series. Shadowplay, has recently been released (it was going to be a trilogy, but Williams’ fans know his track record with trilogies!), so we caught up with him to ask him about his craft…

Are you a bookgeek? (we alway ask that one!)

I am a bookgeek in every single way, except I guess I’m not a fine book collector – my books are in every imaginable kind of condition. I’m a story geek.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it?)

The best piece of advice has been given by lots of people, and it boils down to just sitting down and getting to work. In the long run the difference between a pro writer and most others is that we learn how to make the stuff even on the days we don’t want to.

Where do you write?

Almost always at my desk in our often messy, reasonably sunny office. I can watch the hill behind our house through the window, and make sure it’s not sneaking up on us. I also get to watch the periodic forays of dogs and children. At any given time, from where I sit there are literally dozens and dozens of ways to distract myself within arms’ reach. It is a miracle I ever finish a book.

Shadowrise was going to be the third and final book in the Shadowmarch Trilogy… and then it wasn’t! At what point did you realise that you were going to overshoot and go in to four volumes?

It was somewhere around page 1,400, with what was still at least a couple of hundred pages’ worth of characters and plot still to be jiggled out onto the page. Um… It’s not that I’m as stupid as I seem, although this does make the third-straight trilogy I have had to publish in four volumes (with Otherland I just planned it that way) — it’s just hard to foresee the tenacity with which your characters will cling to having their every deed chronicled.

In his reviews of the three Shadowmarch books we have had so far, Bookgeeks’ Simon Appleby has commented that the books are much more morally ambiguous than Memory, Sorrow and Thorn – it’s much less obvious who (if anyone) is on the side of right. Is that how you see it, and was that a conscious choice you made?

Part of it is probably that I’m a different person in some ways, but some of it may also simply be due to my trying not to repeat MS&T too closely. Also my artistic tastes may be less romantic than they were. It’s not like I’ve lost the taste for the big gesture – all my books go crash boom bang. This newest one, Shadowheart, I’m writing the last bit of it right now and it’s like supervising a shooting war – stuff is just blowing up right and left.

The Qar are developiing in to a deeply tragic race the more readers discover about them – when you were writing, was it your intention to draw any parallels with aboriginal peoples in our own history?

Absolutely. But also I was very strongly moved by Tolkien’s Elves, by the way their long and glorious lives were so tempered by loss. When something really affects me in that way, I tend to try to take part of it as a seed and then grow something that has some of the same feeling without merely being a copy.

Are you very conscious of wanting to avoid the cliches of high fantasy – orcs, dwarves, elves and dragons, etc.?

That’s one of the fun things about writing genre fiction – you have a well-established set of cliches to play with. It’s like choreographing a modern tango — yes, freeform dance is wonderful, but you can use the classic rhythms of the tango to give something a special texture. That’s what the familiar tropes of a genre will give you.

How do you think fantasy has changed since you first started writing?

I think it has become vastly more segmented. Like other genres, the energy of the market seems to have gone more and more into specializing for pocket constituencies. It’s kind of like what the last twenty years of rock’n'roll music has been if you take out the only important new influence, hip hop.

With the works of Terry Goodkind and George R.R. Martin making their way to the small screen, do you think we will ever see TV or movies based on your work? Is that something you would like?

I would quite enjoy it. I think I would be quite willing to see what would come and I’d be perfectly aware that it was someone else’s version of my idea. So far, I’ve been very pleased with other adaptations like the wonderful German radio series, and the upcoming Otherland MMOG from RealU. The good thing about the game and what I would hope for in a movie is that they didn’t slavishly follow everything but very much made their decisions about how to tell the stories in the spirit of my writing.

Can you give us a few hints about what’s going to happen in Shadowheart? And when do you think it will be released?

We’re shooting for this autumn/winter. The mythological and magical side of the story comes closer and closer and really dominates the last volume. Also I think it will be – I hope it will be – by far the most surprising volume.

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