Hello again dear reader or listener, today I have for you what will hopefully be the first of a series for BWG! You may have seen Vanity Fair’s “Notes on a Scene” interviews with movie directors, where they get to break down what went into filming a particular scene in their movies, sometimes alongside their leading actors. I’m a big fan of those types of interviews as I am always curious and fascinated by the various forms of the storytelling process. I’ve also been a big fan of my friends over on SFFAddicts doing something very similar with their Writing Masterclass segments! Don’t we all wonder what goes through an author’s head while writing sometimes?
So, I thought I’d bring those two things together, and ask authors if they’d be willing to break down a chapter from one of their books with me! Because, you see, the thing with reviewing in my case is that I’d love to rave in detail about all the things that made a book great for me, but I also need to balance that with not spoiling anything for those who haven’t read it yet! But what if that weren’t the case? What if I got to pick an author’s brain fully and share it with those who have either read the book already or those who don’t mind the occasional spoiler?
For the sake of those who may be intrigued but might still want to experience the story as fresh as possible, we’ll try to avoid any extremely major plot reveals or, if unavoidable, warn you beforehand which bits will be the greatest offenders.
Book Blurb
Fifteen years ago the feeders rose from the shadows to transform the world into a graveyard. The few survivors exist in fortified settlements surrounded by the empty ruins of a destroyed civilization. For years the citizens of New City Redoubt have relied on an elite cadre of Crossers to navigate the feeder infested wasteland between settlements in order to trade for vital supplies. But the Outside is becoming ever more dangerous, and the ranks of the Crossers grow thinner with every crossing.
Layla, only a child when the Feeding destroyed the old world, spends her days scavenging the ruins for valuable scrap and her nights helping her adoptive family eke a living from the Redoubt’s only movie theatre. Now, with her father slowly dying, Layla resolves to join the Crossers to retrieve the medicine that can save him. Smart, ruthless, and fast on her feet, Layla quickly gains the respect of her fellow Crossers. But, in a world lost to the deadliest predators, can even the most cunning prey survive?
The Feeding – Chapter 10
My first guest in this endeavour is none other than Anthony Ryan, whose work has coincidentally been a first for a lot of my reviewing milestones. His Raven’s Shadow trilogy was the first book review I ever wrote six years ago and, thanks to our wonder-boss Beth Tabler here, Mr. Ryan was the first author I got to interview for the blog when he released his first foray into post-apocalyptic thrillers with Red River Seven! It feels fitting then that I’d kick off this new segment with him, and he was gracious enough to accept my invite! Settle in dear reader or listener, for we are about to have some storytelling craft fun!
[This is your blanket warning for very mild spoilers ahead]
Short recap of events prior to this chapter:
Protagonist Layla needs to become a Crosser in order to find lifesaving medicine for her adoptive father. This tends to be the main drive behind every Crosser as they have the right to carry back with them anything else they can, on top of what their missions demand of them. Before that though, Layla has had to go through Selection, the qualifying tests and then bootcamp that pushed her past her limits, both physical and moral. She was taught to discern the different kinds of Feeders and their weaknesses, mainly mercury filled bullets, as well as how to navigate maps and survival situations. Chapter 10 then, is the moment it has all led to, Layla’s first crossing, and finally getting to see the outside world past the walls of the Redoubt.
Let’s start from your writing process for this book a little more in general:
For those completely new to your work and to The Feeding, how did this story first come about?
I’ve always had a fascination for post-apocalyptic stories. I couldn’t say when exactly it began, but I recall watching – at far too young an age – a somewhat terrifying TV series called ‘Survivors’ which was about a group of people struggling in the aftermath of a deadly, civilisation destroying pandemic. Then there are the collected plays and TV series of British writer Nigel Kneale, most particularly his Quatermass series from 1979, which I was also too young to be watching. I think what piques my interest is that the world in post-apocalyptic stories is familiar in much of its physicality and culture, but also transformed into something threatening. The stripping away of those features of modern life we all take for granted – medicine, law enforcement, energy on demand, running water etc – forces fundamental changes upon the characters, sometimes positive, often negative.
My first foray into the genre was Red River Seven, a mix of memory-loss thriller and post-apocalyptic horror which owed a lot to Nigel Kneale and Joseph Conrad. With The Feeding I wanted to explore a larger scope whilst also indulging one of my other pop-culture fascinations: the vampire. There reasons why vampires have persisted in the popular imagination for so long can be debated endlessly, but I think it’s the combination of the mythic and the visceral. Vampires are essentially immortal which offers a huge amount of potential plot ideas for writers, enabling depictions to vary from the noble to the feral. But Vampires also only survive through the act of killing. They are predators who take the form of humans and multiply through infection. When you consider vampires in those terms, the leap to a post-apocalyptic scenario becomes an easy one.
Is there something special about this chapter that you can remember thinking or doing while writing it?
I recall doing some research into abandoned places and how they recover from human occupation. The ruins of Chernobyl have become a singular case study in what happens when people just disappear overnight. The speed with which nature reasserts its dominance is remarkable – I think I read somewhere that, based on what happened at Chernobyl, if humans vanished from Earth all traces of our civilisation would be gone within ten thousand years, leaving only our bones.
[Life After People is a great series that tackles that, dear reader, and both Mr. Ryan and I agree it is as fascinating as it is sobering.]
Did you plot out the story beats necessary for it or did you just have a general goal in mind and “let it happen”?
I plan my books using a chapter-by-chapter outline. The entry for each chapter tends to be pretty sparse – short descriptions of the action and notes on the setting, plus any important plot points I wanted to outline. The outline for The Feeding was a lot more dialogue heavy than most of my books, though the summary for this chapter was even more short than most.
Did this chapter make it to the end of the writing and editing process intact or did it go through significant changes throughout drafts?
I’m tempted to say that nothing I write survives the editing process intact, but comparing the finished chapter to the outline, I was surprised to find a whole dialogue exchange was completely unchanged. Although, it is a pretty brief section where Strang and the other experienced crossers are discussing their alternative routes.
I think writers often have a distorted view of how much a draft can change in edits because it can be an exhaustive process, requiring repeated revisions of the same text. We tend to remember the hard graft bits and forget the others which required only a few typo fixes. With this particular chapter, I don’t recall much rewriting, just the usual tidying up.
Do you write everything out in order or skip over sections to get back to later?
I always write in order, even with books that have multiple POVs. For me the story is the most important thing. If I wrote out of order I’d be worried about losing track of the plot.
A valid concern! And now for the deeper dive:
What are the key elements you wanted this chapter to have?
Chapter 10 is the first time we get to see the Outside through Layla’s eyes. Although she’s had a hard life in the Redoubt, the destroyed world beyond its walls is on a completely different scale in terms of the unfamiliar landscape and the danger it harbours. I wanted to emphasize the terrible consequences of the feeders’ rise and just how complete their destruction of the world had been. I was also keen to reflect the way nature reclaims its own when humans disappear from a landscape, hence the trees growing within the shells of old buildings. It imbues the atmosphere with a sense of human fragility and hopefully increases the tension felt by the reader.
Do you have a favorite scene/section in it that you were particularly looking forward to writing?
I liked the terseness of the dialogue between Strang and the other veterans. They speak in deliberately clipped sentences with no words wasted. It was a way of instilling some urgency into the scenario whilst also highlighting the extreme danger the characters are in at all times.
In what specific way has Layla’s point of view informed this chapter? It makes sense for her to function as a guide tool for the reader to experience and focus on things that a veteran crosser wouldn’t care about anymore, for instance.
Like Layla, the reader is seeing the Outside with fresh, nervous eyes. To some extent she knows what’s out there, having heard about it all her life, but direct experience is always different to whatever your imagination comes up with. I wanted to convey the feeling that Layla was learning from the veteran crossers with every step, whilst also beginning to understand the realities of life outside the Redoubt’s walls. She knows that, in order to complete this crossing, she has to learn fast.
We can consider this chapter a sort of gateway into the continuation of the story or, arguably, as the true start of Layla’s journey. You have a lot of anticipation built into this moment and there are significant changes in the supporting characters. How do you navigate and gauge the extent of that change?
I wanted to establish the roles each of the veterans plays in the group. Strang is the leader, Eylsa the mentor to the new recruits, and Romer the taciturn, ever vigilant scout. It’s also the start of Layla’s relationships with her fellow new recruits and I wanted to drop some clues as to how this would develop. In the flashback she resists the opportunity to get closer to Luce, something which may or may not change in the course of their shared journey. Layla also already has an antagonistic relationship with Pitt which is further underlined in this chapter when she taunts him about seeing something moving in one of the buildings. That moment also reveals something about her: she recognises Pitt really shouldn’t have been chosen for this job which makes him a possible obstacle to success.
Speaking of the various team members, did you also have some form of outline for every individual character, in order to make sure they each met your goals for them, or was it a more Layla centered process? Was it ever just a case of tweaking whose presence would work as the better foil in that moment?
Although I outline my work, the least detailed parts of the outline are always the characters – usually it’s confined to name, gender, basic appearance and, maybe, some background detail. All of this is highly likely to change in the course of writing, so I don’t spend too much time on it during planning. Sometimes I’ll have a clear idea of who a character is before I start writing, but oftentimes not – they tend to evolve as the story progresses. This is why I don’t view writing plot and character as two separate disciplines, or some kind of balancing act. Plot is character and character is plot.
For The Feeding, when I look back over the outline I’m surprised by how similar the characters are to the sketchy details in the outline. It may be because I was thinking about this book for a long time before I wrote it, which allowed the characters to grow in my imagination. Also, conceiving them was suffused with the added frisson of weirdness that arises from knowing I was going to kill most of them off. In order for their deaths to have some impact they had to be credible as individuals in their own right rather than just adjuncts to Layla’s journey. Each member of the team has their own story, even though for Eylsa and Romer it’s only vaguely referred to. I have written out entire characters in other books, but it’s a rarity and I certainly didn’t do it in this one. However, some, like Dresh, ended up getting less screen time than I expected, mainly to avoid bogging down the plot.
Why was it important to subvert expectations in this story beat at this time? After all, it is a very tense few pages but in reality nothing truly dangerous happens which could almost lull you into a false sense of security.
If Layla had been pitched into an immediate fight scene it would rob the story of tension at this juncture. Also, like Hitchcock, I’m fond of upping the suspense where possible. Although the initial part of their journey is uneventful, the reader is left in no doubt that they are traversing a highly threatening environment.
What is the core of this chapter then, for you?
I wanted to introduce a sense of momentum early in this section of the narrative, so there’s a fair amount of what authors often refer to as ‘shoe leather’, i.e. describing characters moving from one place to another. It’s something that can get boring pretty quickly so I did my best to liven it up with the descriptions of the surrounding destruction and brief snatches of dialogue. During this chapter and what follows, Layla and her companions are rarely still for very long, and any pauses are only ever a brief respite.
Can we say there is a noticeable difference between how Layla enters this chapter and how she leaves it? She is bound to be a different person by the end of her journey but how noticeable do you think this change is at this very first stage of development?
Her determination to see this journey through regardless of cost is unchanged by the end of the chapter, but she’s starting to understand the risks. She always knew it wouldn’t be easy, but the constant tension of the veterans has heightened her awareness to a certain degree. It’s perhaps a subtle change, but important, and one that grows as the story develops.
Absolutely, which is why I picked this chapter to delve into as well! You do subtle buildups really well and they ultimately form a full picture that makes perfect sense for each character by the end.
With that bit of final fangirling done, I think I’ve picked your brain enough for this round. Is there anything you’d like to share about any upcoming work you have in store for us?
This coming year, I have the release of the third and final book in the Age of Wrath Trilogy – Upon the Forge of Battle – which should be out in the US and UK in August. There are also two books coming out towards the end of the year which, unfortunately, I can’t talk about yet. Hopefully, I’ll be able to announce something soon.
Oooh my eyes will be peeled then! Thank you so much for taking the time to do this with me today!
Many thanks for asking me to be the inaugural guinea pig – this was a fun and thought-provoking exercise.
Until next time, dear reader,
Eleni A.E.
Anthony Ryan, also working under the pen name A.J. Ryan, took up writing full time after the success of his first novel Blood Song, Book One of the Raven’s Shadow trilogy. He has also written the Draconis Memoria trilogy and the Raven’s Blade duology, the sci-fi noir series Slab City Blues, and The Seven Swords series of fantasy novellas. You can find more about each of Anthony Ryan’s books as well as updates etc. on his website https://anthonyryan.net/ , or on his socials, Instagram @anthonyryan286, and Bluesky @anthonyryan.bsky.social.
