Podcast with Michael White

Michael White is the author of the bestselling novels Equinox and The Medici Secret. His latest book in the series is The Borgia Ring. He is also the author of the E-force books, which are published under his pseudonym, Sam Fisher. The latest Sam Fisher novel was also published this year and is called State of Emergency.

Michael has a long and distinguished science-writing career. He has written over 20 non-fiction books on subjects as diverse as the science of the X-Files and Dr Who, the history of science and the lives of some of science’s greatest heroes. He is also a biographer and has written biographies of C.S Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein, just to name a few. His biography of Leonardo da Vinci became the fourth best-selling science book in the UK in 2000 and has since been translated into 18 languages.

He has been shortlisted for the Aventis Awards twice (the ‘Booker prize of science’) and, in 2004, was made an Honorary Fellow at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth.

Click play to listen.

Running time: 22.47

If you like the idea of writing fiction check out our Creative writing course.

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for your readability.

Valerie
So thanks for joining us today, Michael.

Michael
Thank you for having me.

Valerie
Now you are a very busy writer, two books published in one year, two very different books. How do you manage to write two books simultaneously?

Michael
They are not written simultaneously, that’s the thing. They came out roughly within a couple of months of each other. But what I do I think it would be very difficult to actually write two books to sort of go from one one day and then in the afternoon do the other one or something.

So what I do is I spend a few months on each one and then I get it to a certain stage and then I spend a few months on another one and then I switch backwards and forwards. But there is a sort of order in which they are meant to be delivered.

Valerie
Your latest book in the series of your best-selling novels is The Borgia Ring. Tell us a bit about that.

Michael
The Borgia Ring is the first in what will hopefully be a series of books featuring a character called Jack Pendragon. He’s a chief inspector in the East End of London. That’s the area in England where I grew up and so I know it quite well and I spent a lot of my childhood around there.

It’s another one of my books in which I have two strands. So it is set in the present day but it’s like he’s back to a point in history which my earlier novels have done. This one is like I’d say he’s back to the Elizabethan era and the plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.

Valerie
You seem to have a real interest in history. Is that something that has been with you throughout most of your life?

Michael
Yes, I’ve always been interested in history but I was trained as a scientist. I taught science for quite a few years. But I got into writing really by writing historical science stuff, typically biographies of scientists. So I sort of then did into history from there and got quite fascinated by the Renaissance. I soaked up quite a lot of history and so when it came to writing novels I wanted to do something that had a historical slant to it.

Valerie
Why did you get into writing in the first place? Why did you actually want to write about the historical aspects of science?

Michael
The whole science thing had a big popular phase a few years or 20 years ago, I suppose, or ten years ago. It’s not so fashionable now but a lot of scientists were writing books. A lot of them were quite inaccessible, the cutting example is A Brief History of Time which everybody pretends they have read but not many people have.

I wanted to write something which would be very easy for people to get into the science so I thought the best way to do that would be through the characters. So I wrote biographies of people like Einstein and Stephen Hawking and Darwin. I introduced the science into it sort of by stealth really.

Valerie
Then this year you also released State of Emergency but that has been written under a pseudonym, Sam Fisher. Can you tell us why you write under a pseudonym?

Michael
It’s basically a beginning of two series so there is the E-Force series, the first of which is State of Emergency by Sam Fisher. Then there are the Jack Pendragon books, the first of which is The Borgia Ring. They’re coming out roughly within a couple of months of each other so the thing is that you can’t really confuse the public by having too many different books by the same person.

So if somebody went into a shop and they bought State of Emergency and it was under my name and then a few months later they saw The Borgia Ring under my name, they would think that it was the same sort of book possibly. So you can’t really do that. So I created the pseudonym because the two books are so totally different, the two series are so totally different to each other.

Valerie
How did you come up with the name Sam Fisher?

Michael
It’s funny because I just made it up and my father’s name was Sam. I thought that most best-selling thriller writers or action writers, if you like, have very short names like Dan Brown. I thought it needs to be something quick and monosyllabic name followed by a surname. So I came up with Sam Fisher which is sort of snappy and then I discovered there actually is a character called Sam Fisher who’s in a game and a character from Tom Clancy I think it is. But it doesn’t matter.

Valerie
Oh, ideal, you definitely have the right genre.

Michael
Yeah.

Valerie
I interviewed Sydney Bauer and she got her name from Sydney Bristow in Alias and Jack Bauer in 24.

Michael
Great, that was good.

Valerie
You have published many non-fiction books on science as we have said but then 20 non-fiction books before your first novel was published. Why did decide to transition into fiction after all that time writing the non-fiction?

Michael
Well, I had always wanted to be a novelist and the reason why I got into writing non-fiction was because I wanted to be a novelist and I couldn’t get accepted. So I thought I will write non-fiction which I enjoyed writing and it will be an avenue into being accepted as a novelist. In fact I discovered quite quickly that it was counter-productive.

In fact publishers are actually suspicious of non-fiction writers trying to write fiction. But the irony is that I was a novelist before I was a non-fiction writer.  I wrote actually rubbish and nobody was interested in it. In fact I wrote six novels while I was writing the non-fiction. All of which were rejected, in fact it was only the seventh attempt of which actually wasn‘t.

Valerie
Was the seventh attempt a variation on the previous six or was it a completely different novel?

Michael
What I did was gradually learn. I had a very shallow learning curve, I think. I’m quite resistant in taking these things in I think. I spent years and years writing all sorts  of novels and then I finally realized that the way to do it would be to write about, not necessarily something that I know about because I think that is a bit boring, but within writing something about which I was known for.

So what I did was I started writing this thriller set in the present day and set in Oxford where I used to live for a long time so I knew the locale. Then I thought what I need to do is have a historical strand which is what I was really interested in. I thought I would create a parallel storyline featuring Isaac Newton. I had written the biography of Isaac Newton which had gone to be really quite well-acclaimed.

That had a double effect and it actually made the publishers believe in my work more because they believed that the public would believe in it more. So it was ultimately resulted in credibility. They believed that I knew what I was talking about, probably was, but they believed it. So that was really a leg up and that was a huge crucial difference because I don’t really think that the seventh attempt was any better than my sixth attempt. It was the right sort of subject matter if you like.

Valerie
As you say you have also written biographies, a number of biographies. Now that must be very different because that is very research-based as opposed to using the creativity in your imagination especially with subjects who are no longer alive. How do you go about getting it right, making sure that it is authentic and it truly reflects that person’s life?

Michael
That’s the difficult bit in a way. I know that I had a great challenge. You have to do a lot of research. Those non-fiction books, particularly biographies, were really three-quarters research, quarter writing time. You have to go back to original sources as best you can. In some cases there was actually too much stuff.

I did a biography of Leonardo da Vinci and treating him as a scientist and looking at his work as a scientist and engineer rather than as an artist. There was literally just too much. There were thousands and thousands of pages of notes to go through and endless archives and also go through all the biographies from the past that had been written about the man.

So really it is all research-based which is very enjoyable but you just have to control it. You have to say, “I’ve only got a specific time period to do this in and I’ve got to focus in on these things.” You can very easily get distracted and taken off course.

Valerie
You have had a very varied career to-date with science as you have mentioned, your interest in history, your career as a writer. But you were also involved with music and were a member of the Thompson Twins.

Michael
Yeah.

Valerie
What do you call yourself when you go to a dinner party?

Michael
I see myself as a writer first and foremost. In fact I wrote my first book when I was ten. It was just like getting together lots of stuff from other people’s books and copying things out and putting pictures in and things. But it was my first attempt. It was about the space program. I gave it to my teacher and he was very impressed with in and it sort of encouraged me.

But I have always considered myself first and foremost a writer but I have also been playing music since I was in school as well and there was a period of a few years where I was a professional musician. I see myself as a writer but I have a serious hobby of writing and recording music that I still pursue.

Valerie
You are obviously from the UK but you now call Perth home, is that correct?

Michael
No, no I live in Sydney now.

Valerie
Did you live in Perth at some point?

Michael
Yes, we lived there for a long time. We immigrated in 2002 and lived in Perth for over five years. Then we moved to Sydney about two years ago, two and a half years ago.

Valerie
So why Australia?

Michael
Mainly the weather and the outdoor lifestyle. We’ve got four children and we only had three when we moved to Australia but they were very small when they left England. But we had quite a big house and big garden but they could never go out in the garden.

Over here they have become so much more extroverts and out with going and into swimming and surfing and stuff. It’s great.

Valerie
Tell us about your writing routine. Do you have one? When you have got a book on the boil do you have any rituals that you go through every morning when you wake up and how do you actually get the words out there?

Michael
I don’t have any rituals really. Basically I’m partly governed by family duties because as I said we have four young children. I sort of tend to work around the family time. I don’t have these midnight sessions and working into the small hours because it just wouldn’t work with the family.

I work pretty regular hours but I don’t work that long each day. I find that a couple of hours, two or three hours of writing a day is about the limit because it is such an intense process. But you would wear yourself out completely. And I write quite quickly. If I’m researching I tend to spend a lot more time each day researching than I would writing. But the actual writing time you can’t really write for more than two or three hours a day I don’t think.

A lot of people are really amazed when I say that I only work for two hours a day but I think that a lot of people who go to offices they spend a lot of time wasted just chatting and standing around the coffee machine and stuff. It’s just one of those things that maybe it is less intense but they spend more time doing it so that’s the way that I feel.

Valerie
Writing non-fiction is very different to writing fiction. Do you have to get into a different mindset or something like that when you  are writing one versus the other?

Michael
Yes, I was always drawn to fiction and I always wanted to be a novelist, as I said so I tried as much as I could to bring some creativity and novelistic aspects to my non-fiction. It used to annoy my editor a lot because I used to keep doing it and a lot of that had to be cut out because I was going to far making things too fictionalized, if you like, or too based on the character and so on.

But with writing fiction it’s basically the great attraction for me has been the desire to lose myself in another world and I just love the aspect of slipping out of reality. It’s like a dream world and you just live in a different world and that is what has always drawn me to it since I was a kid.

It’s still what I enjoy. I love the total immersion in something and its so thrilling. Anybody who is listening to us who’s a writer would know it’s a wonderful feeling when you are just lost in a different world and suddenly a character turns up you never expected or some twist that you never expected. You have all these plans of what you are going to write but it always takes on a life of its own which is what I do it for really.

Valerie
When you lose yourself in those world because often they are historically based do you feel that you need to in the first instance, do a hell of a lot of research first in order for you to immerse yourself into that authentic world? Or do you just let yourself go there and fill in the bits of research later?

Michael
No, I’ve been very lucky in a way because I’ve gone into fiction after having done all those non-fiction books. I remember doing an interview at a British paper when my first novel, Equinox, came out and saying that I couldn’t have written it if it hadn’t been for all of the non-fiction that I had written. And I still think that’s true. I’ve been very lucky in a way because I’ve got all this stuff in my head from all those books that I wrote.

Valerie
That’s a hell of a lot of stuff!

Michael
Yeah and it really helps. I mean obviously I’ve forgotten a lot of it but when it comes to setting something in the Renaissance which is say, The Borgia Ring, I’ve found that I knew a lot of things that I had forgotten that I knew. It didn’t  really take a lot of research just to tidy things up a bit and to refresh my memory and find out a few new bits and pieces.

Researching modern stuff is actually hard in a way because with the Internet you can research historical stuff quite readily but modern stuff is harder. With The Borgia Ring and with The Medici Secret, which was the novel before, I had the huge misfortune to have to go to Venice and Florence and the reason I went there was not to find out about the 15th century or 16th century. It was to find out what the price of a cup of coffee was or what a traffic warden’s uniform looked like or where you could park and where you couldn’t park, and that sort of thing.

Actually those are the sort of things that you can’t find from the Internet and that’s modern research. But finding out about Queen Elizabeth I or about the Catholic conflicts in the 17th century or something, you use a mouse to find that. It’s a mixture and I have been very lucky with that in the past.

I’m now writing the second Pendragon book which the historical strand is set in the 1880’s in the East End and involves Jack the Ripper. I didn’t know anything about Jack the Ripper, really,  or about that period so I’m having to do more research for the one that I’m working on now than I have any of the other novels.

Valerie
So you are obviously writing that one at the moment. What else is on the boil because I have no doubt that there would be more than that?

Michael
Yeah, well I have just delivered the second E-Force book, the follow-up to State of Emergency. So what I did with the current thing that I’m working on is that I did maybe the first hundred pages of the second Pendragon book and then I left it. Then I spent about four or five months writing the second E-Force book, which I have now just delivered. Now I’m going back to carry on from the first hundred pages of the second Pendragon and that will take me up to about February or March.

I don’t have anything organized after that so I’m hoping that my agent in the next few months will be getting things rolling. I’ve got to get some new ideas together and get something else rolling for the next two books.

Valerie
Did you do that on purpose? Write the first hundred pages and sort of left yourself hanging so that you had this thing to go back to?

Michael
Absolutely, yeah, I did it on purpose and it is a very useful thing to do. It’s useful on a smaller level as well. It’s always good to leave something hanging in your writing on the day when you are finishing up so that you can come back to it the next day and you read through it and you want to carry on from where you left off. It’s a bit like the old Saturday morning pictures where they left cliff-hangers. You have to give yourself cliff-hangers.

I did that deliberately because I thought if I don’t do anything and then I go and deliver one book and then I have to start fresh from the beginning of the second book and that is so much harder. At least I’ve sort of got like a hundred pages of stuff then I feel like I’ve actually got stuck into it already.

Valerie
That’s a very practical technique. Would it be safe to assume that you don’t really suffer from writer’s block because judging by your body of work you mustn’t.

Michael
No, I occasionally do. I don’t believe in writer’s block as an idea really. I think that it’s been glamorized and I think that some very wealthy writers might get writer’s block because they have too much time and they don’t have the pressures or the hunger anymore to do things maybe.

But every now and again I hit really awkward patches where I just can’t figure things out and I get in a bit of a state because I hate not being able to work it out. The best thing to do then is to just stand back from it and take a couple of days off because you find that your mind relaxes and then your ideas start to come then.

Valerie
Do you have any interest in exploring other writing genres?

Michael
I think that there aren’t any left are they? No, I’ve been thinking about it occasionally, my kids always say to me, “Write a children’s book.” but I don’t know whether I could really. I think it is a different mindset and I think that you have to have a certain type of mind to write children’s books and I just don’t think that is really me.

I’ve been thinking about slight pure science fiction stuff because I was really into science fiction when I was a teenager and in my early 20’s. I wrote a biography of Isaac Asimov years ago but I haven’t really kept up with science fiction as such. But I have been thinking about a science fiction sort of epic family story going from the present day to several thousand years into the future and following through the evolution of space travel through the family.

Valerie
Well, that’s your next 15 years sorted out then.

Michael
That’s right.

Valerie
Finally what’s your advice to budding authors out there who are listening to this and thinking I’d really like to get my first novel out there?

Michael
Don’t give up. I know that it’s very glib to say such a thing but you can’t. If you give up you don’t have a chance. Believe in yourself and think big. That’s probably one of the biggest pieces of advice that I can give to people is don’t think in a small way. Think in a big way and think about the world. Think about getting an agent in London or published in London rather than just thinking in that small, parochial way that some people do. But in a practical sense but the way to do it is to go via an agent not through a publisher. Publishers don’t read work anymore and in fact many agents don’t anymore but there a few that do.

Valerie
And on that note thank you very much for your time today, Michael.

Michael
Thank you.

---

If you like the idea of writing fiction check out our Creative writing course.

^ back to top