Interview: Steve Lyons

Interview with the author of Crooked World.

The Crooked World sounds as though it could have been a copyright nightmare. Were you under any restrictions other than using real character names?

It's not something I looked into that closely, to be honest. I assumed that Warner Brothers' lawyers would have better things to do than complain about a Doctor Who book.

The cast of The Crooked World were originally meant to be archetypes rather than specific cartoon characters. Boss Dogg, for example, is a cross between several canine authority figures (Deputy Dawg, Augie Doggy, Yabba-Doo), while Streaky Bacon has a bit of Porky Pig and a bit of Elmer Fudd in him.

It wasn't entirely deliberate, then, that some characters veered dangerously close to being straightforward copies of specific copyrighted creations. But hopefully, parody laws should cover that. Or something.

If Doctor Who were to be made in cartoon form, which animation team/studio would you like to see behind it?

I don't think I'd like to see it made in animation form at all. But if it had to be, then maybe the people behind the 90's Batman cartoon.

Would you rather live in a normal or 'crooked' world - and why?

Well, the moral of The Crooked World is that the normal world, for all its flaws, is better - so, I suppose I ought to say that. Appealing as the idea of meeting the Scooby-Doo gang is, I think I'd get a bit fed up with all the irons in the face, etc., after a while. And I couldn't have become a writer in a cartoon world, which is what I've always dreamed of being.

Which fictional character would you be most interested in meeting?

I know it's a naff, predictable answer, but I can only think that it has to be the Doctor. Having said that, I'd almost certainly die during our first visit to Skaro or wherever, so it wouldn't be a very good idea to go travelling with him.

You had the possibly daunting task of bringing back Mel for audio adventure The Fires of Vulcan. Do you think that you've created a more successful Mel than the TV version?

I always thought that Mel, as originally conceived, was a perfectly okay companion, and Bonnie Langford is a great actress. But some writers, when they saw who was playing the character, seemed to end up writing her as a grown-up Violet Elizabeth from Just William.

They turned all of Mel's positive qualities into negative ones: instead of being honest, she became a goody-goody; instead of being enthusiastic, she became pushy; instead of being bright, she became a know-all.

I just tried to go back to basics and present her in a more positive light. I think Bonnie was keen to play a stronger character too - she didn't want to scream!

Historical Doctor Who stories in both the books and audios seem to be undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment - and you are involved in many of them. What's their appeal to you?

Not having to work as hard to create a setting!

Actually, that's not really true. With a historical story, you do start with a full story laid out in front of you - but the difficult bit is to then add the Doctor and his companions to that story, and make them the most important people in it, without changing anything that's already been written. They can't just turn up and watch!

Having said that, I think it's the fact that historicals are based on actual events that makes them more appealing. They feel more 'real', for obvious reasons, and I think that makes you care more about what the characters are going through.

At one point, when I was writing The Witch Hunters, I desperately wanted to change the ending to let Rebecca Nurse survive - but of course, I couldn't do that. Plus, there's always that old saying about truth being stranger than fiction - and if someone had made up all the details of the Salem witch trials, I think people would have complained that they were too incredible.

The historicals have also given me an opportunity to explore how time travel works in the Doctor Who universe, which is something that was rarely examined in the TV stories. I've enjoyed doing that.

Having written so many books and audios, do many original pitches resurface in different forms if they don't succeed first time around?

Oh, yes. The Witch Hunters was turned down three times by Virgin before the BBC published it - twice as a New Adventure and once in exactly the form that it finally saw print.

I kept reworking it and sending it back, because it was the One Big Doctor Who Book I always wanted to write, and I was always confident that it would work. As it turns out, it's easily my most popular book (so far - I think The Crooked World is better, but all the reviews aren't in yet!), which made me feel less guilty about going on to rework Salvation - another rejected New Adventure - and sending that to the BBC too.

There were also a couple of proposals which, in hindsight, I thought Virgin were absolutely right to reject. But rather than waste them, I took the bits that did work and turned them into short stories for the first two Short Trips collections.

How would you compare writing for the Eighth Doctor before and after the character reset of The Burning?

It didn't make much of a difference to me. The Doctor might have lost a lot of memories, but he's also made a lot of new ones by now.

I wasn't planning to refer back to any old stories, anyway. I did make him a little more laid back, a little more reflective, than he was in The Space Age, but that was as much because it suited the story I wanted to tell as anything.

The thing that really did make a difference this time around was having the Eighth Doctor audios from Big Finish. Prior to them, we'd only heard Paul McGann's voice as the Doctor in the telemovie - but now, it's much easier to write dialogue for him that I can imagine him saying, and I think that's important.

When I wrote The Space Age, I read through a lot of the earlier Eighth Doctor adventures and took notes about the Doctor's character, and I concluded that - contrary to what some people were saying at the time - he'd been fleshed out enormously in the books.

But the Doctor, I think, has to be very much a larger-than-life character - which is something that is desperately hard to capture in prose. You need an actor to bring him to life. And the best way to make him leap off the printed page is to somehow remind your readers of that actor, to help them imagine how he would perform your material. It's much easier to do that with McGann's Doctor now.

You've developed the Selachians over a couple of Second Doctor books now. Can you tell us a little about their creation both fictionally and visually - and do you have any future plans for them?

I wanted to create a monster that could be described in as few words aspossible. I ended up with 'humanoid armoured shark'.

I always think of The Murder Game as my (first and only) 'Target novelisation', because I deliberately wrote something that was as close to Doctor Who on TV as I could make it, complete with typical cliffhangers at the end of every third chapter (it's a five-parter).

I think that was because it was my first BBC novel, and it was kind of a reaction to the fact that Virgin had kept telling me I couldn't do things (like The Witch Hunters) because they were too much like what we'd seen on the telly.

The Selachians were very much a part of that. I wanted them to be typical Doctor Who monsters - but the problem there is that the one big thing about Doctor Who monsters on screen - the deciding factor on which they stand or fall - was always their appearance.

It's hard to duplicate the impact of that end-of-episode-one 'reveal' in prose, especially if it takes you a paragraph to describe what the arriving monster looks like. I wanted to be able to put a picture in the readers' minds as quickly as possible, so I kept it simple.

That's not to say that I wanted the Selachians to be two-dimensional. I worked out a history and home environment for them right at the beginning, starting from the basis that they were obviously an aquatic race. But I deliberately held most of that back from their first book because I wanted them to be as 'visual' as possible. I always planned to use them again, and to give them a little more depth.

Originally, I thought I might write a trilogy of Selachian books. The middle one would have featured the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria, but I never really came up with a decent plot for it. So, I skipped straight to book three, where the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe go to the Selachians' home world. At one point, I did include the Selachians in an Eighth Doctor adventure proposal, but that fell through - so right now, no, I don't have any plans to use them again. I might do one day, if the right idea comes along.

What has writing for Doctor Who taught you as an author, and what do you think you have brought to Doctor Who?

My first Doctor Who novel was my first novel full stop, and I wrote it over about seven months, a few paragraphs at a time in whatever order took my fancy. I was forever going back and redrafting stuff, making up bits of the plot as I was going along and trying to avoid action scenes because I wasn't sure how to handle them. Since then, as a result of the challenges that each new Doctor Who book has presented - and I've always tried to tackle different types and styles of stories - I've become a lot more confident and disciplined.

What have I brought to Doctor Who? Lots of stories about time paradoxes.

I've never tried to break the mould exactly. I've always - well, usually - tried to write books that capture the essence of the TV series but maybe do something just a little bit different, push the envelope just a bit. Stories that could almost have been made on TV, but not quite.

Tell us about your research for The Completely Useless Encyclopaedia.

What research? In the introduction, we referred the book as 'a complete alphabetical guide to everything we could remember off-hand about the series' - and we weren't joking, you know.

One thing that Chris and I were keen to do with The Completely Useless Encyclopedia was to break the (quite sensible) rule that every factual Doctor Who book had to be accessible to someone who'd never read one before. We thought that, since there were already hundreds of them out there, it wouldn't do any harm for there to be just one book that assumed a good working knowledge of the series already.

So, the Encyclopedia took all the facts and trivia about the episodes for granted, and concentrated on the experience of being fans of the show - which was something we knew all about already. I can't imagine what a non-fan would make of it - but then, we figured that people who weren't already fans of the series probably weren't buying too many books about it anyway.

What next for Steve Lyons? Spill the beans on all your top secret projects.

I'm writing a trilogy of X-Men novels for ibooks/Pocket Books in America. The first one is out right about now, and I'm just finishing off the third.

I'm also writing a Tomorrow People audio for Big Finish - and then, it looks like I'll be doing another ibooks trilogy, though that's still in the early stages. If that comes off, it'll be a while before I have time to pitch for another Doctor Who novel - but I'd really like to fit in another Big Finish play for next year, if they'll let me.

The Red Dwarf programme guide you co-wrote was hugely popular. Any plans to produce a guide to the film if and when that comes about?

Chris (Howarth) and I keep in touch with the producers from time to time, and we've talked about various things we can do when they start filming. We'd love to write a 'Making Of' book, but it's really up to them what they want to do, and how much access they'll let us have to the set.

• Steve Lyons
  

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