![]() I'd never seen anything like that, so it went into the book. We saw this place where a river just erupted out of the side of a mountain. But we couldn't go up to the top of the cone in Rincón because the volcano was active, and it was producing all this poisonous gas. We worked at Olympic National Park where the ranger station was thirty miles in, from any direction. It's beautiful and unlike a lot of the national parks there that are very structured, very tame. We had gone to Rincón de la Vieja Volcano National Park, which is not the most visited national park. And that's when I started writing The Girl Who Drank the Moon. We speak Spanish, so we could just take buses on our own and find cool oddball places to stay. Then my husband and I - we had been married for fifteen years at that point, and we decided to finally go on our honeymoon. I'm a nature-y girl, so there usually is a lot of the physicality of the landscape in my books. I think we should follow The Witch's Boy with another fantasy." But I didn't have the landscape in my head yet. I had a different manuscript that was much more realistic, but I'd mentioned this one to my editor, Elise Howard, and she was like, "Write that now. I was going to let it sit for another year. I wasn't going to write the book when I did. RS: Where did you get the landscape for the world? Geographically, where does that come from? And there are all kinds of things that don't end up in the book at all. RS: I would imagine you have to have a good amount of faith in some of the things that occur to you. KB: There's no open document, no notebook, nothing. ![]() RS: But this is before you have an actual plot? And the structure of magic in this world, that bit about gathering starlight in the fingertips. I think that idea was one of the first things I put in the box, actually. ![]() How we tell stories and who is telling the stories and how things are framed, what's included and what's left out. How power structures persist and maintain themselves, especially those that are unjust - these things are interesting to me. The power structure of the town was one of my first entry points into the story. RS: Where did that sentence come from? Did it grow out of something else? Tell me. KB: And that's not even the grisliest thing I've ever written. RS: "That baby isn't going to sacrifice itself, after all." RS: I have to give you the award for the grisliest sentence of the year. If there's one sentence that's particularly memorable to me, or just feels good to say, I'll write that down on a little scrap of paper and stick it in the box. Well, maybe, but it starts with an actual box. Not like a metaphorical think-outside-of-the box. I'll write the title or names of the characters as I think of them on the box and start putting things into it. KB: It keeps me from thinking my knee hurts or I'm hot and sweaty and when am I going to be done or why did I go on this longer route? But now what I do when I'm in the thinking process of my books is make a box. RS: Two pages in your head? That's a lot of words. KB: I used to write down all of what I'd thought of while I was running, because I can usually carry two to three pages of text in my head. Sometimes, though, an idea seems really brilliant, but once you're not running it doesn't have quite the same pizzazz it had while endorphins were racing through your body. I'll find a sentence that pleases me, and then I'll move it around in my head until it feels right, and then start to add sentence after sentence, fitting them together. I often will compose fiction while I go running. I had a good sense of the texture of the language, how it would feel in the mouth to read it out loud, how it would feel in the ear to listen to it. I spent time trying to inhabit the characters' bodies in my imagination. For this particular book, I knew a lot of stuff before I even put down a word. ![]() Kelly Barnhill: With all of my books, I think about them for a long time before I begin writing. Roger Sutton: Where did this story start? Reading the book in preparation for this interview I was struck by just how many balls it keeps in the air (see below) and I had to laugh as Kelly and I started talking, because she is exactly the same way. The girl of the title is Luna, found - and enmagicked - as a baby by Xan, a wise woman centuries older than she looks. The Girl Who Drank the Moon is Kelly Barnhill's fourth fantasy novel, none of them a sequel, God bless her.
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