Ask the Author: Daniel Bristow-Bailey
Answered Questions (4)
Daniel Bristow-Bailey
I was first drawn to the Anglo-Saxon period for a couple of reasons.
Firstly as a reaction to the current vogue for various flavours of post-apocalyptic literature. Britain after the Romans was a post-apocalyptic landscape. Many writers and readers, in imagining life after the zombies or nuclear armagdeddon or the melting of the icecaps, seem to assume that civilisation has never collapsed before, when in fact it has, several times, perhaps more times than we can ever know. I find the idea that even the apocalypse isn't the end of the world hugely comforting.
Secondly, as someone who had never attempted historical fiction before, it seemed less daunting to pick a period about which relatively little was known. If I had chosen a setting a few hundred years earlier, at the height of Roman Britain, or a few hundred years later, after the Norman conquest, I would have been inundated by source material and couldn't have written a single line without risking it being demonstably wrong. The paucity of evidence about Seventh-Century England, by contrst, gives a huge amount of leeway to the writer of fiction, while providing enough of a framework to spark the imagination.
Firstly as a reaction to the current vogue for various flavours of post-apocalyptic literature. Britain after the Romans was a post-apocalyptic landscape. Many writers and readers, in imagining life after the zombies or nuclear armagdeddon or the melting of the icecaps, seem to assume that civilisation has never collapsed before, when in fact it has, several times, perhaps more times than we can ever know. I find the idea that even the apocalypse isn't the end of the world hugely comforting.
Secondly, as someone who had never attempted historical fiction before, it seemed less daunting to pick a period about which relatively little was known. If I had chosen a setting a few hundred years earlier, at the height of Roman Britain, or a few hundred years later, after the Norman conquest, I would have been inundated by source material and couldn't have written a single line without risking it being demonstably wrong. The paucity of evidence about Seventh-Century England, by contrst, gives a huge amount of leeway to the writer of fiction, while providing enough of a framework to spark the imagination.
Daniel Bristow-Bailey
I try not to rely on "inspiration". Instead I try to write every day and accept that some days are going to be more productive than others.
Daniel Bristow-Bailey
I am currently working on a full-length novel set in the same world as "The Ruins" - a re-worked version of "The Ruins" will probably form some of the early chapters of this. If you want to know what happens to Edward after he leaves Badon, this is the book you need to read.
Daniel Bristow-Bailey
I don't believe that there is such a thing as "writer's block". There are such things as performance anxiety or lack of confidence but we shouldn't over-dramatise or romanticise these by giving them a special sexy name when applied to writers.
The one thing I find helps is to keep reminding myself that I'm not writing the final draft and no-one but me is going to read it and it therefore doesn't have to be any good. It doesn't even need to be coherent prose. Just keep writing.
The one thing I find helps is to keep reminding myself that I'm not writing the final draft and no-one but me is going to read it and it therefore doesn't have to be any good. It doesn't even need to be coherent prose. Just keep writing.
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