Unpublished Interview
This is an edited version of an interview Matthew Reilly did for Ansett Australia’s Panorama in-flight Magazine for the Nov/Dec1998 issue.
It remains unpublished.
1. When you sit down to write a book, do you know the ending?
Yes. I don’t even begin writing a novel until I have the last scene of the book firmly pictured in my head. This has a lot to do with the kind of book that I write. My books have a lot of twists and narrow escapes in them and to effect these things, you have to know what you’re going to do well in advance. Hence, for me, planning everything out early (even if not quite to the last detail) is very, very important.
2. Do you write from experience?
As anyone who has read any of my books would tell you, this is a pretty silly question. I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who has done the things that the heroes of Contest and Ice Station, do! When you write about a guy killing aliens and sliding underneath speeding hovercrafts and destroying nuclear submarines single-handedly, it’s hard to say that you are basing it on your own life experiences!! No, I must say that my books are firmly placed in the realms of my dreams. Even more than that, what my heroes do, are things that I wish I could do if I were ever put to the test.
3. How do you develop characters in your books?
Developing characters is not an exact science. Sometimes they just come to you in the dead of night, at other times you have to work on a character for a few days (or weeks, or months) until suddenly it clicks. My short answer is: I don’t have a particular process that I use to develop my characters. The only thing I know about character development is this: you know when a character works, and you know when one doesn’t. I just don’t accept one of my characters until I’m know that he or she works. Take, for example, my favourite character in Ice Station, a female United States Marine known as ‘Mother’. Mother isn’t her real name, that’s her military nickname or call-sign, and it’s short for, ah… er… ‘Motherf***er’. She is six feet two inches tall, has a completely shaven head, a foul mouth and a heart of gold. The minute I created her, I knew she worked.
4. Why do you write?
That’s an interesting question. I don’t write to change the world, or to change peoples’ minds for that matter. I write for entertainment’s sake – and entertainment’s sake alone – and yet I firmly believe that I am, in some way, enriching peoples’ lives. There is a place in society for entertainment and the joy to be found in taking a break from the real world and diving into complete and unabashed fiction. And when you view novels alongside other entertainment forms (like, for instance, movies), novels have one unique edge ‘the limit is your own imagination. I mean, how often have you heard someone say, “The movie was okay, but it wasn’t as good as the book.”. I think this one of the reasons Ice Station has sold so well, and in particular, at airports. If you’re going on a long plane ride, you want to be transported out of the real world for a few hours. That’s what I do.
5. What is most difficult about the writing process for you?
Creating new and interesting stories and twists is perhaps the most difficult part of the writing process for me. Once I have the story in my mind, I’m fine, but I put a lot of pressure on myself to come up with a good story. I believe that in 1989 the stakes were raised in terms of high-octane, adventure fiction and the strength of ideas that that form of fiction must involve. So what happened in 1989? Simple. The publication of a book called Jurassic Park. After Michael Crichton came up with the idea of genetically-engineering dinosaurs, the bar was set a little higher for all thriller writers out there. So getting an idea that is a cut above the rest is the most difficult (because it is the most crucial) thing for me.
6. What keeps you going?
Hmmm. Good friends and family. Whether I’m angry and upset because my editor wants to cut my favourite scene or whether I’m over the moon because Ice Station is on the bestseller list, I find that my friends and family are always there to support me. They cheer you up when you’re down and they bring you down to earth when you start to get a little uppity! And if all else fails, I just go out and see the biggest, blockbuster action movie I can find (Rush Hour with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker recently cheered me up immensely!).
7. Where do you find inspiration or does it find you?
To be brutally honest ‘ and this is going to sound really, really weird ‘ I find that my greatest moments of inspiration come when I am sitting in a darkened theatre watching one or both of my parents performing in a show put on by our local amateur musical society! I know, it sounds crazy! But on about five separate occasions, when I have been stumped on a plot point or just contemplating a new story, I have gone to the theatre to watch them perform, and suddenly it hits me. Bizarre, I know, but you asked!
8. (question missing for original text)
9. What is your ultimate goal?
Well, to be really honest, my ambitions are actually rather modest. Ambition No.1: selling the movie rights of Ice Station to a big Hollywood studio and seeing Tom Cruise (or Nicolas Cage) playing the lead in a $100 million, two-and-a-half hour, action-movie extravaganza (I’ve just optioned the movie rights to my first book Contest and it’s gonna be a ripper of a movie — lots of CGI aliens and edge-of-your-seat action). That’s not too much to ask for, now, is it? Second to that, oh, I don’t know, maybe getting to Number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. As I said, very modest ambitions, really.
10. Why do you write the kind of stories that you do?
Easy. Because I like to read those kinds of stories. I like the books I read to be fast-paced, roller-coaster rides to hell and back, so I write fast-paced, roller-coaster rides to hell and back!
11. (question missing for original text)
12. What am I working on now?
I am about halfway through my next novel, a monster action-thriller called Temple. It is set in South America, in the jungle where the Amazon rainforest meets the Andes mountains. It is really fast-paced read (faster than Ice Station, but also a lot darker and more sinister). The villains will be nastier, the action will be bigger, and the subject matter even more intense. How’s that sound?
13. What makes a novel a best-seller?
Do you really want to know? The secret, I think, lies in the wonder of books themselves. Thrillers like Ice Station make it to the best-seller list, books like Longitude make it (what a wonderful book), Angela’s Ashes, John Marsden books, self-help books, cooking books, the list goes on and on and on. Now, what do all these books have in common? Well, I think it’s this ‘they all write about something that people want to read about. Call me naïve, but I think that’s the key. The beauty of it is that people want to read about lots of different things. It’d be a pretty boring world if everyone wanted to read only thrillers.
14. What is the most important element of a novel?
Good story and great pace. As you can imagine, I’m a big fan of narrative drive. The story must propel a novel if it is going to hook me in. I must want to know what is going to happen next (and I guess, attached to that, I should say that I must care about at least one of the characters involved in that story; if you don’t care about the characters, why keep reading?). No, I really hate it when a novel I’m reading gets bogged down. And if the story doesn’t interest me to begin with, then I put it down very quickly.
15. What advice would you have for anyone thinking of writing a novel? Especially, re: dealing with rejection by publishers.
Do it. Write your book and send it out there. Dare to fail. Publishers can be something of an enigma, and sometimes they get a bad rep for rejecting so many writers — they tend to be seen as rather snobbish people ensconced in their ivory towers, not deigning to cast their eyes over new manuscripts. This view is a little unfair, in my opinion. The root of the problem as I see it, is this: any business which seeks to profit from an “art form” (and I classify novel-writing as an art form) is going to disappoint many people. Publishers have to make profits, for the simple reason that they are, first and foremost, a business. I think a lot of people don’t understand that and they wonder why their book about their life story doesn’t get picked up. Publishers don’t want someone who can write one book. They want the person who can write five or ten or twenty.
How to treat them? Difficult question, that. The story about the way I got picked up by Pan Macmillan is somewhat unique. I was rejected by all the major publishers, so I self-published my first book, Contest. It was seen in a store by an executive from Pan Macmillan who bought it, read it, and rang me up (and now, I’ve sold the movie rights to it, so to all those publishers who rejected it first up — well, I guess they missed the boat; a publisher who doesn’t read everything that comes across his/her desk risks missing the next big thing and that big thing could be your book!). Pan-Macmillan has since bought the world-wide publishing rights to Contest (very satisfying that!).
Publishers get 2000 unsolicited manuscripts every year. My suggestion on how to treat them if you have a manuscript is this ‘in some way, somehow, make your manuscript get noticed. Wrap it in flowers! Bind it in wooden planks! Send a letter saying that it is the best damn book anyone’s ever seen! Make them notice you! Make them see you ahead of the other 1,999 manuscripts they get every year. My philosophy with Contest was simple. I thought I had what they wanted ‘a highly commercial book. And I still believe that if you’ve got what they want, all you have to do is get them to read it. Somehow.
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