Newbery Honor Author Margi Preus on the Origin of Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Margi Preus, author of the Newbery Honor book Heart of a Samurai and other books for young readers, including the Minnesota Book Award winning West of the Moon, and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award book The Clue in the Trees. Her books have won multiple awards, landed on the New York Times bestseller list, been honored as ALA/ALSC Notables, selected as an NPR Backseat Book Club pick, chosen for community reads, and translated into several languages. New titles in 2020 include Village of Scoundrels, The Littlest Voyageur, and The Silver Box, part of the Enchantment Lake mystery series.  

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

I was very excited to write this last book because for the first time ever I knew how the story was going to end. Well, sort of . . . I have always known it would be a good idea to know the ending before beginning a mystery (that’s what the experts tell you, and I believe them), but I’ve never been able to pull that off until this last book of the series. Of course, I can’t tell you the ending, so that’s all I’m going to say about that!

I also knew I would start The Silver Box where The Clue in the Trees (second book in the series) left off. But that is ALL I knew about anything when I started.

Inspiration for the series, or at least for the first book in the series (entitled Enchantment Lake) came from the acrimony that arose among my neighbors regarding a road along the lakeshore where I have a cabin. Some wanted the road “improved” (paved) and some (me included) wanted to leave it a bumpy, twisty, dusty gravel road. Passions rose to a level that made me wonder what would happen if people started killing each other over it.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

Plot building for me involves a lot of flailing. I always try to write an outline, and usually get one or two points down and then give up and just start writing a random scene. I have to have faith that it will all come together in some sort of plot eventually, which it does, with a little nudging and pushing and shoving here and there. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

No, I have never had a plot firmly in place!  It can be frightening, but I do love the surprises that come with having a squirmy plot. 

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I usually have several stories going at the same time. I don’t lack for ideas. I have a million ideas course through my brain every day. About 999,999 aren’t very good ideas, however. But I think ideas are like mice. Ideas breed ideas. So you might as well use them up—there’s always something better behind the one you use. 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

It can take some time of going back and forth between or among projects until finally one sort of takes over—it becomes the only thing I want to work on, and I become resentful of anything else that intrudes. Then I know I’m onto something. 

I have 3 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting? 

I have a little mini-schnauzer named Pearl who often sleeps on a chair in my little writing house. When it’s time for a walk, she comes over and stands next to me and growls politely. The gentlest little whisper of a growl. She is usually correct—it IS time for a walk! She’s very helpful that way. I find I get a lot of good writing done on walks.

Q&A With International Best Seller Matt Haig Talks Anxiety, Panic, Depression & Writing As Therapy

Don’t miss yesterday’s podcast with Matt!

What if there were a library that catalogued all your regrets – and opened the door to all the lives you could’ve led? What would happen if you could undo your choices, small and big, and change where you ended up?

This is the situation that Nora Seed faces in THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking; On Sale: 9/29/20), the imaginative new novel from the internationally bestselling author of How to Stop Time, Matt Haig. When Nora—depressed and unsatisfied by her current life—finds herself in a magical library, somewhere beyond the edge of the universe, she has the chance to change everything. Confronted with an infinite number of possibilities, Nora must consider: Should she have stayed with her ex-fiancé? Stuck with playing in that rock band in case they hit it big? Moved to Australia with her best friend? Followed her dream of becoming a glaciologist? Gotten coffee with that cute neighbor? As she tries on these different lives, experimenting with her great what ifs, she discovers what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Where did the idea for THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY come from?

I’d had an idea about a library between life and death for a long time. I have always been fascinated with fantastical libraries, such as Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, because I feel libraries are a kind of magic in themselves. In the Midnight Library, each book on the shelf is another version of the protagonist, Nora Seed’s, life. There are infinite books and infinite versions, so –with the librarian’s help –she has a chance to undo some of her regrets. Every time she opens a book, she falls into that life.I think the idea of wondering how your life would have played out differently is one that a lot of us think about from time to time. Also, my own personal experience with mental health issues, like depression and anxiety, obviously informed some of Nora’s experience.

Your two nonfiction books, Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, discuss depression and anxiety, issues that are also at the heart of THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY. How do you blend your nonfiction writing with your fiction?

I think that whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction, I always make sure I am writing the thing that interests me most at that time. I don’t think there has been a book that has fused my interests more closely than this one. It just turns out that fiction was the most obvious way to explore the ideas of regret and happiness that play out in this book. When I was 24, I had a breakdown. I experienced depression, anxiety, and panic disorder, and was suicidal for quite a while. My recovery was long and slow. And yet despite all that, a lot of goodness came out of that experience. It made me a better, more grateful person, and one that wanted to write about these issues clearly and transparently and shamelessly. Non-fiction is great for this, but sometimes fiction allows you to go even deeper. It can allow you to use fantasy as a way of exploring ideas and experiences. For me, depression was often flavored with the desire to inhabit parallel lives, lives where I had done something differently and ended in a different place. THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY explores that idea and takes it to the next level,I suppose. Writing it was a kind of self-therapy.

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY is your first adult novel written from a woman’s perspective. How did you approach writing from this different point of view, and how did it differ from writing from a man’s perspective?

When I started writing this book, the narrator was male, but for some reason, I couldn’t get a handle on the character –in some weird way –maybe because it was too close to me. So,I needed a narrator who was less obviously me and switching the gender helped do that. In terms of writing her character, there are certain moments –in terms of how she is treated by other people –where her gender plays a part, but to be honest I wasn’t seeing her as being defined by her gender, more by her initially desperate state of mind and the lack of options she felt she faced.

Several of your novels play with different fantasy elements, such as immortality in How to Stop Time, ghosts in The Dead Fathers Club, and now, of course, the titular magical library in THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY. What draws you to fantasy?

I like to use fantasy and science fiction in a way that sheds more light on our reality. I’m not into pure fantasy for fantasy’s sake. It’s more about exploring ideas and sometimes the easiest way to do that is to step into the imagination. Borges, Ursula K Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Mary Shelley, are among my favorite writers for this reason.

In THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, Nora gets the chance to live out alternate versions of her own life, based off her past regrets. During her exploration of these alternate realities, Nora becomes a pub owner, a glaciologist, a rock star, and an Olympic swimmer, to name a few. How did you come up with these alternate lives? Were any based on your own interests, or past regrets?

I gave up piano lessons when I was twelve years old because I was a self-conscious boy trying to fit in. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to continue with music, so the musician strand of her life definitely overlaps with my own wish fulfillment. I never wanted to be a glaciologist or an Olympic swimmer though. I suppose as a British person I have had the odd fantasy of being a pub landlord, but I’m pretty sure that would be a bad idea.

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Libraries (as the title suggests) play a key role in THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY. Why are libraries meaningful to you?

Libraries have always been my safe space. When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time after school in my local library. There was a library in the center of the small town where I lived and it was my safe space. I think libraries should be especially valued these days, when particularly in my country, they are increasingly under threat. Libraries are one of the last public spaces that like us for who we are and not for our wallets. Libraries seemed the perfect metaphor for parallel lives as they are places that really do allow you to enter other worlds, if only for a while. In THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, Nora encounters her school librarian from childhood, Mrs. Elm, who acts like a kind of guide, and she is an amalgam of various teachers and librarians I encountered in my youth. For other people in the world of the novel, their portal to other lives is something different, but I’d like to think mine, like Nora’s, would be a library.

During our current moment, when many of us can barely leave our own homes, I’m sure a lot of people would like to enter a library full of alternate realities they can slip into as easily as opening a book. How do you think THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY relates to the current state of the world?

I think that when we are feeling physically confined our imaginations tend to roam into wilder territory. The idea of a place where we could go and be absolutely anything at all is possibly even more attractive now than in 2019 when I wrote it.

Of all the lives Nora tries out in THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, which would you like to live in the most? Which would you like to live in the least?

I would probably like to live in a vineyard in California, at least to give it a try. I am not that great in cold weather so I would probably skip being a glaciologist.

What do you hope readers will take away from THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY?

Well firstly I just hope they enjoy the story, but I also hope it helps them to think about their own lives and offers some comfort when feeling a sense of inadequacy or regret about their own present situation. Ultimately, like a lot of my books, I wrote it for myself. A kind of therapy for myself, a way of dealing with my own doubts and worries about the passing of time. So, I hope readers find the same comfort in reading it as I did in writing it.