Posted by Athena Scalzi
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/05/28/the-big-idea-guy-gavriel-kay-4/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55841

Author Guy Gavriel Kay believes that sometimes, summarizing a book can be a disservice to it. So how do you talk about your novel in a way that encapsulates everything you want it to, without giving away too much, and while keeping the reader hooked? Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Written on the Dark, to see how it’s done.
GUY GAVRIEL KAY:
So, GGK, what’s the new book about, eh?
Ah, anonymous interviewer, are you so tired of life, that you ask this of me? Understand in your bones and marrow that I am truly Canadian. I can summon Canada geese to deal with you. You really don’t want that to happen, trust me.
Say what? I don’t understand —
Of course you don’t. All right, let’s try this. Some of us (well, me?) take the considered view that War and Peace or The Lord of the Rings or Song of Solomon can be made to sound trivial, silly, shallow if boiled down to a paragraph’s worth of sound bite. Some of us (me!) also know that’s the Way of the World today for books, pitching a novel as a vibe, or as ‘The Godfather meets Ted Lasso!’, to make it easily grasped.
[Pause for someone to say ‘I’d read/watch the shit out of that!’]
[OK, fine, you can say it too, John. You know you want to.]
Truth is, I’ve always felt that nothing I’ve ever written has one single Big Idea. (Tigana is probably closest.) I’m focused on complicating things, multiple ideas, on nuance, on letting readers decide what they find in or take away from a book. (That’s gonna happen anyhow, might as well embrace it!) But as every release date nears (May 27th in US/Canada, 29th in UK, for Written on the Dark) I know I need to prep some sort of answer as the tour and online interviews begin.
Or also, you know, write a short essay, as here. (Thanks, John.) Because just about every interviewer (see top of this essay) is going to ask, given that a) it’s a fair question and b) it is an easy question to ask.
Problem is, like Canada geese, I will protect my young (the book!). That means pushing back against oversimplifying and trying not to distort the story myself with a flippant summary, or even a serious (but too fast!) one.
But here’s something I can say that’s more than a vibe and honestly reflects some things I think as to writing about history and how the past plays in terms of today — which is what I like to do, and what I did in this book.
A wise man who was not Mark Twain wrote that history may not repeat, but it rhymes. (His name was Theodore Reik and he was a psychoanalyst — make of that what you will — but it always seems to be credited to Twain.) I share that thought. I write with that idea in mind. It is one of many reasons why most of my books take place in a not-quite past, with many different settings, under two moons. What one reviewer called ‘history with a quarter-turn to the fantastic.’ If I do it right, this use of the fantastic — because we are not quite here, because there are elements of the supernatural — causes reader and author to share with each other that we are, indeed, rhyming with the past, not trying to pin the present down with it precisely.
Written on the Dark is inspired by France (and Burgundy, and England, and Italy) during the Hundred Years’ War of the 14th and well into the 15th century. It takes its cue, its opening scenes, from the assassination of a very important figure in the city of Orane, which is fairly close to being Paris. (Parts of the book are something of a love letter to Paris, actually.) Its main protagonist is modeled on the celebrated tavern poet, possible murderer and certain thief, François Villon, who is likely best known for asking in a verse, ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ My version of the poet, Thierry Villar, gets entangled in the investigation of the assassination at the start of the book. Why? Well, gosh, there’s a novel that answers that. I, er, wrote it!
But here’s where the idea of, well a Big Idea meets the notion of the past rhyming with the present. I became interested in thinking about people who are just too powerful to be made to face the law. Where the risk to those who might try to pursue justice can cause them to decide that their duty to family, city, even to a turbulent, endangered country, should perhaps lead them away from that investigation. These fears, and moral quandaries, and political realities, are part of the book.
A bit of a rhyme with today, you think? With America, and several other countries right now? Well, yes. But here’s the thing: I began writing the book two years ago, after my usual period of research. Its themes started emerging for me back then, not in the current circumstances of the world. And that, I suppose, might be a big idea for me…that events in our time have antecedents in so many periods and places. That themes of power and justice (and of tavern poets and power, and of women and finding a space for themselves and their desires in the world) are always with us, in one form or another.
You can write about yesterday’s snows — or the snows of an almost-yesterday — and say things that might resonate for readers as they look up from the page at their own time. I want people reading in my books about people they come to care for, set in a world essentially 600 years ago — and also thinking about … well, about right now. Not for lessons! I’m offering a story not giving a lecture. But as John indicates on this blog, with the very concept of these guest posts: novels do have room for substantial ideas too. Page turners can have us thinking: as we read, and after we’re finished.
I suppose this feeling lies behind every book I’ve ever written. That the snows of yesteryear have never gone away. Where are they, François Villon asked in a poem. They are right here with us, I’ll answer, in stories we can tell, and read.
A friend wrote me this spring after reading an advance copy of this newest novel that ‘maybe every book you’ve done has been written on the dark, trying to find the light.’
I’ll live with that.
Written on the Dark: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|BAM|Bookshop|Powell’s
Guy Gavriel Kay: Website|Bluesky|Instagram
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/05/28/the-big-idea-guy-gavriel-kay-4/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55841