Interview

A Conversation with Kristin Cashore, author of Graceling

Have you always wanted to be a writer?
I always wanted to be a reader and a daydreamer. Then, in college, I discovered that I also loved to write. I think it would be fair to say that I always suspected I wanted to be a writer, but didn’t know it for sure until I was about nineteen or twenty. And then, of course, it took a few more years for me to get serious about actually doing it!

How did the character of Katsa come to you?
Unsurprisingly, she came to me fighting—quarreling, to be more specific—inside my head with another character who grew into Po. In other words, Graceling began as conversations in my head between two characters who were furious with each other. My job was to listen to them argue, and figure out what they were so upset about, and what was going on in their world, and what that world was like. Katsa and Po kind of formed themselves for me — at the beginning, I was more of an observer than a creator.

How did the ideas for the landscapes in your book take shape?
In some cases, I had particular landscapes in mind from the beginning. For example, I always knew Po came from a place that was somehow “other”; ...