I Want Books to Hold Wonders: A Guest Post by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher (What Moves the Dead) takes readers into a dazzling, moss-covered fantasy world where princesses get trapped in towers and fairies kidnap babies from their beds. Thornhedge is the very example of a fractured fairytale: glittering, gruesome and endlessly enchanting. Read on for Kingfisher’s exclusive essay on writing Thornhedge.

A number of years ago, in my other life as a children‘s author, I found myself writing a version of Sleeping Beauty where the Princess is a fierce warrior maiden. (Also a hamster, but that’s neither here nor there.) Even as I was writing HARRIET THE INVINCIBLE, though, part of my brain kept whispering that I could take the story in completely the opposite direction. What if the wall of thorns wasn’t to keep things out but to keep something in?

We’ve seen stories like Maleficent that rehabilitate the wicked godmother, but I’d never seen one where the Princess was actually the villain. But I was busy, so I did what authors often do and wrote a couple thousand words to get the idea going, then shoved it in a folder on my desktop and forgot about it.

Years later, I happened across it and thought “Oh, hey, maybe I was on to something!” So I wrote a few more words and a few more and then Toadling was just there, fully formed and deeply anxious and very tired. I related to that on any number of levels. I kept writing.

Some novels are hard to write. You feel like you’re chipping the sentences out of stone. But THORNHEDGE was easy. It just flowed out onto the keyboard. (I suspect Toadling didn’t want to be a bother.) I wish more manuscripts were that polite!

People sometimes ask me “why write fantasy?” If I’m feeling flippant, I say that westerns just don’t sell since Louis L’Amour died. But if they’re serious, I try to explain, probably badly, that there are stories that need to be told, and some of them go down much easier if they’re full of magic. That’s true for the writer as well as the reader. I want to write about human relationships, sure, but I also want to write about monsters and changelings and the benefits of being able to turn yourself into a toad. I want books to hold wonders.

At the end of the day, that’s really what fantasy is all about.