Marie Brennan on the gentle madness of writing

“It’s one thing when it’s a novel.  When you need to turn out 110,000 words (only by the time you’re done, it’s turned into 143,000 words) of a fantasy set in mid-seventeenth-century London, then you can convince yourself that it’s reasonable to be reading contemporary diaries of the Short Parliament and dense Marxist analyses of the causes of the English Civil War and encyclopedic volumes of English folklore and modern biological discussions of the bubonic plague and architectural histories of Westminster Palace and all the rest of the things piling up on your research bookshelf.  Because you need to *know* these things if you’re to write about them plausibly.  And you even have a contract for the book, so there’s money in it for you.

But sometimes it’s a short story.  And then you’re reading a 480-page ethnography on the Nahua Indians of the Huasteca Veracruzana and e-mailing six different professors at six different universities for information on Aztec burial practices and the likely placement of Tamoanchan and the proper orthography of foreign words, and it’s all for a measly 8,400-word story.  Or you’re e-mailing the FBI asking if you can talk to one of their psychologists and hoping they don’t look at you funny when you tell them you want to figure out how they would handle an agent who is also a shapeshifter.  Or you’re glaring at the desert section of the U.S. Army Survival Manual because it doesn’t tell you how somebody armed with rocks could kill lizards and oh by the way which kinds of scorpions are okay to eat?  Or you’re giving yourself late-night lessons in classical Hebrew grammar because you’re at the end of a long daisy-chain of silly etymological tricks and this is apparently the only way your subconscious will let you name that character.  And when it’s all done, you’ve got no promise anybody will buy the story, or pay you more than ten bucks when they do.

Those are the times when you have to accept that, yes, you’re crazy, and the only thing to do is grin and dive right back in.”

-Marie Brennan, author, “Midnight Never Come.”