A Letter from Alison

Dear Reader,

I have sometimes thought that the best thing about writing a novel is finishing it. This no doubt sounds like saying that the best thing about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is when you stop, and there’s something in that. But actually, there’s more to it than that. When I wrote the Pellinor series, I wrote The End four times, and every time I did it, it felt great. And the last time I wrote it, when it really was the end, when at last, after around two thousand pages, I had discovered what happened in this particular story, I was ecstatic.

I was also very tired. Novels do that, too. But writing The End (I’m old-fashioned, and I think novels should have The End written at the end of them) is one of the few moments in my life when I could be sure that I had achieved something. Whether it was good or bad, whether the fans loved or hated it, I had made it. I had completed what I began when, in an idle fit of speculation seven years before, I had said to myself, "Why don’t I write a fantasy novel?"

I can assure you that all the reasons why not became apparent many times over the ensuing years. There is one particular moment I remember: I was sitting next to my editor, Chris Kloet, at a table on which was piled the manuscript for Book Three, The Crow. We had spent the past day and a half painstakingly talking through every correction, and we were exhausted. I looked at the pile and saw that we still had around two hundred pages to go.

With a terrible, vivid clarity, a thought flashed through my mind. Why on earth would anyone write a novel? It just doesn’t involve the labor of writing the first draft, which is daunting enough. There is the rewriting. And the endless, patient, meticulous collaboration with editors and copy editors and proofreaders. It adds up to hundreds of man-hours (or maybe I should say woman-hours: my editors, marvelous people all, are women).

It’s an insane way to spend your life. All those private struggles at the desk, trying to find exactly the right way to describe a complicated gesture, while your family thinks you’re crazy because they see you making the gesture yourself to check what it looks like. And you do it over and over again, like someone who has a horrible tic. Getting the grammar right. Getting the spelling right. Reading every one of those half a million words over and over and over until you never want to read your own book ever again. And yet, those are all the things your forget at once as soon as you write The End.

Of course, I have mixed feelings. There’s a sadness in finishing the Books of Pellinor. I’ll never visit those characters again. I’ll never have that passionate relationship with their lives and their feelings. They have gone into their lives, out of sight, where I cannot follow them, and now they belong to their readers. I am proud of my characters for being so generous to share their lives and thoughts with me, and I am proud of me for being able to listen. It has been a wonderfully rich and liberating few years.

At the same time, I’m so glad that I can now get on with the rest of my life, without feeling haunted by these voices that have been living in the back of my head for seven years.

Until the next time it happens, of course.

All best wishes,

Alison Croggon