By The Way...

Wednesday, August 9, 2006
5:21:00 PM EDT
Hearing Baby We're Going Down -- Fall Out Boy
We're back with another edition of the Wednesday Author Interview, and this one's a treat because it features Naomi Kritzer, a fantasy author whose fantasy goes well beyond the usual "let's tart up England with dragons" bit. Naomi's latest is Freedom's Sisters, the final book in a trilogy which takes Greek and Kazahk history and gives them an intruiging fantastical spin.

1. Quick! Tell us a little bit about yourself and Freedom's Sisters.

Freedom's Sisters is the third book in a trilogy; the first two are Freedom's Gate and Freedom's Apprentice.  This story was originally inspired by a trip to the Badlands in South Dakota.  It's an incredibly stark, barren, fascinating landscape.  Since I'm a fantasy writer, I immediately started trying to imagine what sort of magical catastrophe could create something like that.

I saw the Badlands while on vacation with my family in high school, and immediately started writing a story about a group of people who were subjugated by powerful magic that dried up their water supply.  That story also had a lost princess in it.  The story changed a lot when I returned to the idea as an adult, but the use of water as a weapon is still central.

I live in Minneapolis with my husband, three cats, and two daughters.  I got the contract for this trilogy at almost exactly the same time that I found out that I was pregnant with my younger daughter, and I arranged my deadline about a month before the baby was due so that I wouldn't miss my deadline if she arrived before her due date.  So I did revisions on Freedom's Gate and wrote Freedom's Apprentice while caring for a new baby and a three-year-old.   

2. One of the intriguing things about the series to which Freedom's Sisters belongs is that takes place in a historical culture that's not often examined in either historical novels or fantasy novels. Whatdrew you to this setting? Do you think in general historical and fantasy novels too often visit the same well of past cultures?    

These books are set in Central Asia.  What originally drew me to this setting were the two huge rivers of the region, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya.  (The story required a river that could be magically dammed up.)  I started reading and I found Kazakh culture really interesting.  Also, very little fantasy has a Central Asian setting, and I liked that.    

What I find when I'm writing is that there are certain things I default to, if I'm not careful.  I've read a lot of fantasy that is based in sort of a nebulous, pseudo-medieval-England: names, titles, mythology, and scenery are all English.  It's easy to slide into that, so in part to fight that tendency in myself, I started choosing very specific other locations, and then trying to stay approximately as faithful to those as this default setting is to real medieval England.    

The downside of using an unusual setting is that it's a lot harder to get information about it.  To get a basic sense of what a place looks like, I look through coffee-table books.  There is one really gorgeous coffee-table book about Kazakhstan.  One!  There are about eight gazillion coffee table books about England.  Travel books, maps, and other basic resources are also much harder to find when you're researching a country Americans don't visit much.  

3. This is the third novel in a series. Folks often hear what the challenges are in writing a sequel to a book, but what are some of the specific challenges in writing a third book? (this is of some interest to me, because I'm writing a third book myself!)   

Well, I was absolutely terrified that I'd realize midway through that I was stuck, and the only way to resolve the story required changes to the first two books (you know, the books that were already published).  That didn't happen, thank goodness.    

I was also very worried that I'd screw up continuity -- that I'd get a character's age or appearance wrong.  There are authors who are much more organized than I am about keeping track of their cast of characters; I had to pull up the Word files for the first two novels and run searches to figure out people's eye color.  

Finally, I wanted this book to both meet and defy readers' expectations.  I wanted it to be satisfying, but not predictable.  That was probably the biggest challenge.  

4. Share a piece of advice you've been given about writing.   

The best advice I got, which I resisted for a really long time, was to write every single day without fail.  

Obviously, with twolittle kids, I don't always get to do that.  But if I can squeeze out even fifty words today, it will be a lot easier to write when I sit down tomorrow, and even easier the day after that.  When I write every day, the words flow easily; I write quickly and get a lot done.  The longer it's been since I last wrote, the harder it is to sit down and get started.    

(I would like to note here to aspiring writers reading this that Your Mileage May Vary.  Writing every day may or may not work for you, if it's even possible in the context of your other obligations.  It's just what worked for me.)  

5. In setting a fantasy book in a historical context, how do you manage the balance between historical accuracy (i.e., being faithful to your setting), and the needs of a fantastical story? Do you worry about serving one aspect of that mix to the detriment of the other?   

Mostly I worry about horribly offending some actual scholar of the cultures and mythologies that I'm cheerfully altering in the service of the story I want to tell.  

My advantage here is that I'm writing fantasy, not historical fiction; I don't have to get everything right, because it's a different world.  And there are some things that I knew from the outset that I would be changing significantly -- for example, Kazakh culture is much more patriarchal than the culture of the Alashi.  I wanted a female protagonist, and a culture that embraced women warriors, so for various reasons that's how things fell out in the world of my novels.    

Regarding historical accuracy, the thing I try hardest for is consistency.  Technologies don't appear in isolation.  If a fantasy world has hot running water in people's houses, it needs to have all the technology to support this, including pipes to transport the water, craftsmen to make the pipes and fix them when they break, some method for heating the water, all the attendant pollution....either that, or very generous hot-water-generating fairies.  (The vast majority of people in the world right now don't have hot running water in their homes.  Hot running water is amazing, as I realized when I spent a semester of college in living in a country where almost no one had it.)  Anyway, this sort of thing is one of my pet peeves as a reader.  If I have a technology, I try to have the whole package.  

6. Besides being a writer, you have a life. What's the key to getting the most out of both? Is it a single big thing? Or a lot of little things?  

I think that the key to having time to write, when you have young kids, is a supportive spouse.  It is possible to write if your spouse thinks that your writing is a silly, frivolous waste of time, but it's going to be one heck of an uphill battle.  My husband is a highly involved father, and from the earliest days of parenting -- well before I sold my first novel -- he went out of his way to make sure I had blocks of time to work.

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Thanks, Naomi -- and if you'd like to keep up with what's going on with her, check out her Journal, in which she discusses writing, motherhood and more.


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This entry has 2 comments: (Add your own)

• #2 Comment from producedby 
  9/13/08 8:15 PM | Permalink

  With a name like Kritzer, how could you go wrong?
  
  Eddie Kritzer
  eddiekritzer.com
  
  producedby@aol.com
• #1 Comment from monponsett 
  8/9/06 9:41 PM | Permalink

  I was gonna set my blog in either Cape Cod or Uzbekistan... I figured I could use beach pics if I set it in Buzzards Bay.