Interview with Author Michael McClellan - Part 1

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me Shortly is Mike McClellan. He is the author of the book the Sand Sea, which we published earlier this year through StoryGrid Publishing. It's an epic fantasy novel, and Mike and I recently were able to sit down and have a conversation about what it was like for him to write this book, what it was like for him to work with Sean on this, and what it looks like working on such a huge project, especially because this is Mike's first book. So it's a really great conversation. We're going to cut this up into three episodes because it lasted pretty long, but I think you're really going to enjoy it. And for me, it was fun to have this conversation with him and to talk about all this story grid stuff with another writer who is under the Sean coin umbrella. I also wanted to mention here, I really appreciate everybody's patience as we kind of figure out what we're going to do with the podcast next. We've obviously tried out a couple different experiments, including just not publishing. So we're going to do this for three weeks, and then Sean and I will be back going over my next novel. I'm a little over halfway through working on it, so he's going to. He's looking that over now, and then we're going to record on that, and then we're going to just continue to experiment and try some new things with the podc. So I appreciate you hanging in there with us and continuing to listen, but for now, let's jump in and get started with this episode.

Before we really jump into the nitty gritty of how you wrote this book, I would love to just hear the story about how this book came about, because you always hear these things, like, you know, this person worked on a project for so long, and in your case it was, you worked on this for 12 years. And sometimes I'm like, what? How did that even start? Like, when I think about a writing project taking 12 years, how do you even start something like that? So thinking back all the way to the beginning of what became the Sand Sea, how did you start this project? Had you ever written before? Had you been writing fiction and then this became your obsession? Or was this your first foray? How did you get into this?

Tim, that's a great question. And look, like many things, there's A lot of different ways to answer that. So I'll try to answer it the simplest way possible. I've been writing most of my life in terms of nonfiction and articles, and I used to be a blogger, et cetera. But In September of 2008, I had become friends with Steven Pressfield a few years before, and I was sitting with him at a dinner in Corona del Mar, California. And he had, not too long ago, written Gates of Fire and Tides of War and Killing Rommel and a bunch of his historical fiction. And I was a huge fan of his historical fiction because it was.

In a different way than the history that I had been reading, brought the events to life. I knew a lot about the Spartans, but I never had a sense of what it would be like to be a Spartan until I read Gates of Fire. And it did for me sort of what Michael Scharres the Killer Angels did about the Battle of Gettysburg. It made it real, it made it tangible. And so I had had this idea in my head that there was a book I wanted to read that brought forth the first era of globalization in a similar kind of way. And that era goes roughly from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 to the beginning of World War I with the guns of August of 1914. And I thought, well, look, I'm a. I'm a guy who can write articles, et cetera, but why don't I see if Pressfield would be interested in writing.

A book about essentially the Zulu War, about Khartoum in 1885, and ending with Winston Churchill as a 23 year old at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. And ultimately Steve said, as he saw sort of the fire in my eyes, he said, mike.

I don't need to write this book. You need to write this book. And I think, is it possible I kind of had that idea all along? Maybe. But I think really it was Steve sort of giving me that belief that it was possible, that it was something that I could do. So when he got home that night, he drove back up the 405 freeway, back up to LA, to Malibu, where he lives. And he sent me an email. And the email was called Tattooed on youn Brain. And he basically wrote to me this long email. And he said, mike.

You need to realize that this idea you have is a real idea. And you need to never. You need to never surrender. You need to never quit. And don't. Don't allow resistance to stop you from doing it. Because what I saw.

In your eyes and what I heard in your voice today was something real. And I've been doing this a long time, and you need to do it. And I believed him. Like a crazy person, I believed him. And so I started writing straight historical fiction. In the beginning, that's what it began as. And the problem with me writing straight historical fiction was that. And look, you find out what kind of writer you're supposed to be. I think by the act of writing, right, that the muse ultimately has to guide you. And in the beginning, I started writing straight historical fiction. And it was. The problem with it is that it was gorgeous. Taxidermy, right? It was totally accurate. It was beautiful, but it was dead. It wouldn't. It was not a story that was. That was soaring, that was flying. And so for me, about 2013, after I've been working on this as a weekend warrior for five years, I had this insight that I needed to.

Write a story that was along the lines of the great epic fantasy fiction books that I had been obsessed with as a child, like Lord of the Rings. And if I could fuse that with my era of historical love, that first era of globalization, that that would be a book that I had never seen before, and it would be the book that I most wanted to read. Because what had always driven me to be attracted to the first era of globalization was not the specifics of the history itself. It was the.

Issues, the.

Themes that underlay that era, which was the courage of the men and women on both sides that were thrust into these clash of civilization type moments. And I wanted to bring that to life. And I realized that I could capture that theme perhaps even better if I was. Was writing in a world that mirrored our own Gilded Age or peak of the British Empire.

But that was not constrained to the historical details. And so that's the long answer to your very short question.

Well, you know, it's been interesting because when I saw you had a degree in history, you know, my dad, when I went to college, he's like, the only degree I'll help you pay for is one where you can make money when you get out of college. And so. So I ended up getting a computer science degree. And there was a point where I had a. I had a philosophy class, and it was like an honors philosophy class. And I really enjoyed it. And the professor was like, you know, you should. You should major in philosophy. I said, well, what can I do with philosophy? He said, well, teach philosophy. I'm like, I'm good, you know, and so I just thought it was interesting that you had this degree in history. And then I've heard you a couple times, like just you mentioned, I think it was like some obscure battle in Africa. And just off the top of your head, you, like, named all the players on both sides. Exactly. What happened? Like, what, what is it? Have you always been that into history that it just like you just dive in and just consume it all and remember, I mean, the memory of it has been. What's been the most fascinating, like, is that all? Have you always been like that?

The short answer, Tim, is yes. I've loved history since I was a little boy. And I actually found. I probably should do an Instagram post on this in the next couple weeks, because I found a report, a quote paper that I had written as a fifth grader and it was on the Medieval Age. And I realized that it was actually my first work of historical fiction because some of the things I wrote in there were not true. But the energy and the passion and the quality of the writing in this thing. As a fifth grader, I was actually kind of astounded. And it had artwork in it, it had drawings of knights. I'm talking about the Mongols and the Turks, which is probably not something that a lot of fifth graders growing up in Southern California are thinking about as part of the Medieval age. And so I was the kid who as a 9 year old, 10 year old, was asking my parents or my aunts and uncles or my grandparents for Civil War battlefield books for Christmas. And they were like, what? What is he serious? To my parents, and they said, oh, he's deadly serious and he will read them all. And I think.

I think the.

Drama of history has always drawn me, the sense that this is humanity's real story. I once heard it said that history is where philosophy meets reality.

I think that's always captured me. And I've also always believed that. I've never bought into the concept that history is merely the interplay of impersonal forces. That sort of the end of.

Tolstoy's War and Peace, where he sort of says that, look, if one man wasn't there, some other would have been. I don't know that I believe that. I think I've always believed that the or the woman that is there in the moment is critical, that it is decisions made by individuals at any given time. I mean, for example, Abraham Lincoln. Without Lincoln, I don't think the Union would have been preserved. I think the Civil War could have and would have gone differently. But for his.

Heroism and the iron in his spine and his wisdom and his thoughtfulness and his ability to do what was necessary to, to preserve the Union and to win. I think the same is true of Churchill in 1940. Right. Without Churchill, I don't know that Hitler falls. And I think it was those kinds of moments of heroism that always captured me and really sort of never let me go since I was a little kid.

Yeah, I just watched Hamilton last night because it just came on Disney. And whenever I read anything or see a story or watch a miniseries or whatever on people like that, I'm like, those were just. I'm so used to them, almost like they're not real. They're these characters that did these things. Almost like that feeling of like, this is how it's supposed to happen. And then they were just like.

People doing the best they could, making decisions, having no idea the long term ramifications of what, you know, that in 2020 there would be, you know, a group of judges still making decisions based on interpretations of what they wrote in the newspaper. You know, and so it's just so interesting to me.

I don't know. That's just what struck me so that when you were saying that, I was just, just literally yesterday was thinking that as I'm watching this, these are just, these were just people, you know, just having just like people I know now that are trying to make the best decisions. Except they were at this moment in time.

Anyway. So back to the writing side. So when you started thinking about. So you made the switch from like, okay, I'm now going to not just, I'm not going to write historical fiction, something like Gates of Fire. I'm going to actually make up my own world. Where did you start with that? Did you start with like, okay, here's a group of characters I want to write about? Did you start with like, here's the type of world I want to create?

Did you already have locked into your mind kind of the time, the time, you know, that you wanted to write in. Where did you start? Because now all I see is like these intricate maps and like all the characters and the history. And then hearing you, the conversations we've had where you tell me these intricate histories of these characters, like, I see the final product, but where did you kind of wade into that?

So let me unpack. That's a really awesome question. And there's a lot in there. The first answer is, you're absolutely right that the iceberg principle is real in writing and in particular in fiction. Right. Which is that the final product is the 10% above the surface. But there's 90% that's underneath the water that we don't see. But it's that 90% percent that makes that 10% possible.

I began with.

A streak of lightning that basically struck my mind on a weekend. And in the early years, I was not yet writing every single day. I was a weekend warrior who would go and I'd spend seven, eight, nine hours in my office, my garage office, and. And would work and work and work, and then I wouldn't work until the next week. But.

What it began with was Otto von Fanfar. I saw him.

Standing on a desert. A desert floor with a companion on either side of him, looking up at this horde of adversaries.

Of course, there is a moment in the Sand Sea, fairly late in the Sand Sea, in which that is fully realized. But it was that vignette, that vision. I once heard it said that George R.R. martin began game of Thrones simply with a vision of a lord and his children and a giant dying wolf, and the pups of the giant dying wolf, which we now, of course, know was a dire wolf in which the lord's children each receive one of the pups. I believe that. I believe that because for me, it was the vision of Otto von Fanfar that started the fantasy component at an absolute sprint into the Sand Sea. And so basically what happened was I had. The.

Demissaries in the San Sea are loosely based on the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, and they've always fascinated me. But the peak of the Janissaries was really cent. Before. It was in the Suleiman the Magnificent, who was. I think he was the third Ottoman sultan after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. So he was 15. Early 1500s was his peak.

I think it was Audovon as a sort of fictional fantasy Janissary brought forward into the 19th century. That. That.

That was the great moment. That was the watershed moment. And that day when that happened, when Otto von Fanfar came to me, I think I wrote something like five or six thousand words in a weekend, which for me is a ton.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well. And he wasn't even like. While he was a major character, he wasn't like the pivotal characters, the, like, you know, the. So. But that's where it started was with this character that you then built out from there.

Yeah, it was. It was almost like Otto Von gave me the aesthetic.

Right, okay.

He gave me. It was, what is Otto Von's world? Right. And Selina came not long after Otto Von. But it's. You know, the Sand Sea is really a Fusion of historical fiction of a Gilded Age America and.

Late Victorian England paired with this.

Invented Middle east that is very, very, very different from our Middle East. Right. The religions, for example, of the Sand Sea are. Are dramatically different from, say, Islam. Right?

Yeah.

But what I wanted to do with that was I realized that if I could take Otto Von's world and have the theme of Autobahn's world be.

The place where ancient wisdom still exists, but is fighting to still exist against tyranny.

And in the west.

There is a group of people who are seeking out true wisdom against the sort of illusion of modernity and the greed of sort of domination and empire. Then we could have an incredibly interesting story when those heroes from east and west meet. And Selina and Otofan, of course.

Are characters that demonstrate the reality of ancient wisdom that is, of course, being persecuted in the very land from which they come. And then Peter and Hannah and to a lesser extent, Jack are those that are leaving the order of the west and moving into the chaos of the Sand Sea, but in search of, whether they know it or not, this ancient wisdom that is actually truth beyond the chaos.

That's interesting. So when you started.

So when you say that day that Otto came to mind, you wrote five or six thousand words, is that words that never made it into the book because it was just you trying to kind of fumble your way through it? Or were you.

Because I guess for me, you know, I came into writing at such. You know, I had been writing fiction off and on for years, but when I really took it seriously, I came into it in a way that's probably pretty unique. You know, I started doing this podcast with Sean. He started critiquing my writing, and then we worked through a story basically scene by scene from the start, where, to me, this is something that you almost like. The way that I view it, so correct me if I'm wrong, is you started basically coming up with, like, chunks of it, and you were having to kind of fit them together because you had all these kind of random things. This didn't seem like a book where you just started on page one and just, like, wrote your way to the end. Is that. Would that. Is that accurate? Because I'm. I still try to wrap my head around, because what's the. In the end manuscript was what, about 280,000 words? Is that accurate?

Yeah, I think it's like 285,000 words. I think that's right around that.

So, like, how did you go about.

Writing such a long book? Like, were you. Did you write pieces of it and kind of fit it together.

Did you just kind of start writing and it all just kind of came to you from start to finish? Like, how did you start piecing this thing together?

It's a great question, Tim, and.

It has. There's many ways to answer that, and again, I'll try and answer it in the most straightforward way possible.

The story evolved over time, and many of the best parts came on their own. And what do I mean by that? What I mean is they were moments where I was writing, and.

The way the scene was going was completely unexpected to me as the writer in that moment. And so in order to create the art. And when I think of a big book, I think of art and architecture, right? And the art to me is the scene by scene moment, right? It's the picture you're painting for the reader at any given time. It's the dialogue. It's all of those things that are.

Suspending our disbelief that makes you forget about the author entirely. And all you're doing is you are watching the movie in your brain as you're reading these pages. That's the art. And the art for me, went all over the place. Yes, the final was 285,000 words, but to get that 285, there was probably 1.2 or 1.4 million words ultimately written over the 12 years. And the 5,000 or 6,000 words that were written that weekend, the first weekend that Otto von Fanfar came to exist, I would say none of those words made it into the final manuscript, but 100% of the concept of those words made it into the final. And the concept of Nemekar, Osgar, and Olgur, AKA Captain of Fire, Captain of Bow, and Captain of Lance, that came very, very quickly as I started constructing what does Otto Von's Demissary Legion look like? And it's going to have three components, and some are going to be gunmen with these kinds of weapons, some are going to be bowmen with these kinds of weapons and these kinds of skills, and some are going to be Lancers. And they all started arriving on the scene. And so one of the. To move from that incredibly long process of world building and creation to actually creating something, actually refining it, to something that could be a book that people would be able to read and enjoy. That was the incredibly long, ongoing editorial process that began before I ever met Sean and started implementing the story grid onto the story, but.

Gained incredible velocity once I started working with Sean. And we started really tightening that architecture to make the art of each scene, be able to work in the context of the overall story.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. For everything Story Grid related, check out story grid storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the Story Grid universe. Also, make sure you go to storygrid.com books to see all of the titles, including the Sand Sea, which We've released through StoryGrid Publishing. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any of the past episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast if you would like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter or StoryGrid. Lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at Story Grid. We will see you next week.