The Witches of Winderry Spires by Karen Foxlee
(Allen & Unwin)
Guest author post by Karen Foxlee about The Witches of Winderry Spires for Joy in Books at PaperbarkWords blog
I love how stories ideas come from so many different places. Some of my novels start with just the scrap of a character’s voice or a glimpse of their face. Some start with an emotion that I’m trying to understand. Memories, stored for years in the dusty backrooms of my brain, suddenly sprout story tendrils and cannot be ignored. But I have never had a story start with someone else’s idea. Not until The Witches of Winderry Spires, that is.
To tell the truth I don’t think I am much good at creative collaboration. I’m a loner when it comes to writing. I love the solitude, the obsessing, the getting lost in the journey of a story. I’m also superstitious about not showing work to anyone until I know it is in pretty good shape. So when my daughter Alice, aged eight, announced that we were going to write a story together and it was going to take the world by storm, I’m embarrassed to say, I tried to make excuses. “We can have some little chats about it,” I said. “Or I’ll give you some tips to get you started.”
She had been making title pages for her story for some time. She’d been illustrating the endpapers. She’d painted canvases with character studies and even hand sewn some “plushies” because she was pretty sure “merch” was going to be needed. Her story involved a magical clock tower and a faraway land. There was a water dragon and a winged wolf, as well as a gloomy Pegasus with a backstory. It was the Pegasus with a backstory that sold me. “Tell me about this Pegasus,” I found myself suddenly begging.
We started off with lengthy “story chats” in the car. There were conversations during bushwalks. But things got real when we began scheduling “writing meetings.” These involved large pieces of blank paper and occasionally heated discussions. Alice wanted an evil queen and I didn’t. I wanted a character called Lucy Broadmeadow and my daughter was refusing.
None of this dampened the fun we had during these story times together though. Even when we could not agree we always ended up laughing. I was told, frequently, that I was a control freak and it was, for the most part, true. Somehow years passed and the story grew. It changed directions several times. It blossomed and then wilted. Each time we watered it back to life. Alice grew up. She became a teenager and started high school. She became lost in her own art. She started writing her own stories. And finally, those fabulous characters in that faraway world were packed away.
Some stories are like splinters though. They get under your skin. They remain as a little ache, a reminder of unfinished business. Or sometimes these stories are like an old song, a little melody that is not remembered entirely, but can’t be forgotten either. That gloomy Pegasus kept creeping into my mind. Lucy Broadmeadow kept whispering to me. We are still here waiting.
During the covid years I asked Alice if I could take over the story and she agreed. Those years became known as the “Dragon Years” in our little house. I wrote the novel Dragon Skin, and the first two books in the Mary-Kate Martin series, which featured wyrms and hydras. All the while I tinkered away with Alice’s story, my story, the story that would become The Witches of Winderry Spires.
I wanted to honour my daughter’s original vision for the story. The main characters remained, although there were some name changes. I let my human character Lucy, a character I fell in love with, take centre stage. In a deliciously unexpected twist a character from my first children’s book Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy, turned up to the page. Inside the story, a book titled How to be the Clock Tower Girl, started speaking in hundreds of rustling voices. Beautiful words came out of that book within a book and, on certain days, those words made me cry.
I’m always amazed by the process of writing a children’s book! It never gets old. Sometimes it really does seem slightly magical even through all the mundane, hard-slog moments. I’m fascinated by where the ideas come from and how the sparks of those ideas are transformed to flames. I love that each and every time it is different. Each and every time I learn something new. Writing The Witches of Winderry Spires was perhaps the strangest process I’ve gone through to birth a story but I’m so proud of the novel and how it turned. I’m so grateful that its beautiful first moments came from my daughter’s mind, and that she trusted me to carry those ideas forward and bring them life.
The Witches of Winderry Spires at Allen & Unwin
Dragon Skin by Karen Foxlee at Paperbark Words blog
Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee at Paperbark Words blog (including my review of The Midnight Dress for the Weekend Australian)
