Marie Brennan talked to Suite 101 about dopplegangers, folklore, and the art of writing fiction.
Marie Brennan's award-winning fiction includes two fantasy novels released by Warner in 2006, Doppleganger, and Warrior and Witch. Currently pursuing a PhD in anthropology and folklore, she draws upon her background to inform both her fiction and nonfiction works, and has written several columns for Strange Horizons. Her website appears here.
Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch depend on the concept of twins - are you a twin? If not, are they especially significant to you?
I'm not; I have one older brother, but that's it. The closest thing I have to a twin is my best friend. Everyone assumes she's my sister, and my family has more or less adopted her anyway. She and I have joked that these stories are somehow a reflection of the two of us, but if that's true, it's only on a subconscious level; I certainly didn't think about that at the time. (I started with the notion that Doppelganger would make a cool title for something, and worked backward from there.)
The idea of elemental magic is one a lot of fantasy writers have played with -- how did you come up with yours?
One of the many little tidbits squirreled away in odd corners of my brain was that Eastern cultures generally have a five-element system (as opposed to the Western four-element one). They allocate them differently, but I thought of the Western four plus Spirit, and then changed Spirit to Void. Where *that* idea came from, I couldn't tell you.
Your background is in anthropology and folklore - did that background inform the books?
It informs everything I write. My academic background strongly influences the way I focus on worldbuilding in general, and more specifically, it feeds me a constant stream of interesting notions. My first writing success was my short story "Calling into Silence" winning the Asimov Award (now the Dell Award); that one grew directly out of reading ethnographies on African spirit possession. To pick an example specific to the books, the idea that infants aren't born with souls comes, heavily modified, from something I think I once heard (and probably misremembered) about Zuni cosmology. I could probably come up with something similar for every short story and novel I've ever written.
Is there a particular area of foklore that influences your writing more than others, or that you're particularly drawn to? Why?
Frankly, I'm a dilettante. I don't have truly in-depth knowledge of any one area, but I've got some familiarity with the folklore, history, mythology, etc. of a bunch of cultures: classical, Viking, Japanese, Egyptian, Indian, Celtic, Mesoamerican, medieval European, and so on. I'll get deeply into something for a while, then move on. I'm not sure what attracts me to any one area at a time, other than a fascination with the unending diversity of things people do and believe.
You've been compiling a list of fantasy books based on pre-existing narratives, such as the Bible and the Arthurian mythos. Any plans to write one of your own? If not, which of those narratives do you think would be the most fun to play around with?
I've got one novel written but unsold that's a retelling of a Viking saga (sort of -- maybe more "inspired by" than "based on"). I've done more short-story length retellings, though, maybe because a lot of that source material is kind of short and simple compared to what we expect out of modern novels. My brain seems more inclined to play with them in miniature than expand them out to novel-length. If I do more large-scale work with anything, I'll probably aim for a source that's less well-traveled. I don't feel a need to add to the world's stock of fairy-tale and Arthurian books. (Though it's funny I should say that, given the number of fairy-tale short stories I've done.)
What was the process of getting your book published like for you? What surprised you most about the experience?
What was the process like? Long. They're not kidding when they tell you it can take years. I wrote Doppelganger when I was 19, and didn't sell it until I was 24. In the meantime, I wrote and submitted more novels, so it isn't like that was my only shot, either. You really do need the kind of attitude that picks itself up off the floor after a rejection and says, okay, what now? Where do I go from here? To me, that isn't quite the same thing as being thick-skinned, since I didn't get many nasty rejections telling me I couldn't write my way out of a paper bag. What probably surprised me the most was how quickly everything moved once it started moving. Four weeks to the day after I sent the manuscript to my editor, she called and told me to get an agent. That took a couple of days, maybe a week, and then a month later I had a contract. Which may sound slow, but I was used to waiting nine months or more to get a form rejection, so after five years of that, this seemed quick.
You've written about archaic grammar and its use in writing. Are there other devices that you often see misused in fantasy?
Oh god. Infodump prologues, Special Destinies, magical mcguffins, elderly mentor figures who die dramatically just when it's time for the hero to step up and be heroic . . . I'll be writing essays about those from now 'til Doomsday. One that's related to the archaic grammar issue is the general dialect of High Fantasy Speak. People do it because Tolkien did it, but Tolkien had an ear for it and they don't. I've seen reviews commenting that the langauge in Doppelganger feels very breezy and modern. There are some phrases I would probably go back and change now, but in general, I didn't see why the characters should speak portentously all the time. Mary Gentle played with this in her Book of Ash series; the historian in those books chooses to translate the characters' dialogue into modern idiom, since they were speaking the equivalent for their own time period. I feel more or less the same way. I don't want my dialogue to sound trendy, but I really kind of detest the stilted, formal speech that plagues so much fantasy.
What cons will you be attending this year? Do you have a favorite?
I've got a fairly set round of cons, actually, since I need to try and cover both academic and commercial bases. I go to Vericon at Harvard, since I helped start it; ICFA in Florida, since I can be both a writer and an academic there; World Fantasy, since I love it so; and the American Folklore Society Meeting for academia. Other things get squeezed in there occasionally, like Readercon last summer, but those are more sporadic. I've been to Worldcon a few times, but it isn't my kind of thing -- too big and diverse for me to feel like I'm getting a good experience of the con. I prefer smaller events, where I don't feel like I'm missing out on ninety percent of it.
