By The Way...

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
1:34:00 PM EST
Hearing Nothing at the moment.
Hope you like fairy tales and fables, because for this week's author interview we have Catherynne M. Valente, poet and novelist, whose latest book The Orphan's Tales: In The Night Garden, Vol. 1 is an exploration of the power of myth and storytelling, and in which a mysterious girl who tells equally mysterious tales is part of her own fairy tale, too -- possibly the most interesting one. "Valente's publisher compares this book to Arabian Nights, and that comparison is hardly hyperbole," says Kirkus; it must be nice to be favorably compared to one of the all-time classic bits of world literature. Here's Ms. Valente to talk about writing, storytelling and the real world, at least the parts of it that apply to publishing.

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and In The Night Garden.

In the Night Garden is the first book of a duology--an intertwining series of fairy tales in the tradition of Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales. These stories arc and swerve around each other, coming back together to create one complete narrative.

Each tale is tattooed on the eyelids of a lost little girl, banished to a vast Palace Garden for that strange and ugly mark, left on her as an infant by a creature she cannot recall--though she has been told that when all the stories are read out, it will return and judge her. She is a child without a past or a name, without parents or friends. All she has are her tales--which she shares, at first hesitantly, but with growing urgency and joy, with one of the noble children who shows her a simple act of kindness. She carries this prince with her into the world painted on her eyes, a world of Griffin and Monopods, witches and pirates, selkies and satyrs, living stars and monkish wolves, murdered gods and three-breasted saints. Along the way the two children become close, and the mystery of the girl's own secret history and identity begins to unfold.

I began the book in Rhode Island and finished it in Cleveland, carrying it with me to Scotland, Japan, California, New York, and Virginia. I travel with my two dogs a great deal, and have only recently settled in Cleveland -- this book has seen the world, even as the world within it was growing. I'm twenty-seven years old, in another life I was a classicist, and in this one I live quietly in Ohio, hammering out books in the basement.

2. The orphan who tells the tales seems to be part of a storyteller lineage that includes Scheherazade -- someone who share tells with a small audience which might (possibly) be influenced by them. What goes into building a useful storyteller? And what do the stories tell us about the storyteller -- and the writer who created the story teller?

She is a long-lost daughter, via genetic-literary drift, of Scheherezade, certainly. The heroine of Arabian Nights told stories to save her life; the orphan tells them because they are truly and physically a part of her, and she longs to share them.

I think that a good character-as-storyteller must be fascinating and mysterious in and of themselves. We as readers should wonder about them as we wonder at their tales, their motivations, their history, their future. Scheherezade is tantalizing because we know so little about her, yet she contains all these worlds. But she is not personally connected to the stories; the threat in Arabian Nights comes from without, from the danger of death should the stories cease.

The orphan is intimately connected to the narrative etched on her skin--though obviously I can't reveal exactly how until the final book! The threat of what will happen when the stories end hangs over both children, but neither of them know the nature of that threat. Everything about the girl is a mystery. She is the fulcrum of the story, and she has total power over it, unlike Scheherezade. She can stop telling the tales at any time, and avoid whatever fate awaits her--but she chooses to go on. The storyteller enchants; they must, or else they will have no listeners left. The voice of the tales must be as captivating as the tales themselves.

What does this say about me? I think whenever a writer creates a storyteller character there is a certain amount of authorial doppelganger-ing going on. We are storytellers--our storytellers necessarily reflect us. Even when the transference is barely conscious, as it was when I created my orphan, it is still there. Was I a lost little girl? No doubt. I had no vast Garden or princely friend, but I am certain I poured some of the loneliness of my own life and the desire to reach out to another soul into this child. But she is not autobiographical--she is simply informed by her creator's experience, as all characters are. "Write what you know" counts for fantasy, too. It might even count twofold. When creating a world, shades of authenticity are vital, even in the wildest alternate universe.

3. For Night Garden, you've not only created a fantasy world, but you've also taken a step beyond, creating fables of that world. As a writer, how much more difficult is that than developing just one level of invention for your world? I ask because speaking as I writer I tend to be in the "make things up as I go along" school, and I don't know how effective that strategy would be for what you do. Seems like there would be an awful lot of planning involved.

Actually, you and I are in the same school. Wanna sign my yearbook?

What I wanted to do with The Orphan's Tales was create a complete folklore, so that fable-system was part of the story from the very beginning, if not the story itself. I wondered if it was possible to take fairy tales apart and create new ones from the pieces--I suppose that makes me a long-lost daughter of Dr. Frankenstein--and at the same time, if it was possible to tell a story through all those disparate new tales. Deconstruction and reconstruction, but in the literal sense, not the lit-crit sense.

But the thing is, I agree with you. I make it up as I go along. If I plan it out too far in advance I won't write it--I already know what happens, so I lose enthusiasm for plodding through territory I've already mapped down to the last pebble. I write in order, from start to finish, and I never skip around. I discover the next chapter as a reader would, as the characters do. I wouldn't say it was more difficult to create the fables than to just create a world. Creating a world is pretty damn hard--just ask Coyote. So much of the ligaments of a world are folkloric to me. But it is certainly more challenging to keep it all straight in my head while sticking to that organic method.

It's also difficult to create a mythology that is not dogmatic, that is fluid, the way religion and folklore and mythography work together in the real world in dynamic and mutable ways. One way I've tried to engage this reality is by playing with perception: many times a later tale will re-frame the events of a previous one, yet the only thing which changes is point of view. Every point of view is biased, believes itself totally correct. This is especially true when dealing with the delicatedifference between religion/mythology and folklore. I have never been satisfied with worldbuilding where an entire planet (SF) or region (F) conforms to one belief system, without heretics and atheists and anarchists and just plain folks who look at the whole cosmology thing, shrug, and say "meh." I have tried to keep the world of the tales a changeable and complex one, even while the gods of that world are up and walking around. It's quite the balancing act, and I try really hard not to fall on my face.

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

I'm somewhat allergic to advice about the actual behavior of writing. It causes hives and poor sleep patterns. Everyone works differently and I have rarely heard commentary about how I "should" be writing without grinding my teeth. Even the simplest advice: write every day, for example, is not universal, and I'd rather skip some days and have other days of enormous output as I am driven to rather than fret over whether I'm doing it right because someone told me that if I didn't write every day I wasn't working hard enough.

So I'll share the best piece of advice I've heard about the business of writing, which came from Warren Ellis's blog. He said that all you really need to make a living at your art is a couple of thousand people who love what you do, and love it enough to buy it regularly.

That's not actually as hard as it sounds, and since the advent of the internet and the blogosphere it is becoming easier. You don't have to be a bestseller, and the passionate fanbase of genre readers is one of the greatest gifts those of use who go gallivanting about with aliens and witches in our pockets have. I owe a great deal to the online community: it is where I found my first audience and the source of a great many friendships, partnerships, and readers. I keep Ellis's words in mind--every published writer is at the center of a community, be it great or small, and that is a truly powerful thing.

In the medieval world, there were women called anchorites who were something like super-nuns: they chained themselves to church walls or retreated into the wilderness and often wrote out their hermit-visions in beautiful prose. For a village to have an anchorite was a source of great pride--her work elevated the whole community. I think, sometimes, of authors who actively engage with their readers through the internet as a kind of cyber-anchorites: we go into the divine stuff of the creation of worlds and bring it back for our villages to see and keep.

And we are of course, villagers in our turn, witnessing the each others' worlds. It's one of the most wonderful, profound things to arise from servers and DSL connections.

5. In addition to being a novelist you're a published poet. For you, is there a difference in how you write the two forms? How much does one sort of writing inform the other?

A poem is, for me--and here I wave the white flag which reads "Your Mileage May Vary"--an act of whittling a story down to its most emotional and vital core, capturing a single moment or series of moments and illuminating it, like a gold-flecked beast drawn in the margins of a manuscript. The language is, ironically, more economical and pared down--imagery is amped up, incidental verbiage is stripped out. I used to say that if fiction is a good, strong cup of coffee, poetry is a double espresso, hotter and darker and richer. It is a distillation, fine, high-proof, aged and complex.

Fiction, and especially novels, (I find the line between poetry and short stories is much more nebulous in a world without rhyme, and have turned one into the other a few times when the idea struggled against resolution), takes its time. It is langourous and confident, throwing its plot far afield, asking the reader to trust it to carry them all the way through. It is in possession of nearly infinite space, but often it loses the richness which is so natural to poetry.

That's where the two cross over for me. Language is at the center of everything I do, not just the story but the way it is told. Words are not just tools -- they're tiny gods, and they deserve respect. I try to infuse my fiction with the same weight of language that I use in poetry. It isn't completely possible, as you must have your basic declaratives and dialogue tags, but can be done to an extent, and most mainstream books don't even try. Transparent prose is just that -- invisible, and it almost always fails to move me the way strong and beautiful prose will. I write what I would like to read, and if my language is a window on my world, it is a window drawn in deep scarlet curtains and frosted in snow.

6. You've also moved between publishing in small presses and with larger publishers. What is your experiences of the difference between them? In your opinion, for new writers, is one preferable to the other?

These days there is no one true path to publication. I published two novels and three books of poetry before I had an agent, and they were books that no conventional wisdom would have said could be successes, even small-press-level successes. I think the small and mid-size presses are fertile ground right now, publishing the most interesting and innovative new voices. It's a great place to try your sea-legs before joining the Navy, so to speak. For new writers I would say that small presses must be part of your weapons-cache. We all aim for the big New York presses ultimately, but the new author in this world has to have a diverse attack plan--and if I'm making it sound like war, that's not an accident. It's a competitive field, and I'm trying to avoid the inevitable baseball metaphor of major and minor leagues.

I don't think anyone would have taken a chance on me and my weirdness but a small press, and obviously I'm glad they did--the faith of my earlier publishers was what allowed me to catch the eye of a larger press--that and writing something a smidge more accessible than I had been doing before. The advantages of a small press are the ability to publish riskier work, and more control over the process--I chose my own covers for my first three novels, for example. The advantages of a large press are more money, more publicity and distribution. Both are important when you look at a career as a whole, rather than book by book. The modern author should be able to utilize the strengths of both camps.

But the difference in processes is mainly this: with a large press, everything takes a lot longer. There is a lot more to do, and often the editorial process is more stringent. I have been very lucky in that my Bantam editor and I see eye to eye most of the time, and she is a joy to work with--I never felt the pinch of the editor's grip the way I feared I would. I have enjoyed my first trek through the Random House labyrinth, and I do prefer it to the small presses. I hope I can stay there. But like every other industry, flexibility is now the watchword, and there are a lot of twists and turns yet ahead, I'm sure.

----

Many thanks to Catherynne! Be sure to swing by her blog as well.


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This entry has 2 comments: (Add your own)

• #2 Comment from lurkynat 
  11/3/06 1:10 PM | Permalink

  dear John,
  how fascinating! thank you for showing us her book! It looks very interesting, huh Bea  ?:) (hi Smurfette!)
  natalie
• #1 Comment from fitzzer 
  11/2/06 2:01 PM | Permalink

  Thank you for the interview and book suggestion. It sounds like a wonderful book & I definitely plan to read it.