By Sigrid Lensink-Damen, cofounder of the Fantastische Unie
This interview is a collaboration between the Fantastische Unie and Fantasize. You can read the English version here; the Dutch version is elsewhere on this website as well as on the website of the Fantastische Unie.
In late September, New York Times Best Selling Author Maggie Stiefvater visited the Netherlands for YALFU, the Young Adult Literary Festival Utrecht; after which she would be available for interviews and meet-and-greets. Her new publisher in the Netherlands, Meulenhoff Boekerij, asked us if this would be a good opportunity to meet one of the “fantastic” authors we at the Fantastische Unie so diligently promote. And naturally, it is!
So, on a drizzly Monday afternoon I headed to the middle of the country to interview the author of The Wolves of Mercy Falls (“Ah, Shiver!”), Scorpio Races (“killer horses”) and, the recently published limited edition of Raven Boys, translated into Dutch. Although she still suffered from a jetlag, there was nothing drizzly about Maggie and we just talked for an hour about her creative life, books and, most of all, magic.
Can you please tell me something about you, for our readers, to introduce yourself?
I live in the middle of nowhere, Virginia, and I love music. I play a lot of musical instruments, but I am most famous for playing the bagpipes, which I played competitively when I was young, and I still play them now. I was a fulltime portrait artist for as some time, and I have been writing ever since I was tiny. I always wanted to be a storyteller for other people. So, I always knew that I wanted to write, to make other people feel something. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t.
So, you are a creative milliped, so to speak. Where is this urge coming from? Is it just music or is it all things combined?
It is definitely all things combined. When I was young, I used to think that when I was an adult, I had to give up one of the things, writing or music or art, because I didn’t see anybody doing all of these.
I think I would be really… well, I knów I would be really pleased as a child now, to know that when I grew up, I could do all of them. Author of books, the music I write on them. By the way, the special edition of the Dutch book have my artwork inside.
Yes, so I get to do all of them all the time. It just requires a lot of discipline, because they all require practice, which means you must be quite regimented in them. I don’t think a lot of people think of art of being regimented, it feels like two different sides of the brain. But for me it is sometimes actually the same, when I sit like an hour and a half to practice the same three notes together and together and together, until they attach perfect. The same way I just look at this manuscript and make it perfect. So, I have a high tolerance for that. It comes from… I don’t know, when I was a kid, I didn’t understand other people very well. I was not shy, but I was alien. So, I think, when I am creating stories, it was a way to understand other people. Like rehearsing a conversation in your head. I wouldn’t have thought about it that way when I was a kid, but looking back, I am pretty sure that is what I was doing. Trying on different human suits.
A kind of role playing?
Yes.
And does your writing influence your music and the other way around?
There is this poem about six old men, do you know it? It is quite old, so it is probably translated into Dutch. It is about six blind men, and they are all touching a different part of an elephant and describing it.
Yes, I remember, but in my version, they were monks for some reason. Blind monks.
It is a tale, not a poem. One has the tail and one a leg and he says: “It’s a tree”. Well, that is how I feel with the different people, describing an elephant getting the different parts. Same for the songs.
So, it is a puzzle, and you lay this whole picture of something you want to tell?
Yes, so to speak.
A lot of writers doodle to express their inner views and how they see the characters before they start writing. I have visited your website and was surprised by the high quality of your drawings. Do your drawings also come from this need to visualize characters or surroundings of your story?
First of all, that is a great compliment, thank you. Actually, to my fellow writers, I am an artist, and you get what you put into it. I chose to focus on one, so I am definitely a writer, then a musician and then an artist.
I feel like when I draw a person with words, I come closer, then when I draw it with my pencil. Because I am describing the inside of a person that I am describing with my words. For me it is the real stuff. It always feel it is a little bit different when I am drawing with a pencil, because I am merely glancing at the characters.
I feel I will never be a wonderful portrait artist, because I don’t care enough about the sheet that is over the ghost. I care more about the ghost. And with writing you can write just about the ghost and then you have to describe the sheet only very briefly. “He has brown eyes”.
I have to admit that I never read anything of you before, so I had some catching up to do.
It is a lot.
I started with the Wolves of Mercy Falls triology…
Ah, Shiver!
… and went on with Scorpio Races.
It had a very dire title in Dutch.
Yes, it is called “Dodenrit”. Death ride. But I think it fits, because it is a bit grim with these killer horses in it.
But there is a lot of baking in it! They eat a lot of baked goods, don’t they?
Well, now you mention it… That didn’t stick with me. What I thought after reading Scorpio Races was: I really hate the coast and all that wind!
(Maggie starts to laugh.)
It was like I felt the rain and I felt the wind and it reminded me of my own hometown, in the North of the Netherlands, just above Amsterdam. There is a lot of flatness, meadows, and just wind, wind…
And killer horses.
No killer horses. Yet. But this eternal wind stuck with me. And what I found interesting was how you adopted the mythology. I know I heard somewhere about these killer horses, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Every single seafaring country has a version of it, and I know why that is, because I remember when the first time, I first wanted to write this book. When I was a child and I was looking into the water in Virginia, on the Virginia Beach, and the waves are coming in, they always look like horses galloping in, so everyone standing on a beach seems to see horses galloping out of the ocean, and the horses… I don’t know if you ride horses.
No, I am a bit afraid of horses.
They are quite terrifying, because they are enormous and easily spooked and they don’t know their power and sometimes they do, which is also worse, so it feels natural to be afraid. I know horses, so for me it is such an easy step to see them in the water.
It feels like it is just continuous to be so relevant, so there are like a billion versions of this mythology. My version is the Celtic version. But I had to adopt a lot for this book, because I believe that magic is a metaphor, better, it is myth, which means I am trying to tell this story. I don’t need all the aesthetics which came with what they want to fight against, namely the danger of the ocean against curiosity. A lot of fairy tales tell young people, especially young women, to not go talk to strange men, to obey.
Yes, indeed.
That is no longer what I need.
We are in a different age now, so we need different warnings.
Yes. So, I wanted to tell a story about what it meant for somebody to be named as a monster and now is a monster. This sense of we having to curate the earth, because we are the worst thing. And yet, it doesn’t make the ocean any less dangerous or horses any less dangerous. So, learning to love the wildness, is really at the heart of Scorpio Races.
The myth had to be changed, because I had to cut out all the hilarious things like horses getting a sticky back and carrying people into the ocean that way. Instead, I wanted to write about what it means to be afraid of horses, or losing ourselves, or being afraid of losing our lives.
In a way to grab the reigns, because you want to have some control, but in fact you cannot control killer horses, nor the ocean.
Yes, exactly. So, for me that was what really was orienting that myth. I just had that image in my head of a red horse racing at the base of a cliff. All I knew that was the heart of it. So every time I was on tour for the years leading up to it, whenever there were any cliffs anywhere close, I would take a tour going to the cliffs. To see them. Are these the cliffs? Are these?
And which cliffs were they eventually?
The cliffs in the North of England, near Whitby. They are very, very close to it. There is what it feels like, you know, you live by the water, wind is blowing. You don’t understand it, until you see it and say: “I can’t think about anything else but the wind.”
I wanted that feeling of an island. The thing I love about the book is that I get lots of emails from readers who ride horses and say: “This is the most truthful horsebook I ever read.” Because, how else would you explain how you love them, given that magic and awe, even not-horse people can appreciate that.
Sometimes you have a place and then it clicks. Was finding the golden woods in Shiver the same process as for Scorpio Races?
Pretty much. One of the places I lived in… I lived in many places when I was young, because my father was a doctor in the navy. One of these places was Wisconsin. You know America? (makes gestures) So this is Canada, and this is the North of the US with woods, wolves and snow. Virginia is down here, all mountains and oceans and very tempered. My cousins live in Wisconsin, so I have ties. I think that their defining character trade is that they are proud of surviving Minnesota winters.
These must be cold.
Your snot is freezing when you are going outside.
(we laugh)
It is difficult to explain. Have you gone outside and your eye fluid is freezing? I mean, it is só cold. And so, they have an actual population of wild wolves in the US. And I thought: well, I am going to tell a story with a lie about magic, I just slip it in with something that is true. If they already have wolves, why not wolves that used to be teenagers?
When I read a book when I was a kid, I always tried to find out more about the actual facts of the book, the location of the book… I became obsessed with where it was, who it was, the surroundings and I thought: well, I don’t want to place it just somewhere where there are just snowy woods. If you look up real Minnesota, you will find that there is an International Wolf Centre. You can travel there, it is a place where you can stand there in the golden woods and you can say: “Oh, I am actually in the book”. So, it is a real setting, of course the town is fictional, but with a real setting. That feels important to me.
You mentioned earlier that the myth in your books is a metaphor. And I also read this quote in other interviews as well. What exactly do you mean by that?
So, a myth for me is always about how to make a true thing truer. I am not interested in the aesthetics.
I don’t quite get that. Can you explain?
Right. Okay. So, I have a history major and a medieval history major, so sources are hard to come by, which means you read everything. You read the things you know that are true, but you also read the lies, you read the things you know are forgeries, because they tell you about the person who is making the lies. For instance, 14th century Scotland. There was a lot of debate over kingship back then, so they often forge documents, telling stories about the various candidates to tell you why they are truly supposed to be a king.
The stories are not true, but the motivations of the people telling them would be true, so you could read that. Or you would also read mythologies, because they are as big as the poems, they pull dragons – these are obviously not true – but they are using myth as a metaphor in them.
Can you give an example?
Yes. There is this big Welsh tackle and in them they describe a king who is larger than life. He was a giant. They describe him as he cannot fit into any house, they also said the people relied on him utterly. They were in battle with the Irish and the Irish escaped across the river and there is no way they could possibly chase them; however, this king had an idea. He lays down on the river, quite literal, and they ride their horses across his back, and they get the Irish.
What is great that if you actually know the historical moment they were referring to, it is true! He wás a larger-than-life man, so they made him larger than life. They could not have defeated the Irish without him and we know it is true, because he literary made himself a bridge and had this idea of carrying them one by one across the river.
So, you can take all the details and sieve the history out and that makes it truer than true. Because now you understand what he was to them. He was enormous.
But is it not the other way around? This king has meant a lot to people and they máke him bigger than life? In hindsight?
Yes, in their hearts he was a big, big man.
And that is making the metaphor, you say.
Yes. So, in Shiver for instance. This needs some context, bear with me. I was homeschooled from sixth grade on. I was a navy child, as I mentioned before, my dad was a doctor in the navy, and we moved 18 times before I turned 18. So, instead of pulling in and out of schools, you could get credited school texts. They come in a box, and you have to have some adult to sign off on your things and then, when you move, the box moves with you.
So, from age 12 on, I saw my siblings and got my music lessons, but I did not go into a school, so once I was published though, I thought: I can’t write for teens without knowing what a school is like. I told my editor that I would do school business for them, I would talk to the students, but that I needed a student ambassador, and I wanted to follow some of them around. First, I went to middle school, age 11 to 14, 15. Comparable with your high school, right?
Yes, the lower classes.
These kids are strange, smelly, they are great, they are loud, they can do whatever they want. And then I went to high school, so age 15 to 18. The school I went to was enormous with 3000 or more 15-year-olds in one group, the centre aisle was like a half a mile long and when the bell rang, it was like the death scenes from The Lion King, with the wildebeests.
You get the picture.
And there were a few I spoke to. They all looked the same. They all had perfectly straightened hair, all wore Abercrombie and Fitch and I said: “Where did the middle schoolers go? Did you kill them?”
But you already know what happened to them, because they became all protective coloration to prevent to get being bullied, right, so they all had to look the same. And I remember, I mean, I didn’t go to school, so I could be as strange as I wanted. And in college it is again cool to be strange. And I thought: how horrible that you hit hard on your identity for two years and then you have to find yourself again in college! If you even know that you have lost yourself in the first place.
I was so gobsmacked by this; I thought I am going to write a book about losing your identity. And so, that was Shiver. That is the reason that teens turn into wolves with the cold, because I wanted to have something that you lose. They cannot retain any of their humanity, so there is no monster, they are just going to be wolves.
And if I want you to feel bad about it, I can’t have them just lose their identity for a night, because that is just a metaphor for black out drinking. That is not interesting. But if I say, I turn them into wolves when the temperature drops and they lose more and more each year, so eventually they become wolves for ever, now I have a metaphor about identity and about losing yourself.
That is clever.
Yes. And then I can also talk about people who want to lose themselves. And talk about metaphors with trauma. And then, when I just compare it with stories, it becomes very close to a parable, but I am not going to teach people something. I just want my stories to have truth in them, because then it becomes myth, becomes universal.
So that means I can be signing in Spain, and someone comes through the line and say: “Shiver made me cry, because it made me think about losing my grandfather to Alzheimer’s.” Or someone else can say: “It made me think about losing my brother to addiction.”
So, like the surroundings, this makes it more true, truer than true?
Yes, even when it is fantasy, I wanted to feel like it is grounded in a thing.
Let’s talk about magic. Magic is very natural in your books, especially in Raven Boys. It is like a kind of alternative reality in which magic is simply part of it. Your characters seem to embrace that magic and actively seek it out. Is that how you see it as well?
I love science, but I also consider myself to be a very spiritual person. And I also have been lucky, strange enough, to experience many things that cannot be explained, by science. And to me anything that falls outside that which is obviously real, gets to be magic. So, I absolutely believe in that. I really wanted to put that into my books. When I was a kid, the series that really stuck with me was a series called The Darkest Thing, and it was set in 1970-ies UK. It felt very much like a walk around the corner. The magic was as real as the mundane and vice versa, because the magic was small, so it would fit between the cracks. And it didn’t fix anything, but it was still this sense of wonder that the world was bigger than you could imagine. I really believe in that, so it feels very important for that to be the common thread throughout the books.
And if you are a science person, you want to make the world smaller, everything should be measurable and countable. We had such series as well in the Netherlands. It was magical, indeed. I always thought: why should I stop loving these non-tangible moments? Is this what you want to see in your books?
Yes. One of the things I have been so interested in and was not expecting, was that people flying and driving to the places where my books take place. So, they go on road trips together. The books also believe in functional friendships, what is, I think, a different kind of magic.
And I think that was is also amazing is to watch these fans of the books and that they become friends because of the books. That feels like terraforming the world in a tiny little place to go into, looking for the world to become more curious and bigger.
Is the Celtic mythology the only mythology you are interested in? Or are you just focussing on the Celtic one?
I am interested in all, but Shiver felt like an interesting departure, I remember when I first did it and I thought: o, this is just fantasy, it doesn’t belong to anyone. Ever since I was small, my entire family played Celtic music and it is in that sort of circle, so I felt like that I was allowing to mine Celtic mythology. I feel that way now where it is just myth, just fantasy that everyone knows, I am not going to feel bad about taking werewolves. But I don’t think I would go leaping into a Dutch tradition without actually having lived here. Because it means something here and to strip the meaning from that and put my own meaning in… You have to be very careful, I think, about appropriation. Even though it is a tricky situation, because I know that any Dutch teen would say: “Yes, please, write something” and I have something like: “How about you teach me, and you write about it!”
We actually don’t have much of these mythologies, but they are there, and you have to go look for it. We had the Calvinists and they destroyed all the magic, basically…
Like the Victorians, humourless… Virginia is like this, when the Puritans came. Everything became folklore instead. We had Paul Bunyan and his axe, and it is just folk tale. There is no real magic in them, never had any of it.
That is true. They are also metaphors of course.
They are all teaching how to behave.
But still, you can use them as an entrance for your magic.
There is a Dutch thing that is mentioned in Raven Boys. There are ley lines in the Raven cycle, and you guys have your ‘doden wegen’?
Dodenweg?
When I was looking up ley lines and death rows in mythology and watching for the death on Halloween and All Saints Eve, one of the sources I found was a Dutch one about the death ways.
I think this is what some Dutch authors should investigate for their stories.
I never heard of them before.
Well, step up, find them!
I will!
Back to your books. Shiver was your debut, right?
There were actually two books that came out before them, with an independent publisher, so they came out very quietly. I actually signed some copies of them in Dutch! Amazing, because in the States writing comes out in order, but when people buy things in translation, when they buy the rights, they often don’t really think about what was first published. So, it comes out as if it was brand new, so I can come here, and they can say: “I just read this one!” It is astonishing. To me it is just my first and I think about all the things I could do better with it.
I don’t know if they are still in print. They are called Heartbeat here, in English, for some reason, but it is translated. You have Heartbeat 1 and Heartbeat 2. It is very odd.
Oh, don’t get me started!
In a lot of countries, especially the Wolves of Mercy Falls were translated with English titles, because they said it was cooler. The first thing I thought was: find a cool title, this is ridiculous!
Exactly what I feel.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being an American, and I find very many things cool about it, but I don’t feel like we are the only cool thing in the world. So, especially teens, who are looking for identity. You should be able to find this coolness also in your own language.
I love that the Dutch version of Raven Boys is much cooler than the American version. All Americans are jealous of this new edition, with the sprayed edges and art and all of it. I love it, because they get to come too and they get an edition that is cooler than the American one, which is in Dutch. And that is the way to do it!
Your debut was not Shiver, but these Heartbeat books. Can you tell me a bit more about the writing process of Shiver?
I had written my debut, which was all about fairies terrorizing Irish musicians. I am a musician, so these books are full of mythology and songs and ballads and history and so on, however, I didn’t know how to contextualize that for readers. I just wrote the story that I thought – at the best of my abilities – was fine. It had Irish musicians, Irish fairies, and if you knew Irish lore and Celtic lore, it was very wonderful to find something exactly what you wanted. But, if you have never read lore or fantasy before, it was just weird.
When I moved on, I thought hold on a second. First of all, it came out with an indie publisher, and it was skipped by all bookstores. But I had this dream of becoming a bestselling writer by the time that I was 50, so I was not disappointed. I was strategic.
I thought what do I need to do for the next one to do better, what was in my control. My first books weren’t very accessible, because I definitely lacked control of all the elements in the writing process. You can forget that people have siblings, that they have backstories… you are holding on to twenty balloons and four of them blow away. My next thought was: can I write a book that first of all is a mythology, but has no difficult access point, no barrier to entry. I will teach you everything you need to know about it. Right there.
Then I have as few roles as possible, because people who don’t read magic, also needs to get an access point. I mean, you and I are fantasy readers, we don’t mind reading about all magical. So, write about a ghost or something. A ghost has a very easy set of rules, you don’t have to learn anything about them. That is the reason why vampires are so popular, because you know the rules going on there, even if you are not a fantasy reader.
So, I thought we’re going to pick an animal, a creature that people already know, like wolves. We are going to simplify the rules even more, because if you are not a fantasy reader, the whole biting thing is – I don’t know – flabbering. Then I am going to make the plot structure as simple as possible, so I can hold on to every single piece. I just recently started reading poetry, and I know I cannot make every line as beautiful as poetry, but I can try. I tried to hold the mood as much as possible.
Basically, I thought: how simple do I have to make it to be easy control of the many aspects as possible.
Were you not afraid that it would be become too simple?
I was very much afraid. I was just as simple as possible, and I had no idea what become of it. But I quickly realized that I can’t be simple. The fear went away by the time I was done. I was just looking at it, and it was still… well, I am going to try to do this to the best of my abilities of making sure that everything is a rule, like in gaining control of every aspect.
It is a good rule. You have to find the balance. How do you hold that balance?
I knew I wanted to control the mood, and I wanted to control the metaphor. I knew I wanted the story to have a simple structure, so that meant a love story. That is the simplest possible structure.
And the hardest to write.
Yes, because you cannot hide anywhere, you cannot hide in subplots. You have to hit every beat there is, or the reader doesn’t believe the couple being together. And there is nowhere to hide, there is no other noise in the background.
So, I already started writing the Raven Boys and put it down. I started when I was 19 and I just thought I wasn’t good enough to do it. The Shiver trilogy really taught me how to be able to write Scorpio Races and the two of them together taught me how to write Raven Boys.
It was a steep learning curve.
O, absolutely. Since I was 19 I am on that path and now I feel ready to write for adults. My readers are growing up, because they started reading when I was young. They were every step with me. It’s wonderful. But I feel the projects are quite different, writing for teens or writing for adults I mean. The only thing they have in common is the way I look at the world. The way I use magic.
The Shiver trilogy was very popular, it sold millions of copies. Was it really that much?
When Shiver came out, it was in the supermarket, it was everywhere. I was on vacation on the train, and I went to the bathroom, and I watched three people reading it.
It was thát popular?
It was insanely popular. It was phenomenal.
Do you have any idea as to why it was so popular?
Sure, I can tell why. First of all, Twilight had just come out.
But why is Twilight so popular? It is the same question, basically.
Twilight, because we grew up reading children’s books with magic in them, in every single story. But even the ones I love, like Narnia, tell you that when you hit puberty you put magic away. And we gave up!
But we are from the generation that said: “No!” So, we wanted books that had magic in them. And so, Twilight is a fairy tale but it is for older people. So it is for teens, it is for young women, it is really for all ages.
For young adults.
Yes, exactly. What not surprised me is that Harry Potter had break containment first, right? Some adults realized that they didn’t want to put away magic either. They wanted to have an excuse to go to the cinema every single year with the kids and get to feel like that.
There was something in the air that we needed.
Yes.
So, your books just thrived on this sentiment?
Well, I think Shiver had a beautiful cover, that helped. And there is this… People felt a bit ashamed of admitting that they were into Twilight, but didn’t apologize for reading Shiver. The number of reviews that said that Shiver was the thinking man’s Twilight, so it was seen as the literary version of Twilight. I don’t believe in judging people for which they read, so I didn’t love it, but people didn’t apologize for reading Shiver.
People were so hungry for character driven fiction, with humour and play, that had a bit of magic, and I just happened to be the first. And it was a wonderful package. It was also I think the universality of the myth. Who can’t relate to losing your identity and once you become a werewolf, a wild thing, it is difficult. It went from there.
My editor was very clever. He said: “Would you please write the second one before the first one comes out? You do not want to write it after you know what happened when the first one comes out.” But that said, he said: “I can’t guarantee that you will hit the bestsellers list.”
Was that an option? I didn’t even realise that was an option! So, he was very clever.
And there is no way I could have debuted with Scorpio Races. No one would have touched that book with a ten feet pole. Shiver bought me the ability to write the Scorpio Races, which trained me how to write lots of groups of people in one story, which I needed to write the Raven Boys. I had to write the Raven Boys to understand how to take a real historical moment and to put it into my adult novel with castle characters and myth and… always keeping the reader in mind.
Is this ‘keeping the reader in mind’ also an element of making a novel popular?
I think so. They have to have a good time.
With every project it feels like I have to start all over again. You know, it would be easier if I wasn’t always thinking about the reader. But it has to be someone’s favourite book, you cannot just go writing accessible books and then make an experimental one. The reader won’t be having a good time with it.
You mentioned that you are now writing for adults. When is your adult book coming out?
It is coming out June 2025 in the Netherlands. The publisher actually came for the adult book first and then they decided to make a limited edition of Raven Boys.
What are the differences between young adult and adult fiction in your opinion?
I think that I was aiming for the genre of adult fiction. I think the only difference in genre fiction, fantasy and YA fiction, if both are done well, is that a young adult novel is about coming of age and is contextualized. For instance, if I am writing about a trust fund, I explain in a sentence what it is. I am going to assume that my adult knows what I am referring to.
So, for me the genre feels exactly the same. I am now moving into – oh, this sounds terrible – a genre that doesn’t exist, with my adult book, I mean.
I love fantasy fiction. I absolutely adore it, but I also love literary fiction and the observations that comes from it. But literary fiction is allergic to story, because they say: “You are supposed to be telling a wonderful portrait or tell it as it is, so absolutely naturalistic.”
The thing is, I love story, I love fantasy, but I also love the feeling that comes with reading the really great literary works. And I wanted to see if I could take this and bring it back to my hive of story and fantasy and drag from it as much as possible the observational tools and specificity and put story and magic in.
For me it is ‘story first’, because at the end of the day I don’t care so much about if the book is amazingly written. What I want is people to say: “That was an amazing 4 hours spent.”
But I started to study the literary world, and how much to bring it back here and how much I have to shave of in order to make it into a story. So, the adult project was definitely… it was three years of study doing that. But the thing is, I do love challenging myself at every single one, to try to hold on to fifty more things.
Story first, you say. What are the difficulties and blessings of writing a first novel? Would you do anything different, if you had to do it all over again? Or is that just a stupid, difficult question?
Actually, I don’t believe in regrets. You’ve probably heard that some people are born without the ability to feel pain? I feel kind of the same way about all of my experiences in the past, in which anything that happened teaches me to do better, so…
There were things I did stupidly about the first novel and the process, but I don’t know if I would change it, because it is so difficult to peel away from the success I had later. The biggest one is that I went with a smaller publisher, because I wasn’t getting any traction with agents. And I know now, looking at it, my first novel wasn’t accessible to a wide audience.
But because of this, I did better on the next one and when it sold big, I mean, I wasn’t a seasoned pro, but I still had a very good idea of what to expect. I wasn’t completely stopped and paralyzed by this idea of expectations.
It was your journey.
Yes.
Thank you very much for this interview.
You are very welcome. It is a very unexpectedly pleasant surprise to talk about the Shiver series, which of course is out for a while. There is a film coming out. It is the first of my novels to meet the film and it was last month that I last saw the script. They are starting to film in just two weeks.
Did you have any influence on the script?
It went back and forth with the script. It was interesting because I think that adaptations trying to be as faithful to your book as possible. And I just said: “Don’t do that, because it is also myth making, right. That was me using the myth, describing is important to me. Don’t just do the aesthetics, you are the director and writer. Take this metaphor of wolves and identity to make a clearer version of it. Some people will love the movie better, some people will love the book, but don’t just go copying the book. That would be as lame as a music video with a bunch of wolves in the back. It has to mean something important.”
So, we will see. I don’t know if it will be good or bad, but I have looked at the script and it is very clear and I am hoping that they will put as much of themselves into it, because people respond to that sense of specificity.
But I rather have that they tried really hard and failed, than just playing it safe.
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