Sarah Rees Brennan
About Author
Sarah Rees Brennan, is Irish and currently lives in Dublin. For a short stint, she lived in New York and became involved with a wide circle of writers who encouraged and supported her, including Holly Black (Ironside, The Spiderwick Chronicles) and Cassandra Clare (City of Bones).
She has developed a wide audience through her popular blog, mistful.livejournal.com <www.mistful.livejournal.com>, where she writes movie parodies, book reviews and some stories, and has around four thousand registered readers.
She participates in http://community.livejournal.com/fangs_fur_fey> - an adult and YA urban fantasy writers' community, and is currently completing a Creative Writing M.A.
Author link
http://community.livejournal.com/fangs_fur_fey
Interview
UNSPOKEN
SIMON & SCHUSTER
SEPTEMBER 2012
Kami Glass talks to a boy who lives inside her head, someone the rest of the world believes is imaginary....
Kami lives in the town of Sorry-in-the-Vale and wants to be a journalist. When the Lynburn family, who used to rule the town, return to their ancestral home, she senses a story but what she uncovers could destroy everything she has ever believed in ....
Author Sarah Rees Brennan talks about her new book.
Q: What appeals to you about Gothic novels and why did you decide to draw on the genre for Unspoken?
A: Beautiful sinister manors, beautiful sinister gentlemen, and moors.... What's not to love? I love stories about mystery, and families, and girls who have to overcome suspicion and fears, and a sense of looming disaster. http://sarahtales.livejournal.com/191479.html
But I wanted to do a modern take, as well: the idea of how modern people react to a ruling family, a creepy manor, a suspected crime, even a psychic connection. And I wanted to make it funny.
Q: The relationship between Jared and Kami is central to this story, two characters who can commune telepathically. What gave you the idea?
A: I saw other characters communicate telepathically, and that being seen as an aid to romance, a way of showing people were meant to be together - and I thought to myself that it would really mess up any possible romances!
I definitely would never want a boyfriend who would know when my mind had wandered off when he was talking. ;) I thought it would be fun to show a take on it as complicated and difficult.
Q: Do you feel such a relationship would be a blessing or a curse?
A: I never have. I think it would be both a blessing and a curse - just think of how terrifying it would be, to have someone be able to look into your darkest heart, all your most secret and sometimes most hurtful thoughts. And yet it's something people dream of, too: someone who knows you through and through, and loves you still.
Q: Were you always sure about how their relationship would develop once they met each other?
A: Oh yes. Lots of ups and downs for them... their relationship is only just beginning, having taken its first two serious turns in Unspoken. I knew that they would be freaked out, react sometimes badly and sometimes well, try their best for each other and sometimes fail. To borrow a phrase from one of my favourite shows, Veronica Mars - they don't write songs about the ones that come easy.
Q: The three main girl characters, Kami, Holly and Angela, are all very different who is your favourite?
A: I don't know if I can pick a favourite, since I love them all! Kami is the most like me: Angela is a lot like three of my friends, smart, cynical, sharp-tongued and secretly soft-hearted.
Really, I wanted to have three very different girls and celebrate them all as awesome: there's no one particular right way to be a girl, and these different girls make an excellent team.
Q: There is great repartee between Kami and Jared, and Kami and her friends. Do you enjoy writing speech over other elements of the story?
A: When I was a kid writing, my books used to look like plays, they would have so much dialogue in them. I do love banter, very much: what a character says reveals so much about them, especially if they're trying to hide something!
And the way people's senses of humour interact says a lot about their relationship: if people can volley back what you send to them, if you find them funny, it shows compatibility, either platonic or romantic, on a level that nothing else does. I love the way Jane Austen's characters talk to each other.
I like writing a lot of other things too, but I do love repartee and I'm so pleased you enjoyed it!
Q: Kami, the main character, is a sassy wanna-be journalist - do you feel teenage girls get enough role models like her?
A: I don't know that I think about her as a role model, any more than I think of the boys as role models for guy readers.
Q: Who is your favourite woman in history?
A: Jane Austen. Elizabeth I. Nancy Wake. Nellie Bly. I CAN'T PICK. There have been so many amazing women throughout history! http://sarahtales.livejournal.com/202800.html
Q: The town the story is set in, Sorry-in-the-Vale, has quite an old-fashioned, feudal feel to it - is it based on anywhere in particular?
A: It is a mix of several different towns: the town where my aunt lives, in which I saw a duck race, Broadway, a Cotswold town where I stayed for a few weeks, Stanway, where there is a manor house a lot like the one in my book (and also a GIANT VERTICAL FOUNTAIN nobody told me about which I SAT ON), Evesham, where there is a haunted river, and Stow-on-the-Wold and Bourton-on-the-Water, which have similar names to Sorry-in-the-Vale... names that seem to tell stories.
I went all around the Cotswolds, one of the most beautiful regions in England, and saw a lot of different sleepy villages made with gold stone, and out of all the things I saw I built one of my own.
Q: Have you ever yearned to live in a manor house like Aurimere?
A: I've taken holidays in manor houses... I'm currently sitting in a manor house in France with a bunch of my writer friends! But I think a manor house in England might be very draughty in winter, and of course there's the question of the heating bill.
.... In Aurimere, there's also the question of potentially getting buried alive or having something else horrible happen to you...
Q: This is the first book in a trilogy - can you give us a glimpse into the start of book two? Were all three books plotted out before you started writing the first book?
A: Oh yes, they were: not in detail, but I knew the end, and most of the Secrets of the Past. I always have to have a plan, or else I panic and add ninjas or aliens.
Book two is a lot about loneliness, a lot about change, and evil closing in, and how for evil to flourish all that is necessary is that good men do nothing... and kissing. There's a ton of kissing.
Q: What appeals to you about writing series rather than one-off books?
A: I like to luxuriate in a series: have readers following along, have reader reaction even inform what I'm doing, a little: I want to explore characters so we see layers upon layers of them, get to know them really well, so we want to follow them from book to book and are sorry when the series is over.
Which is not to say I don't like one-off books, too: I wrote one with Justine Larbalestier, and am planning another as we speak!
Q: How does your 'writing day' go? Any writing habits ie listening to music, eating chocolate etc?
A: I'm listening to Taylor Swift and eating a pain chocolat RIGHT NOW. How did you know? ... Is this house bugged?!
Q: Which authors do you enjoy reading?
A: Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, Robin Wasserman, any authors called Robin ;), Holly Black, Tamora Pierce, Jenny Crusie, Kristan Higgins, Ian McEwan, Diana Gabaldon, any authors called Diana. ;) What authors don't I enjoy reading might be a better question.
Q: What would you be if you weren't an author?
A: I have no useful skills. Pretty sure I'd have to turn to crime...
Q: What do you do to relax?
A: Swim, cook, hang out with my friends, watch trashy supernatural TV. Adopt kittens and chase after bats and accidentally commit petty crimes. ;) I have adventures to relax, sometimes: that's something I have in common with Unspoken's Kami.
