Q: You've had a large amount of success with your books,
developing a large fan base and even some sites on the internet that
are dedicated to you. How does this affect your perception of your
writing? Is it a mixed blessing?
MCKINLEY: I do answer almost all the letters my agent and
publishers forward to me (except the actively abusive ones which
fortunately are very rare), but I avoid being dismayed by the
conversations among readers at my web site by never visiting it. I
don't know for a fact that it (I hope it's only an it, and not a they)
still exists.
I'm not going to be able to describe this very well, it may have to be
something you've experienced, and you probably also have to have a
certain kind of personality, but I find the whole business of fan
conversation about the subject of their interest very unsettling. My
own view of my books and characters is inevitably different from any
reader's because of the way I have lived with them in the process of
writing them. I do occasionally receive letters or questions from a
live audience about something in one of my books that I don't remember
(which is always very embarrassing) but no matter how many times a
reader may have read something, and how much better a memory or an
analytical intellect they may have, their perspective is different. I
know that some authors enjoy detailed conversations with their fans
about their work; I don't. I feel as if we're speaking two different
languages with only a few dozen words in common, and the words in
common have subtly crucial differences in meaning.
(Unfortunately my experience of being the subject of fan attention
means that I can't have fan conversations of my own, and being a
devotee of Deep Space Nine
this is a considerable deprivation. I've tried telling myself that it
must be a profoundly dissimilar creative process, writing scripts or
directing and producing them or acting roles, but I don't believe this
enough to do my earnest worshipful fan-self any good. Maybe it's just I
remember I tend to make a horse's ass of myself when I meet someone I
admire, and feel I'm safer staying away from all temptation.)
Having said all this though I will add that book mail, when a
reader is addressing me directly, is often a great pleasure. (School
assignment letters 'I am writing to you because I have to write a
school report your books are okay I guess but I'd rather be playing
Quake will you please answer the following eighty-six questions by next
Tuesday' and letters that want to tell you that you did everything
wrong excepted.) I learn useful things both good and bad about how my
books are read from readers who write to me about them, and yes, I want
my books read, and so I want to write them as readably as I can.
("Readably" is not a euphemism for "easily." I hope that to get the
best out of my books a reader has to work at it a little, has to engage
with the story, involve their brain and heart.) I suppose the ultimate,
unreachable goal would be to have or read or overhear those fan
conversations where both I and my readers were speaking the same
language actually this does happen occasionally, and when it does it
makes my year. But I have a way to go as a writer to communicate that
effectively with more than the very occasional reader; and
unfortunately some readers never get over the fact that they want you
to have written some other book, and there's nothing I or any writer
can do about that. So while the short answer to your question is that
yes, my "fan base" and "success" are a mixed blessing, they are a
blessing, and I am very grateful to have them.
Q: You've said before that many of your books spring from dreams
or half-visions you have-could you tell us more about this? What was
the vision behind Rose Daughter?
MCKINLEY: I wrote an essay, a sort of longer version of the
afterword in the book, which my hardback house brought out as a pre-pub
flyer, and I talk a little more about that there. After the
conversation with my friend in New York City about writing a
short-story version of Beauty and the Beast for him and his
illustrator, and after having said a very firm "No!" because of course
I had said all I had to say about that tale in my novel BEAUTY
almost twenty years ago: "On the plane coming home I had the sort of
half-vision that very often heralds the beginning of a new story. I
thought: Her earliest memory was of waking from the dream. It was also
her only clear memory of her mother. I thought: This is something to do
with Beauty and the Beast. How very extraordinary." And,
sitting, or rather spinning, in one of those madly uncomfortable plane
seats, all of whose bends and bulges seem to be carefully designed to
hit you in the wrong places, while the sun comes dreadfully up and you
know it's still the middle of the night, I found myself in that dream
and in that corridor Beauty dreams of, with the monster at the end of
it, waiting for her.
A few weeks later I thought, oh well, why not, I'll give that
short story a try. Then I wrote a novel by accident. I have to say that
several of my novels (and I haven't written that many) have been that
sort of accident, something I thought was short and wasn't. BEAUTY was supposed to be a short story too.
Q: Why do you think you have such a strong response to the story of Beauty and the Beast? What do you think about its various pop culture interpretations, especially the Disney movie that was based on it?
MCKINLEY: I don't know why my response to Beauty and the Beast is as strong as it is. I can tell you that when I was growing up in the fifties, B&B
was the only fairy tale I ever read that has the heroine doing
something rather than drooping like a tulip in a vase and waiting to be
rescued by the hero. I was a girl and I wanted adventures; I didn't
want to hang around on some hero's arm and agenda. This model for
autonomy was very important. But as I grow older, and especially after
having discovered a whole second novel-length Beauty and the Beast
waiting for me to write it, I realise that being responsible for
yourself is not the only critical element for me. It's also something
about the particular quality of love and faith and loyalty between Beauty and the Beast there
are no Black Knights by the ford, there are no glass mountains, there
are no topless towers in this story, there is only patiently getting to
know each other. And the dangerous climax in ROSE is brought on by love and faith, not tricky cleverness or superiority in arms. Beauty and the Beast
is also, of course, about refusing to let the surface of things dictate
your life or your choices. And this, I think, is why Beauty's family in
both my books is kind and careful, rather than selfish and bullying as
in the usual versions. Beauty is in no way driven to make her choices
as she does: this is also very important. I also want to believe that
gentleness and thoughtfulness about other people is the standard, and
that Beauty isn't so extraordinary by possessing such virtues! Well,
all right, it's a fairy tale!
I haven't and won't see the musical of Beauty and the Beast.
I did, finally, see the movie, and of it I say, tersely, that I...
didn't hate it as much as I expected to. There isn't actually a lot
there to hate; it's all too fluffy. (Although the teacup and his mum
got on my nerves pretty hard.) But if Disney shared my vision of what
is important about this or any other fairy tale, they wouldn't be
Disney. Of course if I shared their vision I would probably have more
money in the bank. But I bet I have more interesting dreams.
Q: Did you reread your book Beauty while preparing Rose Daughter?
Did you feel an impetus to avoid some of the details and
interpretations you had developed in the earlier work while you were
writing Rose Daughter?
MCKINLEY: I reread most of Beauty after I'd already written the first draft of Rose
(and found out, among other things, that it was a novel), just to make
sure, knowing how bad my memory can be about everything including my
own books, that I hadn't repeated anything I didn't want to repeat. And
I hadn't. I think that the only common elements (like the decency and
good-heartedness of Beauty's family) between the two books are
deliberate.
Q: Many of your books have won awards and recommendations as
books for children and young readers. Do you aim your books at that
audience? Why do you think they are sometimes perceived as being for
younger readers?
MCKINLEY: No, I don't "aim" my books at any particular
readership. The story is the story and it will tell you how to write
it, if you listen. I realise that there are so many books published
that bookstore buyers and librarians and casual browsers and so on must
have some guidelines, and that age groupings are a useful guideline,
but I feel very discouraged sometimes when it seems to me that rather
than being a guideline a suggested age group is used as some kind of
standard that you and your book can be failed by. There were several
reviews of Rose that said it was too long and/or complicated
for younger readers as if this meant I'd done it wrong. It seems to me
that all it means is that it shouldn't be pushed on younger readers.
There was one rather important review which roundly hated the book and
began by saying that it has nothing to say to elementary school
readers. It wasn't written for elementary school readers, although I
know from my book mail that some elementary school readers read it
(some of them even liked it). This is kind of a sore subject, I have to
admit. I still occasionally receive outraged letters from teachers and
classes, generally fifth grade for some reason, telling me that Hero,
which is the book that won the Newbery Medal which is a children's-lit
award, is 'too difficult'. It's the outrage that burns me. The book is
what it is; some fifth graders will read it easily and some won't. I
also received some fairly spectacular hate mail for Deerskin,
which is, and was meant to be, a more difficult and bleaker book,
telling me I had "betrayed my audience" and was a vile human being to
tackle such a subject at all and so on. Deerskin was even
published as an adult book for adults partly, I hoped, as a clue that
it wasn't for younger readers and perhaps the clue worked with some
people. It certainly didn't with others.
I write my books for the people who want to read them. I would
have been reading my books in fifth grade, if someone had been writing
them then, but then I was a 'good reader'. I am very, very pleased and
grateful that enough people, of whatever ages, do want to read my
stories that I earn enough money in sales to stay at home and write
more stories... but I also wish there were a way to get out of the
genre racket. Fantasy and science fiction are a racket just like
suitable age recommendations are: the implicit message is that fairy
tales and space adventures are for children or childish grown-ups.
(There's a tangential rant here, most of which I will spare you, to do
with the idea that patronising children and children's books is okay.
Sounds to me like a good way to teach children that reading is
something you grow out of.) It does seem to me that SF has to some
degree broken out of its bounds; I see science fiction reviewed
sometimes as if it were, gasp, novels and short stories like other
novels and short stories, literature even. I see this less with
fantasy. (So-called high fantasy anyway. Certain kinds of magic realism
have been deemed worthy. I am underwhelmed by a lot of the magic
realists, but Alice Hoffman who for the purposes of this argument
comes under this heading is one of my favourite writers.) The big
fantasy books sell very well (I say a little wistfully; I've never been
among them) but they aren't taken seriously. They're, you know,
fantasy. They aren't real. Science fiction is at least based on
science. Fantasy is mere escapism, it has nothing to say about the
human condition, about our lives here and now. Ha. Some of it is
escapism, sure; some of literature is escapism. Good fantasy talks
about our deepest inner selves, about the dreams and longings and hopes
and fears and strivings that make us human. The great thing about
fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears
and strivings out of your subconscious and call them "magic" or
"dragons" or "fairies" and get to know them better. But then I write
the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced. Ask anybody on the other side of
this chasm that I've tried to talk to about it.
As for why my books have been perceived as for younger readers
the obvious answer is that they tend to feature young protagonists
(chiefly women) making their first adult decisions about how they want
to live their lives; but then an awful lot of, ahem, literature,
concerns young protagonists setting out into adulthood, so the answer
really is, I don't know; and it's still a racket. Good books are good
books, whether they're told from a child's or teenager's point of view,
or are accessible and comprehensible to children as well as to adults.
There's something wrong with a mindset that assumes that once you're
old enough to vote you're too old to read Eleanor Farjeon or Diana
Wynne Jones.
Q: What are you working on now? Are you planning on returning to
Damar, or writing another novel that focuses on adult themes such as
those explored in Deerskin?
MCKINLEY: I'm working on a retelling of Sleeping Beauty
at the moment. (I'm under the impression I'm almost done, but I won't
know for sure till I send it to my editor.) My agent, Merrilee Heifetz,
who knows me very well, suggested it. She said (among other things)
that here was a fairy tale absolutely crying out for the McKinley touch
('touch' used advisedly: I think 'disembowelling' is closer to the
mark). You have a princess who doesn't just droop and weep and wring
her hands, she's so incapable of actively doing anything for herself
she actually falls asleep. Ultimate feminine passivity. Beauty with no
potentially troublesome personality (or nascent will of her own).
Hmmmm. Not to mention the bizarrely domestic detail of pricking her
finger on a spindle. I've kept the princess and the wicked fairy and
the spindle-pricking curse and the falling asleep and the rose-hedge
and the prince, but not quite in the traditional combinations.