Author Interview with Cary Fagan

An interview with Cary Fagan, multi-award-winning author of over 40 books, including short story collections, picture books, middle-grade novels, and adult novels. Hear about his typically lengthy revision process, his love of texts within texts, and his experiments with narrative voice and how he has come to look differently at the idea of rules for writing fiction. 25 minutes. All ages. A full transcript is available at CabinTales.ca. Show Notes [0:00] Intro [1:20] Interview with Cary Fagan   CF: It’s very hard to be pretentious as a children’s writer. …   [2:45] CA: Have you ever based a story on other stories?... CF: … I can think of picture books I've written where structurally I have learned from some other book and adapted the way that author dealt with how to tell a story and told my own story using some of the things that they had figured out… I would say The Boy in the Box… was really influenced by Dickens. …   [4:35] CA: You’ve written about siblings; did you have siblings as a kid? CF: I have two older brothers… they had no artistic bones in their body, it seems. And it was a way I could define myself that was different from my brothers. … I've written about siblings a lot, but not in a way that's like my brothers. … My Kaspar Snit books, which I wrote early in my career… I was in a classroom and a kid put up his hand and he said, Why is it that the brother and the sister in the book never argue? … And I it was that kid who really made me think about trying to make them more realistic. …   [7:20] CA: Do you have a favorite plot twist…? CF: … The books that I really like, like for example I love Kate DeCamillo…It's really the voice of her books that I love…   [8:05] CA: Do you have any techniques to recommend for building tension…? CF: …Events in your novel need to have consequences. … I like to define my characters by having them make decisions. … All decisions have consequences, and making those consequences potentially bad and uncertain, I think, is what creates the tension. … There is a fallout from it that makes us worry for the character’s future.   [9:50] CA: Do you have a favorite first line…? CF: …I think first lines are important… That does not mean the first line has to be, “As Gerald looked over the cliff’s edge he thought of how his poor parents would miss him.” …. To be honest with you, for me it's much more a matter of getting the voice right. … I probably could name a lot of Dickens’ novels, like David Copperfield…   [10:45] CA: Have you ever opened with dialogue? CF: Yes. Danny who Fell in a Hole opens with … “’It's really nothing to worry about,’ Danny's mother said.” …So yes, I have opened with dialogue. I would say not that often though….   [11:25] CA: Have you had a narrator who talks directly to the reader? CF: Yes. I love thinking about the relationship between the voice of the book and the reader because really, that is your point of intimacy, of contact, is that voice. … I definitely love to think about what that relationship is. Some stories, I feel, have to be in third person because the character just doesn't have the sort of voice where he or she could tell her story, even if it's to an imaginary reader. …   [12:40] CA: And have you ever switched points of view while drafting…? CF: I did that for an adult novel. … The Collected Works of Gretchen Oyster has two voices…. A few years ago I would have probably told you, You can't have this first person voice interrupted without any explanation by a third person voice giving you information that your main character doesn't have… But as I get older, I realize that you can break the rules….   [14:20] CA: Have you ever written an unreliable narrator? CF: Probably not. I like the idea of one. It's really a hard thing to do. …   [15:05] CA: Do you tend to revise as you draft or does it change book by book? CF: It doesn't. I'm extremely consistent. I will start a novel on page one and I'll write it to the end. And then I'll put it down for a while. … I’ll wait at least three months. Sometimes I'll wait a year… I'll create a scheme of what I actually did in my first draft and I’ll note the scenes that I like and I’ll note the scenes that I don't think are working… And then I will write a second draft by starting on page one and rewriting the entire thing. And then I'll do that 3-6 times. I used to do it like 12 times. …You know which draft I love is draft 3… the third draft is often the one that gets it to the point where I think, Yes, this is actually a book that I'm going to want to publish eventually. …   [18:00] CA. And do you read your work out loud at any point in your writing? CF: Yes I do, wearing funny hats often. …Unfortunately we're not going into schools right now, but I will read something new to the kids. … It is really nice to have an audience.   [18:50] CA: Did you tell stories ...