#AuthorGoals
I have a love/hate relationship with the Edinburgh Book Festival. If I’m being honest with myself I’m probably borderline agoraphobic when it comes to how I feel about crowds, and there’s nothing more certain to put my blood pressure through the roof than the mobs that normally descend upon Edinburgh during Festival season. Because of that, it took a couple of years and lots of nagging from my mother-in-law for me to work up the courage to face my fears, but I’m glad I did. And now, almost two years since the last one, I have to say I really miss it. I enjoy the online events - I attended one the other day hosted by the author I’m about to mention - but I miss the atmosphere. I miss browsing the bookshop. I miss being surrounded by fellow book lovers. There’s just something really lovely about it.
That event last week got me thinking about one of the last EIBF events I attended actually, and how it had actually shaped me and my writing. It was 2019, and I remember when the programme arrived, I had a really quick look through for any popular authors who were likely to sell out quickly. The first name that jumped out at me was Holly Black, who was speaking with another author I’d never heard of. I loved the film adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles (although I haven’t read any of the books) and had finished The Cruel Prince earlier that year. If I’ve one criticism of EIBF, I often struggle to find events that really appeal to me as a reader. I find plenty that appeal to me as a writer, but I wished the had more for mainstream SFF fans. Having found one, I was really looking forward to it.
August was really busy, so I didn’t get a chance to read the sequel, the Wicked King, beforehand and I didn’t have time to look up the other author who was speaking and read any of her work in advance either. Boy, did I feel like an idiot.
Enter: Samantha Shannon.
She was promoting her new book The Priory of the Orange Tree, a feminist retelling of St George and the Dragon. And it was the most inspiring hour of my life. The research, the detail, the beauty of her prose… and she was so passionate!
She talked about how inspired she’d been seeing Arwen rescuing Frodo in the Lord of the Rings film as a child, only to be so bitterly disappointed after reading the book and seeing how Tolkien had portrayed Arwen that she turned her back on fantasy for a good long while. She talked about the lack of strong, female leads in fantasy - articulating feelings and frustrations that I’d never really been able to describe, but had always shared. She talked about how one of her characters, Queen Sabran Berethnet, was a demonstration that female characters did not need to be masculine to be strong. I didn’t really understand what she meant until I took the book home and read it.
And seeing her there with Holly Black, who is just as amazing, and how the two of them interacted! It was just brilliant to see two successful women being so supportive and encouraging of each other, sharing in each others journey in such a genuinely positive way. I was pretty jealous, if I’m honest. Interactions like those were something I cherished while I was competing, and I’ve really missed them following retirement.
I couldn’t brave the crowds to stay for the signing after. If I had, I would have got down on my knees and wept in thanks. I’d been stuck in a rut with my writing for the best part of a year, really struggling to work my way out of it, and she’d given me inspiration. Not for my book, but for myself. A role model I could look up to, someone I could aspire to be like. Then I found this article, and I saw my writing in a whole new light.
“‘Historical accuracy’ seems like a strange phrase to bandy about when talking about fantasy. After all, this is the genre where anything can happen — where imagination is the limit, and where the rules of reality can be shattered... Yet high and epic fantasy, in particular, have long had an intimate relationship with history. These genres owe their very existence to the myths and legends of the past...
Working on my novel The Priory of the Orange Tree, I found that writing a ‘historical’ fantasy allowed me to actively engage with history. Fantasy became a tool through which I could scrutinize, explore and challenge the past without the expectation that I would be faithful to every facet of it. It gave me leave to make informed decisions about what to transfer, what to re-imagine and what to abandon altogether...
But there is another side to the coin. An obsession with ‘historical accuracy’ in fantasy is still used, in certain circles, to uphold the long reign of misogyny, racism and homophobia in the most ancient of genres.”
I’d been guilty of falling into that trap more than once - my societies were generally patriarchal, misogynists were everywhere and, in an initial draft of Blood of Ravens, a female character experienced sexual assault. I’d already cut the latter for a variety of reasons, namely a refusal to contribute to or perpetuate the use of violence against women for entertainment, but that article got me thinking. I was writing a world filled with magic and dragons and all sorts of impossibilities that had come from my imagination… so why couldn’t I imagine a world where women were equal to men?
Spoiler: I can now, and it’s beautiful. Still, I’ve retained at least some of our patriarchal society in my writing. Not because I think it’s right, but because writing a woman living with and rising above rampant sexism and misogyny is something I can relate to. Women succeeding in a world ruled by men speaks to me on a deep and meaningful level. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.
But at least I’m challenging myself on these things now, and if I do decide do go a certain way it’s a conscious choice made for a good reason rather than because I feel tied to tired old tropes that are nearly a century old.
It feels a little awkward writing this, because I’m shy and introverted and just weird about stuff like this, but I’m also trying this thing where I share some love and put more positivity out in the world rather than constantly complaining… Samantha Shannon changed the way I look at fantasy. She changed how I look at writing, and ultimately she changed how I look at myself. And that’s what I love about books - about words and the people who put them together. It almost feels like some kind of magic, and that’s pretty awesome.
Do you have a particular author you look up to? Someone whose writing has influenced you? Let me know in the comments below!