#the grisha

itsnotmika:

and you’re telling me she chose mal

art credit: @lenayvetteillustrations(instagram)

Top ten things I whisper to myself before I fall asleep

While I was at YALLfest, I interviewed bestselling author Leigh Bardugo! We talked about The Grisha, her upcoming series Six of Crows, and writing in general. Interview below the cut due to length.

Me: How far are you towards completion of Six of Crows?

Leigh: I’m about to start the second revision. The first revision is always the biggest one. Luckily I just had dinner with my editor and she felt this wasn’t going to be another big one. I usually go through two to three rounds of revisions before we go to line edits. It’s a little weird that it doesn’t come out for a year but we’re pretty close to being done with it.

Me: Will any familiar faces show up in the Six of Crows series and if so will they play any big roles?

Leigh: At least in the first one they will be playing minor roles. We’re just going to get glimpses of what’s been going on in Ravka since the civil war. I’m not sure about the second book yet. Right now I have no plans to make them major players.

Me: Does Six of Crows happen before, during, or after the events of The Grisha?

Leigh: Six of Crows takes place two years after Ruin and Rising and the end of the Ravkan civil war.

Me: What significance does the title Six of Crows have? What significance does the old title The Dregs have?

Leigh: The Dregs is one of the gangs that exists in the thriving criminal underworld of the city known as Ketterdam where most of the series takes place. There’s a guy named Kaz who is a member of The Dregs and he puts together a team that has to pull off this impossible heist. Three of the members of that team are from his gang: him, Inej, and a guy named Jesper who’s a Zemeni sharpshooter. We felt we needed to change the title because the story isn’t really about the gang; it’s about this team. There are six members of this team and crows come up again and again in the book. All the gangs have their own tattoo and The Dregs’ tattoo is a crow trying to drink from a nearly empty goblet. Kaz carries a cane with a carved crow’s head. The gambling hall that The Dregs runs is known as the Crow Club. So, Kaz is very tightly associated with crows and he’s the leader of the team. That’s where the title came from.

Me: You created a character who wanted to take over the world with shadow monsters and your readers ended up loving him and even sympathizing with him. Was that intentional, and if it was, what did you do to achieve that effect?

Leigh: It was definitely intentional. I built the Darkling to be appealing. I wanted to create a dictator who people would convincingly follow. I wanted to create an antagonist who you couldn’t just write off as a madman. I fins that the people who are most dangerous in our lives don’t walk in with a sign saying that they’re evil and should be dismissed. They’re people who are beautiful and manipulative and charismatic and who can still do a lot of damage just the same. I set about trying to make him as appealing as possible and I’m glad people found him that way. In terms of how I created him, with all of my characters I don’t set out to write a villain or a love interest or a hero; I set out to write a character with a history and an agenda of his or her own and then I see what happens.

Me: What went into the creation of Alina’s complex personality?

Leigh: The linchpin of Alina’s character was Keramzin. When I realized what her backstory was – that she had come from this orphanage, that she had been educated out of the peasant class but was still very much not an aristocrat, and that she was someone who had never belonged anywhere and who had been looked at by the world as somebody without any potential at all, I began to understand who she was. Initially, she was a little too nice for my tastes. It was when I found her sense of humor, her sense of snark, and her sourness – she’s a grumpy, grumpy girl and she has every reason to be – that she really clicked into place.

Me: Was the ending to The Grisha planned from the beginning?

Leigh: About halfway through Shadow and Bone, I realized that I didn’t want to write a single book; I wanted to write a trilogy. But I didn’t know if anybody would want to buy one book, let alone three. I took notes for books two and three and I always knew how that third book would end, right down to the dialogue. Although a lot of things changed along the way, that ending stayed the same. I was lucky enough that when I sold my first book, my agent said, “It feels like a trilogy.” I said, “Oh, funny you should mention that,” and I was ready with my outlines.

Me: Did you have any specific inspiration for The Grisha?

Leigh: The story arose from taking this idea of darkness that operates as a metaphor in fantasy – you know, “a dark age is coming,” “darkness is going to fall across the land,” – and making it literal. It came from the question of, “What if darkness was a place, and what if the monsters you imagined there were real and you had to fight them in their own territory?” Those ideas became the Shadow Fold. Everything else grew out of that initial idea.

Me: What made you pick a Russian-based setting?

Leigh: I wanted to take readers someplace a little different. I love fantasy but a lot of it, though this is increasingly less true, has taken its cue from medieval Europe, particularly medieval England. A lot of the dynamics that exist in Russian history really fit with dynamics that already existed in the plot of the books. There’s a huge discrepancy between rich and poor, an army of conscripted soldiers, failure to industrialize, an inept monarchy, this radical sense of isolation – they all sort of fit with the story I wanted to tell.

Me: What went into writing Genya and Alina’s relationship?

Leigh: Genya starts out as this kind of sassy best friend. This is a trope you see in young adult a lot. She operates as a sassy best friend and fairy godmother. She’s going to give you a makeover and she’s going to show you the ropes of this new world you’re entering. I wanted to give that character – that figure – a real story of her own. Genya has her own hardships and her own trials that she’s been through. She makes terrible mistakes and terrible alliance and I think she really finds her strength in the end. Their friendship is part of that. Alina is really the first good friend she’s had, and that’s true for Alina too. They couldn’t be more different on the outside – Genya is this exquisite creature and Alina is somebody who feels sickly and scrawny and pale – and yet they both spent their lives as outsiders.

Me: What did you do before you were a writer?

Leigh: I did lots of things. I worked for an ad agency, I was a copywriter, I worked for a dot com, and I used to write movie trailers for a living.

Me: Which ones?

Leigh: The Princess Diaries, Herbie: Fully Loaded. Whenever they had a girl project, that’s what they gave to me. I was also a makeup and special effects artist. That’s what I was doing when I wrote the books.

Me: What is your writing schedule?

Leigh: It depends on the book. With Shadow and Bone, when I had days off from work, I would go get my coffee in the morning, put my Bluetooth in, and talk to myself. I would pretend I was on the phone with someone and talk through the story as I walked. When I was on set, I would work all day as a makeup artist and then I’d come home and I’d write down as much as I could. My schedule was very varied. With Siege and Storm, I really put myself in the bunker. I would write all day long. With Ruin and Rising it was different, too. I would work in very productive spurts of a few days, and then I would need a day or two off to really think and process, and then I would go back to it. I’m not the kind of writer, usually, who writes every single day, unless I’m at a deadline.

Me: How did you come up with your characters’ names?

Leigh: A lot of them have spoilers built into them. I go to baby naming sites and look up meanings of names. Some I chose because I like the sound. With my new book, Six of Crows, I was watching a lot of hockey when I wrote it, so there are quite a few hockey player names. Hockey is a great research tool for fantastic names, let me tell you.

Me: What’s the main occupational hazard of writing YA?*

Leigh: I feel the occupational hazard of writing anything is that we are inherently solitary creatures. Sometimes I will lock myself away and I won’t see people for weeks or moths at a time. I think that makes you a little squirrely.

Me: Were you ever a procrastinator? How did you deal with procrastination?

Leigh: I was always the kid who wrote the paper the night before it was due and who crammed for the test the night before. Probably like you, I was smart enough to get away with it most of the time. You can’t write a book that way. You have to do it a little bit at a time and you have to do it badly a lot of the time. Everybody likes to do things they’re good at and I was the same way. The trick for me for finishing a book and not stepping away from it for a day and then a week and then a month was to write it badly. Write a terrible first draft and then come back to it and make it good.

Me: What do aspiring authors get wrong?

Leigh: There are two things. One, a lot of fantasy and science fiction authors get too wrapped up in the worldbuilding. They put all their energy there instead of thinking about the plot and the characters. I understand that pleasure. Worldbuilding is fun. But the world has to serve a greater story. Two, their ambition gets the best of them. There’s an idea that you’re going to write this brilliant, amazing, mind-blowing book that’s going to make your career. Write a bad book first. When you finish that book, write another book. You always have to be working toward something new. You have to get rid of the idea that something is going to be so special or perfect because it puts too much pressure on you. I found it very paralyzing.

Me: Were there any books you read when you were young that had an impact on you?

Leigh: The big one for me was Dune by Frank Herbert. It was the first book I remember closing the last page of and feeling mournful that I was gone from that world. I mean, obviously there are tons of them in the series, but I still remember that experience. A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle was very big for me. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones was very important as well.

Me: Knowing what you know now as a writer, what would you tell your past self?

Leigh: I would tell my younger writer self to finish. Just finish a draft and stop worrying about it. I’m very grateful for where I ended up, so I wouldn’t change much. There were a lot of years where I thought that I was never going to write a book. That I just didn’t have it in me. I wish I could go back and tell that Leigh that it’s all going to work out.

Me: What was your pitch to your agent for Shadow and Bone?

Leigh: It was very much the way I pitch it on panels now in conferences. I say it’s a fantasy set in a world inspired by Czarist Russia of the early 1800s. Then I talk about Alina and the Fold and I try to keep it as short and sweet as possible. That’s basically what I wrote in my pitch to Joanna. She says my query letter wasn’t very good but luckily my pages were.

*I was told to ask this by Alexander London, author of Proxy, who was also in the room.