By Sophie Stein~
“My son is really into birds. Like, really into birds.” Maxwell sat with her legs crossed behind the small table at the front of Beth Parfitt’s Intro to Creative Writing class at Penn State. “He wanted me to write a story for him, and it ended up being about a bird demon coming down from the sky. Oops.” Though her son has since gotten over the birds, Maxwell has never gotten over the magic. “I can’t help it.” As a New York Times best-selling author with five critically-acclaimed, published books, Maxwell is a talented writer and businesswoman. The successful alumna was invited back to Happy Valley to speak at the Penn State English Department Conference on October 5, 2019.
With a PhD in English, Maxwell knew she could write. However, she didn’t know that fiction and romance would be her calling until she picked up a cultural phenomenon she couldn’t put down: Twilight. “I read Twilight to not feel old and out of touch with what my students were reading. And I devoured it.”
They all end the same, she thought. So what made series like Twilight and Outlander such compulsive reads? This wonder prompted Maxwell’s spiral into romance. She was enamored reading about relationships and found them extremely satisfying to write about. This is what romance came to mean to Maxwell.
Image from lisamaxwell.com
Even as a best-seller, Maxwell is always learning. With a background in academic writing, Maxwell never took a creative writing class. Nothing that was taught in literature classes taught her the theory of structure. She admits that this has been hard to learn. “Every single scene has to do something.” To map out her stories, Maxwell creates a spreadsheet of each scene and chapter, detailing how they create action, narrative arc, world-building or character development. When Unhooked sold, Maxwell still didn’t truly understand the main character and has since tried harder to develop the people in her books. For example, it took her years to figure out where the The Last Magician would be set. “Setting makes everything we are, it makes a huge difference to the who the characters are.” Maxwell conducted thorough research to build an accurate description of New York City in the 1900’s when preparing for The Last Magician. She traveled to New York and took notes while standing on different bridges in the city to capture a true and varied perspective. Maxwell believes a book is better when she knows the ending before she starts to write, but also admits the story is subject to change in some capacity. The ending of The Last Magician books had to change after the 2016 election. “We were living in a different future than I thought we’d be in and I wanted it to be more real. The ending I had after the election felt too…frivolous.”
In conjunction with the fantastical and magical worlds she creates, Maxwell is also extremely grounded in reality. Everything she writes is personal. “Window dressing of a book won’t matter without the emotional stuff underneath it.” However, she also acknowledges that book publishing is not just about pretty words and good stories.
“It’s a business. It’s a product. Without a market, it’s a lovely thing you wrote, but your mom’s going to read it.”
Fascinated by the marketing of literature, Maxwell has never lost touch with her establishment as a YA author. She believes that this category chose her. Her first novel, Sweet Unrest, simply had no sex in it, landing it on the YA shelves. Maxwell states it’s an interesting line to toe of doing what she wants and pleasing the market. However, part of her doesn’t care about the line. “There isn’t the line we think is there.” In some ways genre is constricting. “You can’t chase. By the time you chase, it’s over. You have to write what you write and get lucky.”
Photo by Cameron Whitman Photography, from lisamaxwell.com .
Author’s Pick: As a self-described student, she points to Robert McKee’s “Story” as her go to craft-book when sitting down to write.