This Witch for Hire

This Witch for Hire

“Where do you get your ideas?” is one of the most common questions I get asked, and though I and two other YA authors once kibitzed with the readers about a “magic box,” a fabulous box that we simply open up and pull out ideas from…the truth of the matter is ideas grow from the needs of the story.
           
Characters have issues to work out; worlds need to be saved. The original core idea of a story might come from a commercial, an overheard conversation, another book, or a long-running personal question of “what would happen if?” But for me, the way to tell a story, the plot and the characters—the soul, if you will—comes from the same place I decide what I’m going to wear in the morning. I consider the weather, what I’m going to be doing, what I actually have in my closet, and I make my best choice and hope it’s an appropriate one—or in other words, the genre, the character’s background and social standing, the voice the story is told in, and the pacing all play a part. Sometimes it’s a conservative choice, sometimes a trendy one, and if I’m lucky, it might be a little of the old, a little of the new, making an oddball sort of a story that is just what readers are looking for.
           
As for the beginnings of Rachel, Ivy, Jenks, and the gang? I can only make guesses as to where they came from and what part of my psyche wanted to be challenged when I first began writing about them. It all began before I’d found publication. I’d been struggling to find publication for a while and had three novel-length pieces under my belt that revolved around the same core characters, but nothing was happening as far as New York was concerned. It was then that I decided to take a year off from writing novel-length traditional fantasy to try to break into print with a short story—I needed something to attract an editor or agent’s eye, and some publishing credits couldn’t hurt.
           
The material that was making the short story market at that time was an uncomfortable mix of odd sex and outrageous assumptions, and it made sense as to why. These were new talents pushing their skills and trying to gain the attention of a very small circle of people so their work could be seen by a wider audience…but first you have to get their attention, and what better way than with weird sex and violence?
           
I spent months researching the trends…. I sat down, sighed, and started writing and submitting to a few, overwhelmed-with-submission markets.
           
Nothing sold for almost a year, but when the rejections began getting more positive, I thought this might be a viable road to publication if I stretched myself a little bit more. They wanted weird? I’d give them my brand of weird, and taking the oddest characters I could think of—a pixy, a vampire, and a witch—I mixed in the honest appeal of the girl-next-door and put them in a bar to see what happened.
           
The Hollows happened…
 
--Kim Harrison