A conversation with Malcolm Walker

The Stone Crown is your first novel. What inspired you to write it?

I was looking for an entry point into the Arthurian story, which is very old, much older than most people think and certainly has very little to do with round tables, courtly love and well-polished armour ... anyway, I wanted to set it in a Dark Ages landscape. I grew up with stories of Guinevere, Lancelot, The Lady of the Lake, and Sir Kay, all of which I loved, but which never quite rang true. I knew that the Dark Ages Arthur was associated with Wales, Cornwall and Scotland - there are over six hundred sites associated with King Arthur in the British Isles alone, let alone Europe - and I started reading around the subject. I stumbled across a book by Alistair Moffat called Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms and another, Arthur the Dragon King by Howard Reid, both of which placed the legendary hero in the Borders of Scotland around the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th century AD. Welsh, an old form of it, was spoken throughout Britain and, as I have some Welsh blood and I find the rugged landscapes of Wales and Scotland inspiring, I had found the setting for my novel. Once I had the mental landscape, I simply had to find the characters to populate it. The Stone Crown is written, in part at least, out of my love of landscape and nature.

How did you come up with the characters of Emlyn and Max? Are they based on real people?

I try not to base my characters on real people, at least not consciously. And, of course, all characters step out of a writer's imagination. However, our imaginations are fed by reality and the unconscious mind throws up all kinds of memories and half-memories. There's a wonderful line in the introduction to David Almond's autobiographical collection of stories, Counting Stars, where he says: "Like all stories, they merge memory and dream, the real and the imagined, truth and lies. And, perhaps like all stories, they are an attempt to reassemble what is fragmented, to discover what has been lost. " I think writers are often trying to discover what has been lost, trying to re-enter their memories, and what comes up in the form of characters, personalities who are so real to the author that they get up and walk onto the page, sometimes taking over the story, are more to do with that trawling process during writing than with any conscious attempt, at least on my part, to mirror a real person. That said, characters may have certain consciously imposed idiosyncrasies, habits and traits that a writer associates with family members or friends or people they've met, often fleetingly. In the end, the driving engine of characterisation comes from somewhere deep inside the writer and then as their characters interact upon the page things can shift quite quickly.

How do you choose your characters' names?

Well, I've only written the one novel and, although I've started the second book, this is something of a struggle for me. Names can be quite hard; they've got to fit somehow. They've got to fit for the reader, which is always something of a guessing game because if an individual reader has an arch enemy called Emlyn - not a common name these days - then that reader will come at the character in a certain way. But more importantly they've got to fit for the writer. There's a kind of critical mass at which you arrive and at which if you haven't got the names sorted for your major characters you've got a potential problem. In The Stone Crown Max was originally called Mary but as the story grew I knew I had to find an alternative. So names are important. Surnames equally so. Take the McCrossans. That took a while but when I got it and looked up its Irish origin I thought yep that's the one. I also liked the fact it had 'cross' in there, partly because they've made a cross for themselves, one that lasted fifteen hundred years, and partly because you don't want to cross them. Mrs Murcutt and her son Terry were the same. Struggle, struggle ... and then bang, there it was. Again I went with the name because it suited their personalities: Murcutt sounds like murder, and they murder people emotionally, 'cutting' into them ... plus, she cuts up food in her establishment. In my new novel there's a character called Gabrielle. I chose that name because I'm working with the idea of Hades, the Underworld, and an angelic name seems to fit at present. Of course, this can all change in a flash. Ask me next Friday.

What's the title of your second novel and what's it about?

Well, firstly, it's a work in progress and if there's one thing I've learnt it's the probability of anything I say becoming a lie by next Friday. That's the nature of writing. You make things up. Novels under construction aren't like buildings; you don't necessarily work from the bottom up. For example, with The Stone Crown I wrote the first seven chapters and then the ending. That's when it got difficult: tortuous in fact. I had to build a bridge for my characters to get from beginning to end. But then that's half the fun. Sorry, I've digressed. The new book's called The City of Thieves. My agent asked me if I think I can turn it into a trilogy: as Max would say, "Mebbe ... mebbe not."

What's it about?

Loosely, it's another story about two contemporary teenagers, a girl and a boy, who find themselves in a parallel world, a city that mirrors their own in some ways but is entirely different and strange in others. The mirror city is run on an economy of theft. Everyone steals from everybody else. I'm playing around with the structure, trying to find a form that will tell the story best. I can't really say much more because as I said ... by next Friday ...

How long have you been writing books?

I wanted to be a writer when I was eighteen. I wrote some adult fiction, mostly unfinished and not very good, and then when I was twenty-nine I started a family and the writing drifted away. I started again about fifteen years ago.

Do you think they'll make The Stone Crown into a film?

We're talking wildest dreams here, but wildest dreams are important, they're what keep us going. I'd like to think that it was good enough to put on celluloid, but who knows. I try and stay pretty Zen about it, try and hold a middle ground. In the one hand are all those fantastic possibilities, in the other failure and darkness, and in between is this strange state of holding what one wants, but at a distance. It's important not to lose perspective, so I try and not get too caught up in the glamour of it ... all those possibilities.

What's your favourite children's or young adult book?

Tricky question; there's so many. I guess I'd have to speak about those books which have influenced me the most and which somehow still live in my memory. The Wind in the Willows because it speaks of a certain Englishness that has all but vanished, and which might never have existed except in my own mind. Winnie-the-Pooh for the gorgeous illustrations by E. H. Shepard and for the sheer simplicity of Milne's story, a simplicity which belies its depth. More contemporary tales are Tim Bowler's River Boy and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. More or less all of David Almond's novels, but in particular Skellig and Heaven Eyes. Going back a few decades there's Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, plus The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper and William Mayne's Earthfasts, both Arthurian reworkings. But perhaps the most influential writer for me has been Alan Garner. In particular The Owl Service, which, although not about Arthur, reworks the ancient Welsh text from which stories of Arthur derive, the Mabinogion. As you can see Arthur has been something of a reading theme for me. No surprise that my first novel should deal with the Matter of Britain.

And favourite adult novels?

Very, very difficult to answer. I read fairly eclectically. The classics. I still go back to Dickens or Austen because they are like time portals into a vanished world. A lot of contemporary Australian, English and American stuff. Russell Hoban is one of my favourite authors. Riddley Walker is possibly my all-time front runner. One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian magic realist Gabrielle Garcia Marquez. I read a fair bit of non-fiction too, often as part of my research for a new project.

What are you currently reading?

I've just finished a non-fiction work, The Adventure of English. I'm currently halfway through Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and I've just finished J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood. Oh, and a young adult novelThe Messenger by an Australian writer, Markus Zusak.

Do you have any advice for young writers?

A couple of things, although I hesitate in handing out writing tips because everyone has different working methods. Read ... read ... read! You can't write if you don't read widely. Writing can be hard work, or yakka as we call it in in Australia, so you've got to enjoy, enjoy what you're creating and putting down on the page. For me, perhaps the most important element is to let the story run its course, because it's in this exploratory phase when you're doing the first draft that all sorts of wonderful things can happen. Once you got a complete draft down then you can go back; you'll see the mistakes, where it doesn't work, where characters aren't real, where the plot unravels. Thirdly, always show your drafts to someone else to comment on; that's when you need a big heart and an open mind, because it's often the criticism that we don't want to listen to but which we need to hear. Be positive and keep writing.