Author Interview – Iain Stewart – Knights Of The Air

On The Table Read Magazine, “the best book magazine in the UK“, author Iain Stewart talks about the inspiration behind his Knights Of The Air book series.

Tell me a bit about who you are and why you started writing.

I was always in love with words and stories and was reading voraciously from an early age. In fact, at prep school in Kenya I was caned by the headmaster, six of the proverbial best, for reading under a blanket with a torch after lights out. Which taught me an excellent lesson- don’t get caught. But that same school encouraged me to write stories and praised me for them which led to the idea.

I first sat down and tried to write a book, a novel on the Arthurian legends, when I was twenty-two, and found that I did not have much to say. It was hard to add value to the existing libraries on the topic. So, I shelved the idea. For the next few decades, I made a pact to work like extremely hard in the financial markets so I could earn enough to retire at 50 to travel and explore writing. Which I did.

Rather than attend schools to learn how to write, I decided to write and learn as I went along. So the first book was a very inefficient process. Typically, I only wrote only on Thursdays and if something special was happening, like travel, I just missed that Thursday. My vow was that writing would be fun and not a chore. Which it was, enormous fun. I loved the research of historical fiction and then the work of weaving an interesting story into the real facts and characters. But when I first finished the story I wanted to tell it was 400,000 words and I learned that publishing a tome like that was a non starter for a 1st?time author.

A wise author once told me at the very beginning of my voyage that the very first decision of a writer should be whether they want to sell books or they have a story to tell. I went with the latter, but at the same time, the acid test of writer must be whether people want to buy your books, so when I was told I should split my stories into books of 90,000 words each, I got to work. That was harder than writing the original, taking the story structure apart and recobbling it into four books, each with their own structure. But I am grateful for that process, for I think the books are better for that work.

All of which is a long winded way to saying it took me from 2007 to 2022 to get from the first words on paper to four books into publication, released all in one year.

Focusing on your latest release. What made you want to write Knights Of The Air?

It’s a series which is one story. I loved the Arthurian legends and always wondered at the bits that were left out. The triangle of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere seemed extraordinary in its contradictions.

How did a loyal knight who aspired so stringently to be a “parfait gentle knight’ end up cuckolding his king and friend? How did Arthur resist banishing Lancelot when the rumours of the affair start, and how was he so sad when he was forced to do so? This was a violent age where any king who apparently allowed his underlings to steal his wife would have lost bucket loads of Kingly, warrior and manly credibility? And so on.

So I thought it would be interesting to transplant those stresses and strains to the most recent period where men fought individual combats and chivalry had not quite died. It helped that I have always been fascinated by WW1 flying and it fitted the bill. So I put two passions together, and tried to imbue it with the life lessons I had learned around leadership, teams, innate goodness of some men and women and evil in others, and of course the eternal struggle of finding the right sort of love.

What were your biggest challenges with writing Knights Of The Air?

I found the writing easy and enjoyable but the publishing and marketing was a nightmare. In terms of the pure writing,?I first wrote the protagonist as a paragon, before realizing that he must develop an arc & develop. So, I had to give him unlikable and unadmirable characteristics which went against my untrained instincts.

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