An Evening with V. E. Schwab – Waterstones Cardiff, March 2019

Yesterday (12th March 2019), I went to Waterstones in Cardiff to see the lovely Victoria Schwab talk about her new books: the re-release of her debut The Near Witch, and The Steel Prince, which is the first in a series of comics that act as a prequel to her Shades of Magic series.

Everything that Victoria discussed in the talk was so interesting and I could listen to her talk for hours, so if you haven’t managed to get to see her on her UK tour, I thought I’d make some (okay, a lot of) notes and share them with you!

(Obviously most of these are paraphrased, but I’ve tried to stick to Victoria’s original wording as much as I can.)

On Re-Releasing The Near Witch

It’s always going to be hard to get a good send off with debut novel. To get a good amount of success with a debut, especially for someone who isn’t known already, it can often take anywhere up to two years.

For example, Barnes & Noble only keep most books on the shelf for three to four months, so The Near Witch disappearing pretty quickly the first time around wasn’t overly unusual. It’s very cool to see it being released again to a new audience. The first time, it only had a limited US release, so it’s great that it’s now being released outside of the US to a much wider audience (and now even a devoted fanbase!).

However, although The Near Witch wasn’t an overnight success, the thing that kept Victoria going were the people who kept taking chances in her work – not huge investments, but enough to keep her trying.

Victoria then wrote Vicious as a secret project, and her publisher saw the promise in it and tried to get it published. They almost gave up because for this book, the publishing was hard (which is an amazing lesson – don’t give up, because now, Vicious is one of her most loved books!). While this was happening, she was also working on what she described as “a weird portal novel that nobody would want to read”… and this would become the first book in what is arguably her most popular series, A Darker Shade of Magic.

Somebody from the audience asked if The Near Witch has been rewritten or if it’s exactly the same as it was originally, and the answer is that it hasn’t been rewritten at all. Victoria explained that the book is like a time capsule of who she was when she was writing it at the age of 21. She didn’t want to rewrite it at all because the style and darkness of the novel would go on to become the foundation that she grew the rest of her books on.

Essentially, it’s a big privilege to be able to resurrect a book that didn’t do amazingly well the first time around; it’s like giving it a second chance. And according to Victoria, “a lot of people are just excited that it has my name on it, so they’ll buy it for that – so thank you!”

The talk then moved onto the audience Q&A segment and some great questions were asked. Here were some of the questions and answers I thought were great enough to write down…

What kind of characters are your favourite to write?

Victoria said she likes to write damaged, uncompromised, ambitious, flawed humans. These are the kind of people who are the most interesting to write about. She also loves to write (and read) about the effects and the aftermath of what happens after trauma, instead of characters coming out the end of it being perfectly okay.

She explained that there are way too many stories where some massive trauma happens in the first book, and then the character returns in the second book with maybe a few scrapes and bruises, but they’re perfectly okay mentally. Instead, she likes to explore what really happens to the character after traumatic events, because it gives a better insight into reality.

She also likes to pit her antagonists against each other and see what happens, which is a great solution for building character or plot development.

How do you build a whole new magic system?

She explained that she’s a major magpie author and is inspired by so many different things. But essentially, she likes to take everything down to a fundamental, elemental level – meaning that she makes all of her magic systems initiative and user-friendly. She grew up feeling daunted by things like Lord of the Rings, and wanted to make something that wasn’t so daunting.

She explained that there are two main kinds of fantasy authors, and summed them up with what I thought was a genius analogy: the first type of author will build you a house and give you the keys. You can look all around, you’re told what’s in each room and that you should explore every one of them, and you’re given the exact parameters – and you need to learn everything. It’s daunting, and you might feel like there’s way too much to learn and you’ll never be able to get through it all.

The second type of author builds you a house but doesn’t give you a keys. You can look through the windows and see what you can see. You can see the doors, the walls, the hallways, and the more you look, the more you can find – if you want to. But what you see if also enough as it is, and you don’t need to go in and learn everything there is to learn. Basically, the more freedom you give the readers to fill in the gaps themselves, the more intuitive the story is, and the more potential there is for readers to enjoy the story without being overwhelmed.

All of your fantasy worlds are very large. How do you stop yourself getting too caught up in the world building instead of focusing on the plot?

World building is a slippery slope – in Victoria’s words, it’s like “playing Sims with your world” and it can be easy to keep building and building, and forget about the most important part: the plot.

The trick is to limit the world building on the page to what impacts the characters directly. Each character is going to move through your world in their own unique way, and they’ll see things differently – what’s normal in terms of sights, smells, interactions, language, colours etc will be unique to each person. (For example, someone who has grown up in that world won’t notice these things because they’re normal, but someone visiting the town for the first time will notice them a lot more.)

So, the answer is to the world building to what is important to the journey of your characters, and how it impacts them in the course of the narrative. If you build an entire history around food, for example, you’ll still only see it in the context of the meals your characters eat, so is it really worth getting it all down in the page?

If you could bring one of your character alive, which would you choose?

I had to add this question here just so I could include the great answer: “Most of my characters I would hesitate to bring alive because they’re quite bad people! I feel quite protective of my characters but I wouldn’t want to unleash them on society…”

What are you working on right now?

I thought I was busy, but this incredible person is in a whole different league! Victoria told us that she’s contracted until at least 2023, and that she has (in no particular order)…

• A new YA not formally announced yet
• A new adult novel that she’s working on while she’s on tour
• 3 books that are going to be a sequel to the Shades of Magic series
• The sequel to City of Ghosts
• The third book in Vicious series
• What she described as “a super queer anime-inspired Blade Runner”
• And finally, more comics in the Shades of Magic prequel series.

Um… wow.

Do you have any writing advice for people starting out and wanting to get published?

Victoria split this into two sections – writing advice and publishing advice – because although they go hand in hand, they’re both completely different things.

She started by saying that her writing advice is a little controversial, and that other author friends would probably directly contradict it. Her advice is that you should try to know the end of your story before anything else. On good writing days, it’ll be something exciting to look forward to; and on bad days, it’ll be the one thing that will motivate you to keep going and increase your chance of finishing. This is also the same for characters – you should try creating those backwards too, so you know who and where they are at the end of the story, and you can rewind them and fill in the gaps.

For the publishing advice, here’s the main thing: you need to embrace rejection. This is something I’ve heard a lot before and it something Akemi Dawn Bowman mentioned in my podcast interview with her. Some people get rejected a few times and say they’re out, but as hard as it feels at the time, rejection will be your constant companion on your publishing journey.

Rejection is definitely not a sign that you’re not ready, or not good enough – but that you’re simply participating on your quest to publication. You just need to be willing to improve and that you’re going to be a work in progress. Do not give up!

How does a UK audience react differently to your books compared to a US audience? Is there a big difference, or is it just the same?

British people apparently tend to like darker stuff more (which made us all laugh and nod in agreement. We are quite dark and morbid, us British folk.) In the US, black humour can be very hit and miss, and that’s something Victoria said she loves about British audiences – we love our dark humour. She explained that as her books get darker, the funnier they become too – and that we should know by now that the funny stuff always comes before the murder. 😀 So that’s something I’ll definitely keep in mind when I read more of her books!

And that’s all I’ve got! I had such a great night and it was lovely to meet with a fellow book blogger, Steph at Never Enough Novels. I love having a good bookish evening, and I may also have picked up a couple more books to add to my already collapsing bookshelves (I got Vicious and The Steel Prince). I really hope that more events come to Cardiff, because it’s so great not to have to travel miles out of the way just to attend them! Hopefully this will start a trend…

Have you been able to see V. E. Schwab on this tour? Or have you been to any other author events recently? Let me know if there are any that I should look out for!