maggie-stiefvater:the raven king countdown → day...

maggie-stiefvater:

the raven king countdown → day eight

Favorite quote
what am I

I can’t tell you what my favorite quote is, because it’s the last line of the series.

The Raven King is my thirteenth published novel, and you’d think — I thought, anyway — that novel-writing would get easier with practice. But in reality, it feels like a magic trick. Every time.

It’s not that I don’t know now if I can finish a novel. That knowledge, grounded in repeated success, at least conveys from project-to-project. The rub is this: I am absolutely certain that I can get to an end of a book. I’m just never sure if I’m going to get to the end. 

Why are you writing this story? 

I have to know the answer to this question before I begin drafting. It’s my mission statement. My endpoint. It’s how I know I’m done: I’ve written the book I intended to write. It means I often have to write several other books that are not the real thing on the way to it. And it’s getting harder, not easier, now that I know more about building stories. Before, I would get stuck when my subconscious stabbed the brakes. I’d be forced to circle back and ask myself why I couldn’t move forward — oh, because you’re telling the wrong story, Stiefvater.

But now! Nice try, writer’s block. I can strong-arm a set of characters through a properly structured set of tasks to create a beginning, middle, and end. 

Just not the one I intended to. 

It’s a tough problem, because only I can diagnose it. I can send a draft to my critique partners and editors and they can sign off on it, but only I can decide if the novel I sent them was the one I set out to create. It becomes even more complex when looking at a project like the Raven Cycle — four novels written over nearly a decade, a series begun when I was a teenager. Back then, the story asked a question that I didn’t have an answer for. That was the why. 

what am I tell me what I am 

Which brings me to the last line of the Raven Cycle. From my fraught inbox, I know readers are looking forward to very different things in the conclusion of the series. They have dozens of different priorities for what constitutes a happy or satisfying or logical conclusion to the series, depending on what they believe the story is about, depending on what their priorities are for a good story. But for me, the why are you writing this story has always had a pretty simple answer, focused around that question that teenage me had no answer for. 

When I wrote the last line in the Raven Cycle, I knew I’d written the story I had intended to. I’d pulled off the magic trick again — whether it’s a trick that anyone else finds diverting is another thing. I wish I could hand a copy to teen-me. 

“Read this, you asshole,” I’d tell her, “it says everything you need to hear.”

She wouldn’t have believed me — I wasn’t big on believing in people back then — but she would’ve come around, I think. 

Good job, kiddo. We did it. Fist bump.