Robin McKinley Answers
Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How long does it take you to write a book?

RMcK: I used to have an answer for this, some books ago. I used to say that it takes about a year to think about it enough to be able to start writing it down, and then another year to do the writing. That felt like the pattern that was emerging, but it wasn't, and really it never has been. I wrote my first novel, Beauty, in about five months — although I sat down to write a short story, and discovered I had more to say than I thought. Beauty and the Beast had been my favourite fairy-tale for twenty years, and there was a lot of it there, even though when I began I thought I was performing a sort of writing exercise. My next two novels, The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown each took about a year to think out and a second year to write down, but this is almost as misleading as the time I took for Beauty: Sword has its roots in my very early love of Kipling's stories, Hero in my many, many readings and rereadings of The Lord of the Rings, discovered later, at the age of eleven. (My husband has just given me the complete LOTR on tape for Christmas — as I write this in January — and I've been listening to it, one side per day, when I run in the mornings. I run early, before the world wakes up, and Tolkien's world rises around me in the winter fogs of rural Hampshire — it's as magical all over again as it was when I was eleven.)

The Outlaws of Sherwood took about five years to write, for a variety of reasons: that I started out trying to write some other book entirely and wasted a lot of time trying to make it into that other book; that I was halfway through the book again, having acknowledged that the first draft wasn't the book I'd been trying to write but it was now, before I decided to do a little historical research on my supposed time-period in the real world and discovered that one of my major plot lines wouldn't work; and basic insidious corrosive self-doubt. The last-named is always a problem; some years it's worse than other years. It hasn't been quite so bad lately. It was very bad with Outlaws: my previous book had won the Newbery, and I half thought I should have a brain transplant and become a physicist or something, anything but have to write a new book after a big award; and the two circumstantial checks of writing the wrong book and botching my attempt to meddle with history made my rapidly dwindling self-confidence dwindle faster. Mind you, I'm pleased with how Outlaws turned out, and it's as good as I can make it; but the making was pretty gruelling.

And so on. So the short answer is: I don't know that either. Every book is different.

Q: How many hours a day do you write?

RMcK: Two to twelve, approximately. There are more two-hour days than twelve-hour days, but I also work a seven-day week. (Yes, I take holidays, but now that I have a laptop, work usually comes too. It's weirdly comforting, having the thing with me, except when I'm worrying about airport xray machines or about all the bits falling out of the motherboard and settling in the bottom hinge, which is most of the time. Laptops, even in the minefield of computer reliability, are a law unto themselves. A bad law.) Fewer hours, usually, at the beginning of a book, when I'm first straining to get it down on paper. Even when it goes down fairly easily, when I know not merely the next word but the next sentence and maybe even — gosh — the next paragraph, it's an incredibly exhausting process. After two hours of this I have about as much vitality left as wet blotting paper (I feel as if I must look like wet blotting paper too: saggy and squishy and blurred). As the book gathers momentum — and pages and drafts — I can work on it for longer because there's more there to work with; I'm not trying to spin substance out of nothing any more. Mostly I don't choose what I write — as I say, the stories happen; it's up to me only to try and write them down, although it's a big 'only' — but once I've got something on paper and can begin to pay some attention to phrasing and word choice, then my conscious mind and my thesaurus can start to make their presence more or less usefully felt. My conscious mind also has to do the donkey work when inspiration has failed and, for example, chapter two should obviously come after chapter five, but how?, without making a total mess. (One of trickiest bits about writing a story is getting the connections to look inevitable. When I've managed to put a scene in the wrong place, it's not merely a question of putting it in the right place; I have to rewrite all the connections too — including checking all other scenes in the vicinity to make sure there aren't references to the newly-moved scene in its old location. And rewriting connections is a bit like reknotting the same tie or rearranging the same flowers. It's very hard to make the thing look fresh: the old creases tend to show.) One of the lines any writer is endlessly negotiating is when to let the story have its head — when 'inspiration' or whatever you might choose to call it will do the job — and when Conscious Mind should or must have a look-in. Some writers may accomplish this gracefully; I do not. If I can't 'feel' the novel today, does that mean I should let it alone and rewrite that short story that's been gathering dust for x years, or am I just avoiding a difficult bit? If I soldier on with the novel, on will-power instead of inspiration, will I get through the difficult bit or just force the storyline till it breaks? I've had storylines break and sometimes they are recoverable and sometimes they aren't, but it's always a depressing and wasteful business.

By the end of a book, when it's almost done and it and I both know it's almost done, I am just about living and breathing it and time away from my desk begins to feel make-believe, as if the book is the real world and my life is a figment, or maybe a TV commercial. And the working hours mount up. There's an actual suspense to this nearly-finished stage which I don't think I can describe; I really do feel as if I'm racing against some impending doom. The need for sleep and food (and possibly contact with other human beings) does provide a useful counterweight; now that I'm married (especially since it's to another writer who knows the dangers) I can't get away with total preoccupation any more. I'm also older. There have been ends-of-books I spent fourteen and sixteen hours a day over, but I doubt I could do that any more, even if I didn't have a concerned husband dragging me away from my desk for my own good.

Q: What writers have been the greatest influence on you?

RMcK: Probably Kipling and Tolkien. Sigh. I would like to tell you, Plato and Hume, Dante and Milton, Tolstoy and Goethe. But it isn't true. There are some honourable honourable mentions on my list of influences: Homer and Euripides, Dickens and Hardy and Trollope and George Eliot, Keats and Yeats and Auden. (No, not Shakespeare, on either list. I'm not a Shakespeare fan.) But the record begins with Kipling and Tolkien. I know Kipling from very early just-literate childhood with The Just So Stories, and I progressed rapidly — as rapidly as my reading vocabulary would let me — into the British-India stories such as Plain Tales from the Hills and Soldiers Three and the resonant English-landscape stories of Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies. (You can't ever quite pin Kipling down; his best stuff and his worst stuff always lie very close to each other. My favourite books of his usually also contain the stories or poems I detest most. Sometimes best and worst are in the same story, like Kim or The Ballad of East and West — although I probably like Ballad, which is really pretty embarrassing, for the horses. When I was a kid I just sucked it all in and didn't think about which bits I liked or didn't like, but I had figured it out enough by the time I wrote Sword that I was at some pains to make the natives more interesting — and intelligent — than the paler-skinned invaders. Sword's immediate inspiration is Kipling's story The Man Who Would Be King, as funnelled through John Huston's reading of it as a film, and crossbred with The Sheik. Speaking of embarrassing and detestable stories. I read E M Hull's The Sheik because I thought it was going to be not only a wonderful old-fashioned British Empire adventure novel, like The Four Feathers or Beau Geste, but a wonderful old-fashioned British Empire novel where an English woman rides off into the desert to have adventures. It isn't. It's about the punishment a woman who tries to do a man's job — i.e. ride off into the desert and have adventures — necessarily calls down upon herself and how if she's punished long and hard enough she'll learn to like it and embrace it as her fate as a woman. Oh yes, and the sheik himself turns out to be English — not a, you know, unsavoury foreigner — so it's okay that she falls in love with him after he's been raping her into submission for a while.)

The thing about Kipling's stories for me is the energy of them. They burst off the page at you, full of life and strength and — in the good ones — truth (if not, in my opinion, wisdom, at least not very often). I was absolutely taken out of myself — snatched out of myself, when I read them as a child. I am taken out of myself by them now, although I don't know how much of that is the familiarity of long friendship. Rereading a beloved book — or taking a walk in a countryside (or a cityscape) that you have long loved and been nourished by — can both take you out of yourself and set you more firmly within yourself. (I think it's one of the few good things to say about getting older and creakier and more set in your ways, that the richness and value of old friendships increase; and in my life that includes books and landscape as well as people. Now if only dogs and cats and horses lived as long as trees and mountains and books that aren't dropped in the bath so often that their pages fall out.)

Whether you like him or loathe him, you will probably acknowledge that Kipling has style. He could use the language and (as Raymond Chandler might say, speaking of stylists) it stayed used. I wish I had absorbed more of his ability to get seven or seventy words' effect out of a six-word sentence. In this I am more like Tolkien, who goes on rather. I fell out several volumes ago of The History of Middle-Earth . . . but if I were allowed only one desert-island book it would be The Lord of the Rings. (I am not cheating. There are single-volume editions, and Tolkien himself fought hard against having it published as three separate books.)

In Tolkien it's the strength of Story that seizes me irresistably and bears me away, through all 1000-plus pages of small print. I'm aware, at least some of the time, of his defects: there are no women at all in LOTR, although Galadriel at least has a few lines and Eowyn almost gets to do something (although Merry does it first); everybody speaks Old High Forsoothly, except the hobbits, who incline to Early Public Schoolboy; and there are an awful lot of things that seem to be tall and fair, or as clear as clear water, or that shine like silver, or that are silver and shine like the stars, or that are dusk-silver as water under the stars, or . . . well, if you've read Tolkien, you know what I mean. And speaking of fair, there aren't any non-Anglos in the book either, except on the wrong side.

I don't know why none of this ruins the story for me. It should. Similar shortcomings have ruined many other books for me. And in the proliferation of doorstop fantasies since Tolkien — even politically correct doorstop fantasies — I have never found another one to love (I can't love ERR Eddison either, by the way, to speak briefly of pre-Tolkien doorstop fantasy, but I find it strange that Peake's Gormenghast trilogy never quite catches on, although it is periodically rereleased and talked up, as it deserves. I admit I don't love it either although I admire it a lot and read it with a rather mesmerised pleasure. Peake had a strange mind).

If you're interested in more of my ravings about Tolkien, I did an essay on him for a vast heavy reference volume called Writers for Children, edited by Jane M. Bingham, and published by Scribners in 1988. I don't know if it's still in print, but it should still be lurking on library reference shelves.

Q: Do you have any advice for people who would like to become writers?

RMcK: Just this: Read as much as you can and write as much as you can. Reading feeds your own story-telling, and writing, like anything worth doing well, needs practise. It needs practise practise practise PRACTISE. You don't have to be organised about it, either the reading or the writing, unless you're an organised sort of person (I'm not). If you want to keep 3x5 cards for plot and character annotations and draw up outlines and keep a notebook by the side of your bed for scintillating ideas that come to you at 3 am, then by all means do so — just so long as your 3x5 cards and beautifully structured and subdivided outlines don't become an excuse never to get around to the writing. (Procrastination is a whole vast topic of its own. I'll get into it . . . some other time.) Because you do have to put the hours in.

Follow your nose through the library or the bookshop shelves or your friends' recommendations or intriguing reviews; read what you can feel feeds you, that you can feel yourself waking up to take in more fully, that excites you and makes you want to learn more, or want to go to that place again, or think more about something you've only just realised, or only just seen a new angle on. This includes, by the way, a category I will call Good Trash. (My husband once wrote an essay called In Praise of Rubbish, on the subject of reading bad books as well as good ones, and he says it's the most popular and reprinted article he's ever done.) There are a few people out there who do thrive on a diet of pure shining erudition and unadulterated high-mindedness — I'm taking a seminar on Carl Jung from one of them right now — but most of us aren't like that. (And those who are won't be reading this web site, so I don't have to bother about them.) Go on reading the great stuff — you want to know what you're ultimately aiming for, you want that stre-e-e-etch of mental and emotional muscles — but if you thrill to the ongoing adventures of Gzarl, Warrior Queen/King of the Vizibugtherps in the Land/Planet of Kofakskilon, and want to pursue them through 8,134 volumes, then read them and have fun. I read most of Burroughs' Tarzan books, quite a few of his Mars books, and every one of H Rider Haggard's Alan Quatermain series — as well as all of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dickens and George Eliot, although I'm still working on Anthony Trollope who wrote nearly 8,134 volumes, and they're all a lot longer than any of Gzarl's exploits, and I've sort of given up on Henry James, who, it seems to me, makes it harder for his readers than he needs to. And I still reread Aeschylus when I went to be heart-wrung. (Yes, I do read modern novels and stories too. But I didn't when I was younger, when I was still first figuring out how I wrote myself. I liked knowing something about what I was getting into with books I read, rather than falling into the seething, landmark-less maelstrom of the new.) You get a feel for what works, for what works for you — and also what doesn't work for you. Great books are rarely so clear about this as bad books are. (Which is also not to say that great writers always get it right. Romola, for example. Don't bother.) Which brings me to another important principle: Write what you want to read. The person you know best in this world is you. Listen to yourself. If you are excited by what you are writing, you have a much better chance of putting that excitement over to a reader.

And don't forget the possible driving force of fury: I wrote The Blue Sword half in wild revolt against The Sheik (see above).

You can also learn a lot by sheer plagiarism, so long as you recognise that that is what it is and that it's only a writing exercise. I wrote an awful lot of very bad Tolkien pastiche when I was younger — I didn't realise what I was doing at first, but even when I began to, later on, I could see that I was learning a lot about characterisation and plot development, how you get people from one place to another, how much background you need, how to slip in information your story is going to need later, how to lay a good ambush for the innocent reader — and so I kept on with it, when I couldn't think of any stories of my own. Well, that's not quite right: I've always had stories of my own, but writing them down is hell. When I couldn't face any stories of my own. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer — I've said this from a slightly different angle in a previous answer — is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is never as good as what you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think it is, then you've turned into a arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying — trying as hard as you can — which is a good thing. As I started off saying, writing takes practise. More practise than you can imagine until you've been doing it for years and are beginning to suspect that you never are going to learn all the answers and even then all you've learned is that you haven't been doing it long enough yet, and that you'll die of old age before you do.

I don't myself keep a diary or journal (except about our garden, particularly my roses) but journal-keeping can be a tremendous source and inspiration for writing because you don't have to know in advance what it's 'about'. For some people it becomes an end in itself — and think of some of the wonderful (and for that matter the not-so-wonderful) diaries and diary-based memoirs that have been published and avidly read. Some of them are as profound or elegant or moving or funny or whatever you want in your reading material as any other print medium. But even if your daily life isn't ever going to interest anyone but you, it can accustom you to the fact and discipline of writing — and of what your words look like on the page. A journal can also give you the opportunity to try out different effects: the story of the death and burial of a pet goldfish can become just as piteous as the death of Little Nell (and a good deal less ludicrous, just by the way); the story of a flat tire can become an epic adventure (especially if it happened in the rain) — and if you in the writing suddenly find yourself holding a lance and fighting off the attacking hordes of flame-eyed Archalderons... keep writing. Don't stop and think, Hey! That's supposed to be a jack! You may have just discovered a story.

When I was first writing stories, when I was a kid and through my teens, my great problem (the one that I knew of anyway) was that I could think of terrific beginnings and terrific endings (I believed) but never any middles to stick them together. I found that if I just kept writing the fragments I knew about eventually they got longer and began to bump together in the middle (sometimes with a nasty grinding noise).... This is another of those things that is different for different writers. Some writers just sit down one day, write Chapter One or their first essay or short story, and go on from there. But they aren't reading this web site either. For anyone who is: just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it'll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.

And you don't have to think you've got it all right and perfect to be proud of what you've done. If you come to the end of a story or any piece of writing you've sweated and bled over, and you can look at it and say, I've done the best I know how to do, and really, it's not at all bad — then you've done very well indeed. Give yourself a pat on the back — and then get on with the next story, the next thing.

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