Maggie Stiefvater Keynote: A Thief & An Artist, Stealing Stories from Life

The magical Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater is nothing short of astonishing. She's the author of many YA novels, including the bestselling Raven Boys series and the Printz Honor Award-winning SCORPIO RACES.

She talked to us about her life as a writer—which has more dimensions than that single word contains.

"I'm not sure if my job description is actually writer," she said. "It should be thief. Or maybe, if I'm being kind, artist."

"I used to think that my ideal job was to write. To make up stories. To lie for a living." Now that she's a professional writer, knows that she observes, steals, and stylizes for a living.

When she writes, it's not so much that she is creating new things out of nothing, but that she steals from the world and makes it her own. She used to be a professional portrait artist, something she had to practice a lot (much like writing). One challenge of being a portrait artist was that people would move. She learned to look for people being still.

She found one once in a window seat on an airplane—the seat she wanted—and she sketched him with delight. And then she found out he was watching her draw. She teased his life story out of him, or at least part. Specifically the hand part. He had an oddly shaped hand, so he told her the story of how he broke it. On someone's face.

He said he was defending his sister's honor, and she listened to him with her mind on record, as she planned to steal him and his soft southern accent.

Over the years, her thefts have gone from the surface much deeper. Faithful, accurate renderings aren't what she wants. These are mere copies. She wants the essence. The soul. Why that guy threw that punch, or why he never threw one earlier. His broken hand was broken for a reason. He could have been, and probably was, lying.

The truth: A boy had once lost his temper, much to his shame. He had to look at the memory of that moment every single day. Everything else was just details. Just noise. "That was the soul," she said. "And that was what I stole."

He became Adam Parrish in THE RAVEN BOYS.

She talked to us about what the old writing advice "write what you know" really means, charming us with the stories of her childhood horse, a former racehorse that wasn't ready to retire and very well could have killed her. This fed into THE SCORPIO RACES, a book about vicious horses that are very likely to eat anyone who tries to ride them.

The thief then hands the job over to the artist, who understands what details to keep, and what details to cut.  "If I do my thievery well, if I steal the truth and not the details, and then I add the details back in, then I end up with a book that is not just true, but specific, and in only the way I can write it," she said.

She said her most Maggie book of all is THE RAVEN BOYS, one rich with things she's pilfered from her childhood, and literally about someone who can summon things from his dreams, just as she summons from her own.

Maggie Stiefvater: Building Characters with Heart

Thank you to Marquita Hockaday for the photo. 

Maggie Stiefvater is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the novels Shiver, Linger, and Forever. Her novel The Scorpio Races was named a Michael L. Printz Honor book. She has also written the Raven Cycle series among many books for young adults.

For Maggie her primary concern, above everything else, is character.

“For me what really pulls a book through are the humans.”

She notes that what is true for her might not be true for you.

She sees herself not a good writer but a better thief. She can’t create anything from scratch, not characters that actually breath and walk on their own.

She starts with people who have a real human heart and sees it more as creating portraits of people.

You need to know the rules of character building. You can't go around breaking rules without knowing the rules you're breaking. If you know the rules, and break them anyways, then it’s experimenting.

Some rules: 

·      The narrator should be a character who shifts the plot the most. (This rule is very central to commercial fiction.)

·      The narrator should be the character who changes the most. An intriguing character is one who is both internally and externally active.

·      Characters should be sympathetic and relatable ( a rule Maggie disagrees with). You should understand why a character does what they do, but it doesn’t have to be choices you would make.

·      It’s bad writing to write yourself into a character (Maggie also disagrees with this). She believes accidentally writing yourself in is bad writing, but doing it on purpose is creating a portrait of yourself. 

Maggie creates characters subtractively: when she's stealing from real life it’s often a matter of subtraction. From The Scorpio Races she stole from her brothers. One of the characters is very liked by readers, the other is not. So she has one happy brother, one not so much. But if she wrote them exactly as they are they’d be all over the place, so she focuses on the first idea she gets of them, developing the character from there.