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truepennyI'm not sure if this first question is spoilery or not, so I'm putting it behind a cut-tag just in case it is:
Q: Both Mildmay, Felix, Kay and Mehitabel (and probably a bunch of other characters I've forgotten) all have at least one character who has had a major impact on their life and emotional development, but is dead (or soon to die, or offscreen, you get the picture) by the beginning of the story. Mildmay has Zephyr and Nika, Felix has Isophenus Pompey (whose name I have probably spelled horribly wrong) and Joline (another name I have probably spelled wrong), Kay has Gerrard, Mehitabel has Hallam. Was the act of not including these characters in the story, though their actions have major ramifications in the story being told, intentional? If so, why?
A: This is a really neat question. I hadn't consciously noticed that parallel.
I can tell you why I did it, though: it's a way of being sure that every character has a story that starts before they come on stage. They all have something really important--embodied, as you point out, in Zephyr and Hallam and Gerrard and Joline--that happened to them before we meet them, something that shapes who they are and how they think and act. All of these dead or absent characters turn out to be important in other ways, too, and like I said, I didn't deliberately set out to do that--if I had, it might not be so uniform--but that idea of characters having stories that begin before the novel and aren't necessarily finished when the novel is over is important to me.
Also, the fact that almost all the people Felix and Mildmay knew as children--and a lot of the people Mildmay knew as a teenager, too--are dead is not accidental. That's an important detail about the Lower City and kept-thieves.
Q: How much of the plot was planned out in advance, and how much was changed over time, as you wrote the books?
A: Um. When I started writing, I didn't know any of it. I wrote Mélusine and the Virtu by Doctorow's headlight method.1 With The Mirador, I knew the end before I knew anything else, and it was like a nightmare about a plague trying to find the way to get there. And with Corambis we were pretty much back to the headlights, although there I had a bunch of things left over from the previous three books that I knew I had to resolve somehow. Which isn't so much planning the plot out in advance as it is having a list of questions you have to figure out the answers to and then embody the answers in the plot. Also, all of the books had scenes that I knew I wanted to write scattered through them, so another way to look at it would be as stringing rope bridges from one rock spire to the next.2 But that's also quite distinct from having a plot worked out in advance.
So, basically, the answer is: none of the plot was worked out in advance. Except by my subconscious, which seems to have known the whole story all along. It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
---
1"It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
2Apparently, in my head, novels at that stage look like the fabulous rock spires in Chinese landscape painting. Or, you know, the trees in an Ewok village.
Q: When you started writing, did you have that particular ending in mind? Why did it have to end there? (not that I'm asking 'Why did it have to end', I know why it has to end, but why did it end in that way? I liked the ending, mind, I'm just a curious creature)
A: Nope. I knew I wanted a relatively "happy" ending, in that I wanted Felix and Mildmay to be okay with each other and with their relationship. All the rest of it came out of fighting with the novel.
And it had to end there because the story arc was over. Going any farther would have started a new story arc, and thus a new novel.
Q: Where did the original ideas for Mehitabel, Gideon, and Kay come from? And to a lesser extent, Shannon?
A: Gideon, as best I remember, was created purely out of the needs of the story. And then, poor bastard, he fell in love with Felix. Shannon was much the same way: I needed a person with particular traits to be Felix's lover at the start of Mélusine, and then I got interested in the ways he could be used to point out things about unreliable narrators and also about obsession vs. love. Mehitabel began purely as an ironic comment on the Victorian governess and what she might or might not be hiding behind her dull and proper façade. And I don't know where Kay came from. Like Felix and like Mildmay, he presented himself as a person with a particular set of traits and issues and we went from there.
Q: In The Mirador, you mention Gideon using a tablet and a stylus to write. Am I right in assuming that's of the ancient Roman method, with words scratched into bees wax? Or is it another word for paper and pen/ink/quill/etc? Or is paper too expensive to be used so frequently? *continues to dither with trivial details*
A: Yes. Wax tablets. Because paper is expensive.
Q: Who was your favorite Shadow Unit character to write? To read? Why?
A: I love reading Solomon Todd, but I can't write him at all. My favorite character to write is probably Frost, because she's so perfectly, ruthlessly honest, and it disconcerts everyone.
Q: How did the character of Mehitabel develop (how was she inspired, what was your original plan for her in the books, if it changed)?
A: Originally, Mehitabel was going to be Mildmay's wife. (Yes, really. There's about 50,000 words of a false start to The Mirador in which they are married.) She was originally a much less complicated person, with fewer layers and no secrets. It wasn't until the second to last draft of The Mirador that she confessed that Hallam was still alive, and that made a radical difference in how I understood her character. It took me a long time to get into her head.
Q: Out of everything you've written, what was the most rewarding to finish?
A: Mélusine, because there's nothing like the rush you get with your first time. And Corambis because finishing it also meant finishing the series, and I was--and still am!--giddy with triumph at having gotten the whole thing written and published.
Q: How, prey tell, did you get the idea for the concept of the story "Sundered"?
A: I wish I could tell you. There are a lot of different things that come together in that story: the bitter rivalry between the sisters, the aliens who are embarrassingly romanticized by the humans, the alien society and its complicated social structure. So some of that comes from C. J. Cherryh and some of it from Ursula K. Le Guin and some of it is from being viciously competitive myself and trying to learn to be a better huamn being than that and some of it is from the urban fantasy of the 80s in which the elves are all utterly glamorous and beautiful and I want to drown them in a bucket.
And mostly, that's how writing stories works. It's not one idea; it's where one idea runs into another idea. Like the Reese's commercials: "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!"
(The story, btw, is here.)
[Ask your question(s) here.]
Q: Both Mildmay, Felix, Kay and Mehitabel (and probably a bunch of other characters I've forgotten) all have at least one character who has had a major impact on their life and emotional development, but is dead (or soon to die, or offscreen, you get the picture) by the beginning of the story. Mildmay has Zephyr and Nika, Felix has Isophenus Pompey (whose name I have probably spelled horribly wrong) and Joline (another name I have probably spelled wrong), Kay has Gerrard, Mehitabel has Hallam. Was the act of not including these characters in the story, though their actions have major ramifications in the story being told, intentional? If so, why?
A: This is a really neat question. I hadn't consciously noticed that parallel.
I can tell you why I did it, though: it's a way of being sure that every character has a story that starts before they come on stage. They all have something really important--embodied, as you point out, in Zephyr and Hallam and Gerrard and Joline--that happened to them before we meet them, something that shapes who they are and how they think and act. All of these dead or absent characters turn out to be important in other ways, too, and like I said, I didn't deliberately set out to do that--if I had, it might not be so uniform--but that idea of characters having stories that begin before the novel and aren't necessarily finished when the novel is over is important to me.
Also, the fact that almost all the people Felix and Mildmay knew as children--and a lot of the people Mildmay knew as a teenager, too--are dead is not accidental. That's an important detail about the Lower City and kept-thieves.
Q: How much of the plot was planned out in advance, and how much was changed over time, as you wrote the books?
A: Um. When I started writing, I didn't know any of it. I wrote Mélusine and the Virtu by Doctorow's headlight method.1 With The Mirador, I knew the end before I knew anything else, and it was like a nightmare about a plague trying to find the way to get there. And with Corambis we were pretty much back to the headlights, although there I had a bunch of things left over from the previous three books that I knew I had to resolve somehow. Which isn't so much planning the plot out in advance as it is having a list of questions you have to figure out the answers to and then embody the answers in the plot. Also, all of the books had scenes that I knew I wanted to write scattered through them, so another way to look at it would be as stringing rope bridges from one rock spire to the next.2 But that's also quite distinct from having a plot worked out in advance.
So, basically, the answer is: none of the plot was worked out in advance. Except by my subconscious, which seems to have known the whole story all along. It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
---
1"It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
2Apparently, in my head, novels at that stage look like the fabulous rock spires in Chinese landscape painting. Or, you know, the trees in an Ewok village.
Q: When you started writing, did you have that particular ending in mind? Why did it have to end there? (not that I'm asking 'Why did it have to end', I know why it has to end, but why did it end in that way? I liked the ending, mind, I'm just a curious creature)
A: Nope. I knew I wanted a relatively "happy" ending, in that I wanted Felix and Mildmay to be okay with each other and with their relationship. All the rest of it came out of fighting with the novel.
And it had to end there because the story arc was over. Going any farther would have started a new story arc, and thus a new novel.
Q: Where did the original ideas for Mehitabel, Gideon, and Kay come from? And to a lesser extent, Shannon?
A: Gideon, as best I remember, was created purely out of the needs of the story. And then, poor bastard, he fell in love with Felix. Shannon was much the same way: I needed a person with particular traits to be Felix's lover at the start of Mélusine, and then I got interested in the ways he could be used to point out things about unreliable narrators and also about obsession vs. love. Mehitabel began purely as an ironic comment on the Victorian governess and what she might or might not be hiding behind her dull and proper façade. And I don't know where Kay came from. Like Felix and like Mildmay, he presented himself as a person with a particular set of traits and issues and we went from there.
Q: In The Mirador, you mention Gideon using a tablet and a stylus to write. Am I right in assuming that's of the ancient Roman method, with words scratched into bees wax? Or is it another word for paper and pen/ink/quill/etc? Or is paper too expensive to be used so frequently? *continues to dither with trivial details*
A: Yes. Wax tablets. Because paper is expensive.
Q: Who was your favorite Shadow Unit character to write? To read? Why?
A: I love reading Solomon Todd, but I can't write him at all. My favorite character to write is probably Frost, because she's so perfectly, ruthlessly honest, and it disconcerts everyone.
Q: How did the character of Mehitabel develop (how was she inspired, what was your original plan for her in the books, if it changed)?
A: Originally, Mehitabel was going to be Mildmay's wife. (Yes, really. There's about 50,000 words of a false start to The Mirador in which they are married.) She was originally a much less complicated person, with fewer layers and no secrets. It wasn't until the second to last draft of The Mirador that she confessed that Hallam was still alive, and that made a radical difference in how I understood her character. It took me a long time to get into her head.
Q: Out of everything you've written, what was the most rewarding to finish?
A: Mélusine, because there's nothing like the rush you get with your first time. And Corambis because finishing it also meant finishing the series, and I was--and still am!--giddy with triumph at having gotten the whole thing written and published.
Q: How, prey tell, did you get the idea for the concept of the story "Sundered"?
A: I wish I could tell you. There are a lot of different things that come together in that story: the bitter rivalry between the sisters, the aliens who are embarrassingly romanticized by the humans, the alien society and its complicated social structure. So some of that comes from C. J. Cherryh and some of it from Ursula K. Le Guin and some of it is from being viciously competitive myself and trying to learn to be a better huamn being than that and some of it is from the urban fantasy of the 80s in which the elves are all utterly glamorous and beautiful and I want to drown them in a bucket.
And mostly, that's how writing stories works. It's not one idea; it's where one idea runs into another idea. Like the Reese's commercials: "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!"
(The story, btw, is here.)
[Ask your question(s) here.]
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