(Interviewed by Caroline Stickel and Rachel Frei)
Back in December, we had the opportunity of a lifetime for a couple of Star Wars fans: an interview with Claudia Gray, author of six Star Wars novels, as well as the Spellcaster and Evernight series. We talked about her journey to becoming a New York Times bestselling author, her hit novel Star Wars: Bloodline, and her new releases.
Let’s start by talking about your path to writing. When did you decide to pursue becoming an author?
A very long time after I began writing for fun. I was always very interested in writing and in books, so I always thought it would be very cool to write a book, but I went to a very small high school, and it didn’t have any creative writing options. When I got to college, there still weren’t tons of options, and also, nobody was going, “Yeah, that’s a good career choice. You will not be living in your parents garage if you do that. That’ll be great.” My parents weren’t unsupportive—they weren’t discouraging—but there also wasn’t any big push to kind of go for that, so I never did.
I might have not written at all except that, in 1993, I turned on one of the first episodes of The X-Files. And I was immediately seized with the conviction that, as all right-thinking people know, Mulder and Scully should kiss. In ’94, that was the year that sort of mass use of the internet properly began. There were a whole lot of people out there who also thought they should kiss, and we were able to talk to each other, and we could write stories in which this happened. I got super into it, and those first stories were really, really bad. Then I got really into both the X Men and Buffy the Vampire Slayer around the same time, and really began writing tons and tons and tons of fanfiction. I mean, easily a million words of fanfiction.
I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and things went from being—and let me be clear about this, the first stories were really bad—to being okay, to being kind of decent, to “I think this is pretty good.” Then I had my first idea for a novel-length fiction. And I’d always been like, “How would you ever make up enough stuff to be in a book?” But the first time I had that idea, I knew it was that much story. And that was when I was about 31, I guess. It still took me several years to really sit down and work on it professionally after that, but I did. I sold my first book in 2007. There was still a lot of fanfiction being written for some time after that. Literally 90 or 95 percent of my training was just writing those stories and getting used to reactions and sort of seeing what hooked people in and knowing who I am as a writer, which is a really key element of writing. The rest I kind of learned after turning professional, which is maybe not ideal, but then again, you’re always learning, regardless.
Yeah, practice is important. And fanfiction is great practice!
You have to practice it. You have to. I think a lot of people get discouraged because their first few things don’t look the way they hoped they were going to look. But, in the world of fanfiction, you realize: “Mine is not the worst thing out there.” You really would have to be scraping hard to hit that. Those are usually people who are, like, 11 and English is their fourth language. And you’re still like, “I’m impressed. I know one language and enough Italian to order food.”
At what point did you feel like you’d “made it” as an author? Was it when you sold your first book, or was it later?
In some respects, I’m still waiting on that, which is ridiculous at this point. I mean, I sold my first book, what, 14 years ago? And I’ve been doing this full-time now for 11 years. You know, I’ve been on the New York Times Bestseller List, but to feel like “Yes, I’ve got this”?
I quit my job when I knew that I could support myself by writing alone for 2 years. I was like, that’s enough time to justify giving this a go. And, you know, I don’t think I’ve ever known farther out than 2 years that it’s going to work. There isn’t really a point where you can just sort of kick back and relax, unless you’ve written The Hunger Games or something. I heartily support Suzanne Collins burning her piles of money for warmth whenever she wants—those books are awesome. But unless you’re one of the really rare people who hits something like that, you really have to stay on it. And then, of course, some of the few people who could kick back, who’ve actually made it to that level, like a Stephen King or a John Grisham or whatever, they don’t stop. They keep on going.
What’s your writing schedule like? Like, in a day, or maybe just through the course of a book?
I don’t have a single routine. I mean, some people really do need that to be productive, and it’s a perfectly valid way to go. I do better with periods of really, really intense writing and absorption and periods where I’m very much out of it. Or only doing a little bit of research a day or sort of polishing up something. Now, that said, in the last couple of months before a deadline, it intensifies a fair bit. On deadline, I might work 10:00 to 1:00 and then about 2:00 to 5:00 or 6:00, and then into the evening further if I have to. Really, it is just a whole lot of time, you, and your laptop. And that’s it. The year I was writing four books, I realized I was painting my fingernails all the time, because it was the only part of my view that changed at all. Otherwise, it was just laptop, keyboard, laptop, keyboard. I’d paint wacky colors on my nails, so there was at least some visual interest in my life.
One of your Star Wars novels, Bloodline, bridges the gap between episodes six and seven of Star Wars. You describe in detail the New Republic that Leia helps establish. How much of that description did you draw from other Star Wars works about the New Republic, and how much of it did you create on your own?
Usually they give you sort of a two- to three-sentence prompt. You know, “tell us ‘this’.” With Bloodline, they gave me a page and a half. And it spelled out what was going on politically in a lot of detail. A lot of that apparently came from Rian Johnson, who directed The Last Jedi. I think originally there was going to be more about that [Bloodline’s plot] in The Last Jedi. And it played on some stuff that was going to be in The Force Awakens, but was cut from The Force Awakens. The political situation I didn’t much make up, and it pretty much just came from that one source. There were a few things in it that I thought, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s the way I’d have done it,” but that’s part of working in another universe. There are only so many Legos in the box, so you play with the Legos. Doesn’t mean you can’t build your own thing.
When I read Bloodline, I felt that you handled Leia’s character perfectly. Was it easy or difficult to write about a character that someone else created?
Since I’ve been writing fanfic for so long, most of my experience has been writing characters somebody else created. The thing I would say that’s the best thing about writing Princess Leia is also the worst thing about writing Princess Leia, which is that everybody knows who she is. Pretty much everybody loves her, and everybody has an idea in their head of what she’s like. And all of those things are a little bit different. So it was really about touching base with what was on the screen, the personality that comes through the events, and also—I mean, it was interesting for me to get to do Bloodline, because I love Star Wars, but it has not been awash in the viewpoints of women over 40. You’re not swimming in that. And it was interesting for me to think of this character who’d been a hero to me during my girlhood, and now [in Bloodline] she’s just a few years older than I am now. What do those events look like when you look back with this different perspective? You’ve had these experiences like, “You’ve won the big war!” And it . . . didn’t fix everything. And “You got to be with the love of your life!” And . . . it’s a little complicated, even though you love each other—sometimes you don’t know what he’s talking about. I guess it was just about trying to walk the line between adding that sort of realism that comes with age and a more layered outlook with that powerful sense of right and wrong that she has [and] that dynamic spirit that she has. All of that is still there, even though her viewpoint has matured a bit.
I really liked how you built a relationship between Leia and Ransolm Casterfo, a younger male senator. They’re on opposite sides of the political aisle, but they put aside their differences to work together, which I thought showed Leia’s maturity.
Actually, Ransolm was really a pivotal character for me. One of the things that they said they wanted for the book was no Luke, no Han, [and] no Ben (Kylo Ren). And the reason they wanted that is in the previous EU, the Legends series, Leia kind of wound up doing the boring thing. You know, the guys were having the big adventure . . . and she was back in the Senate having arguments with people.
Every character is defined somewhat by their relationships. And this is a woman [Leia] who, despite being very strong, very independent, very self-directed—she’s a mom without a son, she’s a wife without a husband, she’s a sister without a brother, and she’s very much without fathers, as we know. And Casterfo, he had those ties to the Empire, which hearkened back to Vader. He’s sort of brash and idealistic, which is very Luke. He’s younger, like Ben. And he’s someone who can argue with her and drive her to distraction, like Han. And it was sort of a way of connecting those elements with her character with a guy who wasn’t another Luke or another Han, but his own character, but was able to bring that all together.
Last question: What are the most challenging parts of writing Star Wars books?
The most challenging thing—and I know this also from fanfiction—[is that] there’s a big difference between writing open canon and closed canon. Closed canon is “the show is over.” You know everything that’s going to happen to those characters; nothing’s going to change. But if you have an open canon, it’s much more dynamic, but anything is subject to change at any time. And with Star Wars, the hardest thing isn’t getting caught up with what’s already out there, it’s staying caught up with what is being produced at the same time. Some of which I can’t know about. There is, of course, Story Group within Lucasfilm whose job it is to keep it all on the same page. But the fact is, all of us—TV writers, book writers, movie writers, comics people, etc.—all of us have to be off working on our own for a while, and we don’t know what detail may turn out to be a huge conflict. The hardest thing about it is that. The landscape is always changing, and it’s not always changing in ways you can remotely predict.
What can you tell us about your new books coming out in January and May?
The book coming out in January is called The Fallen Star. It is my sixth Star Wars book. It’s part of the High Republic initiative, which is set about 200 years (roughly) before the Phantom Menace, and it’s when the Jedi Order is at its height. It pulls together a whole lot of the plotlines from the other High Republic material, and sort of brings [the plotlines] towards this big suspenseful conclusion which we call “Phase One.” (We have to be very secretive about these things, obviously.)
That will be coming out very early in January, and then I think the first Tuesday in May I have my first non-Star Wars book for adults. Continuing with my tradition of playing in other people’s sandboxes, it is a Jane Austen–Agatha Christie mashup called The Murder of Mr. Wickham (which I had so much fun writing, I cannot even begin to tell you). The characters from all six [Jane Austen] novels are at a house party together. The Knightleys are there, the Wentworths are there. They’re all there. And [as] the villains both in Austen and in Christie always have . . . their evil seems to have touched everybody in some way, so Wickham turns out to have more connections that haven’t endeared him to the company. He turns up dead, the suspects are our characters, and the sleuths are the daughter of Catherine and Henry Tilney from Northanger Abbey and the son of Darcy and Elizabeth. They’re the two people who have rock-solid proof that it wasn’t them, so they have to set to work to figure out who it is. And I had so much fun doing this that I cannot even tell you.