Palace of Stone (31 page)

—Publishers Weekly,
starred review

“Fans of Gail Carson Levine’s
Fairest
will embrace this similar mix of exotic, fully realized setting; thrilling, enchanted adventure; and heart-melting romance.”

—
Booklist,
starred review

www.bloomsburyteens.com

Eager for more tales of magic and adventure?

Follow Rapunzel and Jack (of “Jack and the Beanstalk” fame) to new lands in these fantastical graphic novels!

www.bloomsburyteens.com
www.shannonhale.com

Q & A

with

SHANNON HALE

Q: How do you view the relationship between you and your reader?

A: We’re a team! My part is only half of the storytelling. The other half belongs to the readers; they bring their own experiences, opinions, and imaginations to a book, taking the author’s words and telling themselves their own unique story. I love that reading is such an intimate, individual, and magical experience.

Q: In your Newbery Honor novel Princess Academy, it’s a wonderful moment when Miri realizes she has the ability to read. Do you remember the first book you read? Can you describe any of your early memories of reading on your own?

A: Starting at about age eight, reading became magical. I guess that was the age when I was confident enough in my abilities that I could read a book without struggling over the words and just get lost in a story. Immersing myself in a book was essential from ages eight to twelve, probably more so than at any time in my life. Being young is tough! You have to depend on adults and go along with their schedules, and so much of the world is huge and mysterious and threatening. But when children can read, they control so much. They can imagine what the characters look like, sound like, how the story flows, how long they’ll be carried away in it. They are powerful. Reading under a tree or in my bed with a night-light were some of the best moments of my childhood. Of course I wasn’t really under a tree or in bed—I was sailing a pirate ship or solving a mystery in Egypt or exploring Narnia.

Q: Why did you select the Grimms’ tales to retell with The Goose Girl, Book of a Thousand Days, Rapunzel’s Revenge, and Calamity Jack?

A: My mom read us Grimms’ tales as kids, and we gobbled them up. I think they’re a part of the structure of my brain now. I’m fascinated that certain tales were powerful enough to survive hundreds of years of oral storytelling. There’s worth there. There’s raw truth. Despite my general love of fairy tales, the ones I choose to retell are the tales that are beautiful but also irritate me. My writer brain gets bugged, and I feel energized to put myself inside that story and figure it out.

Q: Any other favorite tales that might inspire a future book?

A: Yes! But I’m a little superstitious about discussing stories I haven’t started writing yet. I like to let them lie quietly in my brain for a few years, gestating.

Q: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

A: Looking back, I can see that I was always making up stories. I put together little plays and performed them for my parents and bribed my younger siblings to take part. It wasn’t until fourth grade that I realized a person could be a writer. I declared my intentions that year and never looked back.

Q: If you hadn’t become a writer, what was your plan B?

A: I love the classroom environment and was interested in becoming a teacher. I also worked as an instructional designer for years.

Q: You read many books in graduate school that you’ve said didn’t ignite your imagination or stimulate much emotion. But, as you’ve noted, reading these books inspired you to write something that you would want to read. What about your books appeals to you as a reader?

A: Yes, for most of my college years I read only what was assigned in class (I didn’t have time for anything else!). I certainly don’t mean to belittle those books or writers—most of what I read was beautifully written or historically important. But many were depressing, and I often wasn’t as drawn into the story or as captivated by the characters as I had been by the kind of books I loved as a kid. By my second year of graduate school, I was craving a book that created a world where I wanted to be. I longed for a rousing story that would give me reasons to turn the pages besides just completing an assignment. I wanted the writers to imbue their characters with skills and resources that would give them a fighting chance to succeed, not just doom them to bleakness and failure. Something fun. Something with hope, but not an easy, obvious happy ending. Adventure. Romance. Fantasy. I love these things. As a reader, I also don’t want to have to sacrifice quality writing for a compelling story.

Q: Explain your writing process.

A: Ideas for books occur to me almost daily. I jot them down. The ones that pester me the most win. I usually let a book idea germinate in my brain for a year (or several) before I put together all the notes I’ve kept, form a rough outline, and start working. The first draft is hard for me, but happily I work in clay, not marble. Once I have that ugly clay mass of a first draft, I have something to work with and will do many rewrites. My process has streamlined a bit over the years. Now I do about a dozen drafts, but
The Goose Girl
took thirty. Certain parts, like the first chapters and endings, I’ll rewrite fifty or so times.

Q: You’ve been writing stories since you were ten years old. What kind of stories did you write then? How has your writing and storytelling evolved?

A: My early writings were very derivative, as they should be. I believe imitation is the best way to start any creative art. I wrote stories similar to whatever I was reading at the time. The books I wrote when I was ten and eleven were
The Gift of the Sea
(a fantasy with three redheaded heroines who discover they have magical powers, and the fact that I’m a redhead was just happenstance, I swear),
The Cave of Blackwood Falls
(pure coincidence that I had recently read the Nancy Drew book
The Ghost of Blackwood Hall,
I assure you), and
My Mother the Queen
(two cousins discover they’re really princesses, and it’s an unrelated fact that I very much wanted to discover I was really a princess too).

In high school, my writing was semipoetic—all style, no substance. In college and graduate school, I rediscovered how much I love story. I’ve tried to merge those two periods, to mature into a writing style that first, tells a story, and second, tells it well.

Q: Who encouraged you most to continue writing?

A: My mom was a dream for supporting my wild ideas and ambitions, and I had great teachers in elementary school, high school, and college who allowed me to explore and express my creativity. I never had a literary mentor who, you know, nudged my shoulder and said, "You’re going to make it, kid. You got what it takes!" During the years of rejection, maybe I kept going in part just to spite the naysayers.

Q: Many of your books transcend time yet are rooted in a concrete past. Why and how did you choose these time periods and settings?

A: I wanted the settings to feel like real places, places where we’ve been before, places that could exist but don’t. To me, it makes the story feel as though it’s starting in a distant fairy tale then bursting through into reality. When you place a story in a real location, there’s always the risk that a reader might dismiss the story as just being about Utah or Mongolia or fourteenth-century Italy. A mythical place, an invented realm, has a universal appeal. Anyone can inhabit it—including the reader.

I do like to base the settings on real places, albeit very loosely. Like most Americans, I’m a true mutt, and with my early books I tended to use my settings to explore countries that are a part of my heritage. Bayern was partly inspired by Germany, Danland in
Princess Academy
is a nod to my Scandinavian ancestry, and the Old West of
Rapunzel’s Revenge
mines the historical landscape of Utah, my home state. But the older I get, the more I feel a universal kinship. I based the setting of
Book of a Thousand Days
on Mongolia, though I have no blood ties to that fabulous land.

Q: How do you see your books fitting into the fantasy genre?

A: I think the fantasy genre (like most genre labeling) is a slippery snake—you can’t hold it still to look at the whole thing. I like that about it. I don’t think I could define "fantasy" to my own satisfaction; there are so many subgenres and slipstreams and contradictions. Genres can be as useful as they are harmful. I’ve read that a genre is a contract with the reader, saying, "This is the kind of story you can expect." That’s helpful. But then again, when I ask people what they imagine when they think of fantasy, they say, "Fairies, elves, sorcerers, barbarian swordsmen, ogres, dragons . . ." My books don’t have any of those things.
The Goose Girl
is fairy-tale fantasy, but are the rest of the Bayern books since they weren’t based on fairy tales? I think of my books as stories that take place long ago in a place that feels familiar, where things that you may not see every day are possible.