maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20:

Dear annagcross,

You have to be tricky.

Once upon a time, I was giving a talk for NASA — yes, the let’s-take-a-gander-at-the-universe people — for a TedX conference. On the shuttle back to the hotel, I found myself sitting beside one of the other speakers from the conference, a clever guy named Daniel Burrus. His talk had been about seeing invisible solutions to impossible problems. Mine had been about how bad teens became famous people.

He said, “So you write novels and you write music and you create art and you speak at NASA. What do you think your talent is?“ 

I recognize a sneaky wizard riddle when I hear one, so I didn’t answer “writing.” Instead, I thought about what might explain all of those things. How I could solve for x. Cunningly, I replied, “Story-telling.”

He disagreed. “I think that’s a byproduct.”

“So what is it really, then?” I asked. 

“Changing people’s moods,” he said. And just like that, I had been out-wizarded. 

Because it’s true. My novels are elaborate tricks. I have an emotional conclusion I’d like readers to draw from each scene or moment, but it will strike a reader harder if they think they came up with it themselves. It’s one thing to say “this is a sad moment” to the reader. It’s another thing to work behind the scenes with word choice and scene choice and character choice to bring the reader to a place where the reader is actually sad without knowing exactly how they got that way. 

The goal is always and ever to move about the emotional furniture in readers’ heads while their backs are turned. I have written about that here. 

I especially like to use it to play with expectations of character. In the Raven Cycle, Declan Lynch is an example of me furiously moving the furniture while the readers’ backs are turned. I never really tell readers what to think about him outright, and then while they’re off looking at some shinier Lynch, I hastily shove a sofa a few feet and move a lamp. 

Is this helpful? Can I ever speak for longer than a few sentences without falling into analogies and metaphor? These are questions that may never be answered.

urs,

Stiefvater