Wisdom's Kiss (55 page)

I wrote this, a little up-close-and-personal for booksellers and reviewers, for advance review copies of
Wisdom's Kiss.
When it came time to develop the enhanced e-book, I realized I could either reinvent the wheel or simply include this as is. In the interests of sanity, I chose option #2. Besides, it reveals a lot of my thinking. Perhaps at times too much...

Some Questions from Catherine Murdock for the Author of
Wisdom's Kiss

S
POILER ALERT!
T
HIS INTERVIEW DISCUSSES THE ENDING!!

Dairy Queen
was inspired by your dream of a girl playing football.
Princess Ben
came from a dream about a girl leaping out a window. Did a dream spark
Wisdom's Kiss?

I wish! No, this book I had to write the old-fashioned way: I made it up. To be honest, I did have a dream several years ago about acrobats performing on bungee cords inside a balloon, but the logistics were absurd: Where does the audience sit? How does one even get in? But I gnawed away at that fig id="the emotions it elicited, what they meant. I loved the notion of the heroines fleeing by balloon, and then, appallingly late in the process, I realized the essentiality of Elemental Spells to balloon flight.

Why the eight points of view?

I had intended a simple, traditional novel. But I also wanted the three perspectives of a boy, plus the two girls who love him, told through three distinct genres. Letters seemed particularly useful given that the boy had secrets, and by keeping them out of his correspondence, he was also keeping them from readers.
>
The problem, I discovered almost immediately, was that these three formats (letters, diary, memoir) totally cramped my narration. Princess Dizzy excels at stream of consciousness, but dialogue? No. And Tips is far too modest to explain his phenomenal talent. I therefore added a play to describe important conversations, as well as Tips's master's memoirs to describe Tips. The genealogy and court etiquette seemed so didactic that I decided to unleash my inner dork in an encyclopedia. The oyster incident needed better rendering than Dizzy could provide, which led to Ben's letters. And pondering Wilhelmina's motivation got me her ghastly Gentle Reflections.

So you see, it was a very organic process, and remarkably plot driven: to accomplish scene
x,
I needed the perspective (and often the bias or ignorance) of character
y.
It was rather like assembling a mobile, hanging one element and then racing to counterbalance it, watching this construction swell while growing ever more fearful that it would all come crashing down around my head. The whole time I was writing, I kept telling myself that no one would ever want to read it—but I was having so much fun, I didn't care! I'm still awed that the book actually got published.

Did you always intend to write a sequel to
Princess Ben
?

Whoa, Nelly, stop right there.
Wisdom's Kiss
is not a sequel. No way, no how, never. It is at best a consequence (my term; very Montagne-y) of
Princess Ben,
but that's as far as it goes. No one needs an iota of familiarity with one to enjoy the other. I hope reviewers won't even mention the connection so readers who are familiar with
Princess Ben
can discover for themselves that this charming old grandmother is none other than
Ben herself
, all grown up. I'll never forget how my ten-year-old heart stopped when I realized that the sprouting streetlamp in C. S. Lewis's
The Magician's Nephew
was the exact one Lucy Pevensie had found—five books earlier!—in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
If I can give readers one sliver of that thrill, I will consider my life complete.
>

That said, would you change anything in
Princess Ben?

There are a few things—"throne room" wasn't capitalized; Edwig of Farina shouldn't have been a baron, which (I did not know then) is the lowest noble rank. Oops. So I had to invent Farina's ascent from a barony to a duchy. It ended up working marvelously, though, to demonstrate Wilhelmina's ambition. With enough head scratching and guile, you can always squeeze out lemonade.

The title. Talk to me.

Titles can be so stressful. My working title was
Fortitude, Wisdom and Tips,
which I knew was wrong because I could not say it aloud. Seriously. Someone would ask what I was writing and I'd gag. We brainstormed for months. Everyone concurred that the title had to be digestible and intriguing;
Includes Encyclopedia!
didn't cut it. What would interest a bookstore browser enough to pick the volume up? Once we came up with
Wisdom's Kiss,
I had to rewrite several scenes to thread in the reference, but I love that sort of work. Had it been asked of me, I would have threaded in references to low-cholesterol butter.

Wisdom's Kiss
includes a glossary of unusual words. Do you feel the vocabulary might be too challenging for your audience?

I worried about this a lot with
Princess Ben
but was stunned by the number of fifth-graders who brushed it off. Kids, I've found—not all kids, but a surprising percentage—can bodysurf through words they don't know. I certainly did (and Lordy, how I mispronounced them). But if this book doesn't grip every
Dairy Queen
fan, I understand. To be frank, I'm more worried that younger readers won't appreciate the place names (Pamplemousse is French for "grapefruit," Sottocenere is an Italian truffle-flavored cheese). But that sort of trivia doesn't affect the story—it just provides a bit of a chuckle.

Do your kids get these jokes? Did they help with the book?

They have no interest in truffle-flavored cheese. But they helped so much. Both kids loved Trudy and despised Dizzy for "stealing" Tips; I had to work hard to make Tips's inner conflict clearer, and Dizzy more sympathetic. The scene in the hot-air balloon when Trudy confronts him—I wanted it realistic, with tears and suffering and silence, instead of Trudy acting as some kind of girl-power ideal. Well, guess what: the kids hated that and demanded that Trudy tell Tips off. So now she's spunkier. That's what my children taught me, that we want our heroes to be the people we wish we were.

Okay, I have to ask: What about your sister?

For the two or three people who don't yet know, my sister Elizabeth Gilbert wrote
Eat, Pray, Love,
so, yes, on a certain level I am related to Julia Roberts. Liz read an early draft of
Wisdom's Kiss
and could not have been more enthusiastic. She had several brilliant observations, such as questioning the role of Providence (Ben's daughter; Dizzy's mom), who in that draft was still alive. Not only did Providence completely gum up the story, but she also violated my rule that Mothers Must Be Absent or Dead. (See my
article
on this subject in the March 2009 issue of
Horn Book
magazine.) So, pfft, Providence falls off a broom. Problem solved. Liz and my husband James serve as my target audience; when I write, I picture them laughing. Then, when James does laugh, it's a little bit of Christmas.

Can you provide a little gossip on the different voices?

I thought you'd never ask...

T
RUDY'S MEMOIRS:
Boy, is third person hard! A first-person narrator uses an odd word or phrase and it only strengthens their character; a third-person narrator not so much. I kept returning to Laura Ingalls Wilder: how did she convey emotion without sounding overbearing, and action without sounding expository? (Note that Wilder had help from her daughter, just as Trudy did from hers.) Both Trudy and her memoirs serve as the central spine of
Wisdom's Kiss.

F
ELIS EL
G
ATO:
I invented Felis to explain Tips's acrobatic skills and good looks and swordsmanship, but the man quickly elbowed his way to the center of the story—in his mind, anyway! I hope everyone else enjoys his memoirs title as much as I have; my kids memorized it and would recite that chorus of inanity with me as I read aloud.
>

T
HE PLAY:
Queen of All the Heavens
began as a screenplay—a screenplay, which my agent pointed out (she's very tactful), was anachronistic and also vile. So I tried playwriting instead, with purposely extravagant dialogue. Inspired by the fact that Shakespeare didn't write stage directions, I avoided them as much as possible, though "They embrace" from act 2, scene 3, is now a catchphrase in the Murdock household.

W
ILHELMINA'S DIARY:
Wilhelmina is my first all-out villain; I generally prefer
imperfect but well-intentioned characters
. Once I realized how far I could take her, however, there was no holding back. After reading an early draft, a friend wrote: "The infectious diseases doc in me laughed out loud that Wilhelmina died of dog-bite sepsis—Go
Pasteurella multocida!
" Should I ever write another book in this vein, one of the countries will be named Pasteurella Multocida.

T
HE
I
MPERIAL
E
NCYCLOPEDIA OF
L
AX:
How did I live forty-three years before discovering my passion for pseudocompendious twaddle? I relish the interplay of obscure but critical facts (Montagne's support of female succession; Circus Primus's association with espionage) with obscure but pointless details (the Magnanimous Goat Incident; mushroom-flavored ice cream). It's great how often wrong this "authoritative source" is. I'm not saying authoritative sources are wrong; goodness, no. But one should never cede them authority unquestioningly.

T
IPS'S LETTERS TO
T
RUDY:
This was another very challenging voice—how to make Tips sound uneducated and tongue-tied but not dim. Plus he's keeping enormous secrets, and while he loves Trudy, he isn't in love with her. Hence the crossed-out words to reveal this subtext and his confusion.

N
ONNA
B
EN:
Writing
Princess Ben
in 2005, I pondered even then this old woman recollecting her long-ago girlhood. I knew she had grandchildren; surely she would attend their weddings. When I realized how unreliable a narrator Dizzy was, I decided to make Ben my backup. After Trudy, Ben serves as the story's second spine, although biased in her own endearing way.

DIZZY'S DIARY:
Some people might be frowning right now, wondering why exactly Dizzy is so unreliable—she's my invention, isn't she? Can't an author control her characters? Um, no. Dizzy (rather like D.J. Schwenk of
Dairy Queen,
and Felis) came out of my fingertips with the inexorable force of a genie; to modify her would require destroying the very story I was trying to create. Dizzy is not a nice person. But she's a good person, and I loved coaxing out her integrity ... even if her eschewal of commas tied me in knots.

Did you have any say in the design of the headers? (They're lovely, by the way.)