Welcome to Write Through The Roof, the podcast for writers who want to improve their craft.

Episode 03 with Angela Slatter: award winning dark fantasy writer

“I’m a hybrid mess.”

Episode 03 – Angela Slatter – Show Notes.
  • Whiskey and the morning writer
  • Reverse engineering for writers
  • Reading like a fat kid at the dessert table
  • Frankenstein-ing her debut novel ‘Vigil’ together
  • Madeleine’s segment – The Foolscap Method

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Episode 03 – Angela Slatter – transcript

Madeleine

A little introduction about Angela. She is the winner of a World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar and six Aurealis Awards. She has an MA and PhD in creative writing, she has eight short story collections and she’s currently writing an urban fantasy trilogy set in Brisbane. Vigil is out, Corpselight is out and the third one is in edits called Restoration comes due in 2018. Thanks Angela for coming along.

Angela

No worries.

Madeleine

I’d like to start with kind of some short and sharp questions so people get to know you. So, think of this as jumping jacks, star jumps. Scales. Do you write every day?

Angela

I try to write every day but sometimes it just depends on what projects are going, sometimes I just do admin and sometimes just talking with my editor or publisher, and some days I’m editing for other people. So, it just depends very much on deadlines.

Madeleine

You write in lots of different mediums. What’s your favourite?

Angela

I like different things about different mediums. I love the satisfaction of writing a short story quickly. I love the process of doing a novel. And I’m currently learning to write for TV and film. So, that is a whole other form entirely which breaks my brain but I really love continuing to learn

Madeleine

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

Angela

I’m hopping in between. I used to be a pantser, but I just find particularly with longer work. I need goal posts, I need guidelines. I do a fairly loose framework and outlines, I know what I´m writing towards, and the next thing might change depending on the needs of the story or I have some idea that knocks the rest of my ideas out. But there needs to be kind of a loose framework, and within that there´s complete chaos, so I’m a hybrid mess.

Madeleine

And your favourite time to write?

Angela

Probably mornings now. I used to be a night owl. I used to probably start at nine o’clock at night and write until one or two in the morning. But, that was probably when I was working having a day job as well but now that I’m able to be a freelancer, which I’ve done for about six years now. I treat it as a day job as I start writing at eight or nine o´clock now, write through until about one, take a proper lunch break, put on the television, some terrible daytime TV and yell at it.

Madeleine

Any particular favourite at the moment?

Angela

Judging Amy. I always judge Amy. The whole point is that it gives me a break, a brain break and I’m not worrying or thinking about it. If anything happens in the unconscious, that’s fine. It just gets me out of the seat, moves me around, gives me stimulation, and then I go back at around two o’clock until five or six. I don’t do too much work in the evenings now unless I know I’m going to have a skype call with my agent or a publisher or something like that. Because most of them might be in the UK or the US so you need to be awake for that.

Madeleine

Your writing fuel of choice?

Angela

Black coffee because if I have whiskey I then just fall asleep.

Madeleine

Whiskey at 8.30 in the morning? What are you? Hemingway?

Angela

Unlike Hemingway, I always lose the first five hundred words, I don’t delete them, I just lose them because of the morning whiskey.

Madeleine

Sounds like we’ve got to know you a little better. So, let’s go a little bit more in depth into your writing. How do you describe your writing and what themes do you like to explore?

Angela

Somewhere between dark fantasy and horror. I think the themes that I always explore depend on whether I’m writing over fantasy or fairy tales or horror, there´s always ideas of family and belonging and ideas of home whether you’ve left it or lost it, how you find it again, and the effect that loss has on different people. Vigil is much like, a series of stories about a family you make for yourself when you’ve had loss.

Madeleine

Because she is basically an orphan.

Angela

She is basically an orphan now but in Vigil you kind of see that she’s got all these people who are satellites in her life that bring her in closer. You know when you get to Corpselight, she’s got, basically got a family that she didn’t have before. And, Restoration which is the third deals a lot with friendships, and how you sometimes, especially friendships with people earlier in life you would have happily set alight. Somehow, they become quite essential to your life. There you go.

Madeleine

So, what is the one thing that you think made the real difference in your writing?

Angela

I always try to find new techniques. I’m getting a greater understanding of structure helps me enormously, when I’m editing the thing that I picked from Alison Goodman, of the Dark Days Club, was the idea of reverse engineering for writers. So, you start either at the end of a scene, or the end of a chapter, or the end of the book. And you work your way backwards to make sure that the end is properly set up. So, you’ve got all your causal links in place, and at no point someone says, well you know, the building did blow up at the end but nobody ever bought dynamite. So, it’s really a good way of, because when we read what we know we’ve written, we read it forward, we insert things. Like how you miss a word because your brain inputs it in there, you may have missed an action when there desperately needs to be one. When you’re reading backwards to front, it’s just a different perspective and you’re more likely to notice it. That´s probably the most helpful thing I have I’ve learnt to date.

Madeleine

Wow, that’s really great. Are you trying anything new at the moment?

Angela

At the moment, not really. Even though I do love structure, I try to. I try to be good about my structure. I sometimes will still write the last scene first because it´s all I’ve got in my head, particularly for short stories. My friend Kim Wilkins who is the structure queen, the linear queen, and she goes, you know, start at the beginning, middle, end. She’ll say “I sense a disturbance in the force. Are you writing backwards again?”

Madeleine

How can she tell?

Angela

She can’t. But she knows I do it.

Madeleine

What writers inspire you?

Angela

Tanith Lee who just had such a broad range of genres and such an extraordinary stylist. Margo Lanagan obviously and John Connolly who’s an Irish writer, he does the Charlie Parker series, he´s the author I wait around every year for that to come out. I’ve got to pace myself. Four hundred pages, oh, I finished it in twenty four hours, then I have to start reading the whole series again. Fat kid at a dessert table.

Madeleine

So, what is it about him?

Angela

He has a fantastic protagonist, a great voice, very conflicted, he knows how to mingle the idea of the noir story with fallen angels. It’s this idea of something very dark moving through the world and targeting Charlie Parker and his family and friends. So, this guy’s got to be not just a detective in a traditional sense, he’s got to research apocrypha and he’s got to find old hidden stories and Biblical ideas. There’s always guns, there´s always lots of guns, there’s always the shootout kind of a thing and there’s always some very interesting stuff with Charlie Parker’s daughters. One of whom is dead. So, I just love the voice, I love the pace and I just think he’s an extraordinary story teller. So, that´s what I look forward to in the Charlie Parker’s books.

Madeleine

So, tell me a little bit more about Corpselight. What inspired it and did you try anything new?

Angela

With Corpselight, I think it’s a better plotted book than Vigil and a lot of people may know this but Vigil started out as a short story ‘Brisneyland by night’, and then I wrote three novellas and then I “frankensteined” them together. So, it´s a bit of a monstrous book but I´m very fond of it and I think it works.

Madeleine

I agree.

Angela

Thank you. But Corpselight, when I went in to write Corpselight, I had learnt so much from writing Vigil and so much about how to structure. It’s got heart, because I like the fact that, as we were talking about, when it starts, Verity´s basically an orphan and by the time you get to Corpselight, she’s got a boyfriend and she’s got a new baby. Sorry, spoilers.

Madeleine

What?

Angela

And it’s, it’s about turning the tables on her. She’s got so much more stake and it’s sort of hard to chase the bad guy down when you are eight months pregnant.

Madeleine

I’ve just got this mental image of her running with this big belly.

Angela

I actually like the idea that, you know, she would just throw something, like one of the DocMartens. and knock them out, because she can’t just be bothered to run. And it’s too much trouble for her. She’s back now. She’s more foul mouthed and impatient. But again, fun, really fun to write, and to give her new things and threaten to take them away and see the way she reacts.

Madeleine

And what are you, you’re working on the third one right now?

Angela

I have finished the third one. I talked about it with my publisher and structurally it’s all fine, it´s just the fine tuning and the editing, going back and finding those infelicities of spelling and grammar that got through because it’s the first draft. And just polishing it up. And there’s a couple of thing I just need to change, it’s just a matter of sitting down when I get back to Brisbane and starting the big polish so, I’ll do that and then I’ll start, I’ll go back to a novel that I wrote as a novella and it´s going to be a novel of a Sourdough World book called Briar Book of the Dead. So, that will take up hopefully the rest of my year.

Madeleine

And it is October tomorrow.

Angela

I know. Three months. Fine, I can do that.

Madeleine

So, time to wrap up. I’m sure you have to get to other things. I haven’t mentioned we’re at Conflux in Canberra at the moment and Angela is one of the guests of honour. She’s got a million panels. Thank you for cramming a few minutes to come and talk to me which is lovely. So, where can people find you and your work?

Angela

They can find me online, my website is angelaslatter.com, you can find my books in all bookstores, Amazon, Book Depository, Booktopia. So, just google. If you´re in Brisbane please go to your local independent bookstores, Pulp Fiction because they always have my books there that have been signed and they can get me to sign books for you.

Madeleine

Well, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Angela

No problem at all. And the other thing I´m doing in November is, I’m a guest of honour at GenreCon in Brisbane. They’ve got about three tickets left.

Madeleine

And I will see you there.

Angela

Excellent. That’d be great. Thank you so much for having me on.

Madeleine

Not a problem.