Interview
1. Plotter or pantser?
I'm a pantser. When it comes to writing a book I usually come up with the opening incident and the basic premise, I use that to write the first 10k words or so; by that point, I've got a good sense of who my main characters are. I then skip to end and write the ending. Then it is a matter of connecting A to B, but doing it so it goes via Q and one of the symbols you can only get by going into a menu. The hope is that with every subsequent draft you make it tighter and more structured, to give the illusion that you knew what you were doing from the beginning.
In my opinion, it just means you end up plotting on later drafts rather than in advance.
I really, really wish I could do the plotting in advance. I wish I had a giant wall of post-its connected by pins and string that spelled out every detail. For some reason, when I try it every ounce of humour and freshness drops out of my writing. The EB White quote always rings in my head: "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." I think something similar which prevents me from being a plotter.
2. Do you consider Far Far Beyond Berlin a satirical novel? If so, what are you trying to say with it? If not...what are you trying to say with it?
There's certainly some ridicule of things such as hubris, unchecked ambition, bureaucracy, status-symbols and ducks. I think the main theme would be failure and that failing for the right reasons is still a noble effort for a person's life. God tries to do so many things for the benefit of his creations, and, although some of them have disastrous consequences, they're not malicious, even if they seem so at ground level. He's fighting the good fight, but losing and there's no shame in that. I think in the world right now people are having an increasingly difficult time telling the difference between pre-meditated malice and absolute incompetence. There's a bit of both in our world unfortunately and that problem mirrored in the book.
3. The multiverse seems like a hot subject for a lot of writers these days - what about it made you want to set your novel in it? Did you use any previous works as touchstones (or did any teach you what not to do)?
I don't even really know how the keyboard I'm typing this on works, so I'm not certain I have the knowledge to determine what properly counts as a multiverse. I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think there is a real multiverse in Far Far Beyond Berlin. In my uneducated opinion, my multiverse is not a true multiverse as firstly, they are created by a deity and secondly, they are arranged in a linear chain in separate space from each other. God creates 7 universes, one at a time and they all sit next to each other in order. Each universe is only created because the one before it has failed. They are never existing, fully populated and active simultaneously. I loved the idea that a fresh, newly minted God would have made mistakes and had to learn lessons the hard way. Wisdom acquired rather than ingrained. The original title for the book was "Version Control." The previous universes are effectively archived when they are no longer viable.
In that regard, I tried to stay away from the various scientific influences of other excellent multiverse sci-fi. I didn't want it to have to compete with anything similar. In terms of what not to do, Good Omens was a book that I greatly admire, which I was keen not to unconsciously copy, so I made a list of all major elements in that book and made sure none of them featured in my story. No witches, no soothsayers, no antichrist, no angels. I did not want to invite comparisons to a book that good.
4. How difficult do you find combining speculative fiction with humour? What are the advantages of the combination? What are the disadvantages?
I think the heightened worlds of speculative fiction lend themselves quite nicely to humour. The advantages are that you can have a character(s) who better represents the reader, reacting with incredulity to what's going on. No-one has to suspend their disbelief upon meeting a sentient almond, if the narrator is in the middle of disbelieving it for them. It can make a bizarre world seem more real by grounding it in a real and very human reaction. I've always been a fan of any novel which manages to incorporate some humour in any genre. Life doesn't seem fully like real life without it.
The disadvantages are that you've set a tone so you can't really transition easily to a scary or serious passage without it seeming like a really big left turn. And there's the inherent risk of humour in the first place. If you have a dramatic scene that just doesn't quite work, people will shrug and move on to the next scene. Twenty pages later, it's forgotten about. If you have a series of jokes that fall flat, it isn't just uninteresting, it is actively irritating, so in my opinion you have to be a lot more accurate with humour than with any other genre. If you miss the mark, you've probably lost the reader forever.
I feel the EB White quote coming back to bite me here.
5. Are you looking forward to being compared to Douglas Adams?
No! That would be actual blasphemy and anyone caught doing so will be reported to the proper authorities. Douglas Adams is for me, an untouchable genius.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is like Da Vinci, Caravaggio and Michelangelo got together to make a gigantic, spectacular mural on the side of the mountain that once seen, is the only thing you can think about for the rest of your life. In comparison, my writing is like an Etch-A-Sketch drawing of a cat, done by a dog with an agenda.
6. Do you feel your background in screenwriting helped you to write this novel? If so, how? If not, how not?
I think it helps you with dialogue, and when there's humour that's extra important. In terms of pacing, it's probably unhelpful. You can show a lot with the camera in a ninety page script to make a feature length film. Ninety pages is less than a third of the average novel length. So you have to learn to portion out your story at a different rate, and you have to learn to set the scene with descriptive language rather than with factual information. An example from Far Far Beyond Berlin would maybe be this short chapter introduction, when my main character is transported to his first alternate dimension - a place called Joy-World:
The green grass I was standing on was really, really green. I mean superbly, extraordinarily green, like think of the greenest thing you've ever seen and then double the amount of green - you're still not even getting close to the greenness. If Dulux had to name it on their colour chart, they'd have to call it something like Super-Mega-Ultra-Lime-Wallop. The sky was blue, perfect blue and there was not a cloud to be seen. The rolling grassy hills stretched out in front of me to the horizon. The air was warm, fragrant, but not stifling, it was faultless, I had never been anywhere quite like it. It looked like a computer-generated image. It was like being in a photoshopped screensaver landscape from Windows 98, it didn't seem real.
In the screenplay it would maybe read as starkly as:
EXT - ALIEN WORLD - DAY
Chris looks confused. He is standing on grass, in a vivid Technicolor artificial landscape. We see green hills too uniform, blue skies too static - CGI feel. Something isn't right. He hesitates to move.
I've perhaps slightly exaggerated the starkness for effect there, but you can see the difference, you can instruct the camera to show a great deal without words in the screenplay.
7. BONUS QUESTION: What is your favourite non-existent (in this universe, anyway), rock song from the 1980s?
I'm a big fan of "Shoot the Jouster" by the hair-metal band Arnason's Hammer. The seven minute harpsichord solo in the middle made it impossible to release on 7-inch vinyl and it sank without a trace at time of release. Thanks to a conversion to digital it has since had a resurgence and has found new popularity as a funeral song in Eastern Europe.
Bio
Craig Meighan was born in Lanarkshire, in central Scotland. Both a keen drummer and a fan of science fiction, he grew up wanting to be either Animal from The Muppets or Douglas Adams. This has led to an unfortunate habit of smashing up his computer at the end of each writing session.
With the ambition of becoming a screenwriter, he attended film college in Glasgow. He spent a short time making corporate videos and then after attending one chance meeting, he accidentally joined the civil service. Intending to stay for one summer, he ended up staying for 12 years (so think carefully before inviting him round for tea).
He is too polite to say which of the killer robots, demons and other assorted antagonists that appear in his book, are based on his interactions with actual government ministers.
His first novel, Far Far Beyond Berlin, was written in the evenings, after work, every day for a year, at the end of which time his wife Jen convinced him it was time to finally leave the safety of the office job and pursue writing full-time. She cunningly incentivised him by promising that if he managed to get his book published, he could get a big dog.
Craig lives with Jen, just outside Glasgow, where they like to play softball, enter pub quizzes and do escape rooms. He is delighted to announce that they are expecting a greyhound.
Blurb
Not everything goes to plan at the first attempt... In Da Vinci's downstairs loo hung his first, borderline insulting, versions of the Mona Lisa. Michelangelo's back garden was chock-a-block full of ugly lumps of misshapen marble. Even Einstein committed a great 'blunder' in his first go at General Relativity. God is no different, this universe may be his masterpiece, but there were many failed versions before it - and they're still out there.
Far Far Beyond Berlin is a fantasy novel, which tells the story of a lonely, disillusioned government worker's adventures after being stranded in a faraway universe - Joy World: God's first, disastrous attempt at creation.
God's previous universes, a chain of 6 now-abandoned worlds, are linked by a series of portals. Our jaded hero must travel back through them, past the remaining dangers and bizarre stragglers. He'll join forces with a jolly, eccentric and visually arresting, crew of sailors on a mysteriously flooded world. He'll battle killer robots and play parlour games against a clingy supercomputer, with his life hanging in the balance. He'll become a teleportation connoisseur; he will argue with a virtual goose - it sure beats photocopying.
Meanwhile, high above in the heavens, an increasingly flustered God tries to manage the situation with His best friend Satan; His less famous son, Jeff; and His ludicrously angry angel of death, a creature named Fate. They know that a human loose in the portal network is a calamity that could have apocalyptic consequences in seven different universes. Fate is dispatched to find and kill the poor man before the whole place goes up in a puff of smoke; if he can just control his temper...
Far Far Beyond Berlin Excerpt
Nohaz was walking along the road nearest his house, laden with goods from the market slung over his shoulder with a rope, it was a hot day and he was sweating profusely. His cloak was absolutely soaked through and the rope was digging into his skin. He needed a break and set the goods on the ground. As he did this, he heard a voice behind him.
"NOHAZ, DO NOT BE AFRAID."
This phrase is used all the time by people who don’t realise that it has the exact opposite effect than the speaker intends. Absolutely no-one has ever said 'Do not be afraid' when there was no logical reason to be afraid. If you were about to show your friend your holiday photos you would never think of even mentioning whether to be afraid or not. What people actually mean when they say this is 'Don’t shit yourself at this scary thing I’m about to show/do to you'.
In this case God was about to appear before Nohaz in a way which would scare anyone.
Links
Book page on Elsewhen Press website: https://bit.ly/FarFarBeyondBerlin
Buy links:
