This
post by dent of the story concept behind my new crossover YA
fantasy novel series, Fearbreeders, will necessarily be a little more
surreal than the usual “here’s why I wrote what I wrote”-type post,
so thank you at the outset for bearing with me. In
fact, the most interesting story behind my new YA series may yet literally
be the one my readers are writing as they get involved online
and through their eReaders with this cross-media concept. How
so? Although readers – i.e., you – remain largely unaware of it, you’re
actually influencing
and affecting my work, even as you read this post online. Kind of like the
“observer effect” in physics – you know; the one that states you
can’t observe certain phenomena without changing the outcome. It’s a bit
like that.
Mind-blowing-The-Matrix-type-stuff, I know. So
let’s back up a bit. Start at the beginning, like a good story should. As
a west London native, now living in east
London to write my books, it was only as I began researching
this series that I began to see the world in this interconnected,
causally-oriented light; a new perspective, as it were; the kind
of perspective a shift in location and thinking can grant a
person. It was a chance to reinterpret my creative ideas through the prism
of a place that I found fascinating; at once familiar but also strangely
alien.
East
London is a tough part of town – a “world”, some would
argue, that is strange enough without embellishment: and I
say this out of great affection for the place.
It’s Earthsea with an ocean of accents … Middle Earth with
a McDonalds Drive-thru; a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities; the weird,
wonderful, wayward and unique. As I am originally from the
rather more gentrified Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, moving
here was actually an unexpected language and culture shock –
unexpected as it is less than 5 kilometres away … but it might as well
be in another dimension! I was determined to use this
feeling of disorientation, as well as that experienced by the
people who live here, along with their speech and
dialects, in my books. I liked the idea of incorporating what I
actually heard around me: in your typical high-fantasy novel you’ll find all
manner of faux Nordic “invented” languages. In east London, why
bother? The reality of what I hear on the streets round here
trumps anything Tolkien could have imagined!
Moreover,
it is precisely the idea that in east London “everyone is a
stranger” that works for fantasy fiction, especially mine. Street kids
round here have got used to the demands of what is admittedly a tough
existence at times; isolating and disorientating. It occurred to me
these types of characters were precisely the types of
individuals you’d want fighting evil alongside you (I
certainly would!), and not the refined, well-spoken milksops you typically see
in British fantasy.
No,
my protagonists, I decided, would fight evil the way a hard-nosed east
London street kid actually would: by dispensing with the fantasy baloney and
looking for the facts behind the strange phenomena they encountered,
Googling answers on their iPhones rather than picking up some hokey book of
spells.
Fearbreeders
tells the story of three young, hip “psychic channelers” fighting
all sorts of arcane, evil monsters and ghosts in the modern world. I
characterise it as “Middle Earth-meets-working class”. Or “Ethnic
HP”. So far, so genre specific then. But I consciously chose
to slant my story more to the
pragmatic sensibilities of east London, to
elicit nuanced drama and humour in with all the monsters.
Imagine an episode of EastEnders where aliens invade the Old Vic:
how would the locals handle it? Sure, they might surrender the planet in
the name of peace, but they sure as heck wouldn’t surrender their place in the
queue at the bar! That kind of darkly funny vibe.
By
doing so, I hoped to update the fantasy genre for a
sophisticated, modern audience. Being savvy, streetwise technophiles, my
heroes have little time for the usual fantasy tropes as they go
about the business of fighting an “army of darkness” from
their crumbling, centuries-old school in Leytonstone, east
London. In their jaded existences they have no need
for “magic” chants and spells (any more than any
of us do, if we’re honest) to enlist the spirits of the
dead to help them fight evil. Knowledge of quantum physics and
electromagnetism is all it takes to do that, thank you
very much! They have no desire to undertake dangerous
and noble quests to find some reputedly significant artefact: why not
just buy said artefact from a four-star seller on eBay and save themselves any uncertainty(and on postage)?
So you
begin to see the humour my work is written to engender; humour
that is prevalent on the streets around here as a coping mechanism,
really. But this concept runs much deeper than surface laughs. Being
a writer of radio stories and plays, as well
as high-concept, commercial Hollywood screenplays, I
know that we laugh initially because something is funny but we keep
laughing because there is more than a smidgen of truth to it. And as I
continued to write my series, it became stranger and
stranger how often the themes intersected with the truth of
the way we all increasingly live our lives, east and
west –through the prism of the internet.
Thus, my
eureka moment came relatively late in the
process. I realised I had hit on not only a new way to write
books for a digital medium but also a new way to
communicate and entertain by combining my passion for cross-media as
well. How so? Once I had figured out this new, modern direction for
fantasy fiction it then occurred to me that the sites I was using to
research the story on behalf of the characters might as well be
included in the eBook itselfas in-text
links.
And
why not? EReaders are specialised browsers, which
means a novel manuscript is a specialised website, pure and
simple. I have no time for simply recreating a flat, 2D digital counterpart of
a physical book. I find it lazy and assumptive on behalf of an
author and publisher when the medium pretty much demands cross-media
applications to fulfil its potential. Better yet, by
including picture, puzzle, game and video links, the process of
reading the story mirrors the creative process the author, in
this case, me, pursued while writing it. This not only creates
maximum engagement but also serves to educate and enlighten.
Moreover,
it gets my readers thinking: if everything in my stories neatly conforms to the
sites a reader can actually click through
and follow along with my characters – in other words, the
online world being identical to the “real” online world (whatever that
oxymoron might mean) –as together characters, author and readers
pursue the story, then how much of the story might actually be true. This opens up a
Pandora’s Box of paranormal possibilities … lets the Jeanie of
Surreal Juxtaposition out of an especially jaded lamp! What
is “truth” anyway and how is the internet redefining it (being another one of
my themes)?
And I think this
is an important theme. Surely the blurring of the lines between what is
"real" and what is artifice online is a perfect place for evil, both
ancient and modern, to hide?
Weirder
still, if you’re following the same sites as my characters, influencing these
sites through comments, backlinks and guest blogs (like this one), hence
influencing the story, then how do you know you haven’t just passed over into
my story world through your eReader in the same way as my characters
have? How do you know they’re fictional and you’re real, and not
vice versa? Think about it: (philosophically, anyway) you
do not and cannot.
Told
you it was weird. In the final analysis then, when reading my eBooks
it is actually impossible to say where you actually are in time and
space. Are you in the “real” world? In virtual reality? In your mind
or imagination? Maybe a combination of all of these concepts? And
so the disorientating effect I was going for as I wrote and
researched my eBook has ultimately been multiplied many
fold by its deployment – creating a fantastic new cross-media reading
experience. My characters struggle with infinite dimensions on their path
to their goals, never sure which dimension it is they exist in: read my
books and you won’t be too certain anymore either.
If
you’re still brave enough to take a look at this new form of
entertainment, one I characterise as introducing a narrative interface for
the web, then go check out my work. If you dare…
Article by Rich James
Fearbreeders
- http://eepurl.com/5e-wj
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