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Science Fiction and Fantasy
How The Bards of Bone Plain Became a Novel

I've published over two dozen novels by now, so you'd think I know how to write one. What I've found over the years is that no novel is predictable. Each will have its unexpected problems, and no matter how often you think you've faced those problems, every one of them will be new all over again. The Bards of Bone Plain began on a quiet plain with a (female) knight riding across it under moonlight and meeting, as she stopped for the night, a man full of ambiguities. He seemed of her time and yet ancient; he seemed to have done something dreadful and mysterious, but she felt she might trust him if she needed to. He gave a name, but who was he, really? I had plans for that pair, but the knight rode off into the land of unfinished stories, leaving me with the stranger on the plain.

Four years and hundreds of pages later, I finally finished his story. It grew in painstaking fashion, stone by stone. Time refused to stand still: sometimes the story was in a medieval world, sometimes in a more modern one. Genders kept switching back and forth. Music was a constant. So was Nairn. The rest of the tale, at any given rewrite, might go any which way. In the final version, it followed Nairn everywhere, and with the aid of three other point of view characters, Nairn and his story and the weary storyteller finally reached its ending.

Patricia A. McKillip

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The Bards of Bone Plain