T. Kingfisher is a busy writer. She’s got books with Tor, and books with Nightfire, and today she’s on our blog to talk a little about the creation process of her latest novella, Thornhedge.
Check it out!
Way back when, in 2015, in my other life as a children’s book author, I had a book published called Harriet the Invincible, the first of the Hamster Princess series. Harriet, the hero, is very fierce and very confident, and she’s also the princess at the heart of a “Sleeping Beauty” retelling (also a hamster). It was a fun romp and I enjoyed writing it enormously, and a lot of readers liked it, too.
But as inevitably happens when you retell a fairy tale—or at least when I retell one—I found myself with all these extra possibilities in my brain afterward. Directions that I could have gone but didn’t. Characters that I could have written but passed over in favor of others. Themes that went unexplored, ideas that never got fleshed out, all the usual writing baggage. And yet somehow, this time, it was different. It didn’t go away.
Apparently, I was not quite done with “Sleeping Beauty,” or perhaps the story wasn’t quite done with me.
I usually find my way through a fairy tale by questioning all the assumptions in it, starting with who the hero and the villain are. The wicked fairy that curses Sleeping Beauty is supposed to be the villain, of course (and yes, I did love the movie Maleficent, but even then, the princess is one of the good guys). So in this case, I started thinking, what if the princess was the villain? After all, why would you trap someone inside a hedge of thorns, anyway? Because you wanted to contain her. Because there was some reason you didn’t want her to get out. Because she was dangerous, and maybe you weren’t a very skilled fairy, so you did the only thing that you could think of to do.
I wrote about three paragraphs with this idea in mind, and Toadling more or less dropped into my lap, fully formed. I rapidly found myself writing the diametric opposite of the book that I had just written. (It’s hard to think of two characters less alike than Toadling and Harriet, although I love them both.)
Once I had Toadling, the whole thing just flowed. It’s lovely when that happens (also, sadly, rare). Many characters bolt off with the story, and I am left staggering behind them, frantically trying to take notes, but Toadling was very polite. Her backstory unfolded pretty much as I typed it. I learned she was raised by greenteeth as I wrote the sentence about them; I learned that she could turn into a toad when she did it on the page—all the little discoveries that you always make writing a book, of course, but happening at my usual typing speed, without sitting and staring at the wall for an hour, or nearly rupturing my wrist tendons trying to keep up.
It was really very sweet, and so if someone asked me about Thornhedge, I would probably say that it is a sweet book, and then presumably someone would point out that the heroine is raised by child-eating fish monsters and the villain is torturing people and animating the dead, and I would be left flailing my hands around and saying, “But it’s sweet! Really!” because I am not always the best at judging the tone of my own work.
. . . I still think it’s sweet, dammit.
The other amusing thing about Thornhedge is that it was the first book I sold to Tor, though it has come out after a couple of others, because publishing. I had written most of it, had it lying around in my mental trunk, and wasn’t sure what to do with it. Novellas were hard to place at the time. There was one magazine that told me flat out that they couldn’t afford to pay me anything like what it was worth, which I respected, but which left me with this weird wrong-length . . . thingy.
And then I saw that Tor had an open submission period for novellas coming up.
Huh, I thought. I should send this in. When is that, again?
Then, a few minutes later: Waaaaait a minute—I have an agent! Agents don’t have to wait for that! They can just send in books!
(I have written more than forty books now, and I am still sometimes not entirely clear on this whole “being a professional writer” gig.)
So my agent sent in Thornhedge, and Tor very kindly came back and said, “Yes, we will take this, and also, what else you got?” which is why Nettle & Bone and What Moves the Dead have also come out by the time you’re reading this. So I am very grateful to them for taking the chance, and also to Toadling, weird as it is to be grateful to a figment of your imagination, for paving the way.
T. Kingfisher
North Carolina
June 2022
T. KINGFISHER (she/her) writes fantasy, horror, and occasional oddities, including Nettle & Bone,What Moves the Dead, and A House with Good Bones. Under a pen name, she also writes bestselling children’s books. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, dogs, and chickens who may or may not be possessed.
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