'Plan like a raven, but write like a fox'

In The Raven Scholar, the first volume of the Eternal Path trilogy, award-winning historical mystery author Antonia Hodgson masterfully combines epic fantasy and a fair-play whodunit.

'I did something which I haven't done before, which was really just play. I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.

One of the books was about animal symbolism, particularly motifs in embroidery and visual arts and what animal symbols within them often mean in different cultures. Then I started thinking about these different animals and what they represent symbolically. My mind tends to work quite intuitively when I'm first thinking, and then goes to character. So, if there was this world that was guided by these guardian animals, how would the world be divided up? Would there be monasteries where people learned skills based around those guardians?

Then I started to build the world through a map. Maps are always great, in terms of not only giving myself a sense of the heft of the world, but also helping to move the plot along as well. For me, as soon as I put a map together, I think about, for instance, what happens if you live in the main kind of seat of power over there? Things like that. It all developed very naturally and organically.

That was a classic first book. It took me five years to write, and ended up being about 230,000 words. It got away from me-I had set off without really quite knowing where I was going, and I learned from that. The Hawkins novels were set over a very short amount of time with a single narrator, and they got more and more hemmed in. I wanted to do something very different from that-something that sprawled out with multiple narrators and games. And so, weirdly, with this new series, I wanted to take some of that playfulness that I had in that first book, in terms of how to tell the story through different narrative techniques.

I think having a book that is both epic fantasy, and has a murder mystery within it, in terms of making sure that both fit in together. That was technically tricky. But it was, in many ways, such a joy to write.

I had the idea of a world where there'd been millennia of tyranny and how a society tried to prevent that, and had sort of successfully done it, but with compromises. So we're in this world that is kind of half in, half out of tyranny, and where there's always the potential threat of falling back into it. The book is set during a sort of slightly precarious moment in a history that's been semi-successful.

You've said before that you plot like a raven, but write like a fox-could you expand on what you mean by that?

I think it would be more exact to say I plan like a raven, but write like a fox. In other words, before I write a word, I read around the subject, fill notebooks with research, draw maps, create detailed biographies of characters, etc. At some point, I usually put together chapter breakdowns-and sometimes I write these out and put them on my wall, even though I know I won't stick to them. Then I start to write.

Once I'm inside the book, all sorts of fresh ideas and avenues open up. Walk-on characters take on sudden significance. A tiny detail dropped in as if by chance becomes a major plot twist. I say "as if" because really it's my subconscious drawing on all the earlier planning. I need to do all that preparatory work, and then once I'm writing I'm free to explore, riff, and play, because I know I'm traveling on solid ground. And I like the creative tension between the two modes. It works for me. As I say in the book, it is good when the fox and the raven agree.

Antonia Hodgson, author of The Devil in the Marshasea, The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins, Death at Fountains Abbey and The Silver Collar, taling abut her new book, The Raven Scholar, in Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/.