INTERVIEW - Carolyn Turgeon, author of Fairest of Them All
Please welcome Carolyn Turgeon, the author of the gorgeous fairy tale novel FAIREST OF THEM ALL to the blog!
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Are you a daydreamer too?
Yes, I always have been.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Yes. We moved a lot when I was a little kid—from Michigan to Illinois to Texas to Michigan to Pennsylvania—and I was super shy and dreamy and basically never spoke to anyone at school, where I was always the new girl. I couldn’t wait to leave each day and get lost in some other world! The library was a magical place to me, and I read everything I could. I especially loved Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy-Tibb series, which was set in the early 20th century in the American Midwest. The main character, Betsy, wants to be a writer and she’s always scribbling furiously in notebooks and hanging out in trees wearing long skirts and imagining a future writer’s life. If I didn’t want to be a writer before that, I definitely did after—it seemed the most romantic thing in the world to me, the best thing to be. I wrote my first book when I was 8, called The Mystery at the Dallas Zoo, about a group of kid detectives trying to figure out who stole the missing tapir. They figure it out when they find a handwritten note on the floor from one zookeeper to another, using their full names and spelling out their next crime.
Tell me a little about yourself – where were you born, where do you live, what do you like to do?
I was born in Michigan but moved around a lot. I went to school at Penn State, then went to grad school at UCLA (I studied medieval Italian poetry) and then lived in New York City for a bunch of years before returning to Pennsylvania. Now I travel a lot and spend a month every year in Alaska, where I teach at UAA’s Low-Residency MFA Program. I love travelling, seeing new places. Last summer I visited Barrow, Alaska (350 miles north of the Arctic Circle) and looked at polar bear tracks; last month I swam with dolphins in Tortola. I love ocean stuff now; after writing my novel Mermaid (2011), I started a mermaid blog and ended up going to mermaid camp at legendary mermaid attraction Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida (and swimming with a wild manatee who crashed the camp) and then, a few months later, getting scuba certified in Nicaragua. So I like oceans and travel and movies and long road trips and films and hanging out with friends, and I like working on Faerie Magazine, which I’m doing now, and assembling beautiful stories and photos and articles, and I like photography. The minute I started writing full time I took up the accordion, dark room photography, and bellydancing, but I don’t really keep up with any of those things, though in my heart I do. Oh, I also like writing. Sometimes.
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How did you get the first flash of inspiration for this book?
Usually it’s a specific image or mood or feeling that grabs hold of me and everything builds from that. My first two novels probably both stemmed from the film Wings of Desire and those images of the woman swinging back and forth on the trapeze, white feathered wings on her back, everything in black and white. It’s so beautiful and so sad (because she’s about to get off the trapeze, and the carnival is over). I ended up writing a novel about a trapeze girl (Rain Village) and another about a woman with white-feathered wings (Godmother, about the fairy godmother from the Cinderella story), that image was so rooted in me and so packed with melancholy beauty. With Mermaid, I had sold a book about a mermaid before writing it, and my agent was pushing me toward the original fairy tale, but it was only when I imagined the opening scene, where the princess (the one who marries the prince in the original tale) stands on a cliff, looking out over the icy sea, and witnesses the mermaid arriving at the shore with the nearly-drowned prince in her arms. I thought of what a gorgeous, sad, strange moment that would be, how it would change both women forever. Once I could see and taste that image, the entire book unfolded from it.
How extensively do you plan your novels?
My first two I sort of figured out as I went along, and ended up writing tons of pages I cut later and taking years to write the books. Since Mermaid, I’ve gone in with a full synopsis, which makes things much easier (and quicker)! I was partly forced to do that, once I was writing full time, but it makes things so much easier. I’m not sure I could have written the first two books from a detailed outline though; I sort of had to learn how to plot and structure a book by doing it, I think. As you can see from my Dallas zoo story, plotting wasn’t the thing that came naturally to me.
Do you ever use dreams as a source of inspiration?
Not really. More the feelings of dreams, that weird half-real feeling when you wake up and long to be back in a world you’re already starting to forget. I like my characters to dream a lot; I like the way that dreams sort of cut in and change your mood and sense of the world in these sneaky, mysterious ways.
Did you make any astonishing serendipitous discoveries while writing this book?
When I was planning The Fairest of Them All, I took a look at all my favorite heroines and villainesses from popular fairy tales and started noticing how well their stories matched up with each other, and I started feeling like I was reading the same woman’s story over and over. Rapunzel is spectacularly beautiful, it’s her beauty that attracts the prince, and she was raised by a witch… so she’s probably a witch herself, and probably won’t deal too well with aging and the loss of the thing she’s most valued for (her beauty). Especially if she married a prince who already had a daughter named Snow White. I started to think that the evil queen from Snow White (and all the other evil queens and witches) are the same gorgeous heroines who end up getting the prince ... after a few years have passed and happily ever after doesn’t quite hold up. I was astonished at how easy it was to meld these two stories, Rapunzel and Snow White, together!
Where do you write, and when?
I used to think that I needed all kinds of specific conditions in order to write, but I eventually realized that this was just an excuse to never write. So I carry around a lightweight laptop and write whenever and wherever. I wrote for an hour this morning at the car dealership while my car was getting serviced. I tend to write in spurts, though—nothing for days and days (or weeks and weeks!), and then just writing obsessively.
What is your favourite part of writing?
When you get so lost in the world you’re creating that you forget you’re writing at all and it doesn’t feel like work. But usually for me it feels like work!
What do you do when you get blocked?
Usually I’m not blocked in terms of not knowing what to write—like right now I have three different novels going and there’s always something clear-cut to write in one of them—but I do get blocked by sheer laziness or by travelling or doing too many other things. I just try to force myself to write and remember the lesson I’ve had to learn over and over: that you just do it one sentence, one page, at a time, until you have a book. Retreating to a cabin in the woods is always good, too!
How do you keep your well of inspiration full?
I carry around a notebook and make notes a lot, and I love to sit and brainstorm new ideas. And I read and watch movies and watch television and go to plays and go to storytelling events and just really pay attention to those moments when I get transported/fascinated/mindblown and try to use those moments as jumping off points.
Do you have any rituals that help you to write?
I aspire to have rituals! I fantasize about being someone who wakes up at the same time each day, makes myself a cup of tea (which I don’t actually drink except in this fantasy) and writes for a set number of hours each and every morning at my lovely big desk with inspirational things hung all around me and birds tweeting outside my window, But I’m usually writing on a bus or in a car dealership.
Who are ten of your favourite writers?
More than anything I love gorgeous magic realist writing and dark, twisted crime fiction.
Some writers are: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Isabel Allende, Alice Hoffman, Joanne Harris, Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, Natsuo Kirino, James M. Cain, Gillian Flynn, etc etc!
What do you consider to be good writing?
I love writing that’s beautiful and/or stylish, that transports me fully into the world it’s creating, and that is incredibly moving in some way. As a teacher of writing, I tend to always push students to write more clearly and vividly and emotionally.
What is your advice for someone dreaming of being a writer too?
To write as much as possible, to read as much as possible (and read good stuff!), to find some writing peers/take classes/join workshops to get feedback on your writing and develop writing relationships that will last throughout your career, and to not be discouraged by rejection, discouragement, or the blank page. There’s so much discipline and so much rejection (usually) involved, you have to have an amazing amount of faith and confidence to keep doing it and getting better and finishing projects, one by one. I’ve seen too many talented writers not get anywhere because they lacked that faith, and I’ve watched less talented writers just push through because they had that ferocious determination every writer needs.
What are you working on now?
A twisted crime novel, a historical novel based on my graduate studies, and a big sweeping epic fantasy!
[image error]
You can find out more about Carolyn at her website
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT - I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!
[image error]
Are you a daydreamer too?
Yes, I always have been.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Yes. We moved a lot when I was a little kid—from Michigan to Illinois to Texas to Michigan to Pennsylvania—and I was super shy and dreamy and basically never spoke to anyone at school, where I was always the new girl. I couldn’t wait to leave each day and get lost in some other world! The library was a magical place to me, and I read everything I could. I especially loved Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy-Tibb series, which was set in the early 20th century in the American Midwest. The main character, Betsy, wants to be a writer and she’s always scribbling furiously in notebooks and hanging out in trees wearing long skirts and imagining a future writer’s life. If I didn’t want to be a writer before that, I definitely did after—it seemed the most romantic thing in the world to me, the best thing to be. I wrote my first book when I was 8, called The Mystery at the Dallas Zoo, about a group of kid detectives trying to figure out who stole the missing tapir. They figure it out when they find a handwritten note on the floor from one zookeeper to another, using their full names and spelling out their next crime.
Tell me a little about yourself – where were you born, where do you live, what do you like to do?
I was born in Michigan but moved around a lot. I went to school at Penn State, then went to grad school at UCLA (I studied medieval Italian poetry) and then lived in New York City for a bunch of years before returning to Pennsylvania. Now I travel a lot and spend a month every year in Alaska, where I teach at UAA’s Low-Residency MFA Program. I love travelling, seeing new places. Last summer I visited Barrow, Alaska (350 miles north of the Arctic Circle) and looked at polar bear tracks; last month I swam with dolphins in Tortola. I love ocean stuff now; after writing my novel Mermaid (2011), I started a mermaid blog and ended up going to mermaid camp at legendary mermaid attraction Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida (and swimming with a wild manatee who crashed the camp) and then, a few months later, getting scuba certified in Nicaragua. So I like oceans and travel and movies and long road trips and films and hanging out with friends, and I like working on Faerie Magazine, which I’m doing now, and assembling beautiful stories and photos and articles, and I like photography. The minute I started writing full time I took up the accordion, dark room photography, and bellydancing, but I don’t really keep up with any of those things, though in my heart I do. Oh, I also like writing. Sometimes.
[image error]
How did you get the first flash of inspiration for this book?
Usually it’s a specific image or mood or feeling that grabs hold of me and everything builds from that. My first two novels probably both stemmed from the film Wings of Desire and those images of the woman swinging back and forth on the trapeze, white feathered wings on her back, everything in black and white. It’s so beautiful and so sad (because she’s about to get off the trapeze, and the carnival is over). I ended up writing a novel about a trapeze girl (Rain Village) and another about a woman with white-feathered wings (Godmother, about the fairy godmother from the Cinderella story), that image was so rooted in me and so packed with melancholy beauty. With Mermaid, I had sold a book about a mermaid before writing it, and my agent was pushing me toward the original fairy tale, but it was only when I imagined the opening scene, where the princess (the one who marries the prince in the original tale) stands on a cliff, looking out over the icy sea, and witnesses the mermaid arriving at the shore with the nearly-drowned prince in her arms. I thought of what a gorgeous, sad, strange moment that would be, how it would change both women forever. Once I could see and taste that image, the entire book unfolded from it.
How extensively do you plan your novels?
My first two I sort of figured out as I went along, and ended up writing tons of pages I cut later and taking years to write the books. Since Mermaid, I’ve gone in with a full synopsis, which makes things much easier (and quicker)! I was partly forced to do that, once I was writing full time, but it makes things so much easier. I’m not sure I could have written the first two books from a detailed outline though; I sort of had to learn how to plot and structure a book by doing it, I think. As you can see from my Dallas zoo story, plotting wasn’t the thing that came naturally to me.
Do you ever use dreams as a source of inspiration?
Not really. More the feelings of dreams, that weird half-real feeling when you wake up and long to be back in a world you’re already starting to forget. I like my characters to dream a lot; I like the way that dreams sort of cut in and change your mood and sense of the world in these sneaky, mysterious ways.
Did you make any astonishing serendipitous discoveries while writing this book?
When I was planning The Fairest of Them All, I took a look at all my favorite heroines and villainesses from popular fairy tales and started noticing how well their stories matched up with each other, and I started feeling like I was reading the same woman’s story over and over. Rapunzel is spectacularly beautiful, it’s her beauty that attracts the prince, and she was raised by a witch… so she’s probably a witch herself, and probably won’t deal too well with aging and the loss of the thing she’s most valued for (her beauty). Especially if she married a prince who already had a daughter named Snow White. I started to think that the evil queen from Snow White (and all the other evil queens and witches) are the same gorgeous heroines who end up getting the prince ... after a few years have passed and happily ever after doesn’t quite hold up. I was astonished at how easy it was to meld these two stories, Rapunzel and Snow White, together!
Where do you write, and when?
I used to think that I needed all kinds of specific conditions in order to write, but I eventually realized that this was just an excuse to never write. So I carry around a lightweight laptop and write whenever and wherever. I wrote for an hour this morning at the car dealership while my car was getting serviced. I tend to write in spurts, though—nothing for days and days (or weeks and weeks!), and then just writing obsessively.
What is your favourite part of writing?
When you get so lost in the world you’re creating that you forget you’re writing at all and it doesn’t feel like work. But usually for me it feels like work!
What do you do when you get blocked?
Usually I’m not blocked in terms of not knowing what to write—like right now I have three different novels going and there’s always something clear-cut to write in one of them—but I do get blocked by sheer laziness or by travelling or doing too many other things. I just try to force myself to write and remember the lesson I’ve had to learn over and over: that you just do it one sentence, one page, at a time, until you have a book. Retreating to a cabin in the woods is always good, too!
How do you keep your well of inspiration full?
I carry around a notebook and make notes a lot, and I love to sit and brainstorm new ideas. And I read and watch movies and watch television and go to plays and go to storytelling events and just really pay attention to those moments when I get transported/fascinated/mindblown and try to use those moments as jumping off points.
Do you have any rituals that help you to write?
I aspire to have rituals! I fantasize about being someone who wakes up at the same time each day, makes myself a cup of tea (which I don’t actually drink except in this fantasy) and writes for a set number of hours each and every morning at my lovely big desk with inspirational things hung all around me and birds tweeting outside my window, But I’m usually writing on a bus or in a car dealership.
Who are ten of your favourite writers?
More than anything I love gorgeous magic realist writing and dark, twisted crime fiction.
Some writers are: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Isabel Allende, Alice Hoffman, Joanne Harris, Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, Natsuo Kirino, James M. Cain, Gillian Flynn, etc etc!
What do you consider to be good writing?
I love writing that’s beautiful and/or stylish, that transports me fully into the world it’s creating, and that is incredibly moving in some way. As a teacher of writing, I tend to always push students to write more clearly and vividly and emotionally.
What is your advice for someone dreaming of being a writer too?
To write as much as possible, to read as much as possible (and read good stuff!), to find some writing peers/take classes/join workshops to get feedback on your writing and develop writing relationships that will last throughout your career, and to not be discouraged by rejection, discouragement, or the blank page. There’s so much discipline and so much rejection (usually) involved, you have to have an amazing amount of faith and confidence to keep doing it and getting better and finishing projects, one by one. I’ve seen too many talented writers not get anywhere because they lacked that faith, and I’ve watched less talented writers just push through because they had that ferocious determination every writer needs.
What are you working on now?
A twisted crime novel, a historical novel based on my graduate studies, and a big sweeping epic fantasy!
[image error]
You can find out more about Carolyn at her website
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT - I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!
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