The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/09/the-big-idea-sharon-shinn-4/

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It’s never too late to tell a good story. Author Sharon Shinn has returned years later to her Twelve Houses series to bring you a fresh novel in a familiar world. Follow along in her Big Idea for Shifter and Shadow to see how she’s breathed new life into a finished series.

SHARON SHINN:

Sometimes I write a book with a grand theme in mind. I want to explore issues of racism, maybe, or cultural diversity, or colonialism or religion or grief. But sometimes I just want to follow a couple of characters around. I just want to tell their story.

That’s the case with Shifter and Shadow, a new short novel in my Twelve Houses world. I wanted to explain what happened between two characters, Kirra and Donnal, whose relationship had unfolded off the page between the end of the second book and the beginning of the third. During the seventeen years since I had published the last book in the series, many of my readers had asked for their story, and I finally decided to write it.

But the idea was a little daunting. First, I had to come up with a storyline that would be a bit more interesting than a reconciliation and a declaration of love. There was no real suspense involved, because anyone who had read the whole series already knew that Kirra and Donnal ended up together. So what plot could I devise that would slot neatly in the gap between those previous books? What obstacles could I throw in their path, what surprises could I manufacture, what tension could I generate from surrounding circumstances? 

Even more difficult, how could I believably bridge the gulf that had always existed between the titled noblewoman and the peasant’s son? What could possibly move Donnal to openly admit his feelings when he had spent, oh, fifteen years trying to conceal them? How could Kirra convince him she returned his love when she had spent the entire second novel involved with another man?

Finally—seventeen years later—how successfully could I recapture the tone and rhythms of the earlier books and the personalities of the main characters? Kirra is one of my more irrepressible heroines and a lot of fun to write, but Donnal is significantly more reserved. Would I be able to tell a story from his point of view?

The questions about this particular book just added complexity to the task of writing a series, which can be challenging at the best of times. Simply keeping track of characters’ names, ages, heights, eye colors, and random personal details can be a monumental chore. (I keep a running file where I add pertinent details as they come up, but if I forget to update the file during the editing process, I end up doing a lot of searching through works-in-progress. “I thought he had two brothers, not one.” “Did she say she’d never been to the royal city?”) I find myself frequently rereading whole books in existing series every time I want to write a new one, hoping not to make a continuity error.

There’s also the ongoing problem of how much background material from previous installments needs to be reprised in the current manuscript. To some extent, an author writing any science fiction or fantasy book has to balance world-building with plotting, avoiding the infamous “info-dump” while still offering enough detail to bring an imaginary place to life. But in a series, it becomes particularly important to remind readers of pertinent events or relevant magic. One of my fellow authors says that there are always certain touchstones that readers expect to see and that the author has to include because they’re what make the books in a particular series familiar and unique. 

I knew writing the book would be tricky. But I had characters I loved and a plot that I found intriguing—one that fit nicely around the romance. And anyway, there were already some built-in grand themes, because the Twelve Houses world always incorporates issues of bigotry, persecution, and fear-based hatred. In Shifter and Shadow, many of the secondary characters are forced to examine their own biases—and maybe overcome them, maybe not. They also have to make hard choices, weighing deep personal risks against powerful rewards. What can they live without? What can they never give up?

I’m not an artist, but I’ve always thought that painting a picture must be similar to writing a novel. I might spend a week on one scene, two days on another, but neither scene is meant to stand alone; each one should merely be part of one seamless narrative. Similarly, I imagine that an artist might spend hours getting the folds of a gown just right or capturing the precise way sunlight illuminates an ocean wave. But that particular section of the canvas will ultimately be viewed as part of the overall picture, something that is taken as a whole.

Ideally, I think, the background effort that goes into a creative endeavor should be largely invisible. The artist might be calculating angles and the implementing the rule of thirds; the writer might be strategizing about plot and pacing and strategic disclosures of information. But the hope is that the audience just enjoys the finished work. At least, that’s what I hope when someone is reading one of my books.

I recently saw a meme that first showed the front of a completed piece of embroidery, a beautiful piece of artwork with clean lines and lovely imagery. The caption reads, “What the reader sees.” Beside it is shown the back of the same piece, with all the threads chaotically crisscrossing and all the knots and trailing ends making a glorious mess. This time the caption says, “What the author knows.”

My goal in writing Shifter and Shadow was to keep track of all those threads and balance all those conflicting imperatives in ways that the reader would never notice. All that’s left, I hope, is the story. 

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/09/the-big-idea-sharon-shinn-4/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57219