Guest Post: Juliet E. McKenna

This is new territory, opening up my site for guest posts. And who better to start with than brilliant British Fantasy Award-winner Juliet E. McKenna? She’s kindly given us a glimpse into her creative process (and now I feel weirdly like eating rhubarb).

Learning to let the seeds of a story ripen.

Juliet E McKenna is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds. She has loved history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read. She has written fifteen epic fantasy novels, from The Thief’s Gamble, beginning The Tales of Einarinn to Defiant Peaks, concluding The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. In between novels, she writes assorted diverse shorter fiction, reviews for web and print magazines and promotes SF&Fantasy through genre conventions, teaching creative writing and commenting on book trade issues. Most recently she’s been exploring opportunities in independent digital publishing, re-issuing her backlist as well as bringing out original fiction.

Over these past couple of years, I’ve been re-issuing my first two fantasy series as ebooks in association with Wizard’s Tower Press. http://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/books-by-juliet-e-mckenna/ That’s meant revisiting the texts to prepare electronic versions. Digging around in the depths of the hard drive also turned up the proposal I originally put together for The Aldabreshin Compass series, to send to my agent and editor. All of this has offered unexpected opportunities to see how the way I approach a story has changed over fifteen novels, since The Thief’s Gamble was first published in 1999.

Looking at that very first outline for Southern Fire and comparing it to the finished book, I see how closely I stuck to my plan. The same is true for Northern Storm, the second book of the sequence. All the main characters are in there and the key beats of the unfolding story are laid out from beginning to end. This is hardly a surprise. I see variations on the writing process as a spectrum, with Outline Writers at one end and Discovery Writers* at the other. I’m definitely way over there at the Outline end. I’ll know the beginning, the middle and the end of a story before I begin to write it, and a whole lot more besides. I’ll have notebooks full of background on people and places and all sorts of aspects of the world that I’m writing about. (I’ve learned a wonderful acronym for these vital scene-setting elements from a panel at Fantasycon 2015, thanks to Karina Coldrick. PESTLE: Political. Economic. Social. Technological. Legal. Environmental. Isn’t that great?)

But going back to that proposal, what really startles me is seeing how little information there is on Western Shore. No wonder I remember being distinctly nervous about sending that off, knowing I hadn’t yet got all the ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed for those third and fourth books. But was I really, truly that vague? Apparently so. If a barebones outline is one of those anatomy class skeletons hanging on a stand in hospital dramas, this is more like the scattering of ribs, vertebrae and the occasional limb bone laid out on a table in an archaeology documentary. The single paragraph on Eastern Tide is even worse. More than half is just listing things that were NOT going to be in the final book. Well, at least I can see I stayed true to those negatives. But where did the rest come from? Because when I came to write those two latter books, I had everything I needed. Re-reading them to check the text, I clearly remember the excitement and enjoyment of writing each one. I have the notebooks showing me the outlines I drafted before I started each chapter. I can see I was building naturally on what had gone before, with everything was falling into place.

With the benefit of hindsight, I see that must have been when I first encountered the value of letting the seeds of a story ripen. Of the importance of not trying to force it – fiction is evidently not rhubarb. Of waiting and trusting that your subconscious will pick up the information you need to round out an idea. That you will notice the people and places, the specific books and TV programmes which will help develop that story’s characters and setting. That as these things coalesce in the warm darkness at the back of your mind, the internal logic of the story will build until some chain reaction generates its own energy, giving the narrative its momentum. Okay, that metaphor’s changed from botany to physics for some reason, but you get the idea.

I can see that even more clearly in an earlier document unearthed from those same archive files. Before we agreed The Aldabreshin Compass would follow The Tales of Einarinn, I wrote to my then agent and editor with a handful of different proposals for possible fantasy series, to see which one they liked best, to help me decide what idea to pursue. It’s not as if I’m ever short on ideas. I don’t know an author who is. The twin challenges are finding the time to write them all – after working out which is the right one to pursue first.

One of those suggestions ultimately became The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution. But looking back at what I wrote? That idea was nowhere remotely near ripe. Writing that series would have been a nightmare struggle, and I shudder to think what the end result would have been. Whereas once that idea had lain quietly ripening for several years, it germinated into a trilogy which I found immensely rewarding to write and which Einarinn fans love to read. With even more of that useful hindsight, I now see that agent and editor already had the experience to pick the best idea and leave the ones that were still far too green.

These days? I’ve learned to consciously let ideas lie fallow until their time has come. I’ve especially learned it’s worse than useless to keep hammering at them, like a monkey trying to crack a nut with a rock. Even when I’ve got a deadline looming. Especially when there’s a deadline, actually. I’ve got a short story to write by the end of the year for ZNB’s ‘Alien Artefacts’ anthology. Back when I was outlining my ideas for the Aldabreshin Compass, I didn’t write short stories. As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t write short fiction. I simply couldn’t come up with good ideas to order, still less turn them into a concise, precise narrative on demand.

But now? Experience has taught me different. I said yes to this particular anthology invitation without having any notion of a story to hand. Since then I’ve been musing on ideas from time to time, in idle moments doing the washing up or the ironing. I’ve put some of those thoughts in my metaphorical basket and left others hanging on the tree. As I was driving up to Nottingham, to Fantasycon, a week or so ago, the story shaped itself in my mind. Now I’m really looking forward to writing it.

When I’ve done that? Who knows which of the other story ideas I’ve got laid aside in my writerly store house will turn out to be nicely ripe?

*Can I just say, I find the term ‘Pantsers’ – as in writing ‘by the seat of your pants’ – really jarring. Because as a UK writer, ‘pants’ means underwear not trousers and more than that, describing something as ‘pants’, short for ‘a pile of pants’, is calling it a heap of rubbish. Which just goes to show how important the writer’s choice of words can be for the reader. Which is a whole other blog post…

Juliet’s books are awesome. You should totally buy them!