Blue Lily, Lily Blue Author Maggie Stiefvater Tells Us What She’d Wish For From A Magical King

More than once, while reading Blue Lily, Lily Blue, I paused to silently thank Maggie Stiefvater for making the Raven Cycle a four-book series. After this, there will be one more book following four prep-school boys and the feisty daughter of small-town psychics Blue Sargent in their search through the mountains of Virginia for the legendary, wish-granting Welsh King Glendower. While hurtling through book three in a trilogy, I’m often relieved that the characters will soon find peace of one kind or another. Not the case here.
“Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening,” she observes of her relationship with the boys. “It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.” Replace the word “friendship” with “fantasy-tinged YA novel,” and you’ll get how I feel about this series, but I promise, I wasn’t quite this gushy when I spoke to Stiefvater earlier this year.
Did you always plan on making the Raven Cycle four books long?
I had a very rough idea of where I was ending up with the Shiver trilogy, and I had lots of opportunities to take wrong turns and double back and add in new characters, and I knew that if I wrote another long series, I definitely wanted to have more of a plan from the very beginning. So when I pitched [Raven Boys] to Scholastic, I had four different titles and four plots, and they all tied together, and it’s been really rewarding, because it means that I can make promises that I know I’m going to keep for sure in future books, and it also means I can refer back constantly to sneaky little things I put in. I feel like it rewards the careful reader more because I leave little nest eggs and you can see them.
You must be a real plotter.
I know it makes it sound like I really know exactly what I’m doing, but in actuality these books kick my butt all the time. I start out and I have my three-page outline for each of them. Theoretically, that tells me exactly what’s going to happen in the books. In actuality, that does happen, but when you’re writing a 400-page novel, so many things are not included in there. I can still make all kinds of wrong turns, and I write twice as much as I keep. I think The Dream Thieves [book two] is 115,000 words, and the other day I was looking at the outtakes folder, which is where I put all of the scenes I can’t bring myself to throw away, and I had 150,000 words of stuff that was taken out of the original.
Do you write straight through and then go back to edit?
No, I edit constantly as I’m writing. I made a huge change in The Dream Thieves, and I thought for sure that it would have affected what came later, but then I found that sneakily, somehow my subconscious knew I was going to do it, and it still flows just perfectly. I started writing this series back when I was 19, so it’s been percolating in my head.
I was doing research on you and found that one of your blogs was called Greywaren Art (in the books, the Greywaren is a person who can turn dream objects into reality), so there are Easter eggs in your real life, too.
[The story has] been in there for a really long time.
Do you believe in psychics?
My entire family is all kind of creepy. My mom has always been known for her hunches, and my little sister has always been very good at eerily predicting things that are going to happen. I remember when I was on my driving tour for Forever with my friend Tessa Gratton in my old ’73 Camaro, and we decided we should stop and see a psychic to see if she could tell our futures. …First of all, she told me a whole bunch of things about myself that were totally not true, and then she said, “You’re going to live a very long life, you’re going to be 84.” In the other room, I hear Tessa start to laugh and laugh and laugh. And she said, “Who thinks you’re going to make it to 84 after they see you pull up in a car like that?”
What would your Glendower wish be?
I think I would ask if I could give it to someone else. Can I say that? Is that too wishy-washy? I used to get asked, “What would you do if your book got made into a movie for a billion dollars?” Or, “What would you do if you won the lottery?” And it’s a really difficult question for me, because I’ve always wanted to earn everything for myself. I’m very much like Adam Parrish in that way, because it doesn’t mean anything unless I’ve done it for myself. A Glendower wish isn’t really the point, is it? It’s really so you can see his little beardy face.
But there is going to be a Glendower, right?
[Sings] I’m not telling you anything!
I’m pretty sure your readers are in love with all of your characters. Do you ever develop crushes on them yourself?
I like the way that this loaded question comes when my characters are teen boys! Under age! No, I definitely don’t. It’s very much like I get to watch a movie that’s playing in my head, only I’m the one who’s directing it. Though I’m totally fine if my readers do it.
A movie deal with New Line Cinema was announced even before The Raven Boys was released in 2012. What’s the latest on that?
It’s so strange to get excited about a movie deal, and it takes forever. They call me and say things like, “Hey, Pookie, what’s up?” Nobody calls me Pookie. They always talk a good game. At some point they had screenplays for various [books of mine], but I don’t know. If I had something to say, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops. I would say that from all of them, I’d really like to see The Raven Boys turned into a series. I actually think it could make a really good TV show.
Are there any movies you think represent what you’d want a Raven Boys adaptation to end up like?
I just saw Dead Poets Society for the first time last year, and I actually enjoyed the way that movie feels very magical, even though there’s no magic in it. That would be nice. I also saw Chronicle, that had teens in it who found out they had secret powers—they found this space rock or something—it was shot in a very reality-show, shaky-cam kind of way, and it felt very dangerous, because it felt like what it would really be like if you were a teen and found out you had these powers. I like a combination of those two things.
Blue Lily, Lily Blue is out now. You can also read Maggie Stiefvater’s guest blog about her inspiration for the title.