Sophia McDougall interview – Part 2

This is the second part of my interview with Sophia McDougall. In it she discusses her love of drawing her characters and invented world, speaks about her characters in greater detail and lets us know what she’s working on now. Be warned that there are more heavy spoilers for Savage City, so if you haven’t read it yet, proceed with caution. You can find the first part of the interview here.

6. You’re obviously quite a visual writer (by which I mean you seem to need to create visual representations of the things you write about). Could you say something about the process of creating the maps, architecture, fashions and so on of the world of Romanitas?

I don’t need to. I can stop any time I like!

But yes, I do tend to see the characters and scenes very vividly in my mind – indeed, one thing I’ve had to learn as a writer is not to try and capture everything I can see, much as it pains me to leave stuff out. I found a sketchpad recently that I’d been writing notes and rough drafts in back in the very early days of Romanitas and all the pages are covered with doodles and sketches of the characters’ faces.

I didn’t have all that much choice about doing the maps for Romanitas, at least not to begin with. The books clearly needed them – you need somewhere you can look and see that Nionia = Japan, and obviously no one in the universe of the story is going to tell you. While I was writing the book I had worked with Encarta maps of the continents, onto which I drew new borders (sometimes along geographical features like mountain ranges, sometimes straight, featureless “administrative” divisions). And there was an artist who was supposed to take these and turn them into something presentable – but it kept coming back wrong, with borders shifting thousands of miles, which would have had rather serious geopolitical effects! I mean, it’s really quite important that Nionia and Rome don’t have a boundary in Asia! So eventually I got to the “want something done, do it yourself” place. And then there was a very painful weekend with Photoshop which kept continually crashing and destroying my work, and that was when I found myself saying aloud to a computer, “If you can’t do it then say so, please don’t lie to me.” But after that I just took it for granted that there would be maps and I would make them. I wrote a little about how the process of making maps worked, and how very long it went on, here.

The pictures of the characters which I now post on my blog sometimes are rather different, though they did begin in a similar way – doodles of faces for fun, and rough “fashion designs” to help me work. Then, when Romanitas was finished, there was a period where I was waiting for notes from my editor. So I refined those rough sketches, and then refined them some more, getting more and more nuttily detailed each time. And that tended to be the pattern – finish the book, then draw after. There’s one exception – there’s an outfit worn by a character towards the end of Rome Burning which is a (spoilery) plot point in itself, and I just could not write that scene until I had a picture. I was downloading images of Japanese silks and everything.

The architecture remains mostly made of words. I drew a picture of the Palace, but I don’t like it all that much. I did do some cars, though. Oh, I should post pictures of the Roman cars! They’re fancy. And very big.

Ultimately, though, I just like drawing and messing about in Photoshop. And when I’m telling a story, I am obsessed with it – what else am I going to make pictures of?

7. Why did you decide to include supernatural/fantasy elements in your story (eg Una, Sulien and Dama’s powers)?

I wanted to access the tradition of writing the Roman supernatural. Sybilline prophecies which come true, healers, (I, Claudius has both these things) Caesar’s ghost, all that. I wanted to see how that would work in a modern context. I also wanted to give my most disenfranchised characters an advantage, “cheat” just once, on their behalf, so as not to have to employ lots of little cheats to keep them alive and fighting when they’ve got the might of the Roman Empire against them.

I have to say, if I’d started the trilogy when I was, say, thirty rather than twenty-three, I might not have included the supernatural elements. But when I said this to my editor she was all, “How dare you! The powers have to be there! If they weren’t, I would MAKE YOU PUT THEM IN!” and her first note on Savage City was “NEEDS MORE MIND READING”.

I made her re-spell it “MOAR.” And then I endeavoured to follow her instructions.

8. There are obviously big chunks of backstory that we don’t know (eg Una’s life as a slave). Do YOU know these things, and why did you choose to keep them offstage?

I … could know. But I prefer to think of it as “suspecting”. I could, if I had a gun to my head, tell you a story about Una’s past life that would fit all the hints that are dropped through the series (some of which I think are fairly blatant), I mean, yes I have that story already there, for me it’s probably what happened. But there could be other explanations for other people, and I think they’re just as valid. In a way, because we don’t know exactly what happened, because even I won’t allow myself to fully “know,” all possibilities about her past are equally true, she hasn’t just got one traumatic backstory of slavery, she has all of them, without it being overwhelming and without wallowing in misery-porn that isn’t part of the story. And I felt it was what the character herself wanted—this ruthless break with her past, even though it’s clearly shaped who she is, and I wanted the narrative itself to reflect her choice and her very considerable will-power.

9. One of the things I love about the story is how in touch we are with everyone’s emotional life (the heroes and the villains). How difficult was it to keep everyone’s interior life in your head, and which character’s headspace did you enjoy occupying the most?

Thank you. And it wasn’t difficult. It’s my favourite thing. Of course there were some characters over whom I had to make more of an effort – Sulien, for example. I love him, but I find open-hearted extroverts harder to write. It’s not only because I’m introverted myself, though that’s certainly part of it – I think characters who are naturally prone to form a lot of relationships rather than just a few, intense ones are inherently more difficult to incorporate into fiction. But not that difficult. And sometimes I worried intensely before I introduced somebody, like “oh God I have to start writing this new character and I only know a couple of things about them and they’ll be terrible” and “Oh No it’s all going to go to pieces right now”. But then, my default approach to more or less everything is “worry my head off about it” and it’s one of the pleasures of writing that it feels as much like discovery as creation. So, I fretted terribly that I didn’t know all that much about what, say, Noriko was going to be like. But as soon as I worked out how I was going to introduce her, there she was, and from then on it was quite easy.

As for who I enjoyed most – maybe it’s not what you’d expect, but writing Drusus was such fun. He’s very nearly without any principles at all – in fact I was rather appalled at how he came out even worse than I intended — and I suppose there is something liberating in occupying the mind of someone who cares almost exclusively about himself. Yet I still find it hard to pin down exactly why I liked writing him so much. There are villains who are always one step ahead of the goodies, villains we love because they’re witty and suave and get to say the unsayable — and Drusus isn’t really like that at all. He’s very manipulative and he’s not stupid, he’s a talented liar and he does have occasional insights the other characters don’t have – but he’s not smooth and unflappable, and if anything he’s trying to catch up with the heroes; he does awful things and a great deal of it comes from this terrible striving for a place of contentment that he’s constitutionally incapable of ever reaching. Wicked as he is, I do feel sorry for him. And yet he’s quite funny to me– especially in his occasional cheerful, ebullient moments. He gets so hopelessly enthusiastic when he thinks things might be going well. I love Drusus in a good mood.

I also enjoy Makaria and Jun Shen a lot. Makaria for her harrumphing, head-tossing surliness, and the Empress Jun Shen because she’s both a skilled, highly experienced politician and someone who takes great glee in messing with people, (especially Noriko, who honestly is quite messable-with) just because she can. And does it all while encrusted up to the gunnels in jewels.

10. Could you say something about the role of family in the trilogy?

There’s the Imperial Family, who are of course terribly dysfunctional, yet they have quite a deep sense of connectedness, and a weird kind of loyalty even when they’re trying to murder each other. They can’t get away from each other, they can’t stop seeing themselves in each other, whether or not they want to. And there’s the curse on the whole family, which places a pressure on the relationships while at the same time keeping them together. There’s always that fear as common ground. And Marcus is introduced as part of that family while also being very isolated from it by the deaths of his parents.

At the other extreme are Una and Sulien, who are a very embattled, very close-knit, tiny family of two. And there is this gradual formation of a new family where the blood ties aren’t the only ones.

It’s an issue Sulien thinks a lot about – he becomes increasingly aware of needing connections of both kinds, to stand up against such a difficult world.

11. In some ways, the series is a reflection on the nature of power. Would you say a little bit more about this?

You’re quite right, that’s just what it is, and… three rather hefty books about the nature of power are quite difficult to sum up! I suppose I was interested in the effect power has on an individual – you see that in Marcus, for whom it’s a pleasure and a burden and corrupting and ennobling all at once, and Drusus, who hangs almost his entire selfhood on getting and keeping it. But I was also interested in how characters without such ready-made sources of power could find ways to it, and what they’d do when they got it.

12. The Sibyl’s prophecy is obviously key to working out how the story will unfold. How difficult was it to write the prophecy in such a way as to keep it misleading and confusing?

I suppose it helped to write it in that rather impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness style: much as I’ve loved stately rhymed prophecies in a lot of other books, (like I, Claudius or The Dark is Rising) I wanted it to sound like something someone in a trance might actually say. So it’s not that obvious where the emphases are – she talks about the future and the recent past in much the same way, for example. Otherwise I guess it’s less about the prophecy than about the plot – try to write something surprising, and then people’s expectations will stay locked to the patterns set by other stories, even with a prophecy there predicting what’ll happen. But then, you can’t let it matter too much – you also have to trust that you can write something that’s still gripping even if someone does figure out what’s going to happen. If you don’t trust yourself to do that you’ll start trying to deceive the reader for deception’s sake and that doesn’t produce good books. Actually, I really thought that everyone would probably guess where the story was going – but so far it seems I was wrong.

13. What’s next for you?

For now I’m writing a sci-fi novel for children. It’s pretty quirky and light compared to Romanitas, but you can’t entirely escape the kind of writer you are, so it does feature the line “I think that’s actually a war crime” said by an eleven-year-old.

14. Is Goshu Australia? [Note that this question is asked out of purely personal interest. I myself am an Australian and wanted to know about the Australian equivalent in the world of Romanitas.]

Yes it is, and those are two Australian Aborigines we briefly see working as Nionian secret agents near the end of Savage City.

15. The Sibyl’s prophecy (and the end of Savage City) heavily implies that Drusus will be the last Roman Emperor. Is this true, and will the Empire dissolve?

Hmm. I think it’s practically impossible that the Roman Empire will remain unchanged, and I think it’s clear that certain of the characters who are left standing at the end will play a significant role in whatever happens, but there are several possible futures. As with the “what happened in the backstory”, I think this is more a question for the reader than the writer.

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