An Interview with David C. Smith
David C. Smith is the author or coauthor of 22 published novels, primarily in the sword-and-sorcery, horror, and suspense genres. Ten of his novels from the 1970s and 1980s are now being revised to be republished by Borgo Press/Wildside Press; the first three—which form the epic fantasy trilogy The Fall of the First World—are now available. They will be followed by Magicians and The Eyes of Night—two modern occult novels featuring the sorcerer David Trevisan—and five sword-and-sorcery novels featuring the character Oron.
In addition, Smith is the author of the screenplay Seasons of the Moon, based on his novel; has coauthored the play Coven House (with , author of the Jeff Award–winning play A Steady Rain); and coauthored the screenplay Magicians (with Joe Bonadonna, author of Mad Shadows and Three Against the Stars), based on the David Trevisan novels.
Smith is also author of the postsecondary English grammar textbook Understanding English: How Sentences Work.
Aside from writing fiction, Smith has worked as an advertising copyeditor and English teacher and for more than twenty years as a scholarly medical editor. He has served on the staff of Neurology, was the editorial production manager of the American Journal of Ophthalmology, and for more than ten years has been the managing editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.
Check out our review of Smith’s latest novel, Sometime Lofty Towers, here. As of this interview, Sometime Lofty Towers is currently crowdfunding.
[GdM] Sometime Lofty Towers
is very much a sword & sorcery novel, what with its bloody fights and grounded characters. You’re also no stranger to the genre, having written countless stories and novels within the space. What drew you to S&S initially and what makes you come back to it again and again?
[David C. Smith] Originally, I wanted to write adventure stories, and actually put down notes for a pirate novel and then a novel about the battle of Teutoborg Forest in 9 AD. But I was restless and got bogged down in doing the required research. I loved history, though, and read quite a bit, and really liked the Conan stories, which had just come out in the Lancer editions. So I began imitating Robert E. Howard, with quite a bit of Jack London and historical fiction writers of the 1950s and 1960s thrown into the mix, and submitted them to the fanzine markets in the very early 1970s while I was in college. I’d write an S&S story, then a horror story, and switch back and forth. Gordon Linzner at Space & Time magazine, particularly, liked my stories and took many of them.
The more of these stories that I wrote—and write—the more I can see that the genre can be taken in many interesting directions, particularly, for me, in terms of characters, as well as the sense of antiquity, bringing alive elements of very deep time and mysteries about that. Atlantis, lost civilizations, archaeological discoveries—I thought when I was in junior high school that I might try to attend the University of Chicago just so I could study the ancient Sumerians and Hittites!
[GdM] Are there any lessons from your previous forays into S&S fiction that you took into Towers?
[David C. Smith] The strength of characterization. How stories are scenes, and scenes are the characters. The ideas you have that come through those characters and their situations, whether or not they create those situations. So going as far back as when I wrote Oron, my first novel, I was very aware that the characters carry everything. There’s the plot, but it doesn’t need to be mechanical. It’s driven by the characters.
In high school, I fell in love with cinema and especially silent movies, so that rhythm we get from drama has a lot to do with how I write, too. Sometimes I’ll just start typing dialogue; that can get the story going, give us insight into characters and their backgrounds. No doubt that’s why Sometime Lofty Towers opens with dialogue. You’re instantly inside the story with those people.
[GdM] What was the initial idea for Towers? What was the writing process like?
[David C. Smith] Believe it or not, the first impulse came from an old made-for-TV movie called The Over-the-Hill Gang, about a bunch of aging cowboys. That and The Wild Bunch. That quickly settled into the idea of two comrades-in-arms who fought in campaigns together before going their separate ways. It didn’t take too long to imagine the setting being one like the taking of the American frontier. The idea sat there for years until my father became very sick with asbestosis, which eventually killed him. The idea came back to me then full force, and I immediately saw him as the character Hanlin. But it took me years, off and on, to finish the story. It was emotional for me.
[GdM] Hanlin is an older character, someone who has led a very long, very violent life. He’s trying to change that, but, damn it, things keep getting in the way, and he’s got to commit violence in order to attain peace. What makes those types of characters interesting? Why did you choose that sort of narrative for Hanlin?
[David C. Smith] Characters caught up in circumstances not of their own making are always interesting, especially if those circumstances are dangerous or troubling. Then you have that person with some miles on him who has to make choices based on what he’s done and where he is now. Any one of us at any given moment is the product of choices we’ve made or did not make, and the things that have happened to us, and in an environment often not of our choosing. What parts of us are called into action when we confront the results of those choices? That’s how we find out what we’re made of.
There’s a line that comes along late in Oron—I come back to that book because I learned a lot about writing by toughing it out, writing that book—where, as strong and capable as he is, Oron realizes that the sorcerer has turned the tables on him and he admits, “I feel weak in my strength.” There’s his tragic flaw. What he’s relied on his own life has failed him. It would be frightening to confront that about oneself.
It’s not dissimilar to the situation my father found himself in. He’d fought in the Second World War, married his high school sweetheart, had the family he wanted and had settled into the career that fit him perfectly, so he’d done everything right, the way the mid-twentieth century measured it, and he still ends up being betrayed by that very system because he worked with asbestos, which the manufacturers had known since the 1920s would slowly kill you. He and the other men he knew who worked in construction, they all died from the effects of that mineral. And most of them lost most of the money they’d saved up paying either for medical care or for lawyers to fight their cases for them. There were no happy endings.
[GdM] One thing I especially enjoyed about your writing was your fight scenes. These scenes feel very surgical, very precise. The wounds inflicted during these battles aren’t superficial: they’re detailed descriptions about which muscles and tendons are damaged. What goals are you trying to accomplish when writing fight scenes like this?
[David C. Smith] That comes from my appreciation of the Iliad, and also many years spent editing orthopaedic trauma articles! I was a medical editor for decades, most of them spent with orthopaedic surgery articles. So that’s where the appreciation for detail comes from. The idea is to make the reader feel those events as deeply and realistically as they feel the other story details, the dialogue and emotions and thoughts. You know, in this type of story, these characters live rough lives, they’ve been in bloody combat and military engagements, and their weapons are edged and pointed. This is their world. It has to be presented in this way. I try to give the reader just enough of it so that, even if it’s jarring or shocking, you feel it as the protagonist does, and it explains a lot about that protagonist.
[GdM] How did you develop the kirangee? How do you go about research? They felt like a deep and well-thought out culture.
[David C. Smith] I depended on what I knew about certain American Indian cultures, both in the East and out West. Where I grew up, in Trumbull County in northeast Ohio, my friends and I could pretty easily find arrowheads and spearheads, just going out and digging. This area was the home primarily of the Iroquois and Wyandot. My dad liked the history of the Revolutionary War period. As a family, we made the trip, at least couple of times when I was young, to Fort Necessity in western Pennsylvania, in Fayette County. The battle there took place early in the French and Indian Wars. Washington lost that one to the Frech and the Huron, the Algonquin—there were a number of tribes. Anyhow, that instilled in me great respect for the indigenous peoples of this country, and I carried around a lot of the research I’d picked up over the years in regard to them, not just in the East but the Plains tribes and the Comanche and Apache.
When the story was finished, I asked a friend of mine, Michael Araujo, to read it through and give me his reaction to how I’d presented the kirangee. He’s a native of New Mexico and has a degree in Anthropology. I’d met him at Howard Days in 2019, and we hit it off. I respect his expertise. He said I did well in creating this culture.
Also, some of their culture reflects that of the early Tibetans. Much of that got lost as I worked on the story, but there’s a bit of the early Tibetan Bon religion in there. The prayer stones that are mentioned come from this influence.
In general, I have great respect for religions or beliefs that respect Nature and find it harder and harder, as I get older, to feel that way about revealed religions, at least as practiced by most people.
[GdM] We grew up in similar hometowns. Does being from the Rust Belt have any impact or influence on your writing?
[David C. Smith] A very great impact I think, yes. If nothing else, I learned to respect people who work hard because everyone in that region seems to be involved in some necessary trade or other. The practical, hands-on livelihoods. I’m not that way, so I respect people like that. But once I graduated college—Youngstown State University—there wasn’t a lot for me to do around there, as I eventually learned, although I regret not going on for my Master’s degree.
The part that hits hardest, of course, is when the mills closed in the late 1970s. One of my uncles, who worked at Sheet and Tube, had to take a job in Cleveland when that plant closed. The effects were devastating. Everyone else in my family has done all right, but the area isn’t at all what it was. There was an identity to that area, there still is, and I think it comes from people who are alert to what could happen at any minute. It was a shock to the system. But the self-awareness and the attitude of people in the Mahoning Valley—that’s definitely part of Hanlin.
Plus, there was the mob. Plenty of interesting stories there!
[GdM] What are you reading now?
[David C. Smith] Just finished lots of sword-and-sorcery short fiction for examples of style, characterization, etc., to use in my upcoming book Cold Thrones and Arcane Arts: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction. Otherwise, in nonfiction, Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell, a history of humanism, and rereading some old stories of M.R. James and Arthur Machen.
[GdM] What fills your time other than writing?
[David C. Smith] Our daughter, Lily, is home from her first year at college, so we have some time now to spend with her. We’re planning day trips to little towns, especially any that have bookstores! And I do have a stack of books I need to get to. More books than time to read them, as usual.
[GdM] What’s next for you? Do you have any projects that you’re working on now or are being published soon?
[David C. Smith] I’m just about finished with a book I’m calling Cold Thrones and Arcane Arts: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction. It will be coming out from Pulp Hero Press before the end of the year. It’s a review of the elements of storytelling as they’re reflected in stories from the current boom in S&S. Character, style, all of that, but I wanted to emphasize the writers working now. We know all about Howard and Wagner and Leiber. With all due respect, let’s start paying attention to the talent that’s out there today. They’re breaking new ground.
I also have to finish reviewing the pages of The Shadow of Sorcery—the proper title of that book—which Wildside will be releasing.
And my Howard biography, Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography, is being released soon from Pulp Hero Press, in both soft cover and a hardcover edition for libraries. I revised parts of it to clear up some errors in light of recent information and to add a bit to some of the notes in the back.
Then I really want to start work on some short stories, horror stories! Plus somewhere around here I have the synopsis for a possible new Oron novel.
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