Earlier today I posted my review for Seven Years From Home, the novella by author Naomi Novik featured in the stellar and forthcoming anthology, Warriors.
Like the other writers I’ve featured and reviewed this week for that anthology, I sent Naomi an interview.
She wrote me this morning, and rather than merely answering the questions she wrote a well-thought out longer post I was not expecting.
I think it’s great, and gives a real look at the mechanics of what a short story writer is thinking while they tackle a new project. So rather than cutting her email up and putting the pieces under their corresponding questions—which I think would detract from the overall tone of the piece—I just decided to post what Naomi wrote.
Here it is:
Hey Shawn! Hopefully this ramble works for you —
I actually started out writing shorter works, in the world of fanfic, so it’s a form I really enjoy — original short stories are in particular a great way to experiment with ideas and play with universes that haven’t quite gelled in my head enough for me to tell a novel-length story about them yet.
Seven Years From Home is very much about a specific voice for me, Ruth’s voice, which is inspired heavily by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in his memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It’s the voice of someone who’s a sort of desperate outsider — someone lost in her own society, finding an internally strong society that she feels more warmth towards than her own, except she can never be a real immigrant — the only reason she’s allowed in at all is because there’s this silent threatening power of the Confederacy behind her that she’s trading on.
So it’s about that tragedy of being an outsider in your own world and imagining a perfect home for yourself, someplace magical and welcoming, and then you find it and discover — you don’t really belong there, either. I think it takes a kind of very intense distance in order to even look at something that painful, almost clinical, and it struck me really hard in Lawrence’s work — that he looks at himself with this merciless eye. I find that a really interesting unreliable-narrator technique, because it sounds so trustworthy, so unbiased — and then he calmly tells you something utterly appalling, or you find out later he made something up.
At the risk of being wanky, I’ll add that I hadn’t actually even heard of Avatar before I wrote this, but after the fact, this story feels like my strongly-worded reply to that movie. One of the things that deeply disappointed me about Avatar was that — well, obvious bias is obvious here, but I do feel like Seven Years From Home is at least trying (whether I succeed or not is up to the reader) to tell a true story — which is, this doesn’t work! You can’t just show up in an alien society and start swanning around being a hero and having laurels heaped on your head, no matter how wonderful you are and how perfect the society is for you, and there is something hard and complicated going on when you have someone who so badly wants to so completely reject everything about themselves, even to the point of rejecting their own body.
And, I mean, I personally think that the more complicated story is much more interesting! So anyway, that’s what I’m trying to do in the story.
Next up from me is Tongues of Serpents, volume six of the Temeraire series, out this July! This one is probably the most action-adventure-y of the series, and was heaps of fun to write — it’s set in Australia.
— Naomi
Seven Years From Home will be published next week alongside many other great writers in Warriors, the anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.
More tomorrow!
