On uninvited characters

Happy March! It’s finally spring, my favourite season, and I’m looking forward to taking a bit of a break to enjoy it. By the time you read this, I will likely have handed in the revisions of two books I’ve been working on—one being Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, my standalone adult fantasy about, well, a magical cat shelter—and the other a not-yet-announced YA fantasy. I’m very proud of both of them, and I’m looking forward to sharing more details in upcoming newsletters, including some behind the scenes info. Unsurprisingly, writing an entire book about cats was pure serotonin in many ways, and I hope you’ll feel similarly once Agnes is out (next spring, most likely).

Also, thank you SO MUCH for your support of the third Emily Wilde book. It made a bunch of bestseller lists, including the New York Times and USA Today. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again—it’s largely due to reader support that this series ever BECAME a series, so thank you again. Please keep tagging me in your photos; I love to see them.

On uninvited characters

Warning: spoilers ahead for Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands and the first half of Compendium of Lost Tales.

I’ve been thinking about uninvited characters a lot recently. That is to say, characters who seem to appear out of nowhere—they weren’t in my outline, or transplanted in from some abandoned manuscript (which happens! Sometimes an idea is weak but a character is strong, so that character just has to hang out in my brain for a bit before I find a better home for them.) I simply started writing a scene, and there they were. I find this phenomenon especially interesting because these are the characters who often end up being my favourites, and/or fan favourites.

It was Poe who made me think of this. I believe I’ve seen more fan art of Poe than I have of any other character save Emily and Wendell, which I find fascinating, particularly since there’s a lot about Poe that is quite off-putting (overly pointy fingers in particular). In my outline, regarding the scene where Emily meets Poe, all I had written down was, “Emily visits the spring and sees evidence of faerie activity.” Once I started writing that scene, though, Poe was there, fully-formed—his tree-home bakery; his obsession with wearing dead animals; his shyness, equalled only by his creepiness.

The other Emily books have their uninvited characters too. My outline for Map of the Otherlands said nothing about Callum and Lord Taran. (In fact, my outline was very rough regarding the entirety of Emily’s journey into Wendell’s kingdom. “There she abducts Wendell’s cat and fools his mother” was the whole of it.)

Callum and Taran, though, have been delightful characters to write—Taran particularly; Compendium of Lost Tales would be a different book without his formidable presence and equally formidable snark. As for the uninvited character who appeared in Compendium of Lost Tales, that honour goes to The Lady in the Crimson Cloak, a wonderfully deranged and disturbing faerie (those being the most entertaining faeries to write about).

It's amusing to me that all the uninvited characters in the Emily Wilde series are of the Folk; it’s of course very faerie-like of them to pop up out of nowhere and demand my attention. But it’s a common occurrence—there’s an animal sidekick in my upcoming YA fantasy (which I’ll hopefully be able to talk about soon!) who has to be one of my favourite animal sidekicks of all time, and again—he just appeared. And the story would be diminished without his presence.

I think my takeaway from all this is that it’s important to leave space for uninvited characters to materialize. If an outline is too rigid, it can block these serendipitous moments of inspiration, which can shift or add colour to the tone of a story, oftentimes for the better.

Q&A

I answer reader-submitted questions at the end of each newsletter; you can email yours to heather@heatherfawcettbooks.com or leave it in the comments.

Q: Do you really think Wendell, being Faerie, would say, “Good Lord?” Has he spent too much time in our world?

Ha! Maybe. Though I don’t think Wendell ascribes much personal meaning to the phrase and is merely imitating the expressions of native English speakers (he, of course, speaks English as a second language). That said, I find the question of how the Folk view religion an interesting one, given that some stories describe them as fallen angels, and it’s something I may address in the future!

Q: How did you come up with the titles of the Emily Wilde books?

They were honestly some of the easiest titles I’ve ever come up with. Each is just the title of whatever research project Emily is focusing on during the events of that particular book. I’ve actually been lucky in that I came up with all of my books’ titles myself (sometimes titles are selected by the publisher), but I was almost certain my publisher would ask me to change Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries to something less unwieldy (or at least something with fewer vowels). But my editor liked it!

Q: If someone with no education in creative writing wanted to write fiction, what book would you recommend to read in order to get some fundamentals before they begin? Something textbook like.

I’m planning to devote the next newsletter to this topic, something along the lines of “my top ten craft books.” I read at least one or two new ones each year (I like to keep learning), so I have quite a list. A few have definitely helped me improve my writing, so hopefully they can do the same for others.

What I’m reading

Deadlines got to me again this past month, and I finished only two books, sadly. Both fantasies, both great—Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher and Ten Thousand Stitches by Olivia Atwater. Though I did at least make a start on a third, which I’ve heard is a really fun read, That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon, by Kimberly Lemming.

Random inspiring thing

Do you like birds? (Who doesn’t like birds?) I’ve been addicted to an app called Merlin, created by Cornell University, which identifies birds based on their calls. Bonus: bird names are often delightful (my recent favourite is the yellow-rumped warbler).