An Interview With Trudi Canavan
Tolkien And Dreams as Inspiration
Was writing something you have always wanted to do?
No. As a child I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to be. At one point I wanted to be a potter, at another a calligrapher. After seeing The Empire Strikes Back I decided I wanted to be a film maker. A wise adult suggested I write my ideas down. I must admit, I was drawing my ideas more than writing them. But when I read The Lord of the Rings at fourteen that desire to tell stories fixed itself as a determination to make up one as grand as Tolkien’s – though I hoped it wouldn’t take twelve years to write it.
Did writing fantasy come naturally or was there a certain amount of genre discovery involved before you found your niche?
I’ve always loved stories that contained a supernatural element, beginning with fairy tales and bible stories and then moving on to children’s and young adult fiction. By the time I was a teenager I was reading adult science fiction and fantasy in preference to anything else.
What does fantasy as a medium afford you that another genre or style might not?
There is a ‘what if’ factor to fantasy that fascinates me. It might seem contradictory, but I find the supernatural element to a story is enhanced by making the world feel as real as possible. With the Black Magician Trilogy I started by the ‘what if’ of magic existing, then went on to consider how a human society might develop if it did, but must be taught by someone who already had a grasp of it. Anyone with magic would be powerful, therefore of the highest class, and if there was a choice they’d prefer to teach novices of their own class. So suddenly I have a story that explores class issues as well as part of the consequence of magic existing.
Who are some of the authors that influenced your writing?
Obviously Tolkien! Ursula LeGuin was an early influence, then I was lucky to be one of those teenagers who eagerly read each book in David Edding’s Belgariad as they were released. That series taught me that fantasy could be fun. Then a friend gave me Raymond Feist’s Magician, which was probably the first book that contained a society not based on a European one, but which wasn’t a retelling of a myth or an alternate history. At the same time I was also reading Tanith Lee’s small but intense books – quite a contrast to the Big Fat Fantasy.
Where did the original inspiration for the Black Magician trilogy come from?
The first chapter was inspired by a dream I had after watching a late-night news report about the authorities in Barcelona gathering up the homeless and bussing them out to other cities so things would look nice for the Olympics. It gave me the character of Sonea, a poor girl who I realised was the perfect character to upset that class system I mentioned earlier.
As a writer, how did you make the switch mentally from having written the trilogy to putting yourself in a position of imagining a prequel (The Magician's Apprentice, 2009) to the trilogy?
By the time I’d written, rewritten, polished, rewritten, polished, rewritten, polished and proofed the original trilogy I’d been working on it for seven years and toward the end I was looking forward to sending the last book out of the door!
I was convinced I would never write about those characters again. But as I was nearing the end an idea popped into my head for a sequel and wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote down an outline. Then later the idea of writing a prequel set around the events of the Sachakan War crept up on me, and by then I had come to accept that there were more stories set in this world that needed to be told. Fortunately by the time I’d finished the Age of the Five series I’d had enough of a break from the Black Magician Trilogy to recover my enthusiasm for that world and its characters.
Trudi Canavan talks about writing trilogies and why the economic downturn is not necessarily bad for the publishing industry
Magician's Apprentice
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