Bantam Spectra Interview, August 2006
Author's Notes
Spectra Pulse recently asked Ellen Kushner, author of this month's The Privilege of the Sword, to give us an inside look at her writing life and a few tidbits about her life away from her computer monitor! Here's what she shared with us.
ABOUT THE WRITING PROCESS:
Music listened to during writing: Different books call for different soundscapes. When I was typing the final draft of Swordspoint, I put Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell on an endless loop! But nowadays I can't listen to anything in English when I'm trying to put new words on a page. It has to be instrumental, or in an obscure foreign language. The Privilege of the Sword (affectionately known as TPOTS, pronounced "teapots") went through a serious phase of Stravinsky's Romeo and Juliet ballet score: it had just the right weird blend of antique charm and modern dissonance, with some very dark and threatening overtones.
Writing habits: I'm a total sprinter. Give me a deadline, and I'll race to finish! I actually write best in other peoples' houses (when they're not there): I make myself a giant pot of stew or something and wander about at weird hours with no one to see me.
My weird food associated with writing: When I'm starting a project and need to hunker down and write – always at night, for me – I'll make a huge bowl of popcorn and sit at my desk wolfing it down with a litre of Diet Coke. This only happens at the beginnings of things. Don't ask me why; I just work here.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Favorite scene/bit in the book: I loved creating the book-within-the-book, The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death. It was a hoot doing the bit where it's been made into a play that all the girls in the city go and see. Between The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies, we're all very conscious of how possessive people get of their favorite novels when someone decides to dramatize them, and I tried to get that range of reactions from my characters. The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death (which is also the name of a short story collected in the Spectra edition of Swordspoint) is supposed to be the greatest romance/adventure story you've ever read, which is why I only give you hints and scraps of it – fill in the rest yourself.
Favorite character in the book: What a question! I love them all SOOOOO MUCH, even the bad ones. I hope that comes through when you read it. But I have to say I have a particular soft spot for Marcus. I love the way he starts out as a minor character, just a servant, but becomes utterly central as the book goes on. He is a very interesting person. (He turns up as a middle-aged man in The Fall of the Kings – someday I'll have to write about how he got there.) I also adore Rose, the actress. She was going to be just a walk-on, but you know how actresses are: she kept insisting I give her more lines, and I'm glad I did.
Scene in the book you're most surprised you wrote: The big showdown between Alec and his sister (the heroine's mother). It was very intense. I was going to skip right over it, the way people skip over the details of sex scenes, implying it without showing it. But when they read the manuscript, Delia Sherman and Holly Black grilled me mercilessly on the Campion family dynamics, and I realized not only that readers needed to read about it all, but that I, in fact, knew the answers and would have to write them down, however painful.
Main inspiration for the book: This isn't the main inspiration, but something that really influenced TPOTS in surprising ways is a book (later made into a movie) called The World of Henry Orient, about two teenage girls in New York City who decide to follow this guy all over the city . . . . I guess I read it at an impressionable age.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Primary occupation: When my dad is asked what his three children do, he says (quoting the old counting-out rhyme): "I have a doctor, a lawyer, and an Indian Chief."
I'm the Indian Chief: I wear so many hats that even Dad can't quite keep count of them. I'm the host of the national public radio show PRI's Sound & Spirit with Ellen Kushner. I write and perform one-woman shows (with wonderful musicians): one is a Chanukah story for children (which has been made into an album) and one is an adult take on the story of Queen Esther. And because of Thomas the Rhymer, my novel based on traditional ballads, I've started folksinging again. No wonder my parents get confused!
Books you wish you'd written: There are many books I worship and/or love to distraction – Huckleberry Finn, The Children of Green Knowe, The Last Unicorn, The Thirteen Clocks, A Traveler in Time, the Lymond Chronicles, The Lady's Not For Burning, all of Shakespeare (except Titus Andronicus!) – without wishing I'd written them. But I do wish I could fully possess the minds that were able to write The Vintner's Luck (Elizabeth Knox) and Death of a Unicorn (Peter Dickinson) and Arcadia (Tom Stoppard). I just want to know what it would be like to be in their brains.
Favorite quote(s): For Daily Life: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Philo of Alexandria. For Writing: "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." Duke Ellington.
Favorite band/musical group: Richard Thompson is all you need. (The last album he made with Linda Thompson before their breakup, Shoot Out the Lights, is definitely Alec [a Swordspoint & TPOTS character]'s favorite album, too – especially songs like "Let Me Ride on the Wall of Death [One More Time]"!)
Spend way too much money on: Travel. I'm incredibly cheap about virtually everything else, from phone bills to window shades, but I'll think nothing of dropping hundreds of dollars on airline tickets. (My friends and I call this phenomenon, which everyone shares, "The Value of Relative Money.")
Favorite furniture: A few years ago I sprang for a leather club chair that I can curl up – or sprawl out – and read in. I put it next to the window of my new house, and it makes me incredibly happy.
A month after I got out of college, I was passing an elementary school on W. 95th St., when I saw an old school desk sitting on the sidewalk. I paid a bum $25 to watch it for me until I could hire a truck to move it to my first apartment. It is huge and brown and utterly dinged up with years of hard use. It has six drawers, and is just hell to move, and I have schlepped it everywhere I've ever gone. I will never give it up.