Tag Archives: Maggie Stiefvater

My COMPLETELY UNAUTHORIZED Interview with Maggie Stiefvater

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So, as you all know, one of my favorite questions to ask writers is my blue pill question. Remember in The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo a red pill and a blue pill? The blue pill will return Neo’s life to normal and the red pill will give him the truth.

I ask authors, if you could take the blue pill to remove all desire to write, would you take it? The pill would last forever, and all desire, all thought of writing would be gone. You wouldn’t regret not writing because the pill would remove all of those messy nostalgic thoughts of satisfaction, fame, and fortune.

99% of the writers would not take the pill. Me? I’d take it in a minute. Wash it down with some Yukon Jack. I talked about that when I interviewed myself, back when I had a soul and believed in God. Oh, wait, no, I didn’t have a soul back then.

Out of all the writers I’ve talked to, Maggie Stiefvater of Shiver fame, had the absolute best answer. I talked with her at the Colorado Teen Lit Fest after her drop-dead fabulous keynote speech.

ME: Ms. Stiefvater, if you could take a pill to remove all desire to write, would you take it?

MAGGIE STIEFVATER: Such a pill would have no affect on me.

Coolest answer ever, right?

She went on to say she wouldn’t take the pill, but that even if she took it, it wouldn’t work on her. If she didn’t have the desire to write, she would find some other artistic endeavor, even if it was ancient Chinese bubblegum crochet (my words, not hers).

Maggie Stiefvater is a natural-born artist and had written like thirty novels before she graduated high school. She is a born writer, and like all successful writers, she is a warrior. It was such a pleasure hearing her talk and meeting her.

And in all the excitement, I gave her a copy of my book. I was a bit smitten.

You can find her books everywhere, but here’s a link to her Amazon page.

When I talk with Twilight fans, I always push Shiver. Well, I did before I had a book of my own. Now I push my book, The Never Prayer, but Shiver is a close second, if they prefer werewolves to angels.

In some ways, writers like Maggie Stiefvater give me hope. Writers who write and stick with it can make it to the top. In other ways, this deepens my despair. I have to write twenty more novels and even then, my chances are iffy. I just wish I had a guarantee. But this is life, not a novel.

Which is why fiction is so much fun. Because in fiction, we can write in our own guarantees.

Thanks so much to Maggie Stiefvater for talking to me!

Twelve Step Tuesday – Step 1 – Nasty Muses – Powerless and Unmanageable

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Step 1 – Admitted we were powerless over our art and our lives had become unmanageable.

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The Twelve Step process is interesting because it doesn’t start with us being heroic and strong and invincible.
It doesn’t start, as Stuart Smalley would say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”  Nope. It starts like a good story.  In a place of darkness and despair.

 

The first step is all about being reduced to ashes, being broken, defeated, wrecked, enslaved, sorry as one shoe battered on the side of the highway alone.

Maggie Stiefvater

​My Step 1 goes back to the very roots of wanting to be a writer and not being able to write.  Trust me, I wanted to write novels.  I mean, Maggie Stiefvater had 30 novels in various stages of revision by the time she graduated from high school.

I wanted to be like Maggie Stiefvater.  Doesn’t everyone?  But then, I was powerless and my life was unmanageable.  I couldn’t write even when I wanted to.

And I had the usual excuses.  I was afraid.  I was busy.  It seemed too hard.  I was full of self-doubt.  T.V. was easier.  Reading other people’s books was easier.  And really, that’s how we begin.  Writers start out as readers. Well, broken readers who can’t leave well enough alone.  Or at least, that’s my story.

When teens ask me how to be a writer and what they should do, I say: Write as much as you can.  Read as much as you can.  And sleep.  Teens need sleep.  Their brains are developing.

But for me, I was powerless over if I wrote or not and my writing life was unmanageable.  ​For example, when I was just out of college and working, I promised myself I would write on Mondays and Wednesdays from 7pm to 9pm.   I was busy, you see.  Yeah, that was before family, house, and children.  I wasn’t busy.  I was preoccupied with a whole lotta’ nothing.  As my friend says, I can waste an entire lifetime in ten-minute increments.

And yes, every so often, I’d get a Saturday and I’d skip watching the video tapes of The X-Files I’d recorded, and I would write, and it would be great, and I would think.  Man, that’s cool.  I should do that more often.  How about Mondays and Wednesdays for two hours at night?  But then the siren call of the TV and I would crash onto the couch and be stuck there.  An eater of the lotus was I.  The television lotus.

Now, I could blame my lack of self-discipline, or I could blame Star Trek, or Fear Factor, or John Hughes movies for taking up all my time.  I could blame my parents for not encouraging me like Christopher Paolini’s parents did. Yeah, the guy was homeschooled and had parental support.  I was educated by Jesuits.  Okay, we’re even there.

But my point is, I was powerless and my writing was unmanageable because of who I was and my inability to accept that I needed help and that I couldn’t do it myself.

Here was my idea of a writer: a writer is born fully grown from the head of his/her father. They stride out into the world with one sandal flapping the dust (very Jason of the Argonauts) and they sit down and write a novel.  The novel is gorgeous.  And yes, it might be a Herculean effort, but in the end, it is wonderful.  They then box up that novel (I grew up before email, and we had paper and typewriters and hippies and 80’s music and boys walked around with their hair in their eyes and girls wore lacy gloves like Madonna) and send that box o’ novel out to the publishing world where it is published to acclaim.

 

That was a writer.  They didn’t have critique groups.  They didn’t attend conferences. They worked alone in crappy, lice-infested apartments and drank hooch and smoked camel-cigarettes and were bad-asses.  Even the women writers.  And that’s true.  Ain’t nothin’ as bad-ass as a lady writer.

I thought I had to learn how to write, get published, and then do all that alone.  And it scared me silly.

It drove me not to write because I was alone and even though my wife supported me (hurray), I was still alone.

Some people can do this alone.  I can’t.  My hat’s off to those bad-ass writers who can churn out pages for years all by themselves.  They are warriors.

I am not.  I’m a scared little boy most days.

Next week, my bottom!

SHIVER – Just Finished This Minute Reviews

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There’s a lot to like about Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver. I’ve been pushing the book for years, because it came from Andrea Brown’s literary agency, and Laura Rennert is Ms. Stiefvater’s agent, and I love all them people.

So I’m biased. But I’ll tell ya what I think. Just between you and me, world. Other worlds don’t need to know.

A lot of it worked for me. And heck yeah, I’m still gonna recommend it. The idea is intriguing: werewolves don’t change because of the moon, they change because they get cold. So during wintertime, our hero Sam is a wolf. Summertime, he’s a boy who meets our heroine, Grace. There’s love. There’s angst. And the nice hook. Sam is going to change back into a wolf forever once winter hits. It’s his last autumn as a human, and he just found true love? Dammit! I hate when that happens.

Nice thing about Ms. Stiefvater, girlfriend can write. Here’s an example.

My parents didn’t even know. The morning after Sam and I—spent the night together, it seemed like the biggest thing on my mind was that my parents had no idea. I guessed that was normal. I guessed feeling a little guilty was normal. I guessed feeling giddy was normal. It was as if I had thought all along I was a complete picture, and Sam had revealed that I was a puzzle, and had taken me apart into pieces and put me back together again. I was acutely aware of each distinct emotion, all fitting together tightly.
–Shiver, Page 300

And Ms. Stiefvater quotes Rilke:
And leaving you (there aren’t words to untangle it)
Your life, fearful and immense and blossoming,
so that, sometimes frustrated, and sometimes
understanding,
Your life is sometimes a stone in you, and then, a star.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

I loved Sam, Sam’s voice, Sam’s memories of his parents and his becoming. All of it well done. Grace didn’t quite work for me, but it wasn’t bad. I’m not saying it’s bad. Am I saying it’s bad? No, but…

As Pee-Wee Herman once said, “We all have a big but.” Here is mine. I needed more whiz, bang, pow action and tension and conflict and villains and explosions and shining moments of high drama. Not necessarily end of the world type stuff; I didn’t need, in the words of that immortal ghostbuster, Peter Venkman, human sacrifice, cats living with dogs, mass hysteria. Hey, I initially wrote cats living with gods, mass hysteria. Cats Living With Gods. That’s gonna be my next book.

Anyhow, Shiver is a bestselling book, in some ways, the heir to the Twilight empire, and so what do I know? A lot of the book is Sam and Grace, together, loving one another. There are some moments of tension, but they aren’t milked for all their worth in my nothing opinion.

Keep in mind, I like me a good soap opera. And what was the genius\idiocy behind soap operas? Milking conflict for weeks on end. Like on All My Children (God rest your soul), the Erica Kane, Dmitri, Edumud love triangle lasted like six months. Ah, Edmund the stable boy, Dmitri the rich landowner, Erica caught in the middle. Love that Susan Lucci.

So then, of course, I take all of theslowness of Shiver very personal. What if my books don’t sell because I do try to milk my conflict? I do aim for the cats living dogs mass hysteria? What if the audience is looking for nice calm books about sorrowful werewolves holding nice girls with family problems?

Here is the reality, oh world of mine. There is enough room for all books. All will have an audience. Some will have an audience of millions. Some will have an audience of one. I will write my books, Ms. Stiefvater will write hers, and in the end, we’ve both contributed to the libraries of human existence. We’ll both end up in that Alexandrian Library in the sky.

Chasing after someone else’s voice or plot or whatever is a dangerous thing to do. Doppelgangers tend not to live very long. Even though they are a 4d8+4 HD monster.

Dungeon and Dragons, Rilke, Ghostbusters, and All My Children in the same blog post. I frakkin’ love what I write.