Jim Butcher Evening at Kiama Library - Part 1
Kiama Library, Kiama, New South Wales, Australia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHxy_9lR4kkJim: Okay, so I was a college student and I intended to write novels. I was going to be a serious novelist. I was going to write swords and horses fantasy, epic fantasy, and that's what I was going to do.
And I set forth to do that. I wrote my first novel.
It was awful. I wouldn't have made Osama bin Laden read that novel. I really wouldn't. It was that terrible.
So, I wrote a novel after that and it was awful. And I followed that up with a third novel in that series - (inaudible).
I tried a fourth novel. It was kind of more of an X-Files-y thing and that was really, really bad.
The fifth novel was just a rewrite of the first novel and it didn't help. Rewriting really didn't make it all that much better.
So, I spun off into some other -- a new fantasy series for novels six and seven, and I still was not getting anywhere with any of it. And at that point, my writing teacher, Deborah Chester, had been trying to give me advice the whole time, which I had not taken because I had a degree in English literature and I knew what I was doing, whereas she had merely published forty novels.
So one semester I decided, 'You know what? I'm going to prove to Debby how wrong she is about everything. I'm going to be her good little writing monkey and I'm going to fill out all her little sheets, and do all her little forms and outlines and plan out everything ahead of time, and use all these stupid little devices. And she is going to see exactly what horrible, cookie cutter, pablum crap comes out of a process like that.' And I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files, which showed her.
So, it was a good age of my life to start realizing that maybe I didn't know everything. I think I was about 25 at the time. That is also when, as a young man, you start thinking to yourself something along the lines of, 'There might be something to life other than boobs.' And also, that's why -- I don't know how they have it set up in Australia, but in America that's when the car insurance rates go down, at that same age. I don't think that's a coincidence at all.
But anyway, so it was at that point that I started learning how much I didn't know. And then I actually started learning to write. And the Dresden Files, I wrote -- the next three books I wrote were the first few books of the Dresden Files and the one after that was the first book of the Codex Alera. And all those sold at that point.
But I remember taking that first chapter of Storm Front in to let her read. She picked it up and looked at it, read over the first chapter and looked up and said, 'Well, you did it.'
And I said, 'What?' Because I was used to very no holds barred, harsh criticism. And she said, 'You did it. This will sell. I don't know if this will be the first thing you sell, but this will sell.'
And I was like, 'G-G-G-G- Okay.' It was like the first positive responses I had gotten from her, ever. And it turned out she was right, to boot -- about the whole thing. Ugh, insufferable.
And then three months later, I was kicked out of the School of Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma, evidently for not having what it took to be a professional writer.
Also, the dean who was actually teaching me one of the classes had asked me to come to an alumni dinner and talk about the professional writing program. And I said, 'Well, what do I say?' He said, 'Well, just speak your mind about it.'
Apparently, you're supposed to know better when the dean tells you that. Your mind is supposed to be in a certain place where you should know.
I don't get along in those kind of structured organizations real well. I don't know why that is. Anyway, that was how I stumbled into writing.
When I started writing Codex Alera, actually I wrote those on a bet. I was on an online list -- this was before I got published -- and I was on the Del Ray Online Writers Workshop, which was a big discussion group where people who wanted to be writers could go on the internet and yell at each other instead of actually getting writing accomplished.
There was a giant discussion going on on the list about whether the great idea was the absolute core, indispensable part of writing, was the most important thing, or whether the writer's presentation was the most important thing. And for me, it was all about presentation. It's all about the writer.
If the writer can put his own fresh spin on a story, he can take an old story that you've heard a thousand and still make a good story out of it that you will enjoy. How many versions of Romeo and Juliet have you seen? That was my point.
The other side was if you've got a great idea, it doesn't matter how lame a writer you are. The great idea will sell the story. Look at Jurassic Park. That was their words, not mine.
But the discussion was going back and forth, back and forth. It was one of those discussions that, you know, pretty much you just hit the CAPS LOCK key and reply and start typing. That's how it goes.
Finally, this guy on the other side said -- and bear in mind, we were all just loudmouths on the internet. I'm still just a loudmouth on the internet, but now I've got some books published.
But this guy says, 'Why don't you put your money where your mouth is. Let me give you a lame idea and see you write a good story out of it.' And being the punk that I was, I said, 'No. Why don't you give me two lame ideas and I'll use them both.'
And so the guy did. He said, 'Okay, first lame idea is lost Roman legion. I am so sick of lost Roman legion stories. All the lost Roman legions should have been found by now. Lost Roman legion, number one.'
I'm like, 'Okay, good. What's number two?'
And he says, 'Pokemon. I am so sick of the Pokemon.'
I'm like, 'Okay, fine,' and I took it.
And I said, 'Lost Roman legion,' and I went and I researched lost Roman legions, which I knew very little about. I discovered that the lost Roman legion that everybody is talking about is the IX Hibernian Legion who marched off into what was supposedly friendly territory, into a storm, and never came back again. And that was the end of their legion.
So, I thought, 'Okay. Well, let's take this legion and where are they going to march to -- maybe they marched to somewhere and came out somewhere and that's where they are. So, where did they go to? Land of the Pokemon. All right, great.'
So, I went and started looking at lost Roman legions and I figured out, okay, the Roman legion was actually only about half Roman citizens and the other half was German mercenaries. And then they had about this many camp followers that were along with them, because even though you weren't allowed to get married in the Roman army, everybody did anyway only it just wasn't official and you had you had your camp followers along.
So I figured out, okay, this is actually a good pretty good sized colonisation force. They went off to this land.
And I went and looked at Pokemon, which is itself a fusion of two ideas. First is the Shinto religion, which holds that there's a divine spirit inside all natural things, a divine spirit, a Kami inside all natural things. A giant mountain has a huge Kami in it and a pebble has a tiny Kami in it. And you'd better respect the pebble. But if you don't, what's it going to do? It's a pebble. And then the second idea that Pokemon is made from is professional wrestling. So, they took Shinto and professional wrestling and (inaudible).
So, I decided, okay, you know what? I'm going to set up this world where these Kami actually exist, where people bond to them. I stuck my Roman legion there and I gave them ten thousand years to ferment, or two thousand years to ferment. And I said, 'Okay, now we'll start the story here,' and that's where we got started. So, if anybody wonders, Alera is set in about 2004, in the first book, so, you know, parallel.
So, this whole time, I put this whole thing together and I got the first few chapters written and I'm like, 'You know, this is actually kind of a cool story. I think I'm going to work with this.' I got back online, I said, 'Actually....'
And the guy is like, 'Well, where's this awesome story?'
I'm like, 'Well, I don't want to publish it here, because I think I can sell it. So, I'm just, I'm not going to put it up here.'
He's like, 'Oh. So, I'm right.' And I had to be like, 'Yeah, you're right.'
And then I sold six books.
To this day, I don't remember the guy. Who knows? He may be in an audience aiming some sort of assassin gun disguised as a sandwich at me one day. Who knows (inauduble).
So, basically, I have stumbled into a career in professional writing on accident and looked around in bewilderment at my good fortune. Mostly that is due to you guys, who put my kid through college. Cheers. So, basically, I'm a goober who happens to be standing at this spot and has lucked out a bit and has worked awfully hard a bit. But that's what I do. I make up stuff I think will be fun. I write down the conversations with my imaginary friends and I've somehow managed to con you guys into paying me to do it. And thank you so much.
So, let's just do like questions and answers at this point. Is that cool? Okay, but it only works if one of you asks a question. Thank you, sir.
