Okay, maybe it was 107 miles to the Jedi Temple. (Thank you for not asking why the charge on the Deece depicted on the cover of ORDER 66 reads 107. No, I mean it. ) But tomorrow, the book that Republic Commando fans have been waiting for ever since a certain Jedi developed inappropriate feelings for a certain hunky clone commando goes on sale.
I wrote the end of ORDER 66 four years ago, when I was still working on HARD CONTACT. I had no idea at the time whether there would ever be any more books beyond this one-off novel intended only to promote the game, but I needed to have an idea of where these characters would go in order to write them convincingly. The basic premise, though, was so riveting that I believed it could sustain a series in its own right; the squeaky-clean and totally unchallenged heroes of the Jedi Order were mired in the exploitation of enslaved human beings, a moral crime so compelling and full of dilemmas that I had to see where it ended. And, if you engage that fully with a story, chances are you can collect enough readers to make the journey with you.
The naive boy-soldiers left Kamino and grew up fast. They worked out what the Republic was doing to them, and that it wasn't glorious, and that it wasn't fair. A few Jedi reached the same conclusion. The dissident band grew, gathered together by a thuggish yet charismatic Mando mercenary, and by the time I got to the end of ORDER 66, the final scene - the whole ending, in fact - wrote itself in a very different way. I'd had to throw away my original road map, because, over the course of four books, the characters had developed and multiplied so much that the whole story arc had shifted.
That's what I mean by letting the characters drive.
I think it shows when a writer shoehorns characters into a plot they want to make happen. I can't work that way. My stories always flow from the personalities of the characters, and how they react and interact. And the characters flow from the kind of person most likely to fill that particular niche in the environment; Kal Skirata and the Cuy'val Dar, for example, were a necessary tweak to the basic story of Kaminoans (not exactly natural SAS material) training crack troops of another species - humans; I didn't believe the old fish-nazis could manage the job, so I asked Lucasfilm for permission to change a bit of the plot of Attack of the Clones to have a hitherto-unseen secret corps of off-world training sergeants, real hard bastards who could train elite troops. That was the only way I could write Omega as an authentic special forces squad along SAS/ SBS lines. That was all I knew, of course - the real world of defence. And, as I wasn't comfortable writing American dialogue back then, and as I also needed to differentiate the clones with varied speech patterns and accents, it enabled me to have a sergeant who used all the services slang that I was used too.
So Kal Skirata was born of necessity. And, because Jango had to pick mercs he could trust to keep the project secret, Skirata had to be Mandalorian. And you all know what happened after that.
The weaselly little bastard decided to have a life of his own, and so did the Mando culture he came from. So did Omega Squad; so did the various Jedi who worked with them, from ethical and courageous Bardan Jusik to earnest and self-doubting Etain Tur-Mukan. Walon Vau and Mird were conjured up on the spot when my buddy at LucasArts mailed me to ask if I could flesh out a sergeant for a cutscene in the Republic Commando game, which was still being finished long after the book went to press. I knocked that profile out in five minutes, and I still don't know quite where those two came from.
But they all came alive. I have no idea how some of them evolved so fast, or even where some of them came from at all, but my toolkit of psychological profiling, a kind of mental identikit of personality types, kept churning them out book after book, and I had a wonderful, scary, upsetting, funny, angry time following them and seeing the world through their eyes.
I still don't understand why more authors don't do this. Why base characters on real people, or - worse, more boring, more pointless - yourself? What could be more of an adventure and an education than taking this journey with complete strangers who never lose their capacity to surprise you?
My characters have changed the way I see the world. Their moral arguments, seen from behind their eyes, have upset and unsettled me, and forced me to rethink my own position on some fundamental ethical choices.
Yes, they really did acquire lives of their own, as all good characters should. And now, four books on, some of them have to bow out. But life and lives go on, and however harrowing the events of the final days of the Clone Wars , the motley Skirata clan will dust itself off and regroup for the next battle, this time under the Empire. The war may be over; but the real fight has only just begun.
I didn't actually want the book to end the way it did, in case you're planning to ask. I woke up for days after I finished the manuscript with a sense of disorientation and grief that disturbed me. It's just a bloody story, after all; none of it is real, nothing except the basic human truths within it. But to write vivid fiction, you have to live the lives of those characters every inch of the way. And that's why it hurts, like the aftermath of a nightmare. Your body and your hormonal systems experience it all as if it really happened. Flat-out balls-to-the-wall writing is just like that.
So, yes, I would have wanted different outcomes for the characters. But the story just didn't develop that way. The characters didn't go in that direction. If I'd interfered, and steered them, then I'd have been left with a wish-fulfilment fanfic kind of fairy-tale that would have defeated the whole object of the way I work - which is to build fully-realised and wholly original personalities, stand back, and report faithfully on what they see, think, and do.
It still hurts. And I'll still keep on doing it. Because that's where the most emotionally resonant stories are born.
