Stephen Markley Interview about the deluge

In december 2024, I interviewed the author Stephen Markley about his climate fiction novel "The deluge".

Below is the Interview on YouTube, and the podcast (listen-only) is at "Literatunnat" (also Spotify, Apple, ...). (Direct Link)

This page is the transcript for all of you who prefer reading, scrolling, searching or speed-reading. :-)

(Yvonne:) Welcome to the new episode

of  “Literatunnat”.

Randomly, it's the 50th episode and I have a guest from USA, Los Angeles.

Stephen Markley, who wrote “Ohio”

and “The deluge”.

And this episode is about “The deluge,”

so we won't talk about anything else

because it already has 900 pages.

So there's no no time to talk about

anything else.

As the German audience might not know you yet, which will change hopefully, whould you like to introduce yourself, Stephen?

 

(Stephen:) Yeah, I'm Stephen Markley, author of “Ohio” and “The deluge”. I'm also

a writer for film and television.

 

(Yvonne:) And you appeared in some TV shows in the USA, and, you were asked

if it's a nice feeling that Stephen King likes your novels.

 

(Stephen:) It's a great feeling. I mean, he was, undoubtedly a childhood hero of mine.

So the fact that he is, he randomly picked up "Ohio" and read it, and then was gracious enough to read “The deluge” next.

And, he's been a big supporter, and I'm really honored.

 

(Yvonne:) And my oldest child is really happy, because she's now nine.

And you told the audience that you started reading King's prose at 11. So she doesn't have to wait so much longer because she wanted to start now, but I won't allow it. So maybe later.

But let's talk about “The deluge.”

I know it's a 900 page novel, and we can’t summarize it in a couple of minutes, but

if you have to summarize, it's in like, I don't know how many minutes. What would you tell us?

 

(Stephen:) Yeah, I always say it's a near-future epic of the climate crisis.

It starts in 2013.

It ends in 2039.

It sort of bridges our recognizable past with, the future or what what I think will happen in the future as the climate crisis carries on and it's very character

driven.

It's seven main point of view characters, spanning decades of their lives.

And it's sort about this fight to create a livable future on our planet.

 

(Yvonne:) And that's the main point. I wanted to talk to you because I've listened to

other interviews, because I thought maybe I don't even have to invite him.

All the other people already posed that questions, but almost nobody posed questions about the characters.

You just said it's character-driven.

And I really like character-driven prose.

Obviously, for most of us, maybe not really for people living in Los Angeles because

there are so many fires.

But in Germany, at least for most of us, climate crisis is still something abstract.

And to really feel about it, what it might emotionally mean for us, we need to experience it through authentic figures.

So maybe you would lose some words about your main characters.

 

(Stephen:) Yeah.

 I populate the book with people, who have these different experiences

and different perspectives on the crisis. So there's a scientist, an activist, a

mathematician, a PR flack working for the fossil fuels lobby and an

eco-terrorist, and all the way down to a character named “Keeper”, who's just

sort of an impoverished, drug addicted person in a rural town, who doesn't believe

in the climate crisis or even think about it.

So it's this wide range of human beings, all sort of experiencing this same set of events.

 

(Yvonne:) I read “The deluge” because of a review in the “Locus” by Ian Mond,

and he told the audience: Okay, I know it's a big book, but listen, you really have to

to read that and it accomplishes something that only really big and thick books can.

So please read it.

And I really trust that reviewer.

So I looked and you can always with e-books, you can download a sample.

And the first chapter is about Tony, who's a scientist, and I think it's an hour long or

something.

And the whole chapter was in that sample, and afterwards I had to buy that book.

But of course, then I had to wait, I don't know,6 or 7 hours to meet Tony again, because there're so many other characters, and I really missed him for a long time.

But the other characters, really grew onto me as well, even “Keeper”. But I think

“Keeper” had the hardest time to grow on me.

Of course, I'm really afraid if you would have started that novel with “Keeper”, I might not have bought the book because he’s ...

 

(Stephen:) Well, I wouldn’t have started  the novel with “Keeper”.

 

(Yvonne:) So yeah. So they are really extremely different from each other. I asked myself, how can you write about them so, obviously you can't know, from your own experience about these people because they are so different. One is on the spectrum, I think.

 

(Stephen:) Yeah.

 

(Yvonne:) And it's really well written. It's very convincing. And one is really poor, the “Keeper”, he’s really poor, and at least at the beginning, not ... well ...

It wasn't easy for me to identify with him. And then you have, a mother who's raising her child on her own.

 

(Stephen:) Yeah.

 

(Yvonne:) And a rich person. So how do how do you relate with these characters?

 

(Stephen:) Well, I mean, I think for me, the act of writing fiction is always about,

exploring, other lives, walking in other people's shoes, seeing and feeling the world

from a perspective other than my own.

Like that is, to me, the big psychological leap into into another person's skin.

And it just is for me, like, that's the emotional path to writing a piece of really excellent fiction. Is is to try and is the attempt to inhabit somebody else, and as a, as an intellectual exercise, as an emotional exercise. I just find it so challenging and therefore so satisfying.

And I think to create a novel, the climate crisis, obviously, you need this range of

perspectives. You need this effort, at seeing the world from other people's points of view. And so I always knew the book would have to be this polyphonic multi-character story.

 

(Yvonne: ) And you, you've written it like, 12 years long.

 

(Stephen: ) Yeah. I started it in 2010, and finished the last edits around 2022.

So it definitely was a labor of love and commitment and passion, to just stick with the same story for that long.

 

(Yvonne:) And I listened in another interview that it used to be even longer, like 600 pages more.

 

(Stephen: ) Yeah. The first draft I finished was was probably about 600 pages longer,

 about 1500 total. And a lot of the editing process was just editing it down, figuring out how to how to make the story propulsive.

I think, if you're asking somebody to pick up a book this big that feels so daunting when you first open it, one of my goals was to make it read quickly and almost feel

like a page turner.

Even though the science is dense, the politics is dense.

It's asking a lot of the reader in terms of connecting all these characters and all these,

sort of, different events and, and aligning the timelines in their minds.

But the way you do that is youjust make it,you know,a page turner.

 

(Yvonne:) Which it definitely is, even the second or the third time. I listened to the audiobook as well. And it's a great audiobook. I don't think it's easy if you listen to it without having read the book first, but for the second run, it's perfect because it's really well (done). 

The speakers are really well chosen. You've listened to it as well?

 

(Stephen:) I have not, no. 

Even though I understand audiobooks a lot of people have migrated to. To me, the experience of reading a novel is, like, sacrosanct. I must pick up the book, and lay my own eyes on it. And and also the with “The deluge”, part of the joy. I think of reading it is all of what I'm doing with the way the text is presented. There are all these different techniques I'm using, in terms of how the layout looks. And that's sort of an integral part of the story. So I always encourage people like, get that physical copy so you can have like the real experience. 

 

(Yvonne:) I would like to dive into the structure in a minute, but you lost. You lost. It used to be 600 pages long and you hinted at that fact that you had more perspective figures. 

Now I think you have six perspective figures, like a second person, first person to third person, but who went away, who of the side characters used to be a main character?

 

(Stephen:) Oh, I have to be pretty coy about that, you know?It's basically like characters got condensed from two people into one minor one or, you know, they simply, exited the book gracefully. But yeah, once I had, like, make those cuts, I had to rewrite around the fact that they were no longer involved. And many of the stories weren't even finished. To tell you the truth, some of those other point of viewcharactersI cut beforeI'd even reached halfway through writing it. 

 

(Yvonne:) It's a page turner. It's, really convention about, the thing thatI'm really engaged in thatI really want to know what happens next. But structure-wise, you have done some experiments. For example, “the Keeper” is written in the second person perspective.

Why “Keeper”?

 

(Stephen:) Well, I always knew that each voice was going to be distinct. Not just in who the person's perspective, but also sort of the way it was presented to the reader. And that way, youknow, as asyou're learning how to read the book, you come across a character in the first, like couple of sentences, you're like you. You recognize, oh, it's first person. It's sort of this tone. I'm back with Jackie. Like, I understand who I am with, and with“Keeper”, you know, I just, I, I had the first chapter written from that second person point of view, and it just felt right. It sort of started as more of an instinct than anything else. But I think the second person is like one of those handle-with-care decisions by an author. Like, if you don't do it well, it's going to come off as really, try hard. But, you know, lucky for me, it's once you get rolling with a character, their voice takes over and it becomes more second nature than you can even imagine. And what that second person with “Keeper”does is, I really think it draws the reader into a level of complexity and psychological closeness. With this person, they almost certainly don't identify with naturally. Right. And you just sort of even though you don't want to be strapped into his brain, you find yourself right there next to him for all of these, like, really terrible things he's up to. And therefore, as his character progresses, you sort of go on that journey with him, you know, and I don't want to give away too much about what that journey is, but, you know, you find yourself compelled to stay beside him. 

 

(Yvonne:) I think each of the characters does bad and good things. They are ambivalent, all of them. Nobody is good all the time or bad all the time. And that'sinterestingbecauseI really that's why I readI want the things to be not so black and white, you know, they all have a major development in some points. How do you make that believable for us readers?The development you already told us you spend a lot of time with them. How do you figure this out?That we go with it and believe you everything?(Stephen:) Well, I think you know, the magic trick of great fiction-writing to writing a great characteris that that voice becomes second nature to you. I always talk about this, this idea that, like, if you're doing it right, you start outby writingthe characteryourself, andyour fingersare movingand you'redictating fromyour head to the pagewhatthey're doing. But at some point you get wrapped up enough in that character and you kind of stop dictatingbecause they'rejusttelling youwhat's going to happen next. They're they're sort of rebelling. So like, for instance, I had a character who was supposed to end in this one specific way. And at some point in the novel, I realized, oh, she wouldn't do that. That's not who she is anymore. She's going to do this other thing. And it almost wasn't even my decision. It was her decision. And I know that sounds kind of bonkers. It sounds a little crazy, but I think if you're really, you know, doing it right, then you areletting thatpersontake overand they'realmostyou'rechanneling themmore thanyou'redictating whatthey're doing. And that's always sort of, the trickI look for when I'm working on a novel or working on a story, it's like to just stop doing it the hard way and let that character take over. 

 

(Yvonne:) I also realized even with side characters who only have like 2 or 3 sentences, for example, there's a chapter in this book where there's a big fire, in Los Angeles, and one of the perspective figures runs into a fireman, and the fireman tells him, don't go here. It's a “FEAR” fire. “Fuckeverythingand run”

 

(Stephen:) Yeah.

 

(Yvonne:) And the fireman maybe has, I don't know, three sentences, but he really sounds like himself. 

 

(Stephen:) Yes. this love to detail really, really gets me. I like that lot. 

 

(Yvonne:) Well, how did you learn that?You can't just be born that way, can you?

 

(Stephen:) Well, I but this is what I used to tell my students when I, when Itaught writing, which is that, like, you know, you always see these, these bullet characters come onto screen when you're watching, like, a mediocre movie, right?You see thempass throughand some actorhas to learnthat lineandthey have toput their faceon the screen, etc. , etc. and they walk. They walkright through. But that doessuch adisserviceto sort ofthedistinctivenessevery humanbeing has, which is thatwe all comeloaded withour story, with our fears, our anxieties, our hopes, our dreams, etc. , etc. and it justto me isit's likeso wonderfulwhena characterjust flitsby in a storyand you'relike, wait, oh man, I would followthat personaround. I want tohear moreabout whatthey're up to. And soI'm always sort of searching for that, that, that distinctive voice, even in the smallest of, of people who populate a story. 

 

(Yvonne:) So you teach writing as well?

 

(Stephen:) I used to. I'mnot doing it right now. 

 

(Yvonne:) Okay. And you, you enabled some other guys to write like this as well. In their manner, you know, to write, figure like this. 

 

(Stephen:) Well, I'm sure none of them listened to me. They were probably, you know, busy texting or looking at TikTok. So, you know, that's fine, though. I gave them my best advice, and that's all you can do. 

 

(Yvonne:) Yeah. I guess so. What a waste. Okay, so I really connected emotionally with the characters. Do you have a favorite character, by the way?

 

(Stephen:) I don't know thatI have a favorite character. Certainly, the beating heart of the novel is Kate, I think, like, the whole book basically is in constellation around her. You know, she is the person that the novel moves through, if that makes any sense. 

 

(Yvonne:) Yeah, it does. Yeah. That's the interesting thing about Kate, which was also mentioned in the review of Ian Mond, that she isn't really a perspective figure. So we see her through the eyes of other figures. So it's like we are getting to know her through her friends, mostly friends, which is really interesting. 

 

(Stephen:) Yes. So with Kate, my idea of her as this, you know, sort of a larger than life figure, this activist who has really captured the public imagination is that we can't ever be inside of her head for too long, like we, the reader, have to feel this sense of like, oh, man, look at this. This character, look at her out there the way we doin real life, the way we access celebrity and access, people that we either admire or loathe. Right?They're always a little bit of a step removed. And so, you know, my theory of that waslet's like, I'm going to tell her story from the point of view of the guy who's had the misfortune of falling in love with her, and we're going to see her from this really intimate perspective. And watch as this person gets his heart broken, more or less, by this woman who is ultimately doing something pretty heroic. And you see her from all these other angles in the book, and sort of her character changes depending on the person who's looking at her. And I think that creates this, that effect that I wanted to, of how we view celebrities and how we view people we don't have access to, but we always feel a closeness with. 

 

(Yvonne:) Yeah, I can totally relate. Yeah. Kate Morris is very intense. Maybe it would have destroyed her character a little bit to be too close. She's really intense. And people talk to her and she answers, and she does things, and she does some really cool things. And also, weird things where it's cool to her to look at her like this. So I can't really imagine to have her perspective to read through her eyes. Have you tried that?

 

  (Stephen:) So what I did was like, I had Kate's inner monologue in my head, right?LikeI knew what she was thinking in all of these scenes and sort of had it written in the other half of my brain. Right. But it's like, then you can't the reader have access to that. So how do you get hints of it through what the other characters are perceiving?And to me, again, it's like it's creating this, this distance that becomes really interesting because, you know, muchlike Matt, the character who loves her, we so badly want to know what she's thinking. We so badly want to have access to her that we just don't get. And there's a brief flash without being too spoilery. There's a brief flash when we do, and it's sort of thismoment of like, oh man, like thiswoman has a stormabsolutelyraging in herhead at alltimes. And that is what motivates her and whatfires her. And to me, like, that's a really key element of the book is only letting the reader have that brief glimpse to Kate.

 

(Yvonne:) So who was first when you started to write? Who appeared first on your private stage in the novel?

 

(Stephen:) Yeah, it was it was definitely Tony. That first chapter, as I wrote the book and edited it, that first chapter moved around a lot about if it would be first or not. And then finally I was like, no, this is like where the book has to begin. And I remember, one of my, friends and fans said to me, you know, I read the first three pages about this scientist, like, just like thinking about methanehydrates. And I was like, oh my God, Markleyhas lost his mind. Like, he's like, gone down a rabbit hole so deep, there's no way this book is going to succeed. But then by the end of the chapter, he was so engrossed with Tony and his life, you know, he had no choice but to keep going. And that's, I think, like, what makes the first chapter, so interesting is that are like, what the hell is going on here?Where are we?Why is this guy the point of view?

And then by the end of it, you're like, oh, all right, I'm leaning in. You know. 

 

(Yvonne:) Well, I never I never stopped reading. And by the end of the chapter, I bought the book. And Ialways have too many books to read. 

 

(Stephen:) Me, too. 

 

(Yvonne:) So to buy a 900 and the first, the first read for me, English is not my mother tongue. So it was a long read. I needed lots of time and I know not all the chapters are easy to read. Of course, Tony usually is easy to read and I can understand everything. But then we have other people like for example, Ashir, who writes, I don't know, essays instead of, you know, the chapters, like with the summary and the conclusions and everything. And he's very much on the spectrum, on the autistic spectrum. Do you say so?

 

(Stephen:) Neurodivergent is the term. 

 

(Yvonne:) Okay, okay. That's cool. I can't pronounce, but okay. 

 

(Stephen:) No. So.

 

(Yvonne:) Did you do some research or do you happen to know people like Ash?

 

(Stephen:) Yeah. Well, 

 

(Yvonne:) Or you find it in yourself?

 

(Stephen:) Well, if you ask the people who know me, they're like, maybe Ashis the most like you, actually, kind of these. Yeah, I mean, I with Ash, I wasI was always looking for, sort of this way into, you know, I'm really interested by all these perspectives the climate crisis, but I also wanted somebody who is just, like, as coldly logical as possible about the topic, probably because I Sometimes am coldly logical about the topic. And once I started exploring Ash's perspective on things, this was a character who had changed my mind about things I thought, if that makes any sense, like having his voice in my ear was an exercise in like, well, you believe this, but interrogate that. Why? Like, what is it about?Or these biased beliefs that you've never really bothered to examine before about the situation. Right. And so creating Ash was this enormous intellectual exercise. And actually, speaking of all those pages, I cut a lot of it was Ash's Pontificating About stuff because I Just found it so interesting. You know, he's already a really long winded character, but I think necessary too, because he sort of takes you through. Here's the problem. Here's what we have to do. Here are the obstacles in the way. Here's how we get around those obstacles. And, you know, like, but when he's talking about, you know, gambling on NBA basketball and that chapter's like 50 pages long, then the actor has to reflect to himself, maybe we don't need, you know, 25 of these pages on rambling about NBA Basketball. 

 

(Yvonne:) Yeah, and maybe people won't buy a book that big, but. Well, there areother booksthat getbought, so. Well, soI don't want to, I don't want to miss him. I really appreciate his view, he has some very intense chapters. I really recommend, to read that. It's Highly Interesting. And, to be that logical about some stuff. Sometimes it helps if something is really bad and something really bad has happened to haveAsh there, to think about it logically, makes it easier to to go further. I think. 

 

(Stephen:) Yeah. And I think what he does over the course of the book is, is earned the reader's trust as the one person who is not going to, let an unexamined bias get in his way,who is going to tackle every issue from, like, the most rational perspective.And trust me,that does not always mean the reader is going to find it palatable.

 

(Yvonne:) Yes. Of course.

 

(Stephen:) And that's hard. That's part of his intensity is his ability to look at things from a cold, logical perspective is so, all consuming. But I also think his chapters are,you know,deeply emotional, like he does feel this incredible amount of love for the people close to him and is motivated to find a solution because of those people, because of the people he loves, as is every character in the book.

 

(Stephen:) I often talk about how, like we are not, duty bound to solve the climate crisis because we're saving some abstract concept of ecology or our planetary systems. We're doing it for the people we care about. That is why we were doing it. This is about, this is as intimate at issues exists. We are we are bound to do something about the climate crisis because of the love we have for each other. Not because of some abstract concepts about ecology. 

 (Yvonne:) And that is why this isTHE book about, the climate change and climate catastrophe at least of the decade. I thinkI've read some others as well. Not all, of course,  thatI don't know. Plenty. But because It's so, it's so near to the figures, I think it's really important. Plus, we kind of dive into it now. But you've already talked about in other interviews. You've done tons of research. 

 

(Stephen:) Yeah

(Yvonne:) You did tons of research. And, I really feel now I feelI know much more about the topic than Iused to know, and Ilearnedabout it in a way that I can remember because I wasemotionallyinvolvedand I didn't just listen to Al Gore in a movie or something, which is also fine. But, I wasn't that emotionally invested than about reading “the Deluge”. I'm really invested. 

 (Stephen:) Thank you. And yeah, that's obviously, a goal of the noveli s,  is to make is to make the crisis as urgent and personal, as I feel it. And  it's so difficult with this topicbecause itfeels soabstract. It feels so ,  deep in the future or something that we can't really be bothered with in the course of our very complicated lives and our complicated world. And the book  frame it as like, no,  this is everything, not just everything going on in the world. This is everything going on, in your immediate life within yourself, like this is, an issue that is going to reverberate for the rest of humanity, and it attempts to pull the reader into that understanding. 

 

(Yvonne:) And which is also important because sometimes in prose, you can feelthe author and the author's theauthor'sopinionand thismight alienatesome readers because they don'twant tobe converted or something. But this isn't the case here. Also, thanks to the different perspectives we also have, you've already mentioned the eco-terrorist who is, of course, doing it differently from the scientists who are working for the government, or the poor guy or the rich woman or, I don't know, or Kate Morris, who's an activist and not an eco-terrorist. So there, are many opinions. And they are really different, different from each other. This is really good because it opens rooms. I think about where I am here. Where is my opinion? I am free because I don't feel your personal opinion. But I can find myself and take a position somewhere in between the characters. Not really near the eco-terrorist maybe, but also to talk a little bit about her. She's also, which is really interesting, and really brave. She's  a mom who is alone with a kid, and she tries to raise that kid, but also having this difficult task to manage. And,  well, I have two little kids. I'm not an eco-terrorist, but I have a husband, so it's much easier for me. But it's still. It's not easy. I have some  kind of respect for how she's pulling that through. 

 

(Stephen:) Yeah. I mean, it's your first point. I always likeI was very careful to not give any character in the book my specific set of opinions to make sure that this argument, this budding of heads, was happening between the characters within every chapter and I love that like a compliment I've gotten on the book before, it is people who are he tell me, I wasn't sure who was actually like hero for a while. Like, I wasn't sure who Iwheremy allegiances lay in terms of what the characters thought. But yeah, with Shane, I wasI was just committed to,  again, like,  writing a real human being. And I thought about it lot about, a working single mother who happens to have a side project that is, bringing down the fossil fuel hierarchy. So,   , giving her this challenge in her life that is,  both the side car project to what she has to do, is raise this little girl. Right. And I, I just think that that, again, that helps frame all of these issues as human issues as things that people must deal with. In addition to the intimacy of their lives. 

(Yvonne:) Yeah. That Really made her story for me. very real.  I could somehow identify … my English is . . . It's evening for me ..

(Stephen:) My German is lacking. That's the problem.