Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

Q. How do you go about creating a fictional world that's already spanned seven novels?

A. Ah, that's a tough one! Every novel (or short story, or TV show, or movie, or comic-book, or any kind of fiction) starts life as a "What If...?" idea. What if there was a school for wizards? What if a man discovered that this entire life was being broadcast as a TV show? What if an alien explorer was stranded on Earth and his only friend was a young boy?

The "What If...?" is a seed from which the rest of the story grows. Writers come up with dozens - if not hundreds - of these seeds when developing a story. Most of these seeds won't sprout, or they'll have very short lives, but some will be strong enough to survive the writer's many attempts to kill them! By that, I mean that the writer doesn't just accept a "What If...?" idea without interrogating it from every possible angle to see if it really will work. Some of the first questions we'll throw at the idea are "Has it been done before?" and "Is it actually a good idea, or is it too silly?" and "Do I actually care enough about this idea to spend time developing it?" and, of course, "Is it good enough to work on right now, or would I be better off setting it aside for a while?" If the idea passes these tests, then it's subjected lots more "What Ifs...?"

The New Heroes series began with "What if the most powerful person in the world was only thirteen years old?" That one passed the initial tests, and so the development began... This is the process of asking questions and throwing new ideas at it to see what fits best. Why is this character the most powerful person in the world? Does he or she have magical powers? Possession of important knowledge that everyone else wants? Maybe she finds a very powerful weapon that's accidentally sent back in time from the far future. All the world's governments want this weapon but they can't take it from her or she'll use it on them. So she's effectively able to hold the world to ransom.

After trying out many different ideas, I eventually settled on superheroes. Partly, this was because I've always loved superheroes, but mostly it was because superhero stories tend to be told in a primarily visual medium like comics or movies or TV. As far as I could tell there were very few superhero novels around, and those that did exist were based on characters that had been established elsewhere.

So now I had to ask myself why my character was a superhuman. How does he or she have powers? Gradually, the story began to build. I liked the idea that there used to be superheroes but they all lost their abilities. Tied in with the idea that superhuman powers kick in when the character reaches puberty, that led me to having my hero inherit his powers from his parents. And so it grew from there.

My initial plan was for three novels, but that was mostly because publishers and readers like trilogies! As I added more characters and plot elements, I figured that a four-book series would work best to tell the overall story. As it turned out, the publisher who first bought the series wanted a trilogy, so that meant ditching some elements and reworking the second and third books. No problem: I'd already generated way more ideas than I'd ever need anyway.

But when I was developing the third novel, my editor told me that they'd decided it would be a good idea to expand the series to a fourth novel. That was one of those moments when you go "Aargh!" and "Hooray!" at the same time... I reworked the plot of the third novel to set things up for the fourth. That turned out rather well because it gave me a great cliff-hanger for the end of book three.

Unfortunately, after I'd delivered the third book and it was too late to make any changes, my editor left the company. His replacement wasn't so much in love with the series and he decided that, no, three books was enough after all. This, as you can imagine, was pretty annoying. But we hadn't signed a contract for the fourth book so there was nothing I could do about it!

Thankfully, the US publishers - Penguin - were more interested in the idea of superhero novels. Initially, they suggested that I create a new, standalone novel. From a marketing point of view, this makes sense: it's easier to promote a new novel than it is to promote the fourth book in a series.

However, I wanted to continue with the New Heroes... So I came up with the idea of a prequel that could be enjoyed by readers who'd never heard of the other books and at the same time would add a lot to the series. This worked out very well for the series because some of the events of Super Human would have been revealed through lengthy flashbacks in the fourth novel, and that would have been a little tricky to do.

Super Human led directly to The Ascension - they're really one large adventure split into two parts - and then Stronger was designed to help bridge the gap between the prequels and the original trilogy.

As I've explained elsewhere, the planned seventh novel was Crossfire, but then Hunter came along and changed all of that!

So.. that's a long-winded answer to the question of how I go about creating a fictional world that's already spanned seven novels! It starts off small, and then grows and grows... Its growth is mostly shaped by the plot and characters, but also to a degree by the needs of the market!

 

Q. How much has the feedback from the readers influenced the direction in which the series is going?

A. That's an interesting one... It's hard to quantify. In certain cases, the readers' responses definitely have had an effect. My initial plan for Stronger, for example, was to tell the story in the same manner as the others: from a third-person perspective through multiple viewpoints. But the readers' reactions to Brawn in the first novel were extremely positive. There's something about him that really grabbed them. Brawn appears in the latter half of the third book of the original trilogy - he's mentioned a couple of times before, and he also featured in one of the short stories - and I think that one of the things that makes him so interesting is that he's neither a hero nor a villain.

So I made the decision to tell Brawn's story solely from his point of view. This would be tricky, I knew, especially because - unlike the other books - Stronger takes place over a period of decades rather than a few weeks, but if it paid off it would be worth the effort. Luckily, it worked!

And, of course, the readers greatly influenced Hunter as well, as I've mentioned before.

There have been smaller changes, too, that came from the readers' reactions. After the original trilogy they really wanted to see more of Solomon Cord / Paragon, so that was one of the reasons he plays large part in the prequels. Same goes for Max Dalton... Everyone loves to hate that guy!

Of course, the series can't be entirely driven by the readers! If it were, then there would be no surprises coming up. And there are surprises on the way... Oh yes! Hunter has a couple of nice little shocks tucked away in there, one of which is rather subtle but those who have read all of the other books should see how significant it is. I can't say more than that, of course, because I don't want to spoil anything!

 

Q. Why does Brawn look like Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen?

A. Ah... Yes, he does have a similar look! They're both blue-skinned, bald and have colourless eyes... And they both look like Rogue Trooper from 2000 AD!

Well, the simple truth is that Brawn's look came about because of how I develop certain characters. As you might have seen elsewhere on this site, I usually create 3D models of the characters. Back when I first created Brawn (in January 2005!) the only 3D software programs I owned were early versions of Bryce 3D and Poser. It was simple enough to pose a figure with Poser and then export it to Bryce so that I could add textures (that is, give the model a "skin"), but both Poser and Bryce were fairly basic and couldn't do realistic hair. I could add "hair" props to the Poser models but they weren't great, barely a step above Lego Man Hair! To add to the difficulty, Bryce didn't have the facility to easily create new props: you could add any number of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders and so on, but creating something from scratch wasn't possible.

So I made the decision to leave Brawn bald. Then I decided that in order to make him further stand out, I'd give him a sort of blue-marbled texture. On the right: the first rendered picture of Brawn, alongside a silhouette of an average-sized man for comparison.

Shortly after this, I gave him green glowing eyes, but I ditched that idea very quickly and went for white. I also decided that I wanted him to have the same proportions as the average man, which I felt was more interesting than a misshapen Hulk-type physique.

Even though I was very familiar with Doctor Manhattan and Rogue Trooper (both of whom, coincidentally, were co-created by top artist Dave Gibbons) it never occurred to me then that Brawn was beginning to look like them.

As the years passed and new versions of Poser arrived, and I replaced Bryce with Cinema 4D (a "proper" 3D program with way more features!) I was able to refine the characters and make them look more realistic. I'd already established Brawn as big, blue and bald, so I stuck with that idea.

These days, I create almost all of the characters from the ground up, no longer relying on Poser for a basic model. Partly, this is because even though the latest version of Poser is very flexible there's still only so much that you can do with it. The user interface is very cumbersome and it's tricky to add new clothes or other props: I'd have to create them in Cinema 4D and export them to Poser and spend ages tweaking them to make them fit, so it's actually easier to just skip the Poser step!

For example: to create the models of Lance and Max in the cemetery on the Hunter video ad, I used the same Lance head from the previous model (with longer hair and a beard) and built a very basic body on which to drape the clothes. Same with Max: there's no point in constructing things like feet or elbows if they won't be seen by the "camera." Also, you'll notice that neither Max nor Lance actually move in that shot! Lance's hair blows in the wind, and there's a lot of snow billowing about, but I didn't have to animate the characters so that saved a huge amount of time. On the other hand, the knife-throwing guy in the video ad required a lot more work because he's fully modelled and properly animated.

Some more detail for those interested in such things: Animating a 3D model is rather simple in concept, but it's a real pain to get it right! You start off with the constructed model then construct a basic bone "skeleton" inside it. Ideally, the joints of the skeleton will closely match those of a real human skeleton. That's the simple part. The hard part is then attaching the right parts of the model to the appropriate bones, so that, for example, when the character bends its knee the lower part of its leg and its foot move correctly. This is called "rigging" the model and it takes forever and a half to get right!

I've created a standard model that's fully rigged and I use it for pretty much everything that doesn't require facial animation. I can add basic clothing to it (which also has be rigged!) and I can scale it or swap out the head pretty easily.

All of this, of course, takes up a lot of time that I could otherwise spend writing, but sometimes a writer needs to indulge in non-writing work to give the plots and ideas time to work away in the back of his or her mind!

 

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5