Interview with Patricia C. Wrede!!!
Long ago in 2021, I interviewed author Patricia C. Wrede for an online literary magazine which is no longer in existence. Since she’s my favorite author, I’m reposting it here on “The Writing Cat.”
“Writers, in my experience, are intellectual pack-rats. Or possibly magpies, collecting every shiny possibly-useful-idea we happen across. It isn’t research, until suddenly there’s a story and you need it.” –Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede’s unforgettable characters and witty dialogue in her fantasy novels have been enchanting readers since the early 1980s. Her novels continue to inspire fantasy authors today. Naturally, when the opportunity arose to interview my favorite author on the writing process, I jumped at the chance to find out more about how she comes up with her ideas and forms them into classics.
The inspiration behind the writing is not necessarily the hard part, Wrede admits. Ideas can be found in all areas of life. However, she states that the difficulty comes with “getting the ideas down on paper, and that has a lot more to do with determination than inspiration.”
Wrede: I have a long list of “someday” ideas, and whenever I spot a random book that looks as if it will be useful for one of them, I read it. Research doesn’t get methodical until I commit to writing the story, but it’s still research and it’s still happening years before I get around to working on the specific idea. Often, it starts years before I have more than a vague idea that the Hanseatic League is interesting and I bet there’s a neat story idea in there somewhere.
Linam: Do you normally think of one scene or incident and plan a novel around it, or do you tend to come up with the general idea first?
Wrede: Every book is different. Talking to Dragons started with the title. Sorcery and Cecelia started as a game. The Mairelon books started with an idea for a mid-book scene that never made it into the book at all. The Liavek stories started with the worldbuilding and my main character. Snow White and Rose Red started with the fairy tale, which essentially means the underlying plot. The Seven Towers started with a mental picture of a tower in the middle of a forest. And of course with a sequel or prequel, I have the background and main characters from the first book(s).
Linam: What kind of research do you do? How long does it normally take?
Wrede: It depends entirely on the novel. If I’m doing alternate history, as with Snow White and Rose Red, the Regency Magic books, and the Frontier Magic books, then I do a lot of general research about the time, the history, the culture, etc. and then I track down the answers to specific questions that come up while I’m writing (like “Where exactly was Hungerford Market located? What dates were the full moons in spring of 1817, because that’s what let people outside of London drive after dark?). I do not, however, decide that I am going to write a novel set in a particular time/place and then spend X-many months researching. I read all sorts of books that take my fancy, and by the time I have read enough of them that I decide to set a novel in a particular time/place, I have already been reading random stuff about it for years. For instance, I went through all of the Andrew Lang fairy tale collections by the time I was thirteen, plus Bulfinch’s Mythology, and I didn’t stop reading fairy tales just because I started high school. You could, therefore, justify the claim that I spent my entire life “doing research” for the Enchanted Forest Chronicles.
Specific research for a specific title generally stops around the time I get the copy-edit to go over, because if it isn’t right by then, it’s really too late. Specific research for a given title starts at the point where I decide I am going to write a book that requires me to know about X. For alternate history, X is the particular time/place/society I’m setting the story in. For everything else, it’s the point at which I realize I need to know something specific, like stuff about sailing ships or how the Hanseatic League worked, because I want to write something that’s vaguely based around that sort of organization.
Sorcery and Cecelia and its two sequels, all set in Regency England, began as a letter-writing game between Wrede and author Caroline Stevermer. Both authors assumed a character and wrote to each other in a historical fiction setting that combined magic with reality. “The game has no rules, except that the players must never reveal their idea of the plot to one another… Good clean fun for the cost of a postage stamp,” co-author Caroline Stevermer writes in the afterward of Sorcery and Cecelia. At the end of the game, both Wrede and Stevermer realized that the game had turned into a book.
Linam: In Sorcery and Cecelia and Mairelon the Magician you combine Regency England with magic. What were your main sources for creating the historical background?
Wrede: A lifetime of reading Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, and an assortment of other books written and/or set in the Regency and Victorian eras. That gave me an idea of what I needed to know, and from there I went to history books. The biography of Georgette Heyer came out while I was working on some of those, and it had some of her references and notes. I spent hours in the Minneapolis Public Library rare book room reading a summary of newspaper headlines and articles from various years from 1811 to 1820, but I don’t recall the name of the book. And the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was invaluable for doing thieves’ cant. And there was a thin red book I picked up on a trip to England about “caravans” – i.e., the sort of camper/wagon/trailer that Mairelon used – that was very helpful. And some books a friend loaned me on the history of stage magic. I’m not writing historical references, so I don’t keep a bibliography.
Linam: Do you find it different to write short fiction as opposed to a novel?
Wrede: Of course they’re different. A short story has much less room, and therefore requires far more focus. I wrote short stories for years before I tried my first novel, because I thought that was what you were supposed to do, and none of them sold. I sold my first novel, and every novel that I have completed since then (knock wood). I’m a natural novelist. Some writers are natural short story writers; they have a harder time writing novels (one of my early writer friends sold her first nineteen short stories, boom, boom, boom, but she had to write three entire novels before she figured out how to work with a long story).
Linam: Book of Enchantments, your short story collection, features a cameo appearance of Cimorene from Dealing With Dragons in her own short story. Do you often write standalone short stories with characters from your novels?
Wrede: Let’s put it this way: Book of Enchantments contains ten short stories, and that represents my entire short story output for the previous ten years, and two-thirds of my short story output if you take it back twenty years (since it only includes one of my four Liavek stories). I’m not a short story writer; I’m a novelist. I write very few short stories, period. Since Book of Enchantments came out in 1996, I have written three, one of which has never sold (and I’m not surprised; there’s something wrong with it that I can’t put my finger on).
Linam: Similarly, Dealing With Dragons began as the short story "The Improper Princess." Do you often expand short stories into full-length novels?
Wrede: Story ideas come in two varieties: those that can work either as a short story or as a novel, and those that can only work as one thing or the other. Most of my story ideas either have to be novels, or else they could work either as a short story or as a novel. Since I am a natural novelist, I automatically default to writing anything that could go either way as a novel. It’s far more efficient that way. The very few ideas that are left can only become short stories; they’re too focused on a single vital incident or moment to expand into a novel.
“The Improper Princess” worked as an expansion because I had already written Talking to Dragons, so I knew where the break point was that would let me write a short story about Cimorene and I also knew what happened to her next... It was a special circumstance that has not recurred, and I don’t expect it to.
Linam: What was the most challenging scene or novel to write? Why?
Wrede: I hate writing transition scenes and I hate writing Council scenes. They aren’t necessarily difficult or challenging in terms of what happens; they’re just a necessary annoyance. Probably the most challenging book I ever wrote was Snow White and Rose Red because I was blending the fairy tale with real history, so I had two sets of constraints to work around, and also because getting the Elizabethan dialog to work for a modern audience was really hard.
Wrede also wrote three novelizations of the first three episodes of Star Wars for Scholastic. Writing a movie into novel format is somewhat different from writing one’s own novel. There are strict deadlines that have to be met. In the case of Star Wars, Wrede was often writing at the same time scenes were being filmed, which meant that she had to stay in close contact to make sure her manuscript was as accurate as possible to the movies.
Linam: What was it like writing for a franchise?
Wrede: Writing for the Star Wars franchise was a really good experience. My contacts gave me as much information as they could, including concept art and photos, and did their best to answer every question I had (though sometimes the answer was “George hasn’t made that up yet.”). The timing of the movie release, combined with the necessary production schedule for a book, meant that things got a little frantic around Thanksgiving – the movie people were still shooting some scenes that needed to be changed before the film went into post-production, while my manuscript (which needed to include the changes) was supposed to already be getting typeset.
Linam: Any tips on how to write a condensed version of something?
Wrede: I’ve never done a condensed version of anything. The scripts they gave me were about 120 pages long; that translates to 25,000 to 30,000 words. The books I wrote were 35,000 to 45,000 words. So they weren’t any shorter than the script. The tricky bit was in deciding what things I really needed to describe and what things I could leave out ... especially since I couldn’t look at the movie (since it wasn’t finished), so what I had was mainly sketches of what they thought places would look like, and still photos of costumes. Luckily, some of the locations (like Tatooine and Coruscant) appeared in the original trilogy, so I knew what they were like in general, if not the specific locations the characters went to.
Linam: Thank you for your insight! It was an honor to talk with you about your writing process.