Kiersten White talks about And I Darken, her latest novel which takes Vlad the Impaler and gives him a feminist twist.
About Kiersten White
Kiersten White is the New York Times bestselling author of the Paranormalcy trilogy, the dark thrillers Mind Games and Perfect Lies, The Chaos of Stars, Illusions of Fate, and In the Shadows with Jim Di Bartolo. Her books have won or been nominated for the Utah Book Award, ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, Florida Teens Read, Texas Lone Star, Evergreen Young Adult Book Award, and the Whitney Award. She lives with her family near the ocean in San Diego.
Let’s be real: How can you see this face and not think, THERE’S MY NEXT AMAZING YOUNG ADULT HEROINE?
Well, okay, maybe not that one. But doubtless you saw one of the many versions of Dracula and thought: I’ll bet there’s actual history there, and I’ll bet it’s even better! This would lead you to Vlad the Impaler, a medieval Romanian prince so notoriously violent that he became a bogeyman even in the midst of the not-super-nice 1400s. And surely if you came across this charming wood carving, you’d see that bearded man eating amid impaled bodies and think, YES, THIS WILL BE SO RELATABLE TO TEENS.
No? Really?
Huh.
I’ll admit, it wasn’t a no-brainer for me, either. But that’s the thing about writing. People ask where you get your ideas, and you honestly can’t say. It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a combination of passions, interests, things you’ve researched, places you’ve been. All of it builds and builds, but most of the time it never turns into anything.
Sure, I dig Dracula in all its many incarnations. I adore the history of Romania and of the Ottoman Empire. I love (inasmuch as one can love something awful, so perhaps I am more fascinated by) good people growing into great people by doing horrendous things. But none of that screams, “WRITE ME.”
However, I also love relationships, the tension between friends, the bonds of siblings, the loyalties of lovers. And I love girls who look at what the world tells them they can be and say, “Screw that, I will make what I want into a reality.” So all this history, all these elements, all my ideas weren’t a story until I took the real man that inspired so many myths and said, “What if Vlad Dracul had been Lada Dracul? And what if the only monsters were the choices these teens had to make on their way to ruling empires?” As soon as that fell into place, I knew And I Darken was a book I had to write.
Because let’s be really for real: when it comes to terrifying, Dracula’s got nothing on teenage girls.
