Malice
Malice
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John Gwynne on Malice
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
A suggestion his wife made that he called ridiculousThe evening that started everything was not a moment of creative vision. Gwynne had left university teaching to be at home with his family, and he needed something to occupy his mind. After the family returned from seeing ‘The Two Towers’ at the cinema, his wife Caroline put a thought to him.
[Caroline] suggested writing. I told her not to be ridiculous, I had no idea how to write a book, and was certain that I didn’t have the skills required.
His sons enthusiastically agreed with Caroline, and Gwynne gave in. But publication never entered his thinking. He wrote without any connection to a writing community, unaware of debut fiction conventions, and with an audience of five people in mind.
I wrote Malice as a hobby with an intended audience that I could count on my fingers — my wife and children. I had no thoughts of publication.
Once he committed to writing, Gwynne defined the book’s target by triangulating four writers whose work he wanted to combine rather than imitate. Each name in this list was meant to answer a specific creative question about what kind of book he was making.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Bernard Cornwell’s Arthur trilogy, The Warlord Chronicles. John Milton’s Paradise Lost. And pretty much anything by David Gemmell. Those four really capture the essence of what I aspired to write. Something epic, with a big landscape — Tolkien. Something that felt almost historical, with a foot in ancient history — Bernard Cornwell. Something intimate, personal and character driven — David Gemmell. And something supernatural, with a sinister edge — Paradise Lost.
draumrkopablog.wordpress.com, “Interview – John Gwynne, author of “Malice” | Draumr Kópa”Milton did more than supply a tone. The theological skeleton of the entire Faithful and the Fallen series, in which the Banished Lands sit at the centre of a war between God and a fallen angel, was built by asking a single question about where Paradise Lost ends.
The back story — the God War between Elyon (God) and his Ben-Elim (angels), and Asroth (the Devil) and the Kadoshim (demons) — came from Paradise Lost. That’s really the story of Satan’s revenge against God, bringing down the human race. I started thinking, what would have happened next.
draumrkopablog.wordpress.com, “Interview – John Gwynne, author of “Malice” | Draumr Kópa”The title carried the same ancestry. Gwynne’s original name for the book was ‘So Deep a Malice,’ a phrase lifted directly from Milton’s poem. His editor at Tor UK, Bella Pagan, cut it to a single word, and Gwynne eventually agreed the shorter version worked better for the market.
How he wrote it
Ten years, by hand, without knowing the rulesGwynne had no creative writing training and no model for how to write a novel. He had a method from his years as a university lecturer, and he applied it wholesale to fiction, spending close to two years on research before writing a word of narrative.
I approached writing Malice the only way I knew how, the way I’d learned at university. To read, read, read, and then read some more.
thebookplank.blogspot.com, “Author interview with John Gwynne”The research ranged from Celtic and Norse mythology to Caesar’s Gallic War, Boudicca’s Revolt, blacksmithing, wolf-pack behaviour, and Komodo dragons. When it finally came time to write, he did not open a laptop.
The biggest one is that I wrote the first draft of my first book, Malice, by hand. Yes, you read that right. I am a dinosaur.
paperprocrastinators.wordpress.com, “Author Q&A: John Gwynne, The Shadow of the Gods – Paper Procrastinators”From the start of research in 2002 to publication in December 2012, the process consumed a decade. He switched to typing from the second book onward.
Because he had never studied debut fiction conventions, Gwynne did not know that a 250,000-word first novel with a large ensemble of point-of-view characters was considered unpublishable. His editors at Tor UK trimmed the manuscript to 212,000 words, and the process of cutting taught him something about his own default tendencies as a writer.
I did break a few ‘rules’ with Malice — basically because I didn’t know the rules were there in the first place.
One of the structural changes made between drafts had lasting consequences for the series. Gwynne had not originally designed Maquin, who became one of the most beloved characters in the Faithful and the Fallen sequence, as a point-of-view character. The role came to him almost by accident, after editorial intervention removed a character Gwynne had planned to carry into book two.
Gwynne had not originally planned Maquin as a point-of-view character. After his editor Julie Crisp read the first draft and suggested he could cut more characters from the end of the book, a character he had planned to carry into book two was removed instead, and Maquin inherited the POV. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Epic scale without losing the person inside itGwynne described his creative goal for Malice with a two-word formula he repeated throughout the writing. The formula was a deliberate tension: scale and intimacy pull against each other in most epic fantasy, and he wanted both at once.
Epic and intimate was my mantra, what I strove to create. By epic I mean sweeping, grand vistas and a conflict that rose above border disputes or politics, and by intimate I mean connecting with characters, caring about what happens to them.
Malice operates with a clear moral axis: Elyon and Asroth are real opposing forces, and the book does not pretend otherwise. But Gwynne wanted every character, including those on the wrong side of that axis, to feel coherent from the inside rather than simply labelled wicked by authorial decree.
Deep down we are all the hero of our own tale.
That principle shaped how he wrote every point-of-view character across the series. The reader is never asked to approve of a character’s choices, only to understand the logic that makes those choices feel, to that character, like the right ones.