Author Interview: Tiger Grey
Tiger graciously agreed to be interviewed and give us all some more insight into the process of writing No Deadly Thing.
When developing the story, did you lead with the plot or the characters? Definitely character. I’ve been writing about these people for years, playing with their stories. They started out in a very different world, and I translated them to something realistic. I couldn’t have done that as well as I (hopefully) did without a strong basis in character. It’s like being an improv actor, ready to riff on a theme or an idea at any moment. A writer has to be like that with their creations.
When reading No Deadly Thing, I felt very much ‘in the moment’ with your characters. Do you have a particular technique for achieving that immersion while writing? I appreciate your comment about feeling in the moment with these people. I tried to think about how they all experience and process stress, for example, since they get the crap knocked out of them several times both physically and emotionally. Physical responses are something most people can relate to. But it has to be more than that because the character also has to be in contrast or compliment to their environment. The setting adds to the emotional color of a particular scene. That’s why most of us find brutal murder scenes creepier when they’re paired with jaunty music.
It’s a combination of factors. The character can have, say, relatable emotions, but if the character’s backdrop is a blank canvas the immersion can only go so far. Reading and writing are at their best multi-sensory experiences. I’ve always thought of it as layering veils. Each is gossamer thin and of a different color. Perhaps the embellishments are unique to each veil, and some are perfumed with black musk while others are scented with lavender. How the dresser chooses to pair these fabrics with one another defines whether the outfit is sublime or a disaster. I believe a novel should be likewise layered. It’s not only the wearer’s body, or the perfumes, or the embellishments. It is all of those factors, coming together to create something greater than its details.
Your prose has a very strong style. What authors or other storytellers influenced you in developing this? Honestly, I’ve always had a style that combined the stark and the lyrical, and I shoot for things that are cinematic. I notice I also have a sense of what you might call staccato timing,with the scene leading up to a dramatic or punchy end sentence. I tend to open things this way too, with a short and (again, hopefully) compelling lead in.
It’s funny though because as a kid I didn’t really read things that used that voice. I loved Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series, which has a much more lush and fantastical style than I do. I absorbed every Werewolf the Apocalypse rpg book I could get my hands on, and that was a little closer. Those works certainly had a huge influence on me as far as themes and the fact that I tend to write about gritty things like abuse. However, what inspires me most now is non-fiction, television, and movies.
That probably seems odd, that I would draw inspiration from a visual media for a novel. But certain shows and movies have taught me a lot about structure and how to tie plot threads
together. When I was mired in the second draft of No Deadly Thing I was also watching the first season of Dexter, and it occurred to me that I wanted the novel to be sort of like that. Something that could be a Showtime program. Episodic, willing to explore the dark side of human nature, visually arresting. The movie version of Let the Right One In deeply affected me as well. (Not the new remake!) There is an incredible sense of background silence in that movie. Things are coated in snow, muffled. There’s very little dialogue, comparatively. It makes the violent scenes that much more stark, because the environment isn’t cushioning the viewer with a hundred other little sounds. All you hear are screams, because everything else is so still.
It inspired me too because it wasn’t really about the supernatural elements. Those were just a method to tell a story, not the story itself. I tried to capture that too, that the magic is secondary to the characters. I got the idea of the novel’s chapters as a scattering of Polaroid pictures from watching that movie, since all the events in the film had a disjointed surreal quality that I loved.
The portrayal of Ashrinn’s culture and spiritual beliefs are very nuanced. How did you go about your research? Non-fiction played a huge role in my research. I read both
ancient and contemporary Persian/Iranian writings. I learned some
very basic Persian and I intend to keep studying the language in
the future. I read Persian poetry, Persian news, listened to Persian
radio. I studied the words of Zoroaster, and delved in to the Indo-
European language connections between cultures, and also the
mythical connections that bind so many people across the world.
The number of cultures that have a great flood story a la Noah’s
Ark is astounding. The virgin birth, the world tree, fire as a sacred
force, and being part of a divinely chosen people are also concepts
that have a deep root system in the collective unconscious. The
whole series is based around this idea in a way, that all worlds can
relate back to and are part of a world tree.
Interestingly as an Irish person I feel connected to Persian
cultural concepts and see some links there that I would really
like to write an academic work about one day. Flower imagery
and the importance of poetry immediately spring to mind.
Existing between modern day religious beliefs and old rituals
and superstitions. Symbols such as the stag and the serpent. That
helped me forge an emotional connection to what I was reading,
a very basic core I could draw from when writing about Ashrinn’s
struggles and beliefs.
I also listened to my friends, read blogs, and absorbed as
much knowledge as I could about what it means to be biracial.
Ashrinn is, like many urban fantasy characters, caught between
worlds on several fronts. In my social circle there are many people,
including me, who straddle this line in one way or another and I
learned a lot just from being quiet and listening to other people’s
stories. He’s a bisexual male which I think is a particularly invisible
population to belong to. He’s trapped in a life that raises questions
about what it means to be a man.
All of that is influenced by his upbringing and the
close relationship to his devout mother. Again, a focus on
intersectionality is, to my mind, what makes writing great instead
of passable. It cures writerly laziness and makes for characters that
breathe.
It’s also important to remember that on the big issues like
race, sex, and gender, there is no hive mind. Everyone who deals
with these concepts on a daily basis will approach their experience
differently. That’s the beauty of intersectionality. So I never took
one perspective as gospel. Instead, I studied and then infused the
work with what I felt was appropriate to the story. I am not telling
a story about what it means to be a bisexual biracial Persian male
in a way that everyone out there will relate to. I am telling the story
of this one man, who experiences those intersections in a unique
way based on his experiences, cultural impulses, where he lives and
so forth. I can only tell his story. Not everyone’s.
I think of it the way I think of science. Take a concept like
the science of why we fall in love. There is no single study that
will ever answer that question. At its best, scientific papers are
like contributions to a living whole, scales on a dragon that’s too
immense for any of us to truly, fully comprehend. I feel that way
about experiences. Every blog out there that captures a piece of
the Persian experience, for example, is adding to a greater whole.
This book will add to the urban fantasy genre, another scale on the
dragon. Hopefully it will be a particularly iridescent scale.
Oh, and if you’re a writer lucky enough to live in a city with
reasonable public transit, ride the bus. It will do more for your
work than you can imagine. Just listen to how people speak to each
other. I’ve been complimented on Jericho’s dialect and I really
owe it to this method. How do people from different backgrounds
choose their words? In Seattle there are so many diverse people,
who speak so many different languages and believe so many
different things, that a simple bus ride can teach me more than a
book ever could.
When developing the story, did you lead with the plot or the characters? Definitely character. I’ve been writing about these people for years, playing with their stories. They started out in a very different world, and I translated them to something realistic. I couldn’t have done that as well as I (hopefully) did without a strong basis in character. It’s like being an improv actor, ready to riff on a theme or an idea at any moment. A writer has to be like that with their creations.
When reading No Deadly Thing, I felt very much ‘in the moment’ with your characters. Do you have a particular technique for achieving that immersion while writing? I appreciate your comment about feeling in the moment with these people. I tried to think about how they all experience and process stress, for example, since they get the crap knocked out of them several times both physically and emotionally. Physical responses are something most people can relate to. But it has to be more than that because the character also has to be in contrast or compliment to their environment. The setting adds to the emotional color of a particular scene. That’s why most of us find brutal murder scenes creepier when they’re paired with jaunty music.
It’s a combination of factors. The character can have, say, relatable emotions, but if the character’s backdrop is a blank canvas the immersion can only go so far. Reading and writing are at their best multi-sensory experiences. I’ve always thought of it as layering veils. Each is gossamer thin and of a different color. Perhaps the embellishments are unique to each veil, and some are perfumed with black musk while others are scented with lavender. How the dresser chooses to pair these fabrics with one another defines whether the outfit is sublime or a disaster. I believe a novel should be likewise layered. It’s not only the wearer’s body, or the perfumes, or the embellishments. It is all of those factors, coming together to create something greater than its details.
Your prose has a very strong style. What authors or other storytellers influenced you in developing this? Honestly, I’ve always had a style that combined the stark and the lyrical, and I shoot for things that are cinematic. I notice I also have a sense of what you might call staccato timing,with the scene leading up to a dramatic or punchy end sentence. I tend to open things this way too, with a short and (again, hopefully) compelling lead in.
It’s funny though because as a kid I didn’t really read things that used that voice. I loved Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series, which has a much more lush and fantastical style than I do. I absorbed every Werewolf the Apocalypse rpg book I could get my hands on, and that was a little closer. Those works certainly had a huge influence on me as far as themes and the fact that I tend to write about gritty things like abuse. However, what inspires me most now is non-fiction, television, and movies.
That probably seems odd, that I would draw inspiration from a visual media for a novel. But certain shows and movies have taught me a lot about structure and how to tie plot threads
together. When I was mired in the second draft of No Deadly Thing I was also watching the first season of Dexter, and it occurred to me that I wanted the novel to be sort of like that. Something that could be a Showtime program. Episodic, willing to explore the dark side of human nature, visually arresting. The movie version of Let the Right One In deeply affected me as well. (Not the new remake!) There is an incredible sense of background silence in that movie. Things are coated in snow, muffled. There’s very little dialogue, comparatively. It makes the violent scenes that much more stark, because the environment isn’t cushioning the viewer with a hundred other little sounds. All you hear are screams, because everything else is so still.
It inspired me too because it wasn’t really about the supernatural elements. Those were just a method to tell a story, not the story itself. I tried to capture that too, that the magic is secondary to the characters. I got the idea of the novel’s chapters as a scattering of Polaroid pictures from watching that movie, since all the events in the film had a disjointed surreal quality that I loved.
The portrayal of Ashrinn’s culture and spiritual beliefs are very nuanced. How did you go about your research? Non-fiction played a huge role in my research. I read both
ancient and contemporary Persian/Iranian writings. I learned some
very basic Persian and I intend to keep studying the language in
the future. I read Persian poetry, Persian news, listened to Persian
radio. I studied the words of Zoroaster, and delved in to the Indo-
European language connections between cultures, and also the
mythical connections that bind so many people across the world.
The number of cultures that have a great flood story a la Noah’s
Ark is astounding. The virgin birth, the world tree, fire as a sacred
force, and being part of a divinely chosen people are also concepts
that have a deep root system in the collective unconscious. The
whole series is based around this idea in a way, that all worlds can
relate back to and are part of a world tree.
Interestingly as an Irish person I feel connected to Persian
cultural concepts and see some links there that I would really
like to write an academic work about one day. Flower imagery
and the importance of poetry immediately spring to mind.
Existing between modern day religious beliefs and old rituals
and superstitions. Symbols such as the stag and the serpent. That
helped me forge an emotional connection to what I was reading,
a very basic core I could draw from when writing about Ashrinn’s
struggles and beliefs.
I also listened to my friends, read blogs, and absorbed as
much knowledge as I could about what it means to be biracial.
Ashrinn is, like many urban fantasy characters, caught between
worlds on several fronts. In my social circle there are many people,
including me, who straddle this line in one way or another and I
learned a lot just from being quiet and listening to other people’s
stories. He’s a bisexual male which I think is a particularly invisible
population to belong to. He’s trapped in a life that raises questions
about what it means to be a man.
All of that is influenced by his upbringing and the
close relationship to his devout mother. Again, a focus on
intersectionality is, to my mind, what makes writing great instead
of passable. It cures writerly laziness and makes for characters that
breathe.
It’s also important to remember that on the big issues like
race, sex, and gender, there is no hive mind. Everyone who deals
with these concepts on a daily basis will approach their experience
differently. That’s the beauty of intersectionality. So I never took
one perspective as gospel. Instead, I studied and then infused the
work with what I felt was appropriate to the story. I am not telling
a story about what it means to be a bisexual biracial Persian male
in a way that everyone out there will relate to. I am telling the story
of this one man, who experiences those intersections in a unique
way based on his experiences, cultural impulses, where he lives and
so forth. I can only tell his story. Not everyone’s.
I think of it the way I think of science. Take a concept like
the science of why we fall in love. There is no single study that
will ever answer that question. At its best, scientific papers are
like contributions to a living whole, scales on a dragon that’s too
immense for any of us to truly, fully comprehend. I feel that way
about experiences. Every blog out there that captures a piece of
the Persian experience, for example, is adding to a greater whole.
This book will add to the urban fantasy genre, another scale on the
dragon. Hopefully it will be a particularly iridescent scale.
Oh, and if you’re a writer lucky enough to live in a city with
reasonable public transit, ride the bus. It will do more for your
work than you can imagine. Just listen to how people speak to each
other. I’ve been complimented on Jericho’s dialect and I really
owe it to this method. How do people from different backgrounds
choose their words? In Seattle there are so many diverse people,
who speak so many different languages and believe so many
different things, that a simple bus ride can teach me more than a
book ever could.
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