Category Archives: Uncategorized

Jacey Bedford was kind enough to ask me to contribute a guest post to her blog. You can read it by following the link…

https://jaceybedford.wordpress.com/2015/09/19/guest-blogtony-ballantyne-tells-us-about-his-writing/

I’m also currently completing a series of posts for a blog tour to help publicise Dream Paris.

(I read the following at the launch party for Dream Paris, 11th Sept 2015)

It’s a common question asked of all authors: why did you write this book?

So when I finished Dream Paris, just like when I finished all my other books, I sat down and thought about what my answer would be when asked that question.

It was only than that it occurred to me how odd this was. I’d just spent 381 hours or 15 and a bit days (I timed myself, see my website) writing a novel over the course of a year, and I hadn’t once stopped to think why.

Why am I doing this? Why write at all?

There’s a very easy answer to this. That great writer about writing, Sol Stein said that a writer was someone who couldn’t not write. But perfect though that answer is, it doesn’t actually answer the question. Why write at all?

I spent a lot of time over the summer, wondering just that. I spend a lot oIf my time writing, my family put up with it, they’ve rearranged their lives to a certain extent to let me spend my time sitting at keyboard.

Why do I write? I could say it’s because I’m a story teller, but every human is a story teller. The first story we tell ourselves is the story of who we are. We make up the story of what sort of a person we are: happy or sad or popular or deserving or hard done by. We make up stories about other people, our friends and acquaintances, and our stories about them never match their stories of themselves. We put ourselves in their shoes so we can try and understand their motives and actions. This is what scientists call a theory of mind, some say this is the dawn of intelligence.

So I don’t think it’s enough to say that I’m a story teller, because everyone is.

I could point out that like many people in this room I’m a professional story teller, what’s called a teacher, and have been since I taught fencing on a children’s camp in America and discovered to my surprise that I enjoyed it. All teaching is story telling, teaching is taking the real world in all its splendid, unknowable complexity and reducing it to a story that a child can understand. Not only understand, but believe. And any teacher will tell you that the student doesn’t always believe what you’re saying.

So I’m a teacher and a writer. I don’t know which of those things come first, I know that they’re both linked. Incidentally, my wife often points out that those are two things nearly everyone thinks they can do until they try it…

Now, I don’t know if the above explains why I’m a writer. I know it leaves me thinking who wouldn’t want to be a writer?

But that still doesn’t explain why I write what I write.

There’s a certain cachet in being a writer, and whilst I’m delighted with this, it’s a sign of our society that someone who has written an impenetrable 80 000 word novel about the pain of being middle class is generally held in higher esteem than someone who gives up all their free time to run a Scout Troop or a Brownie Pack.

It’s also true that there is less cachet in writing SF. Indeed it’s not uncommon for people to ask me if I ever intend to write a ‘proper’ book. And yes, that is as rude as it sounds.

Well, I believe that SF is the only truly original form of literature of the past 100 years. SF encompasses everything from the mainstream but adds its own unique sensibility. I believe that SF is read by people who appreciate the beauty in Euler’s Identity just as readily as they appreciate the beauty in the St Matthew Passion, and if they don’t understand either of those things then they don’t scoff at them, they don’t say they are boring they are pretentious, they set off to learn about them. SF recognises that there is as much beauty in maths and science as there is in the arts, and that all these things make humans what they are. In my opinion, to try and explore the human condition without acknowledging the cold equations is to fail as a writer.

I believe what I just said to be true, and I could say that’s why I’m an SF writer, but it’s not.

The truth is, I’m an SF writer because when I write, I write SF. That’s the way that I think. SF isn’t about the robots and spaceships and rayguns – I rarely write about those things anyway – it’s about the way you look at the world, it’s the way that the stories are told. I can’t write a story without extrapolating, without asking what if, without acknowledging the fact that there is a cold, impersonal but ultimately wonderful universe out there.

I want to explain the world, I want to find wonder in the everyday. Ultimately, I think that the fact of the evolution of the horse is more wonderful than any unicorn and I can’t pretend otherwise. That really would be selling out.

This is why I write
This why I write what I write.
I can’t help it, I have no choice

When my wife and I lived in London, we’d often go to a little chain of restaurants called Pierre Victoire. Back in the 1990s you could get a three course meal and a glass of wine for £4.99.

It was excellent value and very tasty. My wife used to be in catering and she would often comment on how they brought the cost down: smaller portions, using cheaper vegetables like carrots, warming the cheap red wine slightly to make it taste better and so on.

And then Pierre Victoire put the price up to £5.99. Same good food, still excellent value…

… but we stopped going. There was something about that extra pound that meant it no longer seemed like such a bargain. I don’t know, maybe it was the difference between paying for two meals with a tenner and with having to pull out a note and then scrabble for two more coins.

There are lots of occasions in life when a tiny change makes all the difference. My wife calls these changes a Pierre Victoire Event. You can read an Emacs example of this here on my Tech blog