 Writers Talk About Urban FantasybyGillian PolackThis fortnight my round table interview is with three US writers. Two of them are personal favourites. Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty books were already on my Must Always Read list and I discovered Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue this year. She writes a delicious mixture of fantasy and strong characters, and she won the 2010 John Campbell Award for Best New Writer (which means that I have seen her on a stage, in Australia, wearing a tiara). I met Daniel Abraham’s writing only after I started interviewing him, and I wondered what had taken me so long. Three very good writers, all of whom write urban fantasy. Given Carrie, Seanan and Daniel all write urban fantasy, that’s what I decided to talk with them about. Let me admit here that I sort-of-kind-of forgot to tell them that my last novel was possibly urban fantasy too. This is why I spent so much time exploring definitions and what the sub-genre meant to each writer. I felt it was important that people who don’t ‘get’ urban fantasy have a chance to see what it’s like from the inside. First, however, the three writers get to introduce themselves: Carrie Vaughn: I’ve been writing my whole life, and my first novel, Kitty and The Midnight Hour, came out in 2005. Then urban fantasy took off and I was suddenly writing a long-running series about a werewolf named Kitty and her world. The eighth in the series, Kitty Goes to War, was released this past summer, and the ninth, Kitty’s Big Trouble, will be out next summer. I’ve also branched out with a couple of Young Adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel (due out next spring) and the stand-alones Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age (also due out next spring). Basically, I seem to be working on the “write as much as I can as long as I can” model. Daniel Abraham: I write urban fantasy for Pocket Books under the name MLN Hanover. For me, the genre has two main roots: Buffy and Anita Blake. They set the tone for me, and also the kinds of themes and characters and—most especially—plots. I think this is an adventure genre, but with a real interest in the uncomfortable relationship between third and fourth generation feminists (or, rephrased, fifth and sixth generation suffragettes; I don’t want to imply that the issues being addressed are new) and power. In a lot of ways, I think the real grassroots cultural conversation about this is happening in this genre. So when I started building my urban fantasy universe, I tried to make a place that would accommodate the things I think about women and power—be it the traditional power (sexuality à la Anita Blake) or the kind of first-pressing transgressive “masculine” power (weaponization à la Buffy). Since I don’t find either one satisfying, I made a character who was struggling with and against both. I’m of the school that thinks you only get one weird thing, so I found a fantastic element that could give me a lot of play—possession by spirits. And the plots are all action adventures tempered by those. I should say that I didn’t follow either Buffy or Anita Blake to the end of their arcs. Both stories alienated me, so I was lucky in that I had something to respond to. Seanan McGuire: Hi! I write urban fantasy under my own name, primarily through DAW Books, and science fiction/horror under the name “Mira Grant,” primarily through Orbit. Sleep is not a priority. As a folklore major, television nut, and lifelong horror movie fan, I think I find the roots of urban fantasy in slightly more outré places than a lot of folks. Dark Shadows definitely fits our current definition of “urban fantasy,” and so do two of my favourite families, the Addams and the Munsters. You can even source a lot of the “rules” we use today to those shows, and Marilyn Munster is my go-to girl when I need a pre-1980 example of a classic urban fantasy girl. “I’ve always been a Marilyn—that’s Munster, not Monroe” is one of my standard answers when people ask how I can balance my passion for the dark with my equally strong passion for My Little Ponies. I probably write too much for anybody’s good, but my cats like it, since it means I spend a lot of time sitting still and being warm. I have three of them, two Maine Coons and one Siamese, and their cumulative weight is more than forty pounds. Whatever you just heard outside your window, it was probably neither Johnny nor the wind. GP: You all write in one of the fastest-changing sub-genres in literature. Two decades ago it hardly even existed. How do you set your parameters and choose what themes and what characters and what plot arcs are appropriate in this challenging environment? Seanan: I don’t tend to think of urban fantasy as a “new” genre—given its similarities to the pre-Grimm fairy tales, the ones where little girls got eaten and women danced themselves to death in heated iron shoes, a case can be made for it actually being one of the oldest genres. It’s just a genre that fell out of widespread popularity for a long time as modern tastes split horror and fantasy into two distinct camps. Urban fantasy is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of speculative fiction. Bearing that in mind, when I’m setting up an urban fantasy, I tend to set myself very strict out-the-gate rules. “This universe has fairies in it,” or “this universe has cryptids,” or even “this universe is completely centered on the Aarne-Thompson fairy tale index.” Otherwise, I run the risk of making pizza box stew—you know, a pot of soup containing everything that was left over in your refrigerator at the end of the month, and sort of tastes like beets, regardless of whether beets are in there at all. The themes are often set by the rules, since a story with fairies and a story with talking pantheistic demon mice are going to be very different. As for characters . . . characters just happen. They’re funny that way. Plot arcs are dictated by theme and character, and by what I’m trying to say. Tragically, being a blonde of very little brain, I sometimes don’t realize what I’m trying to say until I hit draft two, and then I’m always very surprised by myself. Carrie: Anything goes, really. The more I can push various envelopes, the better. Also, once I started dealing with “supernatural in the real world,” I realized I couldn’t draw a line. If I said this set of folklore was real, then every bit of folklore has to be real. If vampires are real, why not TV psychics? The possibilities are vast. I’m not sure “appropriate” is the right word because I really don’t think at all about what’s expected of the genre, or what people think the genre ought to be, except maybe to overturn those expectations. Whatever makes a good story is appropriate. At this point I’ve established a cast of characters with histories and arcs, and the only expectation I’m really beholden to is what’s appropriate for those characters, and following the arc I’ve already set up. I’m in agreement with Seanan here—characters drive the story, not necessarily external parameters. I started writing stories about Kitty before the genre as it’s currently defined took off, so I didn’t have any expectations to deal with. Urban fantasy picked me, I didn’t try to fit into any particular niche. One of the parameters I do set is “the real world.” Much of this genre ostensibly takes place in “the real world,” and I want to reflect that as much as I can. If vampires and werewolves really did exist, and people knew about them, what would really happen? What would current events and pop culture look like? It was something I didn’t see too much of in supernatural stories and wanted to explore. Supernatural beings really would have their own talk radio show catering to their special interests. Congressional hearings, reality TV, werewolf soldiers, etc. Taking that direction also lets me comment on the portrayal of vampires and other supernatural critters, and have some fun with the topic. In some ways it’s a reactive stance—I like to write about topics I don’t usually see in urban fantasy. (By the way, I’m also one of those people who thinks that urban fantasy has been around forever. I just read Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think (1948) which would be totally at home in today’s market. Not to mention Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, etc.) I’m constantly fascinated and amazed by the many directions taken by discussions about urban fantasy. I think it’s one of the reasons the genre is so appealing—there’s something for everyone, and people can see different meanings in the same stories. For me, the current trend is all about the kick ass heroine, and the issues of women and power Daniel brought up. I think a lot of these discussions get into the history of the genre and semantics of the term “urban fantasy” because we’re all tracing back our roots, and it’s clear with a little digging that these books aren’t coming out of a vacuum. Daniel: I’m thinking back to when I first started not writing, but reading the stuff that’s become urban fantasy. I talk about Anita Blake being one of the first, but that’s not really true. There was a movie back in . . . jeez the late 80s? Early 90s? Cast a Deadly Spell, it was called. It was the first mashup of fantasy and horror and noir mystery that I remember seeing. Frank Ward and Julianne Moore. And even that was harking back to older pulps with Lovecraftian horror and hard-boiled detectives. So I think all the elements were in play long before the thing that really picked it up. Apart from the genres feeding into it, though, I think urban fantasy is functionally about comfort. It’s not a genre that invites really challenging material the way that either horror or mystery does. I know I don’t want to pick up an urban fantasy about, say, child molestation and incurable cancer. And because of that, I think the interesting conversation winds up happening in the subtext. Urban fantasy has the potential to be deeply subversive, but only when it’s done with a light touch. GP: I wouldn’t mind knowing how important writing within a genre is to you, however. How far would you follow your characters? Also, if you could use any words to describe your fiction—if you didn’t have to accept what critics and reviewers and marketing experts and fans and editors said—how would you describe it? What’s important to you about your writing, when everything else is stripped away? Carrie: I often feel like I have a contentious relationship to genre. It’s important to me—I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy across the board. I took a creative writing class in college where the professor really discouraged writing anything speculative, and I had a terrible time—I wanted to go back to spaceships and unicorns. But I start to bristle when genre gets broken down into too many sub categories and the boundaries become too rigid. Urban fantasy has confused a lot of people because of how much it’s marketed as romance, and a lot of people want to see it as one or the other, which is counterproductive. Really, I see genre as a tool, and urban fantasy stands out because it uses so many tools from so many genres — mystery, thriller, horror, as well as romance, science fiction, and fantasy. When I write, I’m thinking less about how to fit into a particular genre and more about how I can use those tools. When the first Kitty book came out I sometimes told people it was “light horror,” because I thought it was a little too happy to be called “dark fantasy.” I still like using that phrase. Hm, how far would I follow my characters? As far as I need to? I’ve got a rough outline in mind of what happens to all of them, where their arcs go, etc. I’ve got a plan that involves drama—that’s already involved a lot of drama. But I’m not really into shock value for the sake of shock value. So I’m not really sure how to answer that. What’s important to me about my writing? That it doesn’t suck? I know that’s a flip answer, but I really do spend a lot of time worrying about how to make sure it doesn’t suck, for whatever meaning of “suck” I latch on to on a particular day. I want reading my books to be a satisfying experience for people. I’m also striving for impact. I see a lot of powerful stuff in the world, and I want to be able to put that in my stories somehow, so other people can see and feel that. Back to you all... Daniel: How far would I follow my characters? Not sure quite what you mean by that. There are places I’m not going with my urban fantasy work because I think it would be inappropriate to the genre. I’m not, for instance, going to explicitly take on rape. It’s too raw and too overpowering. And I agree with Carrie about genre, though I’m a little less contentious. I think genre is a great tool for setting readers’ expectations. And since fulfilling and exceeding expectation is pretty much what defines the win, it’s something that’s important to me. Seanan: I don’t care so much about genre; what I care about is that the story, at the end of the day, makes sense within itself. About half the time, I write it, and then figure out what it “is.” I’ll follow my characters exactly as far as they’ll allow me to. One of the dangers of the first person perspective—which I have a definite fondness for—is that sometimes, characters won’t let certain things happen on screen. Toby, for example, wouldn’t give a loving description of having sex. It’s just not something she, as a person, would share, and as her writer, I have to respect that. If I didn’t have to let other people describe my fiction—like, if we were in a world where marketing concerns just didn’t exist—I’d still think of the Toby Daye books as being pretty straight-up urban fantasy. I call them “fairy tale noir” when I’m trying to explain them to people who don’t read within the genre. Other stuff . . . I call the Fighting Pumpkins (characters in my stories) “psycho cheerleader Halloween goodness,” and I guess I’d take that as a label for everything I do, if I had to. It’s important to me that my writing has a point, when everything else is stripped away. That somewhere under the pleated cheerleading uniforms and the pixies and the plagues, it has a point. GP: What are five books that you really care about, works that have influenced you and your writing? Can you tell us something about each of them? (it doesn’t have to be five—it can be two, or ten—five is a good number though) Carrie: The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. All of McKinley, really, but The Blue Sword is the one I reread every year. It’s haunting and mythical, but at the same time has a down-to-earth heroine who doesn’t really aspire to be a hero, is often confused by the mythic things happening to her, and saves the world not because she sets out to save the world but because she’s trying to save her friends. This is the book that made me want to write about main characters who could be your best friend, who you could imagine being part of your life. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury was the book that taught me that words matter. Individual words build up a whole book, and if the words are wrong, the book won’t stand up. Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy. I know it’s not a trilogy anymore, but it was a trilogy when I first encountered it, then proceeded to use it to try to convince my college English department that science fiction and fantasy are legitimate genres that deserve respect. I think it sort of worked. I wrote a paper comparing The Farthest Shore and Shakespeare’s The Tempest as two works featuring a wizard who abdicates his power and enters retirement, representing rites of passage from adulthood into old age... The prof responded with “I didn’t think you’d be able to pull this off, but you did.” As for more recent influential books—I love it when I find writers who teach me things. I read Iain M. Banks Use of Weapons and it melted my brain. I then borrowed and reworked the structure for a bit of my stand-alone Discord’s Apple, because I loved it that much. I’m also in awe of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series right now. I’m not usually a big fat fantasy reader, but these books are doing some amazing things with character and structure. Erikson writes about characters who are trying to do good, and sometimes even succeeding. It wasn’t until I read these books that I realized how rare that is, and how much epic fantasy seems concerned with how terrible everyone can be to each other, and maybe that’s why I don’t seem to like it much. But I’ll read Erikson. Seanan: Five books that have really influenced me and my writing . . . gosh. First up is my favourite book of all time, IT, by Stephen King. I’ve read it more than fifty times over the years, and it’s taught me so much about the structure of story and the tricks needed to sustain story at a length of several thousand pages. It’s just a beautiful piece of work. Second up, Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones. It’s a retelling of some of my favourite folk songs, and it’s done so perfectly, and with such grace, that it’s just amazing. I think of this book as one of the founding pillars of urban fantasy. It’s really amazing, you should read it if you ever get the chance. In the same vein, Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks is one of the first “modern” urban fantasy novels, and it did a lot to define the genre when it was still forming a unique identity. Back to Stephen King, On Writing is the single best book on the art and craft of writing that I have ever read. I literally re-read it once a year, and I always learn something new. Finally . . . Ray Bradbury wrote a bunch of short stories about “the Family,” a sort of Munsters/Addams Family assortment of monsters and madmen who were still human, and who loved each other. I adored those stories. And then he wrote a framing novel, From the Dust Returned, wherein suddenly, the Family was bad, and shouldn’t exist. I felt so betrayed. I still feel betrayed. This book taught me that it’s not fair to do that sort of thing to your readers—it’s not kind, and it’s not okay. Surprises, sure. Total denial of your own original text? Not so much. Daniel: Books! 1) The Queen’s Gambit by Walter TevisYou remember the Paul Newman movies The Hustler and The Color of Money. They were about a pool shark named Fast Eddie Felson. They were based on novels by Walter Tevis. He also wrote the novel on which David Bowie’s movie The Man Who Fell To Earth was based, and another minor sci-fi classic called Mockingbird. But my favorite of his books was The Queen’s Gambit. It’s the story of an orphan girl with an amazing talent for chess and an addiction to pills. It’s a thriller in which there is never the threat of violence, just of whether Beth’s talent will be enough to redeem her or if she’s going to scrape her brain smooth with drugs before it can. I go back to it every four or five years. It’s a good, solid workman-like book that I enjoy every time. And it’s not so polished that I can’t see what the author’s doing, and because of that, it’s probably taught me more than any other single book. 2) The Belgariad by David Eddings I’m cheating. That’s five books on its own. But they were the books that turned me on to epic fantasy. When I read them, I was exactly the right age. None of the absurdities mattered to me. I wouldn’t have known bad worldbuilding if it had bitten me. I probably couldn’t go back to them now with anything like the pleasure I had then, but at the time I found them, I read ‘em until the spines broke. 3) Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers I read a lot of Peter Wimsey when I was a kid. My father read a lot of it to me. Strong Poison’s only one of them, but it’s probably the one I’ve re-read most. Of course it’s a murder mystery and probably the best case of a Mary Sue character utterly transcending herself. But it was the most effective adult love story I’d come across at the time, and it stuck with me. That sense of doom and terror and resentment and affection and bone-deep longing all floating behind witty, urbane dialog absolutely worked for me. Still does. 4) The Handmaid’s Tale This is almost a perfect book. I read a bunch of Atwood’s early stuff when I was in college—The Edible Woman, Surfacing—but The Handmaid’s Tale blew me away. It’s an affecting, interesting story, and it rewards being smart. It was probably the third time through it when I noticed that when she described the clothes of the dead men hung on the walls, she called the bloodstains “off-red” and that it was a play on the protagonists’ name (Of-Fred). And someone showed me where you could find her real name. And the last line—the real last line, not the last line of that unfortunate epilogue—was just about the most perfect one I could imagine. I love that book. I haven’t read it in years, though. I’m a little afraid to see what I’d find there at my present age and perspective. 5) Homo Ludens This isn’t fiction. It’s actually the pet project of a Swiss medievalist named Johan Huizinga. My father gave it to me when I was in high school, and it’s had a huge effect on how I see the world and culture in general. I think it’s fair to say that without it some of my best work—I’m thinking of the short story “The Cambist and Lord Iron” in particular—would just never have been written. GP: And a final question, how does who you are and what you read affect what you write and how you write? Daniel: When I started out to be a writer, I was younger and more defensive than I am now, and I think when you go back and look at my trunk novels, their problems are about equally failures of craft out of ignorance and unfortunate contortions in the cause of emotional safety. As I’ve gotten older and had the world kick out my guts a few times, I’ve gotten less interested in the literary projects that started me off and more in the ones that caught me once I got into it. I was researching Kabbalah once for a novel I never wound up writing. One of the things I found interesting there was that (at least in some traditions) men weren’t allowed to take up the study until they were middle aged. The idea of finishing the work of your youth and beginning the work of your maturity makes a lot of sense to me. I think the work of my youth was about learning the basics of craft and exploring the things about fiction that were uniquely my own. The work of my maturity appears to be more about learning to apply the things I’ve learned. I feel like I’ve gone from a fairly self-centered writer—well, and person—to someone who is more at ease in the world. I care more about the reader than I used to, and I’m more interested now in what brings them to a book than what brings me to it. For my reading habits, I don’t read anywhere near as much as I’d like to, and what’s worse, I find it hard to read things that are in the genre I’m working at the moment. So while I’m writing my urban fantasy stuff, I can’t put it aside and read someone else’s urban fantasy. I’ve been reading a lot of mystery and nonfiction, only because they’re distant enough from my day job. Carrie: Since I’m constantly learning things about who I am and what I write, it’s a tough question to answer. It’s always changing. For example, with the recent release of Kitty Goes to War which deals with Army soldiers returning from Afghanistan, I’ve found myself talking a lot about my father, who’s a Vietnam vet, and my family’s experiences regarding his twenty-year Air Force career. I’ve realized—or was reminded, rather—what a big part of my identity that is. People ask “Where are you from,” or “Where did you grow up,” and I answer “I’m an Air Force brat,” because that explains it all. The result of all this is I tend to portray the military with a great a deal of sympathy. I worked hard to get the portrayal of the soldiers in Goes to War right, and even Voices of Dragons has an Air Force pilot character who becomes an ally of the main character. Every military character I write about or come across could potentially be my Dad. Seeing the military as a bunch of diverse people rather than a monolithic Thing is something that I bring to my writing because of my experiences. Another thing that’s very important to me is the idea of “girls who do things” (as Robin McKinley puts it). I feel lucky in that I read McKinley’s two great adventure novels—The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, which both feature women protagonists without explanation or apology—at the important and impressionable age of fifteen. Other childhood heroes include Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman and Linsday Wagner’s Bionic Woman. This means, as a teenager, I completely took for granted the idea that women could star in adventure stories. I look around now and get a little bit appalled about how many stories—especially YA stories—feature women main characters but are all about them hooking up with the right guy, rather than having adventures. I have a bit of a mission with my YA novels—Voices of Dragons, and Steel which is due out in March. They’re about girls who do things. Rock climbing, rafting, getting in trouble, flying with dragons, fencing competitively, sailing with pirates. Romance is always secondary in my stories, which seems to frustrate some people, but I want to write and read about girls who have lots going on in their lives and their brains. Like Daniel, I tend to not read anything near like what I write. I actually get frustrated with it in many cases. So, I think I’m unusual in that I’m not writing urban fantasy because I love it. I’m writing it because I have something to say about it, and it’s where these stories fit. What I love reading: any author who can teach me something about writing. Right now I’m in love with Steven Erikson’s epic fantasy series. I’m in the middle of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cryoburn—the Vorkosigan series is my bible on how to write a good ongoing series. On deck is Connie Willis’s All Clear. Willis has taught me a ton about writing humor, and writing about relationships. And McKinley has a brand new book out, which is always cause for celebration. Seanan: What I write is definitely influenced by who I am, and by the way that who I am keeps changing. There’s a point in the movie Real Genius where Chris Knight says to a brand-new kid genius, “You remind me of me. I missed me, so I wanted to room with me again.” Some of my stories are a lot like that. They’re a way of spending time with people I was, and enjoyed being. None of my protagonists are me—not even a little—but a lot of my settings are. I guess I’m more comfortable being a place than a person, in fiction. I’m an omnivorous reader, and since I still have a day job, I have a multi-hour commute during which to feed my inner bookworm. I read a lot of urban fantasy, cheesy horror, young adult fiction, nonfiction, and even the occasional western or romance. Usually, I go in cycles, glutting myself on one kind of book before moving on to the next. I’m currently on a YA cycle, following a long series of books about parasitology and infectious disease. It was reading about infectious disease that inspired me to write the entire Newsflesh trilogy, and I’m now planning on one about, yes, parasites. I love reading things that make me think about things I don’t normally think about. Joe David Brown wrote a book called Paper Moon that changed my world, because it opened all these options in terms of language and places to look. His classic Western, Stars In My Crown, did the same thing. And then there’s everything Tiptree ever did . . . when I want to change my outlook, I read Tiptree, and it works. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever taught me more about human nature in one volume than almost anyone else has ever managed. Lousy horror just teaches me how many ways a person can be taken apart. Books mentioned in this column:
|