An Exclusive Interview
with Graham McNeill

BL: What attracted you to writing for the Time of Legends series, and the Sigmar character in particular?

GM: If you’re going to write about anybody historical in the Old World, as far as human characters go, it’s got to be Sigmar. He’s the character who casts his shadow the longest over the Empire. Everything he’s done is legendary, so it fits the Time of Legends series perfectly. Telling his deeds and humanising them without reducing them was a real challenge. Sigmar’s story had to be epic, but he had to be a real character that wasn’t just going to steam through everything in the way that a Space Marine would. He was human, he was fallible, he didn’t win all the time, he was wounded and bled, but his story still had to be suitably grand-scale.

BL: This trilogy is your first Warhammer Fantasy fiction for some time—how did it feel returning to that setting?

GM: I was really looking forward to it—I love writing fantasy. I don’t get to do as much of it as I would like. I was really excited about it, even though this series is very different to writing Warhammer, because the Warhammer World as we know it from contemporary books just doesn’t exist yet. This is very much a proto-Empire; we’re seeing a land of barbarians and tribesmen change from one state of affairs to another, albeit slowly, taking their first steps towards the Empire as we know it.

I’ve always loved writing fantasy books—axes swinging, cavalry charges, that’s the kind of stuff I enjoy the most. I write it a lot quicker than I write 40k and Horus Heresy—I find those require a much more meticulous approach, and they need more reworkings along the way before I am happy to hand the manuscript in. Fantasy novels tend to flow a lot quicker and I am much more pleased with the initial output. It feels more natural because you can relate to the characters much more easily than in 40k. They still want much the same things that we do—a roof over your head, companionship, family. In 40k characters are more worried about not being crushed by daemons or orks invading your home world. In Warhammer you still have concerns of beastmen and ogres and orcs, of course, but the characters’ immediate homely concerns are much more familiar to us. That’s probably why it’s easier to write, but that also presents its own challenges, because you still want to make it feel like a different world, not just a historical setting.

BL: As you say, Sigmar casts a long shadow in the history of the Empire. How do you approach writing about a character that is so well-known within the Games Workshop background?

GM: You need to make sure he gets plenty of “wow” moments in the books—flying through the air to smash a dragon ogre in the face with Ghal-Maraz, fighting Nagash, any number of big moments. You also give him enough humanity to make sure he has the strength, the understanding and the wisdom to be better than everyone else. There’s no getting away from it—Sigmar is the greatest of the Empire, the one who has the vision to see beyond the petty in-fighting and tribal wars. He can see that the race will either live together or die alone. Therefore he needs to come across as the kind of person people would follow into battle, or listen to when he speaks and change their lives based on his words. That comes with his charisma, but all sorts of things go into making a character charismatic. You’re trying to capture a somewhat indefinable characteristic there.

Essentially I tried to cherry-pick the personality traits I wanted to give him that were interesting and fun and heroic but also making sure he wasn’t all that—he wasn’t all square-jawed, Sgt. Rock, leading from the front. He did suffer loss, he wasn’t infallible, he did go off at the deep end—he is an Unberogen tribesman barbarian warrior at the end of the day, not a gentleman soldier! The key to making him work was to give him a rounded personality.

BL: How about approaching those events that are detailed in the background? How do you go about making those tense and dramatic, even though the outcome is already known?

GM: Taking events people know and put a surprising twist on them has always been the writer’s challenge with this series and the Horus Heresy. We know Sigmar wins at Black Fire Pass, that’s a given, and I’m not going to try and subvert Warhammer history by saying he didn’t! But still, making it tough for the hero is important. I often use the Bruce Willis/Steven Seagal dichotomy—in Die Hard John McClane was always beaten up by the end; he was bloodied, his feet were in tatters, his vest was covered in dirt—you could tell he’d been through the wars. You watch something like Under Siege and at the end Steven Seagal has hardly broken sweat. You never really felt he was in danger, whereas with John McClane, while you always knew he was going to win, you didn’t know what kind of state he was going to be in.

And that’s exactly it for these books. Even though you know someone will make it, you can beat the hell out of them along the way, both mentally and physically. Also, if you build up the characters that surround your hero, they can serve as a means of hurting the main character through their loss. That way your readers feel that, though a victory has been won, a terrible price has been paid to get it. If you create good enough characters, you become attached to them along the way. If some people are lost, you feel there has been tension and things for you to worry about, and you still wonder who is going to live and who is going to die.

BL: There are some epic battles throughout this trilogy, and none more so than in God King. How do you go about capturing the full glory—and horror—of warfare?

GM. I often draw sketches of the battle and scenes that are going to happen, picking out the key moments pivotal to the flow. Keeping things coherent, so that the reader can follow what’s going in, is important. But it also needs to be ragged enough that you feel the confusion that people in the battle suffer—they can only see what’s happening for a few yards around them, their immediate vicinity. They can be fighting and think they are kicking ass, not knowing that the rest of the army has collapsed and is running back to the wall! Or they can be winning, but see a few folk running and think the battle’s lost.

It’s essentially a mix of camera distances—sometimes you pull out and show the shape of the battle, the flanking and the manoeuvres, the strategic elements; sometimes you’re right in the thick of it, and sometimes you’re with a couple of units charging through… varying that allows you to show the progress of the battle as well as the nitty-gritty of it. As much as any student of historical warfare or writer of battles might say “I’d love to see a battle”, you really wouldn’t! It would just be the most horrifying slaughter you can ever imagine, and trying to remember that is important. You want those moments of glory; you want the cavalrymen breaking the enemy line and surging through and the feeling of exultation that comes with it. But you also have to remind people that we’re not glorifying in this—the fact remains that thousands of people are going to die and be maimed for life. It’s bloody and it’s real and it can be glorious, but it’s also horrible.

BL: The second book of the Sigmar trilogy, Empire, claimed an unprecedented success when it won the David Gemmell Legend Award recently. How did it feel to win, and what has it done for your career?

GM: It was an awesome moment. Being a huge fan of David Gemmell, to win an award bearing his name was a real affirmation, and proved to me that tie-in fiction is just as legitimate a form of writing as any other. People were voting for the book that they liked, and, although I didn’t know David Gemmell, I suspect that’s the sort of thing he might have approved of. It was very unexpected given the competition that was there that night—I never thought we would win it. I’m still pretty “wow” about it, because we did that—my website, the BL website, readers and friends and fans around the world really joined forces to make it happen. I’ve no idea what margin we won by—and I don’t want to know if it was by one vote or a million votes—but either way it was an amazing effort from everyone who banded together.

As far as changes to my career, it’s a bit soon to tell, but I’ve got an axe above my computer now, so that’s certainly good!

BL: And what can we expect from Sigmar next?

GM: Well, the biggest challenges (that we know of…) have been met and overcome in these three books, so I’m pretty much free to take the story wherever I want now. I’ve sown some seeds in the trilogy—particularly the last one—for future stories, ones that will allow me to explore the time of Sigmar in new ways, and tell quite different stories, not just Big Bad arises and We Must Defeat It stories. There’s moments of awesome still to come, just not how you might expect them…

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