November 2, 1994

   
   
 
   
      
   
     
   

  

~ Inow know my characters so well. They have been a part of
| my mind now for 15 years, and yet this morning I found
myself in a situation where one of my characters turned
around... I was taking him from point A to point B, and he
turned around and flipped me the bird and said “Let me
finish what I am doing.” I realized that I cannot get him
from where he is now to where I want him to be in the next
chapter until he, being the man he is goes through a series
of questions that have just occurred to him, and he has to
have that information before he, as a man, can go on.

Your characters, if you have done your job properly,
start dictating to you what they will do and what they won’t
do. There is also things, a really bizarre series of things
where I find I can literally sit down and start to write about
something... and suddenly it is like a floodgate opening,
and I write and write and write for hours, and I have no
knowledge of where what is coming out of me came in.
Some of the battle scenes in the first two books; for exam-
ple. Where the frustrations that my characters felt of being
dismounted foot soldiers, and the frustration felt of being
utterly helpless. I experienced that. I felt it. I knew what it
was like, and yet I’ ve never been in a battle. I’ ve never swung
a mace on the end of a chain.

Since I started writing, I have met thousands of people
who are going to write a book someday. “Oh, I’m going to
write a book.” Yeah. And then there are other people who
ask “Well, how do you write a book?” There is only one way
to write a book. That is to sit your ass
in a chair and write it. Once its done,

The Other Press

JACK WHYTE HAS HIS OWN OPINIONS ABOUT THE LEGEND
OF KING ARTHUR, AND HE'S NOT AFRAID TO SHARE THEM.

nated through no fault of his own, but we never did find the
body. And on his tombstone it apparently said “Hic jacet
Arthurus rex q [u] ondem, rexque futurus.” - Here lies Arthur,
the once and future King - The second coming. He will come
back when he is needed. He is a hero in every sense of the
word. He is military. He is strong. He is just. He is compassion-
ate, and he is a champion. We don’t have enough heroes in our
world today, and I believe that is why Arthur has always ex-
isted in the popular imagination, but is particularly strong to-
day. We seem hell-bent on destroying all our icons and all our
heroes and all the people that we should be able to admire. We
have become so adept in the art of navel gazing that humanity
has become a debased currency. We expect our heroes, our pub-
lic figures, our politicians, and even our religious figures to be
base coinage. Base metal. Everybody knows that it doesn’t
matter who you look at, if you look long enough and hard
enough, you are gonna find out he has feet of clay...
Somebody asked me last week what I’m going to do when
the viewing medium takes over completely, when there is no
place for writers. Terrifying thought. My response to that was
that there will always be a place for story-tellers... That is what
can never be stamped out, the creativity. Unfortunately, the
mass media... the international companies, all have a vested
interest in reducing us all to the lowest common denomina-
tor... As a society we seem to be rushing downhill on a nar-
row-gauge railroad track towards an abyss to oblivion that is
looming ahead of us like the entrance to a tun-
nel. Hey, I’m all in favor of jumping off and
sticking some sort of tree trunk ahead of the

guess what? You’ve written a book. f Knew what tt was wheels.

The other thing is that writing is easy.

T: When did you come over from Scotland?

Its the re-writes that'll kill you. Like and yet [Ve never 5: Amoved from Scotland to England in 1959,

The beautiful thing about the
process of writing is that you have to

been in ba tH Je Tve after I left high school. I went to university

there, taught high school there, and them came

have a certain kind of humility going never SwuNg a mace to Canada in 1967 as a teacher of high school

in. You have to accept the vehicle with

English.

which you are trying to communicate. On the end | of aZ chain T: Having been here for so long, have you

The English language. You have to ac-
» cept that the English language is me-

ticulously structured. You have to ac- ¢
cept that it is necessary to learn the rules of that structure.
Once you have learned them... then you can choose to disre-
gard them, but you have to know what they are there for
before you can disregard them. The process of writing is an
éxtremely rewarding one. Writing is the one thing that you
can do and then watch as it improves consistently. I mean,
if you are working with wood and making furniture, you
will see a piece develop under your hand until it is finished.
Then you go back to working with raw wood again all over.
When you become a proficient writer, you don’t ever go
back to working with raw wood again. You take the skills
that you have acquired to the next piece, and you begin there.
It is a wonderful experience.
T: Figure of Arthur. Go.
J: The figure of Arthur is one of the great figures of myth
and history, and in many respects Arthur is the apotheosis
of the hero. Arthur has almost...one hesitates to use it, be-
cause of all the fundamental associations... but Arthur is a
Christ-like figure. Arthur is a man who’s compassion liter-
ally knows no bounds. We admire and respect and like Arthur
because here is a man who can find his wife having a love
affair with his best friend and find it in himself not only to
forgive him, but to understand... From that perspective he is
Christ-like.

He is also Christ-like in that he was abruptly termi-

had much experience with the Can-lit crowd?

With the holier-than-though aspects of Cana-

dian literature, and having been born else-
where, have you found most people in the Canadian literature
scene to be inclusive or exclusive?
J: (Chuckles) The Can-lit scene is something that is forever
close to me, because I am commercially successful, for a start.
I think we have to go back to my comment earlier about how
we as a society are becoming experts at naval gazing. Can-lit is
a phenomenon that doesn’t exist outside of Canada, by defini-
tion. And this search for a national identity, I think it is admi-
rable. However there are elements of it that leave me nonplused.
There is a tendency, for example, for people to spend long peri-
ods of time writing books and poetry which are not intended to
be understood by the general public. Why spend one- two- three-
four- five years writing a book, and go to give a public reading
where the audience sits [and stares] at you... That seems to me
to be self-defeating. Admittedly there is a screaming need for a
body of literature which will be recognizably Canadian. But
how recognizable does it have to be? On one level I can under-
stand that need.to protect that Canadian identity, but by simple
extension of that logic how can I then turn around and con-
demn anyone in Quebec for wanting to leave Canada? They are
primarily motivated by their need to protect and conserve their
French-ness.. They go overboard on it. So do we.in the
Anglophone community in our obsession with Canadian lit-
erature. If it is literature it is going to survive, and be enjoyed
and loved as literature.
The Canadian element is incidental.

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