Today, Graham McNeill tells me why he loves hopping between genres and styles in his writing, from novels to short stories to his upcoming graphic novel.
Most of my writing career has been spent in long form novels set in the grim and perilous worlds of Warhammer, but I often like to venture beyond that into other forms of writing, genres, and tones for variety and texture. What I mean by that is I need to feel like I’m exercising different writerly muscles when I embark on different projects, whether it’s a novel, a comic, a short story, a screenplay, or whatever. I feel this is good for me and the reader, as it helps keep things new and exciting. It means that when I return to each different genre or project type, I’m enthused to explore it again and not likely to get pigeonholed into one corner. Likewise, as a reader, I like to vary my diet of books between SF, Fantasy, Horror, Crime, Non-Fiction, etc., so I don’t ever get tired of one genre or writer.
The reason I do this with my writing is that each project employs different sensibilities and creative choices, whether it’s the discipline of the word count in a short story, where you want to get in and out of Dodge with speed and clarity, or a novel where you can afford multiple sub-plots and be (a little) more self-indulgent. Then you have screenplays, which have a very definitive structure and format, where all the emphasis is on the dialogue and providing a ‘blueprint’ for the folk who have to shoot what you’ve written. When it comes to comics, I love working with an artist to bring the words on the page to life and leaning on their talents for how to lay out the page. With comics, you also have the fun challenge of pacing the story in such a way that the big reveals, splash pages, and so on all come at the right time on the reader’s page turns.
It’s the same with genre and mythologies, I love to mix and match or slam together wildly different origins to see what comes out. So, you’ll get books like Dead Sky, Black Sun, that fuse a grimdark SF tale with Barker-esque body horror, or A Thousand Sons, that’s a story of space wizards in a gothic tragedy of hubris.
That variety is what I had in mind when I first started developing the ideas for Wolves of Winter. I wanted to write an epic story of Viking warriors that ventured into magical and supernatural territory, which combined my love of various mythologies. As much as I love Roman, Greek, and Egyptian mythologies, I didn’t feel they were the right fit, and given that as a kid in Scotland, I’d grown up on stories of Celtic mythology, with its Kelpies, Selkies, and the Tuath Dé Danann, that seemed entirely appropriate a mash-up. Bringing the grand mythologies of the Norse and the Celts together allowed me to delve into both cultures in a way that felt real and authentic (and, most importantly, exciting!).
It’s my hope that, so long as I stay enthused for my craft by allowing for that blending of story types and genres I can keep entertaining my readers in exciting and unexpected ways for many years to come.
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Graham McNeill is a Scottish, LA-based, award-winning, New York Times best-selling author, screenwriter, and games developer. Over the years, Graham has written for numerous global franchises, working on Riot’s League of Legends and on their Emmy-Award-winning Netflix show, Arcane; Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Horus Heresy settings; Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft universe, and the Dark Waters trilogy for Fantasy Flight Games Arkham Horror range. To date, Graham has penned forty-five novels, ninety-plus short stories, audio dramas, and comics. His novel, Empire, won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2010, and four of his novels in the Horus Heresy series have gone on to become New York Times best-sellers.
