L'interview en anglais

How is the fair going? Are you happy with the way the Shades of Magic series has been received in France so far?

I am, I’m thrilled! My family lives in France, and it’s the only language I grew up being able to read. My French is pitiful now, but it’s still the only language I can technically read. I wanted for years to be published in French. I got all these other languages, and I was like: “But where is French?!” Then the books finally came out here, and it’s been so exciting. Today was actually my very first French book signing, I signed at the fair for an hour. Honestly, I couldn’t ask for more. It’s such a cool experience, and everyone is so lovely. I’m just honored to be here.

Can you tell me a bit more about your background? How did you start writing, and how did you end up publishing your first novel in your early 20s?

I actually started writing in my early teens, but I never wrote a book. I had a very short attention span, and I thought I didn’t have the attention span to write a book. So I wrote poetry, which is one of the reasons I’m kind of fixated on cadence and words, and how they sound and run into each other, that kind of lyricism. I started in poetry, I tried screenplays, I tried non-fiction – I tried everything I could to avoid writing a novel, because I didn’t have the attention span for that! And then, when I got to college, I realized that I hadn’t tried to write a novel because I was afraid of failing. Not failing to be published, simply failing to write a novel, to finish something. I’m very type A, very controlling, and I don’t like the idea of not being able to finish something. And the moment I realized I was afraid of failing, I knew I had to do it. I have a very adversarial nature: I had a fear of heights, and so I went skydiving; I had a fear of change, and so I chopped off all my hair; I had a fear of being away from home, and so I backpacked through Europe. So when I realized I had a fear of not being able to write a book, as a university sophomore – second year –, I sat down and wrote a book. It was terrible; it had no plot whatsoever. It was like Alice in Wonderland on acid – which tells you something, considering… Alice in Wonderland! But I did it; I managed to finish it. It was addictive, and it kind of opened the whole world for me. It didn’t sell, it didn’t succeed. When I was a senior at university I thought to myself: “I’m afraid of failing again. I’m gonna have to try again. I’m either not going to write for the next decade and I’ll come back to it later in life, or I need to sit down right now and try again”. I was a second-semester senior in university, studying graphic design and art history, and I started in astrophysics. And I sat down and I wrote what would become my very first novel. I finished it the week before I graduated. I got an agent, it went on submission, and it sold to my first publisher at the end of summer. So at 21, I got my first book deal. I’m now 30 and I have thirteen books published in the United States, which is where I started. They’re starting to trickle out across the rest of the world. I’ve been doing this for almost a decade now.

Selling the second novel you ever wrote, that never happens!

No, it was sheer stubbornness! But it has not been a smooth road. I talk a lot about this online, I have posts called “The Slow Pursuit of Overnight Success”. Shades of Magic was my eighth book in the United States, and it was the one that broke me out and kind of made my career. And people look at that and think: “Oh, overnight success!” But it was my eighth book! A lot of people think I’m lucky, because it happened when I was so young. But since then, I’ve had series cancelled, I’ve had books that I wrote that never got published, I’ve had things fall through. So I’m very, very grateful for every good thing that happens, because I know how hard it is to get there.

How does one of your novels take shape? What comes first? Is it the storyline, the world, the characters? Are you the “planning a book from beginning to end” type or do you sometimes let your characters do what they want, so to speak?

One of the reasons I don’t have any “trunk novels”, as they’re called (novels that I’ve started and never finished), is because I don’t actually start writing a book until I know that I have the whole story – or at least the most important parts. I know the ending before I ever start actually putting pen to paper and writing it. Because of that, I have a very, very slow gestation period. I use a cooking analogy: you’re making a soup, and you have to collect all of the ingredients. You put things in, and you don’t know that it’s soup until you hit a certain ingredient. Until then, it’s just pieces. For me, the pieces of my book, the pieces of my story, are like ingredients in a meal. I sometimes have to wait for the ingredient to come along that is going to make a meal instead of a collection of ingredients. Sometimes that takes six months, and sometimes it takes six years. So I’m always working on something, but usually, the thing that I’m working on has been taking time. For Shades of Magic, I wanted to write a love letter to Harry Potter, and I wanted to use elemental magic like Avatar: The Last Airbender or Full Metal Alchemist, something that uses these pieces. From these first seeds to me actually putting a pen to paper and writing the very first line, “Kell wore a very peculiar coat”, it was about a year and a half.

You’re starting to have quite the bibliography. Where would you advise people to start first to discover your books (assuming language wasn’t a barrier)?

It’s usually either Vicious or Shades of Magic, because they’re two starting points and they’re very, very different. For people who are comic book fans or more Marvel fans, I recommend Vicious. And then, for those who are more fantasy fans, or interestingly, for those who are reluctant to get into fantasy, I recommend Shades of Magic. It’s kind of become this very interesting gateway book for a lot of people, a lot of young adult readers, who are a little daunted by the size of fantasy, and maybe by the intensity and breadth of it. I see you have an Elvish tattoo! You know, growing up, I was very daunted by The Lord of the Rings, because I felt like you had to prove you deserved to be there by learning fictional languages and doing all these things. It felt like a test. And that was something I actually didn’t want in Shades of Magic. I wanted readers to be able to pick it up and fall in, and for the fictional languages to feel like the seasoning and the spice, and not this integral ingredient. I was really put off by fantasy growing up, because I was so daunted. So I usually recommend Shades of Magic, unless someone has quite a dark sensibility – then I recommend Vicious. If they’re coming from dark YA, then I recommend Monsters of Verity, with This Savage Song, which is very, very dark. I always say This Savage Song and Shades of Magic are the two reactions to a very dark world: one is pure escapism, Shades of Magic allows you to get out of that world, and This Savage Song allows you to fight in that world. It’s this idea of taking up arms, so to speak, inside your broken world.

Shades of Magic is being marketed as YA in several countries, including France, which really surprised me, because that’s not at all the vibe I got from the novels. Do you agree with that label for this particular series?

It’s difficult. The age range is different for every country. For young adult, the age range in some countries is 16. In the UK, it’s really 16. I believe it’s 23 here, and in the US, it’s 18. But you know, I don’t really care! People are always mixing it up: they either put Shades of Magic in YA when it should be in adult, or in some countries, in adult when it should be in YA. I don’t really care. I see it as a shelf space. I think that books, like puzzle, have a lower age limit, as a friend of mine would say. If you look at a puzzle or a game, it says: “8+”. It’s an age up. I think my books have a lower threshold sometimes, depending on their content. But I don’t care beyond that. If you feel old enough to read my books, congratulations! I have fans who write to me who are in their 70s and 80s, and I have fans who are 11 or 12. It’s something the publisher has to be concerned with. It’s a marketing concept, and it’s space on a shelf. As the author, I could not care less what it gets marketed as, as long as the readers who want it can find it.

The problem is, some adult readers can think: “It’s for kids, I’m not going anywhere near that!”

Well, they probably wouldn’t like my books anyway, if they’re coming with a level of pretention, where they think: “Oh, this is beneath me”. This is the same kind of pretention people bring to all genre work. People will poo-poo on fantasy all the time, until they find one that they love – and suddenly, the fantasy that they love becomes the exception to the rule. But a good story is a good story, and fantasy is held to just as many standards (if not more, because it’s a sub-genre) as anything else.

I heard that the YA label didn’t go down too well in Russia, where the novel ended up being censored because of the gay relationship between Rhy and Captain Emery. How did you sort this out with the publisher?

It was very upsetting, because they censored it. They wanted to publish it as young adult instead of adult, and what that means in Russia is that they had to censor it. They basically went in and edited it without my approval, and they cut material. I probably wouldn’t have found out had I not had Russian readers who had read the book in English as well as Russian and brought it to my attention. We tried very hard to work with the publisher. We said: “All you have to do is destroy all the copies you’ve printed, and you need to fix it”. In the end, they refused. They were in breach of contract, and I cancelled the deal. It was really upsetting, because I’m LGBT, and that kind of display is very important to me – seeing myself on the page, and making it so my readers see themselves on the page. A lot of Russian readers said: “You’re being too sensitive, it’s just a few pages, just get over yourself!” But it’s an identity. And I didn’t even understand how they were going to publish the third book, because it becomes an actual romance in the third book! But luckily, another Russian publisher stepped in and bought the rights, and said: “We will publish it as an adult book”. There are still a huge amount of censorship issues in Russia, they still have to do this thing where they essentially shrink-wrap it, because it had “adult content”. But I said I’d rather have the book be shrink-wrapped and marketed properly as 18+ than someone cut the words from the book without permission. It’s been a bit of an issue; I’ve heard that I’m not a favorite in the Russian publishing community. They’re now blaming me, saying that it was the fact that I wasn’t explicit with them, because they bought the book on partial. But I don’t really see that as my problem! I can’t believe they tried to get away with it. I was hesitant to blame the publisher for a very long time, because they’re obviously operating in a climate of extreme fear and censorship themselves. But it simply can’t be done. I’d rather have my books not there than have them misrepresented in that way. It gained a lot of animosity from Russian readers, who thought I was being selfish and depriving the readership simply because of a subplot. But it’s too important to me.

Vicious and This Savage Song felt very much like stand-alone novels, but now you’ve released Our Dark Duet, and the sequel to Vicious will be out later this year. Was it always planned, or did you realize only after the first book in these two series was done that you had more to tell?

No, there were both planned. Savage Song and Dark Duet especially function as two halves of a whole. I always say one is the cause, and the other is the effect. This Savage Song shows how Kate and August become the people they are in Our Dark Duet, and for that, it’s essential that they be read as a pair. Vicious was a little different. I always wanted there to be a sequel for Vicious, but it was my very first adult book, and we had no idea how it was going to perform. So it was safer to design it as something that could stand alone, so that if it didn’t perform well enough, it couldn’t have a sequel, and people wouldn’t feel disappointed in it. I also believe that the first book in any series, regardless of whether that is a book of one or a book of five, should be able to stand alone. I think that the strongest beginnings of series are capable of being read as stand-alones. To that end, you could read Shades of Magic as a stand-alone. You save the day but not the world in it, and that’s the trick with a stand-alone. The most ironic thing about Vicious is that people see it as a stand-alone, but the last page should blow it up as a cliffhanger. Because Sidney Clarke has never successfully resurrected an EO (an ExtraOrdinary person, someone with superhuman abilities) without extreme, catastrophic results – and she ends the book by resurrecting an EO. It’s really interesting that about half of the readers of Vicious thought it ended as a stand-alone, and half thought that it ended on a massive cliffhanger. But the other thing I’ll say about Vengeful, which is the second book, is that it’s not a direct sequel. Vengeful is playing with its own set of themes, and with several new main characters. So I’m hoping that readers see it’s in no way meant to be a direct continuation of Vicious.

Your novels have very different settings, very different storylines, but the one thing I’ve come to expect from you is a very dark atmosphere, as we already mentioned. Happy ends don’t happen, and I’ve learned to try and not grow too attached to your characters, because you never know – my heart still bleeds from what you did to Rhy over the course of three books. I know this is the most naïve question in the world, but what drives you to write such dark stories?

I would argue it’s a happy ending! It’s a hopeful ending. And as dark as Our Dark Duet is, it is a hopeful ending – for the characters who are alive! (laughs) You know, Our Dark Duet was very late to go to the printer in the States, and one of the reasons it was so late is that I kept trying to give it a lighter ending. The fact was, a lighter ending would have been totally disingenuous to the world I had designed. This is going to sound like such a trite answer… I think Stephen King answered this one time, when people were like: “Are you this really messed-up person?” He said: “No, I get all my demons out on the page, and that makes me a very healthy person in real life”. I like dark themes. I grew up quite a morbid child, I became quite a morbid teenager, and I am quite a morbid adult! I think we live in a dark world, and I think the best place sometimes to explore very real darkness is in fantasy. It gives us a perfect metaphor, a perfect lens. In how many worlds would I be able to explore violence in the United States, except through the lens of Monsters of Verity, with this idea of the physical aftereffects and monstrosity of violence? I love that fantasy gives us a place to explore really dark themes with a very specific lens to them. I don’t know, I try to write lighter things, it just doesn’t work! They just don’t interest me! I try to write realism, and I get about ten pages in before I’m like: “You know what would be better? If she was a demon!” (laughs) I just like it that way. But also, the darker my books get, the funnier they get, too. I work very hard to bring in moment of levity or moments of humor. I don’t think you can be unreservedly bleak. I will never be able to get through a television show that does that. I remember having to quit Battlestar Galactica because I was like: “This is relentless”. I had to quit The Walking Dead, because I was like: “Where is their hope?” So I think that, as dark as the books get, they have hope in them, and that’s really important to me.

You also seem to enjoy breaking clichés: Vicious tells us having superpowers doesn’t necessarily make you a superhero, you have a YA series with close to zero love story (and therefore zero love triangle)… Do you voluntarily set out to break clichés or is it something that just happens once you start writing?

Sometimes I set out to break clichés. With the Shades of Magic characters, specifically, I always knew that Lila was gonna be a Slytherin, and Kell was gonna be a Hufflepuff! One of my favorite dynamics is to make the girl the much more ambitious, driven, a bit more Machiavellian character, and make the boy the more emotional one.

Which is also the dynamic of Monsters of Verity.

It’s the exact same dynamic. But really, when it comes to clichés and stereotypes for romance, I break them because… I feel like this is a bad thing to say in France, because I know that romance is huge. But there are so many fascinating relationships, and they always get put beneath romance. Family dynamics, sibling rivalries, parent-child relationships, friendships and adversaries, childhood friends to adults… You have all these cool things, and they almost always have to take a back-burner to romance. It’s not that I dislike romance; I think it absolutely has a place in my stories. But I can never value it as highly as I would value a complex friendship or a sibling relationship. To me, they’re just far more dynamic. My rule as a writer is to write what I want to read first and foremost. Everything that I write is for myself first. And as a reader, what I want to read are complex relationships. Because of that, I’m drawn more towards Kell and Rhy’s brotherly dynamic, or Baron and Lila’s parent/child dynamic, or Kate and August’s awkward friendship, slash starting to be adversaries, then back to friendship. Those things are way more compelling to me. Then, what it allows me to do is to sometimes have romance blossom out of them. Not the sibling ones, obviously! But something romance blossoms, like Kell and Lila. Kate and August try it, and it fails spectacularly, which I loved to do! But I love the long game. I want you to be invested in them as people first, and not as love interests. Then I can choose if I want to make them love interests or not. But then, their value to the reader won’t be based on the fact that they’re love interests.

You split your time between the US, Britain and France, where your family lives, as you said earlier. Do you see a difference in the way fantasy is treated between these three countries?

Yeah! But I see it as an extension of the way literature and reading are treated. The audiences are very different; the kind of passion is very different; the turn-outs at events are very different. The demographics at the events are very different. Each one is different. The United States has a very big fantasy problem, in that it looks down on fantasy. I feel like it’s less of an issue in Britain, but in the United States especially, fantasy is like a second citizen of the literary community. They don’t treat it as a valid form. And there’s always in-fighting; sub-genres are always going to have in-fighting. There’s always fighting between science fiction and fantasy, which I think is absurd, because 99.9% of science fiction is fantasy! You’re not writing it to a technical audience here. The people who make the argument that science fiction is better than fantasy and then cite Star Trek… I’m like: “You guys… That’s science fantasy!” We can set one in space and one in London, but these are both fantasy! If we were to write true science fiction, it would be unreadable to the lay person. So there’s a lot of in-fighting, and it tires me. There’s a lot of in-fighting in YA as well. I sit there and I see people argue about whether Shades of Magic is young adult or adult, but I don’t care! I have passionate readers, and that’s all that matters! I don’t know, what do you think is the state of it in France? I’m too new to it here.

It’s dreadful! When you said it was looked down upon in the US, I thought: “Oh, really?” Here, it’s not even a second-class citizen, it’s like a third- or fourth-class citizen.

I wonder why it is. What’s the first-class literature here?

It’s what we call “white literature” – not genre fiction.

Literary fiction is what we call it in English. But that’s interesting: the most popular genre by far in the UK is crime. You go into a bookstore and you look at the space – how much space is given to this thing. In a UK bookstore, the amount of space given to crime is twice what’s given to science fiction and fantasy, and twice what’s given to YA. While in an American bookstore, literary fiction is given twice as much space as anything else, despite the fact that people don’t read as much literary fiction. At the end of the day, I don’t really care as long as readers have access to my work. But each country is different. In Brazil, it didn’t seem so, but I was there very briefly, and I feel like I would need to spend more time in more countries to get a good feeling for it. Yeah, it’s weird! I just want to write my books, and I want people to be able to find them.

You live in Edinburgh, which makes me very happy considering how deeply in love I am with that city myself. I lived there for a few months as a student, and there’s something about it that just screams “urban fantasy”. Your new novel, City of Ghosts, to be released in August, is at least partly set in Edinburgh, and I can’t wait to read that. How does the City of the Dead inspire you as a writer?

Oh, immensely. I lived in Edinburgh originally as a graduate student. The thing that struck me first is that it’s a city obsessed with story. Everywhere you go, there are placards that say: “Here, on this date, this happened”. Everywhere you go, they have recorded their story. But the thing that I noticed, living in Britain… I don’t know what it’s like here in France, and it’s very different in the States. The United States is so young, Native Americans aside; the white, colonized United States is so young and so puritanical, it has no pagan underpinning. It has no sense of myth and history, aside from what it’s tried to obliterate. I’m pagan, and when you spend time in Britain, even the Christian contingent in Scotland has an immense reverence for the pagan foundation on which it is built. They celebrate festivals and take them very seriously. And in with that is the relationship to the supernatural. I find people’s relationship to the supernatural in Britain incredible in how blasé they are. They believe in everything and they fold it right in. It doesn’t define them, it’s not seen as blatant superstition. You’ll go places and you’ll hear things or see things, and the person who is local will be like: “Don’t mind that”. I remember, I lived in Liverpool for a little while, in a very haunted house. Nobody thought to tell me it was haunted, but about a month into living there, I said something. I was like: “I think this place is haunted!” And they were like: “Oh yeah!” Nobody thought to tell me, but they just thought I’d figure it out eventually. In Scotland, it’s taken to an even bigger extreme. Everyone has a ghost story, and they’ll tell it to you in the exact same way they would tell you about that time their uncle went to this pub. It’s just folded in; myth and history sit side by side in this incredible way that allows you to believe in magic. I grew up looking for the cracks in the wall where a door might be; I grew up wanting to see magic, wanting the world to be stranger than it was. That’s why one of the dedications in Shades of Magic is: “For those who dream of stranger worlds”, because that’s what I wanted. Britain dreams of stranger worlds every day. So getting to write a ghost story in Scotland was so natural. One of the opening sequences when they get to Edinburgh is them driving in a black cab. The cab driver asks what they’re doing in Scotland, and they say they’re hunting ghosts for a television show. And rather than this shutting down the conversation or being this very skeptical moment, the driver is like: “Oh, you know, I was up in this place one time…” And that’s exactly how it would go down! Everyone you meet would be like: “Oh, ghosts! I did this one time…” Everyone has a story. I was able to merge that love of story that Scotland has with this complete natural affinity for the supernatural. It’s part and parcel of their history. I was very excited to get to write it. Plus, Edinburgh has these incredible ghost stories! The big fight scene finale is set in Greyfriars Kirk, which was where it had to be – this incredibly famous graveyard. I’m working on the sequel now, which will be set in Paris, and I’m able to pull real ghost stories. The only fictional one is the one I’m making up at the center of my story. Everything else is bases on local legends.

Since this is a book fair, I’d like to conclude by asking you what your sub-genre or author of choice is as a reader – if you even have time to read at all, that is!

I do. I try to read about 100 books a year. I’ve met that for the last three years, but I’m not sure I’m gonna meet it this year. If I’m writing fantasy, I’m not reading fantasy. I have to read outside of the genre of whatever I’m writing at the time. So I save all my fantasy and science fiction for when I’m in-between projects, which is a very short window. I read a ton of non-fiction and memoirs. I specifically love memoirs because they give you insight into another person’s life. Right now I’m reading a memoir called Educated, by Tara Westover, which is incredible and very disturbing. It’s about being raised as an end-of-days survivalist in the United States. I love memoirs; they give me so many ideas and little seeds of character. I’d say probably about half of my annual reading is non-fiction, history and memoirs.

Pages de l'article

1. L'interview en français
2. L'interview en anglais