Interview to Megan Whalen Turner
Dear Books Lovers,
this post is probably one of the most importants since the day I opened the blog. This is not my first interview, but it’s my first interview conducted in english, with a very talented american author – the sweetest and nicest of them all – whom I had the chance to meet in person.
It’s was my biggest pleasure to meet and interview Megan Whalen Turner in Torino some time ago. It took me a while to write down the recorded interview, but I’ve finally done it, and I’m finally ready to share it with you. More than an interview this was a read chat, I hope you’ll enjoy ‘cause we don’t just talk of the first book in her fantasy series called The thief, but we talk of a lot other important things.
At the bottom of the article you’ll find the audio part. It’s not very understandable because of the noise but it’s basically almost the same of what I wrote down.
Me: What inspired you to write this particular story? Was there any momento where you thought I want to write a book where a thief has to go on an adventure to retrieve a precious jem?
Megan: No, really, my story begins with this idea that there will be this group of people travelling together and they would realize very suddenly that there was one person among them that they had vastly underestimated, and I realized that what I wanted was for the characters to realize this but for the reader to also have this experience of realizing they did not understand what was right in front of them.
Me: So it kinda came like writing…
Megan: right, and the rest is, you know filling out, who would the travellers be, where would they be going, what would this underestimated character be like and the story filled in in that sense.
Me: at the beginning you outline the story and then….?
Megan: What I usually do is… I tell my story out loud. He [her husband] has to listen to them, he’s the first one I tell them to, and when you watch someone reacting to the story that you’re telling is a very different act than writing, but it tells you whether you have the main point right, and then you sit down and you try to write and try to recreate that experience.
Me: So, I know you put a lot of important thematics in the book, can you tell us which ones and why those specifically?
Megan: I can say that, when I was reading Rosemary Sutcliff, she’s a british author, she wrote hystorical fiction about roman britain, I wondered from the very first time, why we don’t ever see characters who have some sort of disability in fiction, and Rosemary Sutcliff soffered from Juvenile idiopahic arthritis and she was in a wheelchair and she wrote these amazing books with these amazing characters and they were unlike anything that I say saw, and anywhere else in the books that I read, so I started writing with this idea that it would have to feel like an hystorical fiction, because Rosemary Sutcliff was a very huge influence for me but also have some of the humor of Diana Wynne Jones and John Aiken, and so that was sort of the tone of the story, that I was aiming for. But another thing that was really important to me is that when I was growing up, and still I think today, when we talk about things like war, we quite frequently ask really simple questions and stick to those. There is a bad guy, the bad guy wants to take over the world and the good guy has to stop them, but we know that a war starts not really because there’s one bad guy, but because lots of people want the same resources, lots of people want oil fields, lots of people…
Me: They all want power, not just one
Megan: right, and many people are cought up in the conflict, who maybe don’t believe in the conflict, or would choose some other direction if they had a choice, but they’re making the best decision that they can, given the situation that they’re in, and so, when I was writing The thief I had that very much in my mind, that you have three small countries, and that means that their choices are limited and those are the things that were going over in my head.
Me: And I think it’s very profound, because many things are not really seen through in books, and in this way someone who’s not educated in something can be more educated on a certain topic, even if it’s just through fiction
Megan: right, and I’ve always expected a lot from my readers, and I treat them generally like adult readers, by the time their 12, 13 they have all the cognitive capabilities of an adult reader, they just don’t have the experience, and so when I talk, I make sure I’m talking to them as I talk to adult readers, who happen not to know certain things, and maybe have never been shown this things before.
Me: I thing this is a very important question because your series is composed of six books…
Megan: Is complete with six books.
Me: So can you say something to convince readers who want to get into this journey, because six books can seem like very much.
Megan: Well, I will say this, and this is very important to me, I write very slowly, so there are long periods between books, and I’m very honored that people who read The thief have been literally waiting for 25 years for the conclusion of the story. But each of my books has a beginning and an end, every one of them stands alone. Maybe not so much the very last one, but if you have a reader who is interested, they should not feel like they have to read all of them, and they don’t have to read in order, if they want to start with the Queel of Attolia, or they want to start with the king, they want to read them out of order, they can do that.
Me: And I think that’s one more point to the story because many readers might feel like six books is a big commitment, so maybe you get to the third, and you don’t like the third and don’t want to continue, so if it’s stand alones you can get to the forth and expect something else and love it.
Megan: right, they’re all a little bit different but they all stand alone.
Me: Like in the same world, but the stories are on their own. So… do you have any further message you want to give to italian readers?
Megan: Really, I just hope that they like the books. I hope they love the books.
As said in the interview, the series is complete, you can find all the books in any bookstore, and that’s it. Let me know if you’ll ever read any.
Book 1 amazon Book 2 amazon Book 3 amazon Book 4 amazon Book 5 amazon Book 6 amazon
