Interview: May 2008
May 2008
Though Holly Lisle has written numerous fantasy, science fiction and romance novels for adults, her latest work of fiction, THE RUBY KEY, is the first book in a fantasy series aimed towards younger readers called Moon & Sun.
In this interview with Teenreads.com's Sarah Rachel Egelman, Lisle discusses the similarities and differences between writing for the two age groups and describes who and what inspired her to create her main characters and complex plot. She also reveals what aspects of the writing process she found most challenging, talks about the resurgence in popularity of the fantasy genre, and offers advice for young aspiring writers.
Teenreads.com: THE RUBY KEY marks the beginning of the Moon & Sun series and is your first children's book. What was your inspiration for this novel? Have you always wanted to write for a younger audience, or did you want to tell this particular story to kids?
Holly Lisle: I've always wanted to write for younger readers as well as adults. I like writing young heroes because they don't have a tremendous amount of past to drag around with them, but they have huge, wide-open futures. The older the hero in the story, the more that hero has winnowed through all the directions his or her life might take, and the more he's made it difficult for himself to change directions (and for me to write those changes). That sort of writing is its own fun, but I have a huge universe opening up in THE RUBY KEY --- the universe was one of the two inspirations --- and I wanted characters who would have the flexibility to keep changing as they careened into new parts of it.
My own kids were the other inspiration: my daughter and older son, who are grown now, and my younger son, who's in here stretched out on the floor of my office as I type this, doing his American History. Genna, Danrith and Doyati are based on the three of them, though I mixed and matched qualities that each of them have, and some adventures each of them survived, so that none of the characters are exactly like any particular kid.
TRC: This is a complex story, full of twists and turns and logic problems. How did you balance the complexity of the tale with readability for your young audience?
HL: To keep the story readable while I wrote it, I kept three things in mind:
1) Kids who read are smart and attentive, so I plotted for them exactly as I would for adults. I didn't simplify; I didn't make anything easier. I've learned over the years to trust my readers to get the story, and that trust has been amply rewarded by readers who appreciate fiction that hasn't been watered down.
2) Teenagers have different relationships with each other than adults do; best friends, worst enemies, mentors and crushes are much more intense and much more important because all the great things and all the awful things they're going through are happening for the first time --- so those relationships, and the huge weight of them being first relationships, had to be at the core of everything that happens.
3) I wrote the story I would have loved to have read when I was that age --- and that I would still love to read now.
TRC: You fuse many classic fairy tale elements with elements found in fantasy novels. What unique ideas do you think you have added to these genres?
HL: The second you think you have a unique idea, someone comes out of the woodwork and lists three or four novels you never read that include variations on that idea. So I'm going to assume that someone else, somewhere, has also come up with variations on my cool magic, my twisty plotting, and some of my more mysterious characters, such as the monstrous gurleeg (or the other taandu monsters), or, for that matter, the cat.
Having said that, I've never read anything that used the magic I developed for the moonroads, I've never read anything that was similar to my taandu monsters (or the underpinnings of the civilization that spawned them), and my world and the folks in it are mine.
TRC: The majority of powerful, strong, positive characters in THE RUBY KEY are female. Was this intentional?
HL: This was one of those situations where the characters who got the best part of the first story happened to be female. Though Genna remains the main character, the guys --- especially Danrith and Doyati --- play enormous, central parts throughout the series. And while the biggest villains the readers meet in THE RUBY KEY are male, the overarching series villain is female --- so I'm making sure I give evil's minions equal time, too.
TRC: How did you come up with the interesting names for your characters?
HL: I'm a language buff --- I've been creating codes and languages since I was nine, when I read a book in which the characters spoke Pig Latin, and another one that was about codes, ciphers and secret writing. I learned Pig Latin from that book because I thought it was wonderful, and for a while made a huge pest of myself by insisting on speaking it around the house.
When I was 14, I was a student at the Instituto de Lengua Espanola in Costa Rica for one trimester (the youngest student ever admitted into the course at that time) and learned about as much Spanish as you can by being submerged in it for four months; but I also learned about languages, and wrapped my head around the concept that languages define what we're able to think, and create the cultures in which we live and grow. People who speak other languages cannot understand some concepts English speakers understand --- and vice versa --- because words for those concepts do not exist in those languages.
So I develop languages for my fantasy stories at the same time that I develop the stories themselves, and I figure out what the cultures are like by what the characters are able to express in their language, and by the concepts they simply don't have, and therefore won't comprehend until they're thrown into the middle of it and given the word for it at the same time. And I create for them concepts that don't exist for English speakers, and put those concepts into the stories to surprise readers.
The names I give my characters are an outgrowth of the languages I've created, and the cultures that come from them.
TRC: Of the two bad guys --- Letrin, who abuses the power he was given, and Banris, who will stop at nothing to gain power --- who is more dangerous?
HL: Oh, I can't tell that! That would be a spoiler for the first book. <g>
However, power and what it means, who wants it, and why are all things that will shift around in this series. One of the two main series villains is male. The other --- who readers have seen and have met, but have not yet recognized as a villain --- is female, and of the two, she's the more frightening. Not necessarily the more dangerous, but she's the one who gives me nightmares.
TRC: Do you have a favorite character in THE RUBY KEY? If so, who is it and why?
HL: That's tough. I love all of them for different reasons. Genna is one of my favorite heroines, and Doyati is so mysterious. And Dan is so much like my two boys at times.
The one who's the most fun to write, though, is the cat. He's such a pain, and he keeps surprising me. He also keeps hiding things from me, and revealing little bits and pieces of himself when it's convenient for him, and terribly inconvenient for me.
TRC: What was the most challenging aspect of writing THE RUBY KEY? What was the most fun?
HL: Finding the bigger story is always the toughest part. In the first draft, you think you know what you're writing about, but by the time you get to the end of the story, you discover you might still be telling that story, but you're telling another one, too, about your own life or about what's happening in the world around you. And getting those two stories to mesh, and understanding that you have to bring one to the front and hide in the basement for readers to find on their second or third time through ---and then doing it --- is tricky.
Sitting there thinking, "Oh, what can I do to them now," and then doing it, was the most fun. It always is.
TRC: How is writing for children different from writing for adults?
HL: Honestly? The books are shorter, and the characters are younger. The stories can be just as deep and complex, the themes can be just as important, and there's room for plots and subplots, for things you hide away in plain sight, for all the fun things you can do in novels for adults.
I guess a third difference is that the things the characters do and say have to be age-appropriate --- not just for the characters themselves, but also for the intended audience, so keeping that in mind is important.
TRC: Why do you think fantasy is such a popular genre in children's literature right now?
HL: Bless J. K. Rowling --- who wrote a fantasy series that was bigger than the surface story it told, and whose layered story that was fantasy with really wonderful underpinnings of the real world and our real lives and challenges in it --- brought people back to fantasy in droves.
Fantasy lets us tell stories that are about much more than what you see on the surface. Tolkien did it, though he denied it, Rowling does it, and I do it too.
Fantasy was the first genre. Before mysteries or science fiction, before Chaucer and the world's first road-trip novel, before the Greeks and then the Romans invented history as some of the world's great reads, people were reciting tales of fantasy around campfires. Heroes who were small, under-armed and outnumbered stood against monsters and gods and enormous armies and proved that the small and weak could beat the huge and magical. They proved that being a quick, clever thinker --- a trickster --- could save your skin. They reminded us that the individual can change the world. They showed us again that virtue beats vice over the long haul, that dreams can come true, and conversely, that not everything you wish for is a great idea.
Fantasy was the first genre because it let us shape the world into patterns that made sense to us and taught us how to overcome enormous obstacles with limited resources. And because it showed us that hope was not futile, that if we dared to step forward and accept the challenge, we could overcome it --- sometimes alone, sometimes with a few good friends at our sides.
And that is still what fantasy is about. It's also why I write it. Dreams matter, but even more than dreams, acting to make them real matters.
TRC: You encourage aspiring writers to work toward their dream of writing books. What advice do you have for children and young adults who have their sights set on a writing life?
HL: One: Learn everything you can from anyone who will teach you --- and not just from books, but from practical experience. Learn how to camp and fish and hunt; how to ride a bike and climb a tree; how to survive alone in the wilderness for a few days; how to run an old-fashioned printing press and set type; how to save someone's life; how to weave a basket and build a house and cook over an open fire; how to bind a book by hand; how to speak another language. Do your best to learn something new every day.
Two: Do a job (at least for a while) that has a life-or-death outcome. I'm an RN and I worked mostly in the ER during the 10 years when I was nursing, and I got experiences out of that work that I could never have earned any other way. Other jobs that have the same possibility for life-and-death change are cop, firefighter, EMT, soldier and so on.
Why does this matter to writers? Because, at its base, all writing is about living and dying. When you're writing, some things you write will only ring true to the people who read them if you write about them from having known them yourself, from having done them, from having been there.
I have saved lives --- the lives of a lot of strangers, but once, my own daughter's, and once, my older son's. Learn the Heimlich Maneuver even if you don't ever learn anything else about life-saving. I have three kids instead of one because of it.
I know what dying looks like, I know what fighting to save someone who is dying feels like, and I can understand, though it is hard, when the time to stop fighting has come. In some cases, there is no time to stop fighting --- you keep going until you cannot go any more, simply because the stakes are that high and the outcome is that important. This truth is something that has been burned into me --- sometimes you cannot quit.
I understand the impact of one life on the people who love that person. I've stood there and held the sobbing parents who lost their kids, the kids who lost their parents, the husbands who lost wives and the wives who lost husbands, and the best friends who suddenly found themselves alone in the world.
I know what an emergency is, and what it isn't. There are, for example, many jobs where no possibility for emergencies exists. There is no such thing as a retail emergency. If products are not shelved RIGHT THIS MINUTE, no one will die.
So when I write about life and death, about saving lives and about losing them in spite of everything you did right, about emergencies that are real emergencies, I bring truth to those situations and those stories. Writers need to have the truth beneath the fiction in their hands when they write.
Three: Write about what matters to you. Write stories that make you passionate, write characters whose lives get under your skin so that YOU care whether they live or die, and write themes that grab you and hold you and keep you awake at night.
Four: Never let someone else define your dream for you, or tell you that your dream should be something other than what it is. If you cannot stop writing, then don't. Not even if your parents want you to be a doctor or a lawyer, or take over the family business.
I'm not saying turn your back on your family, or on your responsibilities. In order for dreams to exist in the real world, you have to make room for your obligations, too. You have to take care of your family. You have to take care of the people who depend on you. You cannot go chasing off after your dreams to leave people who are counting on you hanging in the wind --- or you can, but I don't think you'd be much of a human being if you did.
I had two kids when I became a full-time writer, and I was a young nurse with no outside support --- I was divorced, and I was all we had. I kept the nursing job and wrote nights and when my kids were at school; I kept us fed and kept a roof over our heads; and until I'd been published and had a three-book deal, I wrote part time. When I moved to writing full time, I worked harder than I ever had in my life to keep us in food and shelter. It got pretty scary sometimes, but we made it.
TRC: What books have inspired you as a child, as a reader and as a writer?
HL: I read everything I could get my hands on from the time I was six. Everything. My father's hunting and fishing magazines and books on wildlife and ecology, my mother's Bible and home magazines, all the books I could carry away from the library in my bike basket. I loved THE THREE MUSKETEERS and THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK and DON QUIXOTE; Cherry Ames nurse novels; Dickens and more Dickens; everything I could find by Mary Stewart, Mark Twain, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov, Lawrence Block, Agatha Christie, all the science fiction and fantasy I could find, all the National Geographics I could lay hands on (this was back before they were political, and were still about cultures, exploration and geography). I read the Koran and the Book of Mormon. I read Tolkien endlessly. I read C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, but only discovered his kids' books when I read them to my kids as an adult.
I am the product of every book I've read, of every country and state I've lived in, of every place I've traveled, and of every event I've ever experienced, from the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala to the flood in Alaska to going to school in Costa Rica and at a Friends Mission in Guatemala, to coming back to Ohio after living in strange places and doing strange things and having to go to new schools and get reacquainted with kids who'd lived their lives all in one place.
TRC: How many books are planned for the Moon & Sun series, and what can readers expect next for Genna and her friends and family?
HL: You mean AFTER Genna gets eaten by a monster and her friends and family mourn her death while her enemies celebrate?
Seriously, though, the events in the series happen over about four years in the Moon & Sun universe, when Genna's humans --- who are nearing extinction, the Nightlings who are expanding everywhere, and the denizens of the worlds of the Moonroads --- go to war to decide the fate of the real world and all the shadowy, magical universes that connect to it. I keep re-plotting the story; at present I can make it come out between eight and twelve total books, depending on what I leave out.
