PC: Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
SH: Getting to the place where I can concentrate on what I’m doing absolutely and without interruptions. It’s easier than it was when the children were toddlers, but at least then I could fob them off with some toys or a computer game. These days they come and sit at my research desk, next to my desk, and babble at me. And I have to pay attention because otherwise they’ll slip in those words I might not notice “your car” “this girl” “For a night” “You don’t mind, right?”
Once I am immersed in the world, it’s no trouble. As for aspects of my writing that I have to work very hard on? Making sure everything is on the page. If I don’t pay attention, half of it stays in my head. I tend to assume people “of course know” historical facts or how to do things that… well… they don’t.
PC: Where do you hope to take your writing in the future?
SH: Hope… The creek not rising and publishing willing, I will be writing sequels to the Shifters novels as well as to the space opera. There is this historical novel I’m up to my neck in just now about which I’ll say nothing except that maps of Paris in the sixteenth century are very expensive.
Someday I’d like to write a sequel trilogy to the Magical British Empire, centering around the Red Baron (who is a dragon, natch) and their version of World War I. There’s this fascinating idea for a foreign-legion derivative which I haven’t even told my agent about yet (sorry, Lucienne!); a murder mystery set around the time of the American revolution; I’d love to write a sort of alternate magical regency thing; someday I’d like to write a YA set in the village of my grandma’s stories (as well as I can remember them.); I bet a writer friend that it would be possible to write successful fantasy in a Mediterranean setting; there’s this true-murder-case in Colorado in the nineteenth century that would allow me to explore the cold war and the Sand Creek Massacre as well and… uh… Yeah. Lots of things.
PC: How do you develop your plots and characters? Do you use any set formula or outline?
SH: I outline. Though I think I’m a bizarre mix of non-outlining and outlining. I do make a very detailed outline, but then I find it changes in the writing and I go back and re-outline again. Usually I can trust about fifty pages ahead, after that it’s all subject to change. As should be obvious I don’t use any set formula. Not sure how I could. I just try to make sure it works and has a satisfactory ending. Sometimes I develop blindspots, of course, which is why good editing helps.
I have friends who read my stuff before anyone else does, and then, of course, there is the whole apparatus of publishing. Sometimes shocking slip-ups get all the way to the book, but normally someone stops me. Like, in my first Shakespeare book I suffered an attack of number dyslexia and scrambled ALL his siblings’ ages. This required massive editor intervention. And thank heavens it was caught.
PC: What were your feelings when your first novel was accepted/when you first saw the cover of the finished product?
SH: Some days I still don’t believe I’ve sold any books. I worked for so long without selling anything. I THINK I was happy but also mildly apprehensive. It turned out that feeling was justified since Ill Met By Moonlight came out a month after 9/11, in what was arguably the worst quarter in American publishing. (NOT that this was the worst thing that happened during that event.) Unfortunately Ill Met had been targeted to be “mainstreamed” with a cover that didn’t say fantasy or even “fiction.” The expectation was that it would reach beyond genre. It ended up shelved everywhere and I received a furious letter from a Shakespeare professor who thought I was out of my mind to be writing about elves.
PC: Do you hear from your readers much? What kinds of things do they say?
SH: I get a few fan letters every week, and I have someone who reads them first, to make sure I don’t get any screeds – those would stop the writing cold for a day. Yes, I am a fragile plant (Sort of). But, most of them are very nice. Some are astonishingly useful, giving me details about the time and place I set a book in that I could not find while researching for it. For instance, I tried to figure out the hair color of the musketeers and re-read all of Dumas, but I must have missed it… After my first book came out, a very nice gentleman sent me a note pointing out that in Dumas' Twenty Years After , Porthostells Aramis he looks very young and his hair is “Still so black” – while in my novel, I’d made him a blond.
What’s a writer to do? Well… I lie for a living. I immediately sent a letter back pointing out that Porthos was clearly much deeper than Dumas thought and that this remark was in fact a way of making fun of Aramis for dying his hair to hide the white.
Some of letters demand I write the next one of whatever it is right NOW. THIS MINUTE. It’s very flattering, but it doesn’t take in account publishing schedule or the fact that – at least to date – I can only write a book at a time. My husband is trying to convince me I should learn to type with my feet… so that might change in the future.
PC: Would you share advice for aspiring and upcoming writers?
SH: Write. You are not going to improve while the stories are in your head. Write. Read. Learn. Model yourself on Renaissance painters, who spent a lot of time practicing before they ever tried to show anyone their work and who often painted over what they’d painted before. Study the masters. Dissect what you read. Discover how people do things. Find friends to help you, or discover a good critique group. And don’t be afraid of rejections.
Every rejection you get is one less you’ll have to get before you get to paint the third cherub from the left in Leonardo Da Vinci’s triptych – metaphorically speaking. Actually, generally, don’t be afraid. I have over my desk, a poster with a phrase I read somewhere: “If you must walk on thin ice, you might as well learn to dance.” Never let fear stop you. Yeah, some of your stories will be horrible. So were a lot of Dumas’ and not a few of Shakespeare’s. Even Jane Austen had her Mansfield Park. (No, don’t want to hear it!) And they didn’t do altogether too badly.
PC: Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?
SH: Groan. I hate that question. It’s like asking a kid in a candy store what his favorite candy is. I grew up in Heinlein’s books. It could be said the man brought me up. (Right along with my grandmother. Wonder what they’d have thought of each other, if they ever met? They were very much of an age.) However, I suppose eventually kids grow up and leave the nest…
My favorite author currently working is Terry Pratchett and I am forever struck by how he combines the everyday and the sublime – how you can be laughing one moment and gasping at an insight the next. It’s like… his characters’ love affairs. No one can doubt that it is love, sublime, near-mythical love – but it’s done in a realistic down to Earth style and none of these people are … well… the stuff dreams are made on. I think when I grow up I want to be Terry Pratchett. Only, not with a beard, or male, because my husband would hate that.
PC: If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in any of your novels?
SH: The first three. I’d learn to plot before writing them instead of gradually through the three of them. This is probably unkind. I THOUGHT I knew how to plot at the time. But I can’t read them now without flinching. But then, that is normal for a writer, right? I understand that the fact I can’t look at anything I wrote three years ago without wanting to get out paper and pen and EDIT means I’m growing – or becoming more curmudgeonly, which is probably true, also – and I hope it never stops happening.
To escape into one of Sarah Hoyt's mystical and bewitching worlds, visit her website at: www.sarahahoyt.com/ and pick up a copy of one of her books today!
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