Genevieve J. Griffin is joining us today with her novel Dance ‘Til Dawn. Here’s the publisher’s description.
Beneath the palace, deadly magic waits…
Rose is a seamstress for her kingdom’s twelve princesses, who all hold a bewildering secret: how have they been disappearing every night and dancing through each pair of shoes Rose makes? Overworked, overwhelmed, and fearful of what the princesses are hiding, Rose sets out with her sister Peony and the gardener’s son William to unravel this mystery themselves. Soon, however, they become so entangled in the palace’s dark enchantments that there might be no escape. The only chance Rose has is to begin crafting her own magic…and to step into the shoes of the cleverest princess of all.
What’s Genevieve’s favorite bit?
GENEVIEVE J. GRIFFIN
Endings. Endings can be such a bugbear (and for its own part, bugbear remains a fabulous word). No matter how good your work is, no matter how compelling the story, the ending can stick with people in its own particular way, for better or worse—because if you miss that landing, your readers won’t forget it. Just ask anyone who still rants years later about TV Shows That Shall Not Be Named, as if those disputed endings were betrayals of everything that came before.
So, y’know. No pressure.
When I start writing, I usually try to have a story’s basic ending in mind already so I’ll have something to aim for. Still, things can change in the telling. With Dance ’Til Dawn, I had the benefit of an expected story arc, since any version of The Twelve Dancing Princesses is likely to involve a horde of mysterious girls, someone determined to discover what they’re up to, and a happy (one presumes) ending for whoever succeeds. But I knew I was going to bend the path, and so where this story would end was still an open question. Originally, Dance ’Til Dawn was headed somewhere truly dire, and shadows of that still remain. (Let’s be honest, “shadows” is probably an understatement.) But I realized as I wrote that I wanted a better resolution for the girls I’d gotten to know.
Rose, the protagonist, isn’t even a princess herself. She’s a seamstress, and the product of the logistical question that started all this: Who on earth is making all those dancing shoes? Surely it’s someone hard-working and loyal, but I also imagined her as intelligent and perceptive, as someone who wants to help her fellow seamstresses out of this bind, and as someone who’s able to take advantage of how overlooked she often is, as a young and supposedly unimportant servant. So then what of the youngest princess, the central figure in so many tellings of this story? She would undoubtedly be just as underestimated, and with just as much potential to shape the story. Indeed Alia became a lot like Rose, albeit with her own brand of strangeness, her own dangerous secrets.
The door unlatches. Opposite me is not a maid but Alia herself. I curtsy deeply and fight to steady myself on the rise.
“Your Highness,” I murmur, offering the shoes.
Slim white fingers grasp the periwinkle silk, and the door, on an ill-maintained tilt, creaks open enough to show her in full. She has dark blonde hair in a long, simple braid, and her pale eyes glint sharply. She has already prepared herself for the day, unlike the other girls, and is wearing a lovely embroidered gown—I think it’s Nina’s work—along with surprisingly practical shoes. She regards me across my own handiwork. Her steady poise is…unsettling.
These two dance around each other throughout the story as both of them work against the enchantments that bind the other girls. Then at a key point, Rose has to step into Alia’s shoes herself. In lieu of spoilers, I’ll simply say that the following scenes are…eventful. But the resolution is ultimately very personal, and depends on the way that Rose and Alia have come to mirror each other.
It’s also the easiest thing I’ve ever written.
I’ve seen a lot of writers push back against the popular notion of the muse and say that no, creative inspiration is not some ineffable strike of magic, your characters aren’t suddenly speaking up and telling the story to you, etc. I tend to agree. Whatever you write is the result of your own ideas, plans, and work. But something else is also true: your mind is extremely adept at making connections, and sometimes those can fire off in useful ways you didn’t see coming. The trick is to set yourself up for them. If you seed your story with enough interesting details and build your characters well enough, then you’ll have things to work with when you need them, and the pieces can start clicking together in ways that feel almost inevitable. As it turned out, a couple little things in that quote above—the very first meeting between Rose and Alia—gave me the last scene of the story. I didn’t even realize at the time what I’d set up, but once I got to the end, I just knew. Fitting things together felt enough like magic as to make no difference.
Even magic still needs work, of course, and much of Dance ’Til Dawn was edited, tweaked, and rewritten before I was done. Still, the spirit of the last scene never changed, and I think the closing line has remained as-is since the first draft. I’ll have to leave final judgement to my readers, but at least for me, it felt too right to meddle with it. And even if I can’t say exactly what happens without giving too much away, I hope you’ll understand when you get there why it’s my favorite bit in the story.
Because damn, it feels good to stick the landing.
LINKS:
BIO:
Genevieve J. Griffin is a writer living in the woodsy outskirts of the Seattle area, in a home full of books, gadgets, and creepy dolls. Her novel STRONGER THAN BLOOD and dark fairy tale DANCE ‘TIL DAWN are now available at Amazon.
