>> Jennifer Abella:
Hello and welcome, everyone to the National
Book Festival. I'm Jennifer Abella,
a copy editor at the Washington Post Magazine. And I am so excited to
be here today to talk with fantasy author
Victoria Schwab. [ Applause ] As you heard earlier, we will
be taking questions at the end so be thinking of your own and there are mikes
out in the audience. And a reminder that Victoria
will be signing books downstairs at 1:30. Yeah! So Victoria, you've
brought us on a journey through alternate universes
full of stoic magicians, sneaky thieves and
rakish pirates in the "Shades of Magic" series. And you've immersed
us in a world where people gain superpowers
through near-death experiences in her "Villains" duology. And she has taken us to
supernatural worlds full of monsters and ghosts in
your adult, in your novels for young adults
and middle graders. Each of those books have
kept us glued to the page. Your latest novel,
"Vengeful" is a follow-up to "Vicious" from 2013. Can you give the audience a
little background on that world? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. Of course. First of all, thank
you for coming. This is my first
National Book Festival so I'm ridiculously
excited [applause]. So fancy. Yeah, so it's really
important to understand that "Vicious" is a book that I
wrote completely in secret. Basically, my entire career
was falling apart three years in as it tends to do. This industry has a very,
very high mortality rate. And so, everything was
falling apart and I was falling out of love with writing. And I needed to find a way
back in or I was going to quit. And so I decided I was going
to write one more book. And I was instead of
trying to find an audience, I was just going to write
whatever I wanted to read. And I know that sounds
really obvious in retrospect. We should all do that. But it's a business. And it's very easy to try and write what you think
other people want to read. But I thought, well, screw it. No one's going to
read me anyway. I'm going to find, I'm just
going to write for myself. And I'm going to know that
if this book doesn't find its audience then at least
I was true to myself. And so I just started
to ask myself, "What do I want to write?" And I wanted to write
a book about villains. I wanted to write a
book about the idea that superpowers do not
make us good people. They just make us
people with powers. And that, if anything, and this
is kind of a theme across all of my books, power
makes us worse. Like power is a conduit
for all of our aggressions, all of our wants and
desires and it kind of isn't, it disinhibits us, you know. And so, I wrote a book
about two pre-med students who discovered the key to superpowers are
near-death experiences. And they set out to manufacture
their own supernatural abilities like controlling their own
suicide and resurrection. And everything goes
predictably horribly wrong. Just atrociously wrong. And the book actually starts
10 years later when one of them is breaking out
of prison where he's been for murder and the other one has
been a decade-long killing spree of every superpower
people he can find. And that was "Vicious." And then I was lucky enough that
after three years of writing it, I showed it to somebody. I showed it to my agent. I was like, "Hey, surprise. I wrote this really weird book." And my agent didn't represent
science fiction and fantasy but she was very supportive. And she said, "I
can try to sell it." And I said, "Yeah,
let's just try," because it had done what
it needed to do for me. It gave me my love
of writing back. I thought, if this
doesn't sell, that's fine but I loved writing this. And then, kind of you
know the rest of the story and that "Vicious" did sell. "Vicious" sold to
Tor and it came out five-and-a-half,
six years ago. And I always wanted
to write a sequel but because this was
my first adult novel, because I didn't have
a huge track record, it was very important
that I wrote a book that could stand alone. Because the last thing I
wanted to do was write a book that had a cliffhanger ending
and have it not sell well and have not be able to
tell the rest of that story. That had happened to me
once already in publishing. So about two or three years
later, I'm writing the "Shades of Magic" series and
I'm like, Hey, Tor. I really want to write
the sequel to "Vicious." And they're like,
"Vicious has a sequel?" And I was like, in my
heart, it does [laughter]. It's always meant
to have a sequel. And you know, Tor was like okay,
if the book sells really well, after "Shades of Magic" is
done, you can write the sequel. Now what happened was I finished
the "Shades of Magic" series and "Conjuring of Light,"
the third book in the "Shades of Magic" series. It was the book that I was
proudest of in my entire career. And suddenly, "Vengeful"
became the book that had to follow "Conjuring of Light." And it had been four years
since I had worked on "Vicious" and I don't know about you
all but you change a lot as a human every year. And you change a lot as
a writer and the thing is that books are static
entities but authors are not. We're continuing to grow and I
had, in those five years between "Vicious" and "Vengeful,"
my whole life had changed. I had come out. I had found my place a
little bit more in the world. I had found my place
in this industry. The world was on fire
even more than usual. Everything was ruinous. And when I went back to tell the
rest of Victor and Eli's story, my two leads, I kept finding
my attention going to the set of three women in the story. And they started out
as minor characters. You know, they started
out as conduits for Victor and Eli's story, a
continuation of "Vicious." But what I found was that
2018 me, 2017 and 2018 and 2019 me needed a story about
female rage, needed a story about the avatars
of female anger. And so essentially, "Vengeful"
became a conversation with "Vicious" where "Vicious"
is a book about Victor and Eli taking control. "Vengeful" is a book about
Victor and Eli losing control and about these three
women, June and Sydney and Marcella learning to take
control back from a world that has taken it
away from them. And so these books are
not simple sequels, not simple pairs. They exist in conversation
as I think books should. And yeah, that's a very
long-winded answer of saying that we expect writers to
be as static as the works that they make but we can't be,
we have to constantly be growing and changing with the work. And I have no doubt that if
and when I write the third book in the series, 21-year-old
or 2021, 2022 year old me, year old, but you know what
I'm trying to say [laughter]. I am just, I'm tired inside. I'm sure that will be
a different iteration of myself as well. I'll be 34, 35 instead
of 25, instead of 30. >> Jennifer Abella: You had
said on Twitter that you had had to rewrite the entire
draft of "Vengeful." >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. >> Jennifer Abella: Can
you talk about that? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah, one day, it
will hurt less to talk about but essentially,
as I was saying, I started writing a
book that was a sequel. When I sat down to write
"Vengeful" after being away from it for four years, I thought I was writing
the next chapter of Victor and Eli's story. So that's what I did and
that's what I turned in. And my editor had some of the hardest conversations
I've ever had. She called me up. I turned in the book at the end
of December and she called me at the beginning of
January of the year that "Vengeful" was supposed
to come out. And she said, "This
is a very good book. This is an excellent
book and I'm sure that your existing fans will
be perfectly satisfied." It's the worst words
you ever want to hear [laughter] especially
if you're someone like me who really thrives
on the challenges of changing the narrative
with each contributing book. And she said, "The problem right
now is that this book could be so much more than it is. And now you have a choice. If you choose to
put out the book that you've written,
I will support you. I will always support you and
a lot of people will like it. If you choose to make the book
what it's capable of being, and really add to this
narrative, you will have to rewrite it from scratch and
I can only give you two months." [ Laughter ] Right? It's like a bit
of a disastrous choice. And I went and I cried
for several days straight. I just want to be
really blunt about that. I like hung up the phone and
I had a little scream moment. And I genuinely considered
putting out the book that I had written
because it was a good book. It's so much easier
to delete a bad book. But in the end, she was
right and I embarked on one of the hardest two
months of my life. And I rewrote, I
scrapped 100,000-word book and I rewrote it from page one. And there were times along
the way when I doubted that it would be worth it. And the fact of the matter is
the book that came out last year when "Vengeful" debuted
is something that I'm just extraordinarily
proud of. And I think so much of being
an author and having a career in this industry is
understanding that nothing that you write is
written in blood or stone. You have to be willing
to get better. You never want to get to
a point where the people around you think that good
enough is good enough. So yeah. >> Jennifer Abella: Oh, God. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: But in retrospect,
it's really a fine line. It's fun to talk about it now. But if you had seen me
a year-and-a-half ago, I was like a shell of a human. >> Jennifer Abella:
Did anything survive from the original draft
besides like the character. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Well, that was the
maddening thing, right? Like the characters
were totally fine. But the plot changed. No, nothing more than like
maybe 200 words here and there. Like nothing, I didn't get
to transplant any chapters because the entire construct
of the story had to change. >> Jennifer Abella: Oh, wow. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. It's really hard to
think about some days. I have like notecards
from when I [inaudible]. Because these books
are not linear. They're not structured simply. They don't move from
beginning to end. They move in and
out of timelines and then "Vicious" had
essentially two primary characters with four,
two secondary characters and each one of them had
a past and a present. This book has like 10 and
the thing that you learn is that you can change time or
you can change point of view but you can't really change
both at the same time. So everything had to be
framed and shored off in a very careful way so they
can move through the narrative. And you can find on mine,
there are pictures of my editor and I went to a cabin
in Upstate New York. It's like the beginning
of a horror novel. But we didn't kill each other. And laid out every scene
of the book on notecards. And there are pictures
of 300 notecards in different formations
scattered across the floor of this cabin. And we were there for a week. And it was brutal. I think I tore down the
bones and the scaffolding of it maybe five or six times
before I found the right one. >> Jennifer Abella:
So I've heard that you write out
of order as well. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. >> Jennifer Abella: So
when you were [laughter], so when you're alternating
points of view in timeline, do you plot out that
before you start writing? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Okay. >> Jennifer Abella: And
the order they go in? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: The thing you
have to understand is, when I say I write out of order,
I literally mean every chapter of my book is like you
know, you open a new puzzle and you just dumped
all the pieces out and you start assembling
like corners. And then you're like, oh, this little piece clearly
goes somewhere down towards. Like I do that with
every chapter. So when I start writing
a chapter, I will maybe write the
first line, the last line, some of the dialogue that goes
towards the end of the scene. And I start building it out in
almost like a blossoming way. It makes sense in my head. I once told my agent and so
she was, she looked at me with so much horror [laughter]. She was like, "Why
would you ever, why would you ever do this?" But to mitigate that, I'm an
incredibly strict outliner. So I outline. I map out my books
completely beat for beat. I understand all 300 scenes. And then what I'm
able to do is I pull out the scene I want to work on. So I go based on
the emotional beat. So like the book that I
was just finished writing, which comes out next fall,
is a character-driven novel. And so it's really
dependent on like which emotional beats I feel I'm
capable of writing on that day. And it's nice to know, okay, I'm in a very introspective
phase today and I think I can write this
essentially a nervous breakdown. And so I'm going to
pull that scene forward and I have my beats at
the top of the page. I know what needs to
happen in this scene. And then I can let the scene
flow and happen organically and then I essentially
put it back on the shelf where
it needs to be. So I always cringe when
people call me out on writing out of order because I do truly. But I allow myself
to write out of order within a house I
have already built. I would never, I don't
wander lost in the woods. People are like, where's the
joy without the discovery? And I'm like, that's
anxiety for me [laughter]. For me, the joy comes
from the pleasure of executing a strategy,
not from wandering lost. I need to build a map and
then maybe I'll wander down the wrong path but I'll
never wander off a cliff. >> Jennifer Abella: When you
are plotting out your scenes, is it harder for you to write
those character beats or more of the plot or dialogue? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Oh, I hate character. They're the most
important things in my books and I always say that I'm a
character writer who writes under the illusion of plot? Like my books are all character
books that are pretending to be plot books and yet,
I still, I think the thing about plot is you know
when you've got it wrong. And I have trained, I've fed
the story monster in myself to know exactly when
I've got it wrong. I can feel that almost
thud, thud of warning. The problem with
character is it's like a picture out of focus. When you've got it wrong,
by just the smallest amount, is when it feels the
most disconcerting. So when you stare on a picture
that just barely out of focus, it's the most maddening thing. And so I feel like with
plot, I have a better sense of when I've gone wrong. And with character, it's
something that I have to layer over and over revision and I'm
such a type A person that I'm like 17 books and then I'm like why can't I just do
it right the first time? If I can't do it right the
first time, now, I'm never going to do it right the first time. And the answer, of
course, is they're not. You can't write a book right
until you write it wrong and it doesn't save me from
just like the existential dread of not being able to hit
every little focused moment. But I will say, if
anyone follows me online, I exist for the huge amount of
angst and I understand that. Like I project all of that. But I want to be very clear. Every now and then, someone will
be like so do you not love it? And you have to understand that
much like my enjoyment coming out of executing a plan,
every time I write a book, there is a moment that
I hit and I never hit it until the last revision. But on the very last revision,
right before it goes to print, every single time, I read it as
a reader instead of the writer. And the moment that happens, that last like tiny step
before the end where I am able to forget that I wrote
it which is its own weird like neurotic condition
because then you're like, I can never do it again. I don't know who did this. It wasn't me [laughter]. There's no winning. But I live for that. I live for the moment when it's
typeset and I go through with that fine-toothed comb at
the very end and I realize that I'm a reader now. That I have stepped away from
it and gotten that distance. So I do love it by the end. But I am dragged
kicking and screaming through the creative
process to get there. >> Jennifer Abella: What
superpower would you have if you could choose one? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I think about
this a lot, obviously. I've been asked this
in the form of magic, in the form of superpower
and I have a very, what I feel to be
an excellent answer. Especially for readers, I feel like every reader
can relate to this. So I want the ability to control
time with a massive caveat which is that everything
that goes wrong when people control time
happens when we go back. You cannot go back. Every time you go back,
you butterfly effect and everything is ruined. So I want to be able
to control time but only moving forward meaning
I want the ability to pause, to slow down, or to speed up as
there are moments that I would like to be over faster. There are moments that I
would like to last longer. There are days when I would just
like to hit pause on everything and catch my breath and lie
on the sofa and read a book. And I feel like if
I could control time in that way, I would
be so happy. So no, I don't need to go back. I think that's just a fool's
errand but I would love, love the ability to just stop. >> Jennifer Abella: If
you could team up with any of your superpower characters? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I don't even think
about my superpower characters because I'm not sure I want to
be anywhere near any of them at any time [laughter]. They don't seem like the most
balanced human beings so June, my favorite superpower that I've
ever written, one of the leads in "Vengeful" is a young
woman who goes only by June. And June is a living
voodoo doll. You have to imagine
Mystique from X-Men. If Mystique could not only take on another person's
visual identity but if any damage you did
to Mystique would happen to the person she was
imitating instead of her. June is absolutely invulnerable. She comes in handy but she's
also made an immense sacrifice for it in that she
can never be herself. The only vulnerable
manifestation that June has is if she were to take
on her actual form. But I do think that June is one, she's a really real
bad-ass murderer. So like she's great at
killing people and that seems to come in handy for her. But also, she can get
into almost anywhere. So I do feel like if I
had to pick a friend, she's a bit flighty but she's
not, like there are characters in these books who would just
literally burn the world down. And I don't really want
to be near any of them. So I don't trust
anyone except June. >> Jennifer Abella: Like I said
before, you published books for adults, middle graders,
children, young adults. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: You're missing
picture books then I'm going to corrupt everybody [laughter]. Yeah. >> Jennifer Abella:
What is the hardest part about changing mindsets
from project to project? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I love this question
because I think a lot of people make the assumption
that adult books are harder and darker and that children's
book are lighter and easier. And for me, that
doesn't track at all. I don't know if I see anyone of
them as harder than the other. The thing you have
to understand is yes, I write for middle
grade, YA, adult, comics, everyone who wants to read them. But when I sit down to write a
book regardless of the category or the shelf that it falls in, I'm writing for a
version of myself. So "City of Ghosts"
and "Tunnel of Bones," these are written
for a 10-year-old me. And 10-year-old me was super
morbid, death-obsessed, really kind of scared of that
boundary, that line I grew up with a sick parent
and it felt like if I could just
pay enough attention, I could keep people alive. So I wanted books that
talked about death, not through metaphor or analogy
but I just wanted to know that other kids thought
about death, right. When I am writing my YA
books like the "Monsters of Verity" books, I am
writing for 17-year-old me. And 17-year-old me was angry. Same 17-year-old me did
not fit into the world, 17-year-old me would have very
happily burned the whole world down to be happy. Like I was not the kind of kid
who understood books in which when we give young women
power, they are expected to self-sacrifice
for the greater good. Like if you would have handed
me power, I would have, I would have been
a super villain. I would have done a lot
of selfish things with it. But that's what my YA novels
are about powerful girls trying to survive in difficult worlds. And when I'm writing
my adult books, I'm writing for whatever
age I am at the time. I was 25 when I wrote "Vicious." I was 27 when I wrote "A
Darker Shade of Magic." I will be, I was 30 to 32
when I wrote "Addie La Rue" like they are moving
along with me. So I don't think of any of
them as harder or easier. The YA books I write are
probably my overtly the darkest. But my middle grade
books are not light. My adult books are probably
weirdly the funniest. But that's a bad sign. You should know something
about me which is that if you ever find yourself
laughing in any of my books, someone's about to
die [laughter]. And I do this on purpose, right? I want you to expel the air. I want you to relax in a moment. And I think you have to have
levity along with horror. It's one of the most important
kind of binaries that do exist in the balance of prose. And so, yeah, I don't think
any of them are easier. I think if I had to pick, adult
is the most intuitive for me because it's the truth
I'm at in this moment. So I don't have to ask myself
who was I 20 years ago. I have to just ask
myself who am I right now. So in that way, there are
fewer boundaries between it but now, I love it all. I'm just missing that
picture book [laughter]. Can we get it? But I'm just going
to ruin everyone, set you like a little
fuse [laughter]. >> Jennifer Abella: One of the
things that I love about all of your books is each world
is very specific and they come with their own set of rules. How does your approach to
world building differ from say, "Vicious" and "Vengeful"
and "Shades of Magic" which are two very
different kinds of worlds? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I mean, setting
is my primary character. It's the first thing
I think about. Most of my [inaudible], most of my stories revolve
around an outsider. And in order to understand
an outsider, you need to understand insiders. In order to understand insiders,
you need to understand the world that they fit cleanly into. So in order to create
people who are perpendicular to their environment, who
don't feel as if they belong, I have to understand
the environment. I love creating worlds and I love creating
rules inside those worlds that you mistake
for innate aspects. Like for me, the most beautiful
world building is "Intuitive." It is simple. It is, like I may make
this as short as possible. I have this philosophy that I
really, really love which is that there are two kinds
of fantasy authors. There are fantasy authors
that build a house, right. Both of them build
a house, right. When we build a world, when
we build a story world, we're building a house. The first fantasy
author builds the house, builds and decorates every
single room and gives you, as the reader, the key. And says, "Go into the house. Look around. Explore. If you don't
see it, it's not there." They let you see the entire
boundary of the environment. That's very, much
more like Tolkien. But then there are fantasy
authors and I consider myself in the second category who build
the house, decorate a lot of it, and don't give you a key. But maybe they leave
the curtains open on one of the rooms. Now, you can see into that room. You can see through a
doorway, perhaps down the hall. And it is your job as the reader to infer everything
you cannot see. So I have to give you
enough information about what you do see to kind
of guess at what the rest of the house looks like. And I like this because
then as the series goes on, as the world expands, the
best example is in the "Shades of Magic" series. In Book Two, you meet a
character named Alucard Emery. Alucard Emery has a magical
ability that was not introduced in the "Darker Shade of Magic." He was never introduced and
yet, it's a magical ability that makes sense as
inference, as something that you are extrapolating from what you do
know about the world. Now, as Alucard Emery had ridden
in to "Gathering of Shadows" on a dragon, you
probably would been like, "I didn't see any dragons
through the living room window. I didn't see any
sign of dragons. I don't think there are
dragons in this world so I'm a little put
off by the fact that suddenly, there
are dragons." So it's a matter of understanding what
you're giving the reader so that they can guess
at what they can't see. And like that to me is
the most exciting balance of how do I build a world
that you feel as the reader, you are beginning to understand
and you're getting to know without feeling like
you've explored all of it. >> Jennifer Abella: Have
you ever been writing a book and realized that you've
broken your own rules and then have to
kind of go back? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I try not to, honestly. The only time I've ever done
it is that I was that person who needed a glossary for
"A Darker Shade of Magic" because there are
fictional words. Now the logical thing
would have been to write that glossary as I was going. Or even to write the glossary
after finishing "Darker Shade of Magic" so that when I
started "Gathering of Shadows," I have the glossary and
didn't say like break the laws of language or add in a new
word that meant the same thing as a word that I've already
used or something like that. I have done that
twice by accident. And one tiny, tiny mistake, it's
not a mistake because I chose it but this is like
authors do mess up. In "Vicious," Stell,
who's the detective, who's kind of overseeing the
EOs in the case, his name, it turns out his first name
is given to you at one point. Totally forgot this, right? And the problem is his first
name was given to you as Marcus. Now, I started writing
"Vengeful" and I realized that Marcus needed to
be Marcella's husband because they have this
name echoing thing and I was like, "This is fine. I mentioned it in the
briefest of moments. No one is ever going to notice that I changed his name
from Marcus to Joe. Right? It's fine. Just going to change his
name from Marcus to Joe." And everything was
fine until one of my foreign publishers
decided to make massive amounts of marketing materials featuring
every character in the book and they made like a
giant poster that was like Meet Marcus Stell
and I was like, "God! Like really of all the details,
you picked the one that I like consciously was like I'm
going to put it under the rug and like no one's
going to notice this." So there are really, really
minute ones but I take a lot of time with my world designing
it to have a bit of give, a bit of flex so that I can
introduce new ideas as I want to without them feeling
like they're world-breaking. So really, the only
mistake is one, one word that I gave two
meanings to basically in "Shades of Magic" which I think is
fine because if you want to go down a really deep
linguistic tunnel, we in the English
language, have tons of words that mean the same
thing and tons of words that are spelled the same
and mean different things. So it's fine. That's just a quirk of
language [laughter]. But the Marcus Stell/Joe Stell
thing, I think I'm going to, I'm going to put something in
Book Three that like references that Marcus was his first name but Joe was the second
name like a middle name. But I'm going to find a
way to smooth that out. But that one's completely
my bad. I'm very sorry [laughter]. >> Jennifer Abella: Well,
speaking of a third book. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. >> Jennifer Abella: Do you
already kind of have a plot in mind or did you have one
in the back of your mind when you were writing
"Vengeful?" >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I had a few
aspects for a third. So my rules with these are I
won't write a book unless I have enough story to make
the book worth it. I don't want to continue
with things just because people are enjoying it. That's how all television
gets ruined is by being like "Supernatural" should have
stopped at five seasons instead of like 14 seasons long. They were beautiful
five seasons, you guys, but like I don't ever
want to be that author that continues something
past the point. But there are a few
things I really want to do. And so, I'm working
through it right now. I'm in the steeping part which
usually lasts one to two years where I'm figuring out do I
have enough to make it worth it? And the hardest question, "Can
I make it better than the last?" Like that's the scariest thing
for me is I never want you to be able to compare apples
to apples with my books but I still need
to feel confident that I can deliver a third
Villains book that is as satisfying as "Vicious"
and "Vengeful" because I live in a world where like I've
just finished my 17th book and every time I finish a book, it's like a little
step up the mountain. There's this game that I feel
like half of you have never seen but it was on Price is
Right for a very long time. And it's this mountain
climber and he just climbs up and then he gets closer
and closer to the edge. And you never want
to go over the edge. And every step you take up
with each book as you try to get better and
better and better, you also risk kind
of the topple down. So I never want pride
or ambition to drive me over the edge like that. So I won't do it until
I'm absolutely positive. But right now, it's
looking pretty good. I've figured out the concept
and I've cleared it with my team so I hope in four
years [laughter]. >> Jennifer Abella: Can you
talk about what's next for you? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah, sure. So my next book comes out next
October, my next adult book. My next middle grade
book comes out on Tuesday but you can buy it here. So [laughter], it's
called "Tunnel of Bones." But my next adult novel
comes out next October and it is called the "Invisible
Life of Addie La Rue." It is a standalone novel and
it is about a young woman in 1700s France who sells
her soul to the devil to live forever and ends
up cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. And so, it's about her
life over 300 years where the devil becomes
the only constant. And it's about her over
one year in New York when she meets a young man
who remembers her name. And that comes out next October. And I was working on it
and have been working on it for eight years. So proof that you don't always
write books quickly [laughter]. >> Jennifer Abella:
If people want to start lining up
for questions? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah, I think
we have like 10 minutes? >> Jennifer Abella: Yeah. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Do it! Be bold. It's very
scary sitting up here. Join me [laughter]. I'll start over here. >> I guess my question
is I was just reading the "Shades of Magic" trilogy. And what struck me about the
books was how distinct every single character felt,
even the minor ones. So I guess I was
wondering how you sort of helped shape those
different points of view and help make them
distinct from each other. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Thank you. It's actually really
important to me. I have a philosophy that
whether a character takes up a major role or whether
they're only on the page for a single scene,
they should feel like they could be
the main character of their own narrative. So you should be able to feel
like in another iteration of "Shades of Magic" Hastra
is the main character. You are not going to see them as
the main character in this book but they need to
be rounded enough. And so I based all of my
characters on three pillars. I don't know the
character without being able to answer three questions
about them. What do they fear? What do they want? And what are they
willing to do to get it? And I kind of filled what I
hope is a character in the round out of those three
elements and know that I could give them a
story within the narrative. I may be able to hold it. Over here. >> Hi, okay. So I wanted to speak
to a little, I know you're primarily
a fantasy author. This is the genre
of fiction room. I've always loved
fantasy and genre fiction. I think you've probably noticed
this being in publishing. There has always been a little
bit of a different viewpoint but I think people
[inaudible] genre fiction with literary fiction? Yeah and I think literary
fiction, genre fiction is kind of viewed as entertaining
and literary fiction is kind of given that like
important [inaudible]. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yes, [inaudible]. >> Yeah and so I was, I wanted
to hear from you, I think, what you think [Inaudible]
and books like that can give that maybe contemporary
fiction, literary fiction can't or even giving that or doing
that has been the primary point. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I mean, I think both
categories have a potential to be excellent and both
categories have the potential to be bad. Like a good story
is a good story. And I do think it's
troubling that we so continually rate
literary about genre. I think one of the
most beautiful things about fantasy is they
simultaneously give us the ability to escape and the
ability to see ourselves. We so often think that
realism is the place in which we see ourselves, that realism is the
place in which we live. When the truth is that fantasy
not only has the ability to take people cast so often
to the margins of a narrative and center them, and create
worlds that are aspirational in that way where we get to see
ourselves in positions of power when we don't see ourselves
like that in the real word. But also, there is this fallacy that because it's
fantasy, it's not true. And it absolutely is true
if we are constructing. It's the same way
that people think that photography is not a lie. Like photograph is a lie. Like you are choosing what to
photograph and what to shape and how to create a lens
and what to exclude. And both fantasy and realism
do that exactly the same way. I just think that we have a
really amazing opportunity in fantasy to show not
only the world as it is but the different ways
that the world can be. >> Thank you. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. >> Okay, I actually
have two questions. One is really fast
and kind of goofy. And the other one's
more in-depth. The first goofy question
is what kind of dog is Dol because I was picturing a
big black German Shepherd and I was wondering if you knew? >> Jennifer Abella:
Dol's a Great Dane. So close, yeah, a
black Great Dane. >> Big [inaudible]. Okay [laughter]. Second question is I
was thinking about this and since you've established
in "Vicious" that people's will to live is what reflects their
superpowers and I was wondering in that case, what was
Serena's will to live that gave her this complete
manipulation ability? Because like we know Sydney
just didn't want to die and wanted [inaudible]
come back. And we know that Victor
was just in a lot of pain. So I was wondering what you
thought about, you know, what gave her that I
want to influence people with fickle [inaudible]. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I think to be
honest, so it's a component. It's your personality
and it's your will and it's your circumstance. And the fact is, I'm not sure if
Serena would have climbed back out of that lake if
Sydney hadn't been in the lake with her. But so much of what influences
Serena's ability to live and control the situation is her
not wanting her sister to die. Her wanting to be able
to control that moment. And so I don't think if Sydney
had been in the water with her that Serena would
have come back. >> Okay, thank you. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. >> Hey, I was wondering if you could talk a little
bit about Addie La Rue. You've talked a lot
about how you changed as an author over the years. And since Addie La Rue is such
a longstanding project for you, I was wondering if
you could talk about that transformation a bit? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Of course. Yes, so I started writing
Addie La Rue eight years ago. And by that, I mean, I
started brainstorming and I started sitting with it. I don't start a book unless
I have a few crucial pieces, the voice, the narrative
and the ending. I never have started a book without knowing exactly
how it ends. The ending is the
thing I'm working for. It's the thing that I use to reverse engineer
the entire emotion arc of the rest of the book. So for the first few
years, I didn't write Addie because I felt I wasn't
a good enough writer. And I mean that like
with no false humility. I knew what I wanted
to do with Addie. I knew it was the kind of
story I only got to tell once. And I wanted to make sure I was,
I was a strong enough writer and I had the education
of other books behind me in order to do it. Once I felt like I might
be a strong enough writer, I still didn't have the
most satisfying ending. And I am actually,
in retrospect, so glad I did not write
this book five years ago because I would not have given
it the ending that it deserved. I do feel also like I could
not wait another 10 years to write this because this
is a book in many ways about the boundary of
30, especially these days and how lost you can feel and
how you can feel like you knelt down to tie your shoes and
by the time you look up, everyone around you
is a mile ahead. It's that feeling like
you're on the boundary between young adulthood
and adulthood and everyone's telling you,
you should know what to do. And you feel like
somewhere along the way, everyone else made choices
and you still had questions. It's so much about that, the
kind of the millennial quandary and I'm really like one of the
human characters in the book, Henry the boy, is absolutely
a reflection of who I would be if I hadn't found writing. And he really is the most truth that I've ever put
into one of my books. And so, I felt like I hit
30 and then I was like, "This is the time for
me to write this book." Not necessarily because I'm
the best writer I will ever be but because this feels
like the most honest time to explore these themes. So from the time I
figured that out, it took roughly two
years to write. And I was kind of propelled
by not wanting to enter that next stage of my life
with its new questions and new problems before I had
solved this particular one on the page. Yeah. >> Hi, so I recently just
finished "Vengeful" and I fell in love with Marcella's
character. Just especially in the
beginning because you see her like she's not afraid to stand
up in what she believes in and she just kind of
takes control of the room, if you could put it like that. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. >> Did you base her
off somebody or like who was her inspiration
for the character? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: I love this question because I wrote several very
powerful female characters and they had something in common which they were all
really defeminized. Now, I did this with Mackenzie
Bishop and Kate Harker and Lila Bard because they were
aspirational characters for me. I'm not a hyperfeminine person. I've never been terribly
attached to my gender identity. And I wanted to create
characters that I wanted to see. But in so doing, I
made a kind of pattern. And the problem with patterns
is that we can read into them and I started getting
the feedback that readers were
worried that I thought that femininity was an
opposite of power, right. So I took a challenge
with Marcella to see if I could write a
character who was in every way Delilah Bard's
opposite in terms of femininity, in terms of body and ideal
and image and present-day like the embodiment of what
we think of as female power. And what we think of,
of somebody who exists at that extreme end of
the spectrum and show that she was just as
powerful as Lila Bard. And so I really wrote
Marcella as an answer to that ringing concern. I wanted to show
her in that way. And she also just became an
avatar for all of the anger that comes with all of
those micro-aggressions. All of those being put down
every day in small ways. But yeah, she was written
as an answer to Lila. >> Thank you. >> Jennifer Abella:
I think we have time for about two more questions. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. >> Okay, I think [inaudible]. Hi, there. So I've heard you say before that you have a very adversarial
relationship with fear. And I really loved that. So my question is, as
you continue writing and facing new challenges, how
do you cultivate and nurture that adversarial relationship? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Oh, it's hard. It's hard. As I said, if you
follow me online, you know that my
greatest fear is failure. And for failure, I don't mean
not selling books, though, of course, that's
always very scary. What I mean is I have a
fear of letting down myself and my readers and
my publishers. I have a fear of the words,
"the last one was better." I have a fear of
that inevitability of people liking something
more than something else or less than something else. But and I tell this to writers who are just starting
out as well. The truth of this industry is
if that your fear is louder than your want, you
will not survive. You don't have to
get rid of fear like fear is just an
inevitable and natural part of any creative process
because you're making yourself vulnerable. But you have to want it always
more than you are afraid of it. And I have to remind myself that
pretty daily when I'm sitting down to work is do I want this? Do I want to tell this
story more than I'm afraid of being judged and
found wanting? And for me, if that's a one day,
the answer is no, that's okay. If I ask that question every day and the answer is
no, I have a problem. >> Thank you. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah. >> Jennifer Abella: Last one? >> Hi, so first of all,
I love your cat ears. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Thank you [laughter]. >> And so yeah, you got,
your story, you have a lot of like really great and
wonderful characters. So I was wondering
what is your process for creating these characters and how have those characters
evolved as your versions of your story has evolved? >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: That's a great question. Probably a really
good one to end on. In some ways, as I've said
before, the three pillars that form all of my
characters are want, fear and what you're
willing to do. But I also, I need them
to feel like people. And the fact is that people
aren't really good or bad. They are a balance of their
strengths and their weaknesses and the ways in which
they're wanting and the people that they care about is one of the reasons I love
the ensemble cast. It's we don't actually
get to know characters through their own perspective. We get to know them through
how they interact with others and how other people see them. And I think that's an
immense, immense gift when you're playing
with perspective. I want them to feel real. And that means, I tend to err
towards super-flawed people because I think flaws
are way more interesting than the strength. I think the flaws are
what make us relate. You know, and the thing is,
the "Vicious" books, "Vicious" and "Vengeful" are books that
are not about superpowers. They're not about
world domination. They're books about jealousy
and about revenge and about fear and very few of us can
relate to world domination. I'm not judging if
you do [laughter]. But most of us have
been slighted. Most of us have felt
left behind. Most of us have felt
underestimated or jealous. And so by really
examining the really human, almost small-scale
flaws that exist in our inner personal
relationships, I am trying to create
people that we relate to, that we see ourselves in. So I don't really, I'm not
interested in archetypes so much as I'm interested in how do I
get to the truth of a person that you are going to read? And even if you come from
a completely different walk of life, you can read Victor
or Eli or Sydney and say, "I've been there and
I know how it feels." >> Okay, thank you so much. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Of course. Great. >> Jennifer Abella: I
want to say thank you -- >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Thank you. >> Jennifer Abella:
-- to you all. [ Applause ] >> Jennifer Abella:
And reminders, we'll be downstairs
signing at 1:30. >> Victoria "V.E." Schwab: Yeah, [inaudible]
are signing at 1:30 and I'll be telling Ghost
Stories and talking about ghosts in like 45 minutes, 35 minutes. So I don't want to say that,
I just want to say thank you for making this first
National Book Festival absolutely wonderful. That's all. [ Applause ]
