What types of media influenced this story?
Shekar Kapur’s movie Elizabeth left a strong imprint in my mind (and I’m delighted to see he’s made a sequel). I recognize the liberties he’s taken with history, but Cate Blanchett makes a fantastic Elizabeth, and Geoffrey Rush ain’t bad as Walsingham, either. The Onyx Court owes a lot to that film; Kapur’s vision is very rich and dark.
I also think Invidiana’s the conceptual daughter of Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, though I’d written the whole novel before I noticed that.
Music was a huge part of writing this book. Since I made “soundtracks” (i.e. mix CDs) for my game, I started off with some songs already chosen; I also made playlists for different moods — the mortal court, the Onyx Court, confrontations, romantic/sad scenes (funny how those two go together), church scenes, and tavern/city scenes. Those were playing on shuffle while I wrote, and then in the end, for the first time ever, I went the extra step and made a “novel soundtrack.” You can see the full listing on my website, and if you have a good film score collection, you can reconstruct most of it for yourself.
What can you tell us about your faerie research?
Without realizing it, I set myself a big challenge at the outset: keeping it English. Most of the faerie fantasy I’ve read, especially the modern urban fantasy, takes a globalizing approach, where a redcap and a kitsune and a leshy might all rub shoulders. That approach has a lot of fun potential, but for a story set in the sixteenth century, I decided I wanted to preserve regionalism as much as I could.
Which turns out to be harder than you might think: many of the most famous bits of faerie lore (like the sidhe, or the Seelie and Unseelie Courts) turn out to be Irish or Scottish. If you strip those away, then the next biggest category is probably Welsh. Strip that away, and you find yourself looking at Cornwall and Yorkshire. We’ve got precious little surviving faerie lore from central and southern England. But although it’s a lot of work, I’m glad I did it; my own setting felt more real to me because I could talk about continental fauns and muryans from Cornwall and redcaps along the Border, and how the Goodemeades are from the North originally, because that’s where stories of brownies come from.
I’m deeply indebted to the folklorist Katherine Briggs. Not only does she have two very useful books on general British faerie material (British Folk-Tales and Legends, and The Faeries in Tradition and Literature), she wrote one called The Anatomy of Puck that’s specifically about the lore of Shakespeare’s time. I couldn’t have asked for a better resource.
What about the historical research?
There was a lot of it.
I ended up with nearly three shelves of the small bookcase in my office devoted to nothing more than the books I was using to write this novel. Biographies, books about London, some literature from the time period, architectural histories… the list seemed endless. Like an optimistic fool, I believed at first that a time would come when I would say “okay, that’s it for the research” and be done. God only knows where I got that idea; maybe my subconscious was in denial. Research never ends. There’s always two or three more books that will be the last, you swear. I think I was reading William Tighe’s dissertation on the Gentlemen Pensioners while I was in revisions.
But the good news is, it’s fun. I can’t remember where I came across this line, but someone once said history was a cross between a disaster movie and a celebrity tabloid; I love that description. The further I got into the biographies, the more people came to life, with all kinds of quirks and warts and behaviors that make you think, humans haven’t fundamentally changed. The surface details, sure, but where it really counts, they’re not so different from us.
So I guess what I would say is, it’s a tremendous amount of work, but the payoff is worth it. As long as you enjoy history, anyway, and if you don’t, what are you doing writing a historical novel? There are easier ways to go crazy.
How was writing this book different from others?
Not since the first novel I wrote (which was not Witch) has a project eaten my head so thoroughly. Part of it, I’m sure, was the necessity of research; when I wasn’t writing, I was eyeball-deep in nonfiction. I’ve done spot research before — reading up on poisons for Warrior, for example — but never on anything like this scale, because I was never representing a real time period and place before. But I think it was more than that.
Like I said above, certain key events in the plot came from the game Memento. That served as a kind of outline for me, and normally, I’m not an outlining kind of writer. Between that and my own growth in the craft, I found myself going through this book less asking myself, “how is this going to get resolved?” and more “how can I make the resolution of this more awesome?” Add in the richness of the history and backstory, and the greater number of pieces on my mental chessboard… you get the idea. Pretty much every aspect of this book, down to the words I used to tell it, really challenged me. And you don’t meet a challenge firing on only half of your cylinders. I said in a post on my journal that this was the fourteen-year-old boy of books: it ate everything I fed it and demanded more.
Would you write a historical fantasy again? If so, what time period?
I’m pondering this very question right now, actually.
If anybody had asked me right after I finished the draft, I would have screamed “HELL NO” and dived for cover under the bed. But people were smart and didn’t ask me. Now that I’ve had some time to recover, the answer is “maybe, if I get an idea that grabs me.” I found it deeply satisfying, slipping my story into the cracks and open spaces of history, and as I said, the research was fun. But, as I also said, it was a huge amount of work, so it isn’t the kind of thing that I’d enter into lightly.
The question of time period is pretty wide open. If I were smart, I’d do more with the Elizabethan period, so I can make use of the research I’ve already done. Unfortunately, I’m not smart, and so I’m likely to skip off to a different century entirely. Running Memento introduced me to a broad swath of English history; I might latch onto any part of it. Of course, then there’s the rest of the world — who says it would have to be England? But I boggle at the thought of setting something in a country where the best research materials wouldn’t be in English. Knowing me, I’d feel like I ought to get fluent in Arabic or whatever before I try to write the thing.
But all that is dancing around the question. Honestly? Right now the nineteenth century is trying to look enticing. I’ve got a couple of ideas, unrelated to each other, that would all benefit from me knowing more about that era — even if some of them are modeled on that culture rather than being set in it. Only time will tell which ones will struggle to the top of the heap in my head and make it out into the light of day.