maggie-stiefvater:maggie-stiefvater:the raven king countdown → day eightFavorite quotewhat am II can
maggie-stiefvater:maggie-stiefvater:the raven king countdown → day eightFavorite quotewhat am II can’t tell you what my favorite quote is, because it’s the last line of the series.The Raven King is my thirteenth published novel, and you’d think — I thought, anyway — that novel-writing would get easier with practice. But in reality, it feels like a magic trick. Every time.It’s not that I don’t know now if I can finish a novel. That knowledge, grounded in repeated success, at least conveys from project-to-project. The rub is this: I am absolutely certain that I can get to an end of a book. I’m just never sure if I’m going to get to the end. Why are you writing this story? I have to know the answer to this question before I begin drafting. It’s my mission statement. My endpoint. It’s how I know I’m done: I’ve written the book I intended to write. It means I often have to write several other books that are not the real thing on the way to it. And it’s getting harder, not easier, now that I know more about building stories. Before, I would get stuck when my subconscious stabbed the brakes. I’d be forced to circle back and ask myself why I couldn’t move forward — oh, because you’re telling the wrong story, Stiefvater.But now! Nice try, writer’s block. I can strong-arm a set of characters through a properly structured set of tasks to create a beginning, middle, and end. Just not the one I intended to. It’s a tough problem, because only I can diagnose it. I can send a draft to my critique partners and editors and they can sign off on it, but only I can decide if the novel I sent them was the one I set out to create. It becomes even more complex when looking at a project like the Raven Cycle — four novels written over nearly a decade, a series begun when I was a teenager. Back then, the story asked a question that I didn’t have an answer for. That was the why. what am I tell me what I am Which brings me to the last line of the Raven Cycle. From my fraught inbox, I know readers are looking forward to very different things in the conclusion of the series. They have dozens of different priorities for what constitutes a happy or satisfying or logical conclusion to the series, depending on what they believe the story is about, depending on what their priorities are for a good story. But for me, the why are you writing this story has always had a pretty simple answer, focused around that question that teenage me had no answer for. When I wrote the last line in the Raven Cycle, I knew I’d written the story I had intended to. I’d pulled off the magic trick again — whether it’s a trick that anyone else finds diverting is another thing. I wish I could hand a copy to teen-me. “Read this, you asshole,” I’d tell her, “it says everything you need to hear.”She wouldn’t have believed me — I wasn’t big on believing in people back then — but she would’ve come around, I think. Good job, kiddo. We did it. Fist bump.It’s 2018 so I think I can spoiler and say the line:He began to dream. -- source link