Science and Fiction - The thoughts
of David Clancy
The following interview with David Clancy was conducted by Darran
Jordan on the 16th of November 2005.
DARRAN:
Do you want to start by talking about how you got started with writing?
DAVID:
Oh. Started with writing… I had the interest all the way through,
all the way from when I was small through to at school. I used to
annoy teachers by constantly asking them what the next composition
title was going to be, hoping it was going to be a good one. But just
kept going with the idea, it sat at the back of my mind all the time
then I just started to get really interested in it just after I finished
university. And being at different times dabbling in it then getting
more serious with it as time went on.
DARRAN:
Did you study writing at university?
DAVID:
No, I studied pharmacy.
DARRAN:
Something quite different.
DAVID:
Totally different. It's funny I had… when I did the job aptitude
test it told me to be a journalist. I ended up with the sciences so,
unusual, but that's how it happened.
DARRAN:
The sciences do filter through your stories, which are generally science
fiction in nature.
DAVID:
Definitely.
DARRAN:
What is your attraction to science fiction as a genre?
DAVID:
It is something that you can play around with more than anything else.
You can actually put present ideas and you can actually put them in
perspective in such a way that you can discuss issues that are very
sensitive for most people and you can put it in such a way that it's
not going to be offensive to people at the same time.
DARRAN:
Do you have certain agendas then with your writing, comments you want
to make with it?
DAVID:
No, the ideas just come up, they just get born, the germ just starts
up and then develops from there. I had one collegue actually said
to me that she loved the imagination that I've got, she said she doesn't
know where I get it from. As I said it just develops. One moment you
can be sitting there thinking of one idea and then it just develops
into a totally different tangent.
DARRAN:
Do you plan your stories before you start writing them?
DAVID:
Not always. Sometimes I do. It's much easier if somebody has a theme
that they actually want you to work with, it's a lot easier. But once
you actually get an idea, then the story starts to develop from the
single idea. Planning I often find is a lot more time consuming and
a lot more difficult to get through. The finished result I think with
planning is a lot better, a lot tighter. But when you start off with
an idea and you just work with it it develops its own journey.
DARRAN:
Do you find it more fun then, working that way?
DAVID:
More fun, yeah.
DARRAN:
Have you worked much with other writers on collaborative pieces?
DAVID:
I've never done a collaborative piece with anybody else. Not for the
fact of… not that I don't like the idea, it's just that I've
never had anybody that actually wanted to do something together. I
know a couple of collegues who have collaborated and it worked but
even collaboration… you basically live in each others pocket
for quite a period of time. This is what I got from talking to people
who had collaborated. He lived in somebody's pocket for a little bit
of time. You get very personal, and different words somebody would
change, so you get this very intense feel from what the story is.
The story gets mollified from what you might get, and it takes a combined
character, something that's half and half, like a hybrid, rather than
just one idea.
DARRAN:
Do you have specific things you want to achieve as a writer over the
course of your writing career?
DAVID:
I take it project by project. The thing that I just like to do is
just get the work out there and actually have people enjoy it, and
things like that. If I sort of feel… I'd like to have some sort
of mark with it and have a bit of moderate success with it. I don't
expect to make a living with it, just enjoy doing it and hope that
other people like to read it, and that's it.
DARRAN:
What sort of feedback have you got from readers?
DAVID:
Ahm, different people enjoy it, other people just… well, most
of the ones that do read it, I get mostly positive feedback. But so
far as the professional area goes I've had mixed feelings with that
particular one. Like, there's so many writers out there that there's
a limited market and I get positive views from different people but
usually they offer that they'd like to see lots of success coming
with your work but don't seem to come to far for the fore with regard
to getting them into a publication. I have had quite a few different
works published but the number of times that I've had people say as
well that 'thanks very much for sending it to us, but at this particular
time it's not what I want' that's another one.
DARRAN:
Do you find that discouraging as a writer?
DAVID:
Discouraging in the thing of when it comes… you know, a few times
after each other. But when the success, when they come along they
usually outweigh that. I feel that it warrants me continuing rather
than being discouraged totally.
DARRAN:
Do have publication and an audience in mind when you're writing, or
do you write for yourself and seek an audience after?
DAVID:
I write for myself then I'll think about, okay, where will I send
this. There's a lot of work that I've actually done that I've never
put out there to be published and things like that. I've written those
pieces for myself. There are certain pieces that I think, okay, this
one may be able to go out there or something like that, put that out
and then… it depends on the… on where it sort of goes to.
I've had a couple of pieces where I've sent them out to a few people
and they've knocked those back, and then you'll find somebody else
who says, hey that's great I want that. You've got to find the right
person. H. G. Wells, when he wrote 'The Time Machine' he was knocked
back thirty times. He was too scientific for the general population
and not scientific enough for the others. So he kept going until he
found somebody. Now if that one got knocked back how many times? If
he got discouraged on that one… that's a story that has actually
spanned over a century. And it's still being read. If you had a story
that was actually written last year that's made it to this year and
still being talked about I'd be surprised with a lot of publications
that are going out now.
DARRAN:
Talking about the longevity of writing and writers, do you think the
works that are considered great today will still be considered so
in the future, or do you think the nature of writing and literature
will change into the future?
DAVID:
As with Shakespeare. I think a lot are period pieces… you never
know, they may be looked at as great, it depends on how civilization
changes and the needs that they find that they have. I think it'd
be the same as when you have the information revolution, that we've
been going through. Every ten years information doubles in such a
way that you'll have so much information available with limitred resources
on how to find it. It'll be quicker to rewrite a book than to try
and look up one to find one. They get lost amongst the mire. You're
going to have to have a fairly rare book to keep going. At the moment
Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings', it has this perennial thing that keeps
going. It's being relaunched, it had a movie done from it. I think
once you go past the movie and get into some other medium, if that
gets relaunched again it's like springboards, trying to go from one
spot to another. They get a resurgence, if you have one story that's
catalogued amongst thousands and thousands of others, unless there's
a reason that somebody's got it and pulled it aside, it's going to
be difficult to keep it going. I've found a whole lot of different
stories from the thirties and forties in science fiction that…
you'd never fibd them anywhere. You've got to find them in a really
old book or something like that, and they're all out of print…
they're brilliant pieces, but unless you actually have the means of
finding it you're going to have troubles trying to get there. I think
it's going to be luck as well as perseverance on a story for longevity.
Getting back to Shakespeare again, Shakespeare from what I understood
of what actually happened with Shakespeare, somebody in the eighteen
hundreds discovered these stories, Shakespeares plays. From the time
that he is purported to have written them and the time, about eighteen
fifty when they were rediscovered by this fellow in America, nobody
knew what they were, nobody read them, nobody did anything. But he
made them fashionable by actually promoting them and going through
America trying to introduce them to people. Now that has actually
taken so many resurgences and so much learning with them that it's
staggering.
DARRAN:
Do you think writing itself has longevity, especially as people look
more to film and television and visual mediums these days? Do you
see the novel and short story as a form having a limited lifespan?
DAVID:
Only limited in the fact of what people are wanting to do with it.
So many times you hear people say something like, I haven't got time
to read, I haven't got time to sit and read that and do this…
The pace is increasing so much and we are allowing it to increase
so much that that can stop that kind of thing. The short story is
something that you can actually do in a short period of time, at the
moment it seems to have gone out of vogue and the longer story, the
novel, is actually more in vogue. But even people reading that has
come down. Watching a video or listening to somebody read, a talking
book, or something like that, that's coming into vogue a lot now because
you can actually do that while you're doing something else. The type
of media that you can actually go to is changing, so that is…
again it depends on the way we move as a civilization to what we are
actually going to do in the end. It's a good concept, I might even
think to actually postulate and do something on that one in the way
of a story as well.
DARRAN:
You mentioned before someone commenting on your imagination and where
it comes from. Where do you think writers do get their ideas from?
DAVID:
They basically arrive… it's just constantly having your mind
open, being observant, looking at what is actually happening around
you. Just basically thinking and being there. See the way people react,
just be really obsefvent. You can be extremely observant with one
situation and get something else out of it. I remember Greg Bear once
said that imagination is "delving into the faerie Bear",
you know somebody can walk down the street wearing one white glove,
having a hat on with a propeller on it, and you sort of look at it
and you try and work out what they actually are doing. The more you
actually look into it in an unusual way, the more interesting it is
going to be. That's the type of thing - when you actually allow something
that you see to actually not be totally real. Let it just become surreal
and see what happens with it.
DARRAN:
Having spoken about the writing side, how do you understand the point
of view of a reader? Why do you think people read stories?
DAVID:
I think if you ever… it depends upon the time of story you mean
too. As I said, science fiction to me is actually something where
you are actually using your imagination, you're doing something that's
not real, it's more an escapist thing. A lot of times stories will
give you something that is non real, it's an alternative to what is
actually happening. We do so many things that are either mundane,
ordinary, everyday… or something that you don't want to actually
know about, just to try and escape from it. Or to enhance. If you've
got something that you actually feel something good about something,
then you read a story about that particular aspect. It's something
to try and read out and have something that's private, that's something
you can get from books that you can't get being with people. You don't
always have the luxury to be with people that you want to be with
so it's a way, while you are by yourself, to fill that.
