Fran Wilde Interview, Fall 2016

Editor's note: I've grouped similar questions and replies from Fran Wilde's visit to class in March 2016. Many thanks to Kate for her notes.How did you go about constructing the City and its culture?

FW: World-building comes down to a couple of big things: structure, issues of line of supply and how do they get it, what are they eating, the pressures from outside forces.

This is a very superstitious society. To put [a bone tower's collapse] onto luck is a way to say "that won't happen to me."

The hardest part was from outside to center it on Kirit. I began to think about what kind of society would make people fight to the death for the right to speak. This is a scarcity society, a slow-burn scarcity society.

You have to pitch your publishers [because] people want it a certain way. You'll get a letter, sometimes a multipage letter, on how everything in your world must make sense.

It is [also] a lot of fun to say "giant carnivorous squid." I wanted something that could come at you from any direction.

What influences and inspirations did you draw from?

FW: Paradise Lost always comes up. [Other influences include] Flannery O'Connor's story "Everything that Rises Must Converge" and Gerald Manley Hopkins' poem "The Windhover."

Would you call Updraft Young Adult Lit?

FW: I wrote a novel that needed to be told. I didn't want to write Hunger Games in the sky. Your story is going to be different from someone else's, so write it.

I like to take different forms and blur boundaries. There's a lot more gray area between young-adult and adult literature than publishers and advertisers make it seem. There isn't as much of a wall between this as there is between good literature and bad literature.

What type of research have you done for the world-building in Updraft?

FW: I had to do a lot of high-altitude research. I also did research on movable wings and how long we have been trying to fly. It has been 2,000 years.

I found it interesting that you chose a young woman as your protagonist and had a boy as her sidekick. How might these roles serve as a lesson to younger readers?

FW: My biggest choice was who would be the main character. . . .Ezarit is one of my favorite characters.

[Main character] Kirit is kind of a butthead. You don't give Kirit a diplomatic task. I like that she's a female and allowed to be impulsive and not nice. You don't see female friendship a lot in fantasy and you don't see characters a lot where they are more than a love interest. I wanted to write those kind of complex characters.

Several questions followed about writing a novel and how one finishes writing one.

FW: The advantage of writing in first person is that you can only know what your characters know. I wanted to write an epic. I had to keep it focused on one character.

Always let things sit even though when you finish something before sharing it. . . . [because when you are done] you feel like the smartest person in the world.