The Story Behind The Hawk's Flight
Once I reached middle school, I rarely cared for any of the books I read in school. They were the “classics”, which meant they had a lot to teach about the art and craft of writing (something I appreciate now), but I didn’t care for the characters, plot, or setting. But my middle school had a program called “Reading Counts”, which let us check out a book from the library, read it, then answer a few questions about it, and that would count towards our English class.
This let me select books I enjoyed, one of which was A Wizard of Earthsea. I enjoyed it, never realizing that it was only the first book in a series. This past January, I got the entire collection, deciding I wanted to read all of it. Being in quarantine has helped expand my reading habits from non-existent to reading every day. I began it in January, and finished it at the end of October.
While I was reading the books, I’d been thinking about Skwyr Court. A lot of it came from the ideas I’d had in Girl in Red, but I kept asking “What makes this different?” At the time, not much. It was a standard story about teenagers growing up in a castle in a fantasy world, something that’s been done to death since the Harry Potter books were first published. It was when J.K. Rowling essentially claimed that trans women weren’t actually women that I had another idea. I wanted this world to include everyone.
Which brings me back to Earthsea. When Ursula K. Le Guin began writing it, as she said, it was fairly standard. The first big difference she made was not making the main character, Ged, white. When she reached her second book, The Tombs of Atuan, she made the main character female. There was a long gap between her third and fourth books in the series, and during that time, she began to rethink the ideas instilled in her about the standard tales. The brave man saving the damsel in distress, etc. And so she focused more on the women for the fourth book. She went against many of the stereotypes of the time, which haven’t faded away yet.
I’ve always been timid, something I don’t often see in male characters. That’s why Neville is the only male among my main four in Girl in Red, because he’s the character I wanted to follow. And female characters can do so much more than sit back and cheer on the men (as Rose, Hermione, and Luna have proven many times). I didn’t want Skwyr Court to be yet another story with the knight or powerful wizard defeating the villain in an awesome display of power. As Le Guin has written before, this doesn’t need to be the main plot.
As I read the books of Earthsea, I found that the fantasy story I wanted to follow was no longer Harry Potter, but Earthsea. A series that pushes the limits of the possible archetypes. I’m not saying that Skwyr’s going to be groundbreaking, because it’s simply not, but I want to focus more on problems real people encounter, putting them in a world of magic and wonder.
I wrote The Hawk’s Flight as a tribute to Le Guin, not only for showing me a world of wonder, but for showing me that my writing can push the boundaries of the familiar. And that’s exactly what I want to do.
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