Q&A with Frederic S. Durbin discussion
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Frederic S. Durbin
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Frederic
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Jan 11, 2012 11:45AM
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What is the genesis of The Star Shard? Did it begin with a mental image of Cymbril? Or with the Rake? (You mentioned that a sense of place is vital to your writing.) Or did the beginning ideas come to you in some other way?
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It was with the concept of the Thunder Rake. I had originally developed Thunder Rakes (smaller than the one appearing in The Star Shard) as vehicles used by the forces of evil in The Threshold of Twilight, the first novel-length manuscript I wrote as a student in high school and college. I envisioned many of them, wheeled "battleship"/troop carriers "rowed" over the plains by monstrous creatures manning the levers that turned the gears. I often recycle ideas from my earlier, unpublished works for use in later projects. I suppose the idea of the Thunder Rake goes all the way back to elementary school, when we read about Windwagon Smith and the (folkloric?) windwagons of the American frontier, wagons outfitted with sails. That's when my wheels started turning. And when you've got a great setting, there's usually a story hiding in there somewhere!
Do your stories generally begin with the setting? Or does a character ever come and tap you on the shoulder?
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Yes, my stories almost always begin with the setting, or with an idea that's closely tied to the setting. I can't think of any case in which a character has come and found me before the setting did. Once I'm working on a book or story, then sometimes characters show up out of nowhere. But in general, my imagination gravitates much more toward places than toward people. That's why character development is a lot harder for me than it is for many writers. I know writers who love thinking about what makes people tick. I've never been that way.
Your stories have such a sense of place, such an atmosphere. Maybe, for you, the setting is the first character to show up, the one who defines all the rest of the characters!
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Just tonight at our local writers' group, we were talking about how we think there are at least four types of writers, and in our group, we have writers who represent all four types:
1. writers of place (world-builders)
2. writers of character
3. writers of plot
4. writers of situation/idea
Those four aspects are "doorways" that lead the writer into the story. For me, it's the place that draws me in. For some, it's a character that shows up. For some, it's a plot to hang a story upon. For some, it's an intriguing situation to be explored. We all come in by different doors, but we all reach a fully-developed story. Very interesting stuff!
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How was your writing process different in writing The Star Shard the novel than when you begin with a blank page? Was there a difference for you having already figured out some of the story in the Serial version? Did you find it easier or more difficult to let the story unfold as you were writing and expanding it?And I have to echo Dorothy; do you feel that your places are sometimes the character to you? It sure feels that way when I read your stories. Your places definitely feel like doorways, but it seems like more than that sometimes. Harvest Moon and The Sacred Woods felt like characters for sure, and I will let you know about the expanded version of the Rake very soon :-)
Interesting about the four types of writers! I have a tendency to think that all stories must begin with the characters. Thanks for enlightening us!
Mod
I think that the characters have to be solid before the story is finished, definitely! The reader has to identify with the characters and care about them, or there's no book/story. But the characters aren't what comes first to every writer.
You've probably heard the story of how Tolkien began The Hobbit. It was late at night (he was a night owl, like me), and he was grading student papers. He came to a paper in which the student had left most of a page blank, and he was grateful to see that, as I usually am -- less to check, you know. Suddenly this line came to Tolkien, and he wrote it down, right on the student's page: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." That's the first line of The Hobbit, and the author then goes on to describe the hole in some detail before he describes the hobbit. So I would argue that it was the hole, not the hobbit, that first came to J.R.R.T. And when you read his works, he's obviously more excited about the lands as a whole -- the geography, the languages, the history, the culture -- than about developing any of the characters or exploring their feelings/growth/relationships. The characters are wonderful, but it's Middle-earth we remember and want to visit again, time after time, in our lives. So I would place Tolkien in my canoe, on my team -- does anyone care to argue that point? :-) J.R.R.T. was a writer of PLACE/SETTING! MILIEU!
I wonder whatever happened to that test paper! Did Tolkien erase or blot out the line before he returned it? Did the student save it?
You and Tolkien in a canoe--that's quite a mind picture! That might be too much of a good thing. I rather think that you two would have such an interesting discussion that you would forget what place you were actually in and capsize the canoe! :-)
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Maybe I shouldn't say it, because I'm providing fuel for critical critics, but it was HARD to write The Star Shard into a novel from an existing short story! Imagine that you have a pair of pants that fit your two-year-old son, and you then set out to make them into a pair of pants that will fit your husband. Yikes! You can do it, of course, with more material, with a lot of measuring, stitching, snipping, etc. -- but they were perfectly good pants to begin with. They fit the two-year-old just fine! There's a shape to a short story that is different from the shape of a novel. Maybe that's why it took me many, many rewrites before I found the new shape of it. The characters at one point got much older, and then they got back to their original ages. The second half of the book jumped much farther ahead in time in one draft, and then it came back. All in all, I'm not eager to convert another short story into a novel.
But don't get me wrong! I love The Star Shard, and I'm delighted with it now. It just had a very difficult adolescence! I am intensely curious to know what Cricket readers who knew the story in its first incarnation there will think if they re-read it as a book. Interestingly, they'll be bigger and older people than they were in 2008-2009. They will have grown up with the story. (I hope their interposing years were easier!)
I didn't answer your question, did I? What was the process? I had to try to find ways to explore the spaces-between. Here was a story with a solid (little) skeleton. It had to come out more or less the same (I tried having it come out differently, and it didn't work out) -- but a lot more had to happen in the novel than in the story. I introduced two interrelated subplots that aren't in the Cricket story. Oh, I can't say that it wasn't fun! Hard, but fun!
Place as character -- yes, I suppose that's one way of putting it! In Dragonfly, Harvest Moon (the subterranean Gothic town) does seem like the "main character," doesn't it? Like Middle-earth is the "main character" of The Lord of the Rings!
Mod
I'm afraid that's true: we'd go over Rauros Falls! And all the way down, we'd be aware of how awesome it was to be among all that falling water . . .
I had a feeling you were going to say that. Thank you for explaining it so well. I was really curious about how you managed it, and I thought it might have been a difficult task because the process would be so unlike writing any other novel. You had all the pieces but now they didn't fit together anymore. Had to be an interesting feat to say the least! I am REALLY glad you managed to do it though. When I finished The Star Shard I just wanted so much more of Cymbril and Loric and the Thunder Rake and now I can have them.
Oh, one more question: How much longer is the novel than the story? Not exactly a writing process question, but I just had to know.
Mod
This took some research, but I finally have an answer for you. At one point near the end of our revisions on the Cricket story (there was a lot of back-and-forth refining), the story weighed in at 23,992 words. I would guess that that's pretty close to the finalized version that appeared in the magazine (give or take a couple hundred). On a near-final draft I have of the book manuscript, it's 62,500 words. That means that from the story to the book, it grew by 38,508 words. That means that if you divide its volume into three, one third of it was the Cricket story, and two thirds of it are part of the novel alone.
In NaNoWriMo, they shoot for 50,000 words as being the line at which a story becomes a novel. Different places will give you different numbers on what constitutes a story, novelette, novella, or novel.
Holy smokes! Two thirds, it WAY more than doubled! I knew it was much bigger but wasn't sure how much. Thank you for researching that. You rock mister! So excited about this book :-)
Mod
What advice would you give to writers seeking to create believable characters, characters that other people will care about? Are your characters modeled on people whom you know? Do you keep a notebook with ideas about characters? Do you ever go to a mall to watch people and maybe make up stories about the people you see walking by? Do you study people and try to figure out what makes them act the way do?
Mod
It's very encouraging to know that there are multiple ways of approaching the writing of fiction! Now I'm wondering, if you start with the setting and allow your characters to develop within the setting, where does the plot come from? Does that all develop, too, as you go along, or do you have some basic plan of where the story is going before you start to write?
Mod
As for plot, some writers like to figure it all out in advance. J.K. Rowling and Christopher Paolini are two famous examples of writers who have gone on record describing their intricate plotting before ever setting down the first word of the story. Then there are writers like Stephen King, who let the plot grow by putting the characters into a situation and watching what they do. I'm much more toward the Stephen King end of the continuum, but I do like to have a very rough, general idea of what the plot might be before I start. This may amount to a page or two with a basic outline. It's a big, broad gist of a story, but with few particulars. More than outlining the plot carefully, I tend to jot notes over a long time about names, settings, situations, or maybe a quirky character on scraps of paper, and I keep them in the box with the manuscript. As I think about these elements, either when I'm writing or (often) when I'm walking, I'll gradually understand where they fit into the structure. In some stories, I've used such snippets that came to me years and years before, which is why I recommend that writers keep their writing materials in a safe place where they can always find everything again.
But yes, I'm discovering most of the little twists of the story as I go along. That's the only way for me to keep it real. If I try to hammer the plot out, it becomes a dead, cold thing. If I let the plot grow from the characters' efforts to solve their problems, it stays alive and genuine, and it keeps surprising me. I have to let a book tell its own story, because it knows that story better than I do.
Thanks for the writing tips! Now I'm wondering, out of all your books and stories, do you have a favorite or two? Perhaps a favorite story you would like us to know about? Or is your favorite always the one you happen to be working on at the time?
Mod
So, no, I don't have a favorite among my stories and books. I have a great deal of sentimental attachment to Dragonfly, because that was my first work of published fiction as an adult. I'll never forget the ecstatic joy of hearing that Arkham House was going to publish it. That was the moment that confirmed I could be a professional writer.
As to the very last part of the question: no, I don't necessarily always feel that the project I'm working on is the greatest yet -- I LIKE it when I feel that way, of course! To use a pottery analogy: sometimes you're making a simple cup, and you know that, even though you've made ornate urns or fantastic vases before; you still pour your love and skill into that cup, so that it's the best cup it can be. I strive to do things better and better each time around, and when you get absorbed in the crafting, it's exciting.
Thanks; I enjoyed reading this!You described yourself as a "writer of place." What are some of your favorite places to visit? Are there certain places you like to go to receive inspiration for your writing? How about your favorite fictional places to visit, in the books and stories of others?
Mod
1. The Edges of the Yards and Fields: This might also be called "Hidden Outdoor Spaces." As a kid, I was fascinated with the borders of places. I was forever crawling into the bushes, exploring the hedgerows at the boundaries of our property. There were little paths inside them where animals (foxes? raccoons? opossums?) had pressed down the weeds with repeated passage, and I found that supremely alluring, like roads into Faerie. I loved the idea of the forests encroaching on the back of our property, that dim, cool, secret world beyond the sunlit field. And I was enchanted by the cornfields. The world of tall green stalks and whispery leaves existed only in the summertime, and you had to cross a physical ditch (left by tractor tires) to get into it. Finally, there was the realm of the treetops. I found you could also climb out of the everyday world. High up in the trees, there were places of emerald light and sunbeams, of squirrels and knotholes and birds, from which you couldn't see the ground very well. If you've ever read my story "The Place of Roots," you can see where tree-climbing experience led -- to a society of folk who live in the tops of vast trees, and for whom the distant ground is nothing but a vague myth.
2. Hidden Indoor Spaces: I loved playing in closets as a small child, particularly if the closets had shelves that I could climb up to. I'm guessing C.S. Lewis was the same way as a boy, since a wardrobe is an entrance to Narnia. I loved my grandma's basement, too. There were dusty shelves of jam jars and vegetable preserves, old seed packets, antiquated washtubs where I actually helped her do laundry . . . and she had a bomb shelter, too, built at the recommendation of President Kennedy. It was reached by a twice-turning hallway from the basement proper, and I thought it was the epitome of wondrous playhouses.
3. Mammoth Cave and all its kind: When I was 7 or 8, my parents took me to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. Forever after, our family vacation trips had to be structured around caves we could visit, because I was hooked on these hallowed halls beneath the ground -- places of unfathomable mystery, older than any structure of humankind, where possibility seemed to flow like the air currents.
I receive inspiration from natural places: caverns, forests, wilderness trails, rocky heights, rivers, waterfalls, canyons, sea coasts . . . the backyard at dusk, especially in the summer, when the fireflies drift and wink, and the trees stand in silhouette.
In fiction, these borders and secret realms are also my favorite places to go: in Tolkien's stories, the mines of Moria and the forest of Mirkwood; in other tales, the jungles, the lost cities, the subterranean kingdoms, the attics, the basements . . . all those places where stories whisper until they are found and heard.
Very evocative writing! Yes, you certainly are a writer of place! Reading this makes me eager for summer, so that I can once more walk into a cornfield to experience that green solitude, and so that I can look for paths in the hedgerows.
