Robin McKinley Answers
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What are you working on now?
RMcK:I used to try to answer this but then there got to be too many people who, when I saw them again a few years later at another library conference or on the street in New York City (or for that matter in the corner grocery in Maine) would say, So, did you ever finish -----?, or, Whatever happened to -------- that you talked about when I saw you in x, y number of years ago?, and then they would mention something I could barely remember having toyed with as an idea, let alone have worked on steadfastly, finished, and sent to a publisher. Indeed more than once I've had something described to me that I
would swear I have literally never heard of before in my life and certainly have never tried to write a story about. Sometimes this is probably just someone who doesn't know me very well confusing me with Samuel Beckett or Barbara Cartland (easy to do of course) but sometimes, knowing my own memory, doubtless I have claimed to be writing whatever it is they're talking about, and whatever-it-is has either turned into something else entirely, or has sunk without trace into one of those cobwebby boxes under my desk, or, possibly, both. The most embarrassing of these Disappearing Stories are the ones I've actually read aloud from in public. Those are harder to deny all knowledge of, although I may try anyway.
So I stopped answering this question.
Unfortunately, for reasons which now escape me, sort of this last year I've started answering it again. This is a mistake, because my method of work, cough cough cough cough, which is to say my lack of method of work, hasn't changed significantly in the last thirty years. I still don't know what I'm doing, and while sometimes, having plunged over the side of the boat of reality into the sea of dream in response to a rainbow flicker I thought I saw out of the corner of my eye, I reappear exhausted but victorious on shore with a story flapping between my teeth, also sometimes the boat, circling gallantly at the last place I was seen, hauls me back aboard again and gives me artificial respiration and dry clothes. I think I started answering this question again in an attempt to seem... well, less strange. Sometimes you start to feel it would be nice to be able at least to appear normal. The problem is that I am strange.
So I'm now in the position, as I write this, of having told several people whom I want to, you know, go on liking me, and whom I see and talk to more often than every several years briefly and accidentally at the crossing between Christopher Street and Seventh Ave, several highly contradictory things about What I Am Working On Now, which include two short stories, one second volume of a short story series, one long short story to be published as an individual illustrated book, and five novels, one of which began life as one of the short stories, which was before I hastily came up with another short story to take its place, since it sort of had a place, and one of which started as a bit of business in yet another novel... oops, that makes six novels... which wouldn't go where I wanted it to and which I then thought briefly would make a story in the second volume of the short story series, which idea lasted about the first half page of writing this thing down, and which is now at the end of a first draft of what I assume is the next in the series of what I am now calling my accidental novels, since it occurred to me as I was writing a piece for my UK editor's newsletter about how Spindle's End came to be written that Spindle in fact is unusual in that I meant to write it.
(Yes, two of the above semi-works in semi-progress are about Damar, and neither of them is the cobwebby box under my desk mentioned in the afterword to Rose Daughter. Including the cobwebby box would make seven novels, or ten, depending on how you're counting. Now shut up. Nothing you say will have any effect except to piss me off.)
Did you follow that? I didn't think so.
But my point is, no one can be writing six (or ten) novels at a time, let alone all that other stuff, and you're right, she can't. I can't. I'm working on two. Novels. Which is actually a new thing, trying to work steadily on more than one thing at once, and kind of interesting in that 'may you live in interesting times' baneful sort of way. But I'm so embarrassed about my lack of control, direction, or restraint, that most of the people I've told about one (or more) of the other novels, or stories, I mostly haven't corrected their impression of, so when they innocently ask me, So, how is The Whippet that Ate Manhattan coming, I have to say, Oh, fine, fine, can I get you some more tea? Isn't the weather, er, weathery today?, and leap to my feet in such great haste to change the subject that I trip over a chair, which then as I hop around on one foot and howl, does distract the other party from their ominous line of questioning.
So much for trying to appear less strange.
PS: Also, writing something new for this web site is always kind of three things from the top of my list of things I must do. I mean it's always about three things from the top. If I were trying to keep 'What are you working on now' answered accurately, I'd be rejigging this answer constantly. Which would be one more thing I wasn't getting done. I like things that stay done. It's enough effort performing them the first time.
Q: Where do the names of people, places, animals, in your books come from?
RMcK:I think this is buried somewhere in another answer already, but I hear it by itself often enough I thought I would give it its own heading.
I've just been interviewing myself in which I make reference to hearing voices. I like to assume that since I drive a car and maintain a respectable credit rating and rarely murder anyone and bury them in the back garden unless they really deserve it, that the fact that I hear voices won't unduly disturb anyone. The thing is that this is how a lot of my writing gets done: I hear the story going on. The background and plot stuff that I have to turn into words first I tend to 'feel' more than 'hear' — but I do, as literally as you like, hear my characters talking to each other sometimes, and I pick up most of the names of things that way, by what they call each other and what they say about what they're doing.
Occasionally I have to make up a name in cold blood because I haven't managed to hear it. I am never happy about this, although over the years I seem to have become a little better about letting un-clearly-heard names evolve until they 'feel' right in a way similar to how the background stuff 'feels' right — I know, this is an even less useful answer than usual to this FAQ — but I 'made up' Corlath's name, for example, in Blue Sword, having consistently just failed to hear what anyone called him, and am secretly convinced that he, or the Chancellor of the Archive, or someone, is still bitterly hacked off with me for getting this wrong.
Q: Will you write an Inspiring Letter to our students about writing/reading/libraries/something that we can Prominently Display on our Authors/Artists/Successful People bulletin board for our Arts/Professional Success in Future Life/blah blah blah Week/Month/Small Cultural Event?
RMcK: Probably not, because requests like this make my mind go blank. See, I don't feel like a source of inspiration: I feel much more on the terrible warning end of the 'If you can't be a good example you'll have to be a terrible warning' scale. Yes, I have been writing books for a quarter of a century, and earning my living doing it for about half that, but this still seems to me like a daily miracle. There's still a strong sense of Who, me?, and I'm (still) afraid that when MBAs in their power suits and nasty haircuts come at last to Valhalla or Avalon or wherever the Creative Summit meets, I'll be one of the ones they chuck out for accountable delinquency and Failing to Live Up to My Potential.
An appeal for an Inspiring Letter makes me look over my shoulder for whomever the appealer is really talking to.
Occasionally such a request hits me at a good moment. I had an email query not too long ago (although I read it a week after its not unreasonable 'please reply by' date because I was behind answering email, of course) which wanted a paragraph on Library Use and I had just spent the morning a day or two before driving the perky young information desk lady at my local library crazy. I had been cruising through the county-wide computer catalogue and making lists, and after I'd come up with two different secret cache inventories she'd never heard of, plus sent her down to the sub basement (where all the Things that used to live under kids' beds before the invention of under-bed drawers were invented now hang out) for an armful of books by a creepy and obscure British Low Gothic writer I was interested in, she went suddenly on break and left me with another woman a lot older and flintier. (When I told this story to a librarian management friend she said that the poor woman probably thought I was a spy from headquarters, testing out Hands On Service Delivery to the Community.) Since in fact I'd had a very good time and was sorry I was driving the young perky lady to drink and a change of career, I had the pleasures of libraries on my mind, and wrote and sent a paragraph that I was anyway dutifully thanked for although whether they actually used it or not I don't know, since I doubt it was, you know, Inspiring.
I'm sure I'll later regret saying this, but you probably have a slightly better chance of prising something out of me if you give me some direction about what you want. I mean, even asking for a paragraph on library use was better than just asking me for A Few Nice Words on Libraries. On the other hand, asking me for A Few Nice Words specifically on, say, The Murky Clandestine Imbalances of the Dewey Decimal System as Opposed to the Sleek and Admirable Limpidity of the Library of Congress, will probably gain you nothing at all except possibly murmurs of resentment. (I'm sure the L of C system is much superior and far fewer librarians have nervous breakdowns on it, but I grew up with DD and am accustomed to it.) You have to remember that my range of expertise is limited, and impinges on reality only sporadically.
Q: You've written about the origins of all your novels but Deerskin. Why?
RMcK:It's my bleakest book, and it was, in some ways, the most devastating to write. That's not a place I go back to easily. Also I get the most devastating mail about it. I hear sometimes from people who tell me that they understand, literally, what Lissar went through, and even the ones who say that reading Deerskin helped them deal with what they have to deal with make me cry. I'm not going to belabour you with my Views of Artistic Responsibility; but Deerskin wanted me to write it and I wrote it, to the best of my ability. I think — I feel — that it does work and I'm very, very glad to hear readers tell me it does — there are worse things to be brought to tears by — but writing it was not a fun experience. Writing drains me flat anyway, and Deerskin was something beyond merely emotionally and physically exhausting.
I also hear from the people who want to hang, draw and quarter me for writing about So Nasty A Subject. I occasionally receive very, very squirrelly letters about all of my books, but Deerskin is the only one I've ever had hate mail for. I can wonder why it freaks certain people out so badly — not as if rape and incest don't exist in the real world — especially when the book is essentially about healing: or anyway I believe that Lissar is going to stay with Ossin at the end. But it's true that this is not the same thing as saying that what happened to her never happened: it did happen, and it will never not have happened. But healing has also happened. It discourages and disheartens me far worse that people need to hate me for writing this book than that there are people who have been through an experience enough like Lissar's (which I knew already) to find her story inspiring. One of the first 'You Evil Person for Writing this Foul and Revolting Book' letters told me that not only had I 'betrayed' my audience (huh?) but that the princess/heroine in fairy tales (and therefore books that grew from fairy tales) had to be a virgin and by destroying her virginity I had destroyed my heroine. Sorry, this just floors me. What an absolutely terrific message to give to anyone (male or female) who has ever made any kind of mistake with moral or spiritual or ethical repercussions. Virginity is one of the biggest and most oppressive — and most misused — metaphors in our society, and it is horrible to be persuaded to feel that if you've 'lost your innocence' about anything important then you're ruined for life. Everybody makes mistakes. Sometimes these are mistakes that aren't your fault, like being born into a family that will abuse you. Sometimes these are just mistakes because you're mortal: like taking a risk walking home late at night by yourself in a dubious area, or saying 'yes' to spending the night with someone you should have said 'no' to. (By the way, no, I don't feel that restricting sex acts to heterosexual couples married to each other is a feasible or even legitimate social philosophy.) The sheer cruelty of such a notion — that rape, even (or, possibly, particularly) in a fairy tale, is a final, irrecoverable destruction — makes me flaming gonzo.
Now let's move away from the most blatant errors and malignant crimes of sex-and-power. Everyone has had experiences that wounded them. You're breathing, ergo you hurt and get hurt. Later on you die. That's life. All of us need to feel that healing is possible. Some of us need to believe this harder than others. Where there's life there's hope and all that. And there's life and hope even very far out on the last perimeters of sanity and vitality. That's also what Deerskin is about, for me anyway. It doesn't anything like cover the ground — it was never meant to. And there are plenty of bridges-too-far that I couldn't personally cross, in fiction or in 'real' life. But Deerskin is, I hope, an example of the possibility of healing, even from mortal wounds, and about the enormously healing potency of love and loving.
There's another facet of this fairy-tale-as-metaphor for me too. Before Deerskin begins there's an author's note that says: There is a story by Charles Perrault called Donkeyskin which, because of its subject matter, is often not included in collections of Perrault's fairy tales. Or, if it does appear, it does so in a bowdlerised state. The original Donkeyskin is where Deerskin began.
I can't remember when I first read Donkeyskin but I remember how much I hated it. For those of you who don't know it, the rough outline is that there's this princess whose mother dies, and her father starts coming on to her in a suspect manner. Advised by a fairy godmother she flees the country, disguised in a donkeyskin, and accompanied by a magic chest that carries those truly crucial accoutrements of princesshood, some really great dresses. She falls in love with the prince of the country she is doing menial work in as Donkeyskin, who then falls in love with her because one day he's bored and decides to try some peering in at keyholes for fun and happens to apply himself to the right keyhole at a moment when Donkeyskin is playing dress-up out of the magic chest. Gross me out. Okay, there's a little persiflage about her kindness and generosity, and I suppose the prince in Cinderella (not one of my favourites either) fell in love with her because she looked good in a ball-gown, but they did have a little conversation too, and that prince wasn't a voyeur, even if his ideas about how to choose a bride are a little retro. So this airhead and her peeping tom get married, and her sick puppy father is invited to the wedding, and he says, oh, gee, I'm so sorry, I can't imagine what came over me, let's be friends, and the airhead and her new perv say, great, swell, keeno. And everyone lives happily ever after.
The heart of fairy tales, for those of us who are devotees, is the clear and shining emotional truth in them. They're the sub- or, sometimes, the unconscious, brought up into the sunlight and done up in the metaphors of princes and princesses and ogres and enchantments because the nonrational bits of our brains and spirits can't be bothered (and good for them) with the standard draconian limitations of so called reality where most of us are floor-scrubbers and hod-carriers and enchantment is something that happens on television. Donkeyskin, for me, reeks of emotional dishonesty. It may work just fine for other people, but it gets up my nose big time. Deerskin starts with the idea that the princess doesn't escape unscathed from the dreadful menace of her father's depravity. It also comes from my own personal rebellion against this society's idea that the loss of innocence is the same thing as the destruction of the spirit, and the hate mail I receive for the book proves that this a beachhead that needs to be better established.
There's yet another thing about Donkeyskin that seriously creeps me out. If I do take it as emotionally honest, then the only psychological interpretation that presents itself to me is that our princess, having been mind-screwed by her dad, can only 'fall in love' with another mind-screwer, another pervert, another sick puppy. Straight out of the psychology books: Bruno Bettelheim (who I think is all wet on Beauty and the Beast) would be proud of me. The prince in DEERSKIN whom Lissar falls in love with is a good guy.
All of that said (or ranted), I still have to remind you that I wrote Deerskin because it wanted me to. I can't say it often enough that I'm not in control: the story is. There's some chicken-or-egg about it: am I the way I am because of the stories that come to me to be written, or do the stories come to me to be written because I am the way I am? Both. I can't help having an effect on them because I have to write them down; and they sure as the sun rises in the east have an effect on me. But the story is still, you should forgive the phrase, the one who has the last word in our relationship.
Q: Why are all your answers so long? I just want something I can put in my book report.
RMcK: Sorreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Was that short enough?
If the answer to your question isn't here, you may email Robin at nuraddin (at) aol (dot) com — but please be sure your email is plain text only, without html or attachments.
Robin replies when and as she's able. She has been having email troubles recently, so if you haven't received an answer within a month, please email your question again.
She may post your question (anonymously) and her answer here.
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