Author Interview: Tamora Pierce
By Ludmila Rishkova and Angela Roberts
May 4th, 2011
Tamora Pierce is the acclaimed author of more than two dozen novels, among them such famed fantasy series as the Song of the Lioness Quartet, the Circle of Magic series, and the Immortals Quartet. She is well known in YA lit as a creator of strong powerful girl heroes who can kick ass. We met the author at Ad Astra, and our editor Ludmila Rishkova sat down with her to discuss YA fiction, writer’s block, writing, and the writing life.
Ludmila: My first question would have to do with writer’s block. I read in your biography that you went quite a few years without writing. And I wanted to know, what did you do to overcome it? How did it come about?
Tamora Pierce: My mother didn’t like my writing. I sent a story to a magazine, and when they wrote me back and she found out what I’d done, we had a terrible fight. I didn’t write original fiction for five years. I wrote very bad poetry. I wrote comic articles for the school newspaper, I did homework, obviously. But I don’t know that I did anything. I wrote stuff in other people’s universes. But I wasn’t able to write a drop of my own fiction for years.
I thought that I would go to college for writing, and since I couldn’t write, as I saw it, I went for psychology with an eye towards working with teenagers at some point. And then somewhere before my junior year, the block broke, I wrote my first short story, and a year later, I sold my first short story, and I sort of forgot about the degree. At least, I didn’t work too hard on the statistics requirement.
L: Problems with math, right?
T: I found out only recently that I had what’s called Dyscalculia, which is the mathematical version of dyslexia, but at that time, I thought I was just being stupid or lazy about science and math. Which was what I was being told.
So, as far as I know, I didn’t do anything. I did move out of my mother’s jurisdiction, and went to university, and I think the relaxation of a couple years there, and not having to deal with my mother anymore, was really what did it.
L: So it was on a personal level, rather than intellectual or having to do with the workload.
T: Yeah. Now I know all sorts of fixes for writer’s block, including the one that no one taught me, which was that sometimes you’ve just run out of idea, and you haven’t wasted your time, but you need to go on to something else. Don’t throw it away, because you don’t know when you can come back to it, and find either good things you can take from it, or finish it.
L: Or that it has grown a little bit too. I’m discovering that right now, actually, and it’s always a pleasure to come back and slowly advance the story.
T: Yes, it is.
L: Do you have a writing routine? Are you an everyday writer; do you write several pages a day? Or you’re more eclectic, once every couple of weeks?
T: No, if you’re going to be a pro, you can’t really afford to; I mean, unless it’s poetry, and then you can write whenever you feel like it, because you’re not going to make a living at poetry, strictly poetry, ever. On the other hand, most poets I know of teach. But yeah, I write pretty much every day. The number of pages has varied. I used to, at one time, very regularly start with five pages; by the middle of the book, I was at six to seven, and by the end fourteen to twenty, because it was all action at that point and I was rocketing along. Now, I’ve had days where it’s been two to three pages, and through all of the book, which has slowed me down. But I write six-and-a-half days a week. I do a half-day’s work on Saturdays usually. And I can’t write on the road. I can do revisions, I can’t write.
I sit down at my computer at around 9, and I’ve found recently that I can squeeze in a couple of hours then. And then I do my business correspondence and then my journal pages, and I read the news and visit all my sites, like Astronomy Page a Day. And then around 3 or 4, I start to work, and my prime writing time is 3 to 8 or 9 at night.
L: So you’re the afternoon-evening writer.
T: Yeah.
L: It seems as though you write Young Adult fiction because you had a pretty eventful childhood yourself, and you write about strong powerful girls who can kick ass, and, as you said, boys can kick ass too. It’s not just a feminist world. It’s a world of equality, a little bit in the way we imagine it and want it, at the end of the day, right? But I was wondering if there is anything else that makes you write YA fiction besides the fact that you wanted to write what you thought was missing in SF?
T: Well, it isn’t that intellectual a process. It’s that I really wanted and needed those girl heroes and, in a way, I still do.
L: You needed it for satisfaction.
T: Yes, for satisfaction, for feeling like I brought out some other interesting kind of woman who’s not like the others. And, because I have things to say that I can say in a story and not get banged on the head for being preachy. I still believe in those heroes.
L: Any reason why your heroes are young adults or teenagers?
T: I think, in a way, if people are going to change who they’re basically programmed to be, that’s the time where they’re going to lay in the work for real change.
L: That’s the time when they learn how to become a person altogether.
T: Yes, their minds open up to new ideas. They are very idealistic and passionate and they make mistakes. And for writers, that’s a dream character right there.
L: That’s the most important part, I believe.
T: Yeah.
L: Because that’s where we learn.
T: And I like my adult characters too. But I like exploring what makes a hero, what forces shape, primarily girls, but the next three books are going to have male heroes. I just haven’t run out of ideas in that area yet.
L: And you’re not antagonistic to adults in your stories.
T: Or boys. We all live together; we all have to work together.
L: And we’re all part of the same whole.
T: Yeah. Hopefully a better one, one day.
L: Can you tell us about your first sale and how long it took? Were you self-conscious about it? (Maybe that’s too personal a question.)
T: No. I wrote the first draft of what became the Lioness Quartet in 1976-77; I rewrote it for another year. So, in 1978, I started sending the adult book around. I got turned down by four adult publishers. And by that time, I’d moved to New York to work on publishing, and I’d gone to work for a literary agency. I was also writing reviews of martial arts movies for a magazine. At the agency, and now we’re talking about 1979-80, I was urged to show my book to one of the agents, and she said to break it up into four books for teenagers. I put it off because I thought she was being nice. And then I learned what a heavy price being nice carries when you work in publishing. So I discovered that she wasn’t being nice.
I did the work, and we sent it out, and two publishers turned it down as a teen book. Well, Judy-Lynn Del Rey didn’t precisely turn it down, she said we should send it to Jean Karl at Atheneum, and Jean said no. She took three pages to say no. And my agent saw something there that I didn’t; she set up an appointment for Jean and me, for Jean to talk to me about the revisions she felt I needed to make. We talked about that book and the rest of the quartet, because of course I already knew what it was from the adult manuscript. And some other things I was planning to do. And Jean said at the end of the hour, “If you make the changes that we discussed, I’ll buy the series.”
L: So they were very cooperative.
T: I got in a lot easier than a lot of people. I got in fairly young, well, fairly young even for YA in those days; not so much these days, women and men in their late 20s are publishing. I was considered young because I was 29 when my first book came out.
L: OK, so it’s not too late for aspiring writers who are fresh out of school.
T: Nope.
L: That’s good to know.
T: Most writers who go on to writing as much as they can usually get their first publication in their mid-30s. And that’s not counting the people who deliberately wait until their kids are in school, or the kids have left for university, or until they’re retired, to start their first book.
L: That’s why I was wondering if you were self-conscious for your first sale. Maybe it’s me personally, because it seems like some people have no qualms about sending out their stories and getting an acceptance or a rejection. I have a really hard time of taking something and sending it out, because I feel uncertain about it. I feel like a sham, in a way. I don’t know what that is.
T: We all do.
L: Because we’re selling fantasy. We’re selling imagination. We’re not selling something concrete.
T: It is concrete. You have stuff from your own experience or what you’ve learned and that’s as concrete as hell. And you also have to make it real enough that your readers will stay with you through the suspension of disbelief, of the magic. So, for me, what I write, I make it as real as possible, so when my readers get to the magical events, they’ve got plenty of belief there. But we all feel like shams. We all feel like it’s no good. You have to brainwash yourself.
L: Probably you don’t by now.
T: Actually, I still do. And as long as I feel my work needs correction, I’m in good shape, because it means I’m getting better with everything I do. It’s when you finally reach a stage where you say, “Yeah, this doesn’t need any changes, it’s perfect as it is,” that you’ve gone stagnant and you need a big shake-up. But no, if you look at what you did a week ago, or a month ago, and don’t see things you can fix, you’re in trouble. And it doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or if you’ve been at it as long as I have. You have to keep learning.
But what you have to do after a certain point is say, “I have nothing to lose by sending this out and everything to gain.” And then when I was sending my stuff out, I would give myself a week to be depressed when a book came back, and a day to be depressed when a story or article came back, and then I’d send it right out again. It wasn’t something I sat around and thought about; it was a hard and fast rule. So I would do it anyway. Even though I said, “It’s probably bad; everybody hates it.” You can’t do that. You’ve got to keep sending.
L: Even if you feel it’s not ready.
T: Look at it again. If you get two or three more rejections, look at it again. And try touching it up. But if it’s finished as far as you’re concerned, then you’ve got to send it out, because it’s not doing you any good in the drawer.
L: That would be, I guess, one piece of advice for young and aspiring authors. Would you have any other advice?
T: Yeah. The chief one is, be determined. Listen to your own gut because plenty of people will tell you what to do, but they may be talking about something else entirely. They may be thinking that you’re writing the book that they want you to write, or that they want to write, or they just didn’t get it. I got one rejection where the editor said that the book had too many rules. And I said to Claire [my agent], “I don’t know how to feel about this, because she’s obsessed with chivalry; of course there’s too many rules.” And Claire said, “He didn’t get it.”
It was this huge revelation because I thought editors were gods, of course they knew everything, and they’re human beings. So sometimes people just don’t get what you’re doing. You have to listen, there’s this tiny voice, the one that makes you write in the first place, and it knows better than you that you’re any good. And you have to learn to listen to that separate voice. Because if you listen to your own long enough, you’ll never do anything.
L: I definitely agree with that. So you spoke about a project now where you’re going to have boy heroes. Can you tell us a little more about the project?
T: Well, the next book I’ve got is in the Circle of Magic universe, and it’s Briar the boy mage of the four mages; his particular magic is with plants and growing things. And his teacher, Rose Thorn, who’s also a plant mage, and his student, Evvie, who’s a stone mage, they travel to my equivalent of China and Tibet, and get caught up in a war of conquest from Yanjing, the China equivalent.
And then after that, in my Tortall universe that I’m best known for, I’ve got two books about a character from the Immortals quartet. Numair in that book is twenty-nine, he’s a very great mage, and he’s escaped virtual captivity in Carthak, where he went to school. These two books take him back to the time where his friendship with the newly crowned emperor Ozorne goes to pieces. And Numair is forced to flee the empire and he makes his way north and it’s about how he finds his place in the world and a new home, having been in the University for seven years and not knowing much about reality at all.
L: Which is something plenty of people will be able to identify with.
T: Yeah. He’s got all of this strength, but his control is very recent and it doesn’t always work. And once he’s fleeing, he dare not use his magic to do anything because the emperor has mages set up who will feel if he uses his magic anywhere. And they will come after him again.
You can find more information on Tamora Pierce and her works at her website.