y insightful. When I mentioned this to her, she looked slightly amused and explained that writing was most of what she did. She scripted her videos, then recorded them. The scripting was the lion’s share of the work.
She pointed out some things that needed work in the story, some rough spots, some logical incongruities. She pointed out the parts she liked, too, and talked about the story as a whole.
I should mention that by this point in the evening, I was slightly drunk. A bit of a rarity for me. But since we were hanging out in a bar, it seemed polite to buy a drink. Then I had a drink because Vi was having another, and I wanted to be social. Then I had another because I was a little nervous about meeting Vi for the first time. Then I had another because I was a little nervous about my story.
Well, let’s be honest, I was more than a little nervous about the story. I knew, deep in my heart of hearts, that my new-wrought story was a train wreck. A colossal, smoldering mess of a train wreck.
“It doesn’t do the things a story is supposed to do,” I said to her. “A story should have dialogue, action, conflict. A story should have more than one character. I’ve written a thirty-thousand-word vignette!”
Vi said she liked it.
“Well, yes,” I said. “I like it too. But that doesn’t matter. You see, people expect certain things from a story,” I explained. “You can leave out one or two if you step carefully, but you can’t ditch all of them. The closest thing I have to an action scene is someone making soap. I spend eight pages describing someone making soap. Eight pages of a sixty-page story making soap. That’s something a crazy person does.”
As I’ve said, I was really worried about the story. And perhaps more than slightly drunk. And I was finally getting something off my chest that I hadn’t really shared with anyone before.
“People are going to read this and be pissed,” I said.
Vi looked at me with serious eyes. “I felt more of an emotional connection to the inanimate objects in this story than I usually feel toward entire characters in other books,” she explained. “It’s a good story.”
But I wasn’t having any of it. I shook my head, not even looking up at her. “Readers expect certain things. People are going to read this and be disappointed. It doesn’t do what a normal story is supposed to do.”
Then Vi said something I will always remember. “Fuck those people,” she said. “Those people have stories written for them all the time. What about me? Where’s the story for people like me?”
Her voice was passionate and hard and slightly angry. She might have slammed her hand down on the table at this point. I like to think she slammed her hand down on the table. Let’s say she did.
“Let those other people have their normal stories,” Vi said. “This story isn’t for them. This is my story. This story is for people like me.”
It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.
I did not mean to write this story. Or rather, I did not mean to have this story about Auri turn out the way it did.
I started writing it midway through 2012. I meant for it to be a short story for the Rogues anthology edited by George Martin and Gardner Dozois. I’d anticipated it being a trickster story and figured Auri would make a nice complement to the more traditional scoundrel-type rogues who would no doubt show up in that book.
But the story didn’t turn out the way I’d expected. It was stranger than a simple trickster tale, and Auri herself was more full of secrets and mysteries than I had guessed.
Eventually the Auri story hit 14,000 words, and I abandoned it. It was too long. Too odd. And beside all that, it had become clear it wasn’t right for the anthology. Auri was no mere trickster. Most importantly, this wasn’t a rogue story at all.
Despite the fact that I was already over deadline, Martin and Gardner were very kind and gave me some extra time. So I wrote “The Lightning Tree” instead, a story featuring Bast. A much better fit for the anthology.
But Auri’s story was still crawling around in my head, and I realized the only way to get it out was to finish the thing. Besides, I owed Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press a novella from way back. He’d published my two not-for-children picture books, The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed, and the sequel, The Dark of Deep Below. So I knew he wasn’t afraid of a story that was a little strange.
So I kept writing the story, and it kept getting longer, and stranger. I could tell by this point that it wasn’t any sort of normal. It wasn’t doing the things a proper sort of story should do. It was, by all traditional metrics, a mess.
But here’s the thing. I liked it. It was weird and wrong and tangled and missing so many things that a story is supposed to need. But it kinda worked. Not only was I learning a lot about Auri and the Underthing, but the story itself had a sort of sweetness to it.
Whatever reason, I let the story develop according to its own desire. I didn’t force it into a different shape or put anything into it just because it was supposed to be there. I decided to let it be itself. At least for now. At least until I made it to the end. Then I knew I’d probably have to wield the editorial hatchet, performing cruel surgery in order to turn it into something normal. But not yet.
You see, I’d actually been down this road before. The Name of the Wind does a lot of things it’s not supposed to. The prologue is a laundry list of things you should never do as a writer. But despite all that, it works. Sometimes a story works because it’s different. Maybe this was that kind of story. . . .
But when I wrote the eight-page scene with Auri making soap I realized that was not the case. I was writing a trunk story. For those of you who don’t know the term, a trunk story is something you write, then when it’s finished you put the manuscript in the bottom of a trunk and forget about it. It’s not the sort of story you can sell to a publisher. Not the sort of story people want to read. It’s the sort of story that you write, then on your deathbed you remember it and ask a close friend to burn all your unpublished papers. Right after they clear your browser history, of course.
I knew Bill at Sub Press was delightfully open to strange projects, but this? No. No, this was a story I had to write to get out of my head. I had to write it to learn about Auri and the world. (Which is named Temerant, by the way, did you catch that?)
Simply said, I knew this story was for me. It wasn’t for other people. Sometimes that happens.
But still, I liked it. It was strange and sweet. I’d finally found Auri’s voice. I’m rather fond of her. And I’d learned a lot about writing in the third person, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.
When it was finished, I sent it to my agent, Matt, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a writer. I told him I was going to offer it to Bill, but that I didn’t expect Bill would actually want it, as it was, narratively speaking, a train-wreck.
But Matt read it and liked it.
He gave me a call and said we should send it to Betsy, my editor at DAW.
“She isn’t going to want this,” I said. “It’s a mess. It’s the story a crazy person writes.”
Matt reminded me that, according to my contracts, Betsy had right of first refusal on any future books I wrote. “Besides,” he said. “It’s just polite to loop her in. She’s your primary publisher.”
I shrugged and told him to go ahead and send it. Slightly embarrassed to think of Betsy reading it.
But then Betsy read it and liked it. She really liked it. She wanted to publish it.
That’s when I started to sweat.
In the many months since my conversation with Vi Hart, I’ve revised this story roughly eighty times. (This isn’t unusual for me. In fact, it’s a little on the light side.)
As part of this process, I’ve given this story to about three dozen beta readers, gathering feedback to help me in my endless, obsessive revisions. And one comment people have made over and over again and again, phrased many different ways, is this:
“I don’t know what other people will think. They probably won’t like it. But I really enjoyed it.”
It’s strange to me how many people have said some version of that. Hell, I just now realize I said something similar myself a page or two ago in this author’s note.
The truth is, I’m fond of Auri. I have a special place in my heart for this strange, sweet, shattered girl. I love her more than just a little.
I think it’s because we’re both somewhat broken, in our own odd ways. More importantly, we’re both aware of it. Auri knows she isn’t all quite proper true inside, and this makes her feel very much alone.
I know how she feels.
But that itself is not unusual. I am the author, after all. I’m supposed to know how the character feels. It wasn’t until I started gatheri