Dear Reader, thank you for opening the door I built, and thank you for stepping through. I hope it didn’t give you splinters, and I hope you have a nice view. Katsa and Po—and all the characters who came after them—would be nothing without you.

Q&A with Kristin Cashore

What inspired you to write Graceling?

The truest answer is somewhere between I don’t know and I can’t remember! However, I can say that the whole thing started with the characters. Katsa came into my mind first, and unsurprisingly, she came to me fighting—quarreling, to be more specific—inside my head with another character who grew into Po. Really, Graceling began as conversations in my head between two characters who were furious with each other. My job was to listen to them argue and figure out what they were so upset about, what was going on in their world, what that world was like. Katsa and Po kind of formed themselves for me—at the beginning, I was more of an observer than a creator.

What was the process of writing Graceling? How long did it take you to write?

I quickly learned the difference between planning a book—which is exciting and pleasant—and writing one, which involves a lot of false starts, uncertainty, and plain old labor. The first draft of Graceling took me about a year and a half to write. I plotted everything out beforehand, then tried to use the plot to illuminate character. It was much harder to create Katsa and Po and everyone else on paper than it had been to get to know them in my head! It was like translating them into a different language. My first readers were my sisters, who gave me lots of great feedback. Then, once I was revising with my wonderful editor, Kathy Dawson, I probably spent another half a year pulling it together. It was my first time writing a fantasy, and I was learning a lot of things as I went along. I sort of taught myself to write it through the process of writing it. I made a lot of mistakes, and had my first real experience of throwing out big sections and starting over. It’s funny, because throwing things out and changing things was very painful for me then. I was so emotionally attached to the writing. Several books later, I don’t really have that issue anymore, maybe because I’m quicker to see when something isn’t working.

Who’s your favorite character in the book?

That’s a tough one, because I like different characters for different reasons. Characters who are talkative and fairly open are easier to write than characters who are deceptive or taciturn by nature, so Po has always been one of my favorite characters to write. It’s never been too hard for me to figure out who he is; he’s always happy to show himself to me. I also enjoyed writing my sea captain, Captain Faun, and I enjoyed writing Po’s family, because they’re so expressive and emotional. But I’m going to have to go with Bitterblue. This is probably because I’ve gone on to write an entire other book about her, and more than any of my characters, I relate to her most. She has no special powers, she just tries, as hard as she can, always. I think I worry about her the most, too, as if she’s my daughter or something.