Hello! On February 16th
2018 I attended the book signing of Holly Black and Susan Dennard for their
Cruel Prince and Sightwitch book tour. The event took place in San Diego at
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore.
I arrived around 15
minutes early, but I couldn’t find a seat this time, so I picked up my copy of
Cruel Prince and bought another book and then stood around waiting for the
event to start. This time the event was moderated by booktuber and book seller,
Kaitlyn, so the event was in an interview format, that’s why I recorded the
audio of everything and transcribed it, it was easier than summarizing.
K:
What drew you to the world of fairies?
 |
| Holly Black |
Holly Black [HB]: [I didn’t record Holly’s answer :c]
Susan Dennard [SD]: I started reading fairy tales and
fantasy when I was young. I was a teen, we didn’t have YA, so all I could
consume was adult fantasy mostly from the library. And we didn’t have Amazon
either back then, so you could only get what was on the shelf at a bookstore or
a library which meant you frequently didn’t read things in order or a whole
series, you would skip book four.
K:
Do you create or discover your characters? What is your process like?
HB: I used to say I created my
characters and get frustrated when people talked about how their characters
veered off in certain directions. My characters are lazy and they wouldn’t do a
single thing for me, they don’t want to be in the book. None wants to be in a
book, right? It’s the worst thing ever to find out you’re the protagonist of a
novel, nothing good will happen to you. And then I would say that in Darkest Part of the Forest, which is the
faerie book I wrote right before this one, I had a character whose name is
Hazel who had a secret that I didn’t know. And I was like “this doesn’t seem possible, how does she have a secret I don’t know”,
but she did and it was kind of the big turn of the book. I would like to say
that I create them but sometimes is a process of figuring, creating and then
extrapolating from their behavior all of the things they want to hide from me.
SD: I definitely create some
characters. I found this with a novella I wrote for my first series, I created
maybe a secondary character, but when it comes to write a novella from their
point of view, I realize I don’t actually know them. So I have to discover
them, it takes time. Sometimes they don’t have a voice in my head and are not
ready to talk to me. And I push their word, deadlines. But it’s a process of
waiting for that voice to come, and I learned that if I don’t have a voice, I
cannot write that story until the voice is in my head, and everything I write
is just going to be crap.
