Video transcript
NSW Premier's Reading Challenge 2024 – SWF author interview (secondary) – 01. C. S. Pacat

[intro music]

LESLEY: Hi. My name is Lesley, and I'm a student from Bankstown Girls High School. And today, I'm here on Darug land at Parramatta Riverside Theatre for the Sydney Writers' Festival Secondary School Day. And I'm very, very excited to be interviewing C. S. Pacat for the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge.

C. S. PACAT: Oh, I'm really excited to be here. Thank you.

LESLEY: So how are you today?

C. S. PACAT: I'm really good. I'm loving my time in Sydney.

LESLEY: That's very nice. So as a writer who's written a lot of stories from your coming of age stories like 'Fence' and your fantasy, which I very much enjoyed, what sort of ideas do you have that can lead to a book?

C. S. PACAT: So to be honest with you, I find ideas to be the most difficult part of writing. I'm not someone that is constantly bubbling with ideas. And they come to me rarely. And I have to go out into the world and seek them out. When I start to write a book, I do this exercise where you know that cliche, think of the book that you want to read?

LESLEY: Yeah.

C. S. PACAT: But I try and really think about it. So imagine myself walking into a bookshop, and there's always a book that you're looking for but never exactly finding. And I think the reason that we're not finding it is because that book is not on the shelf. It's only within you. So I ask myself questions about it. What genre is it? How do I want it to make me feel? Do I know anything about the characters or the setting? And that's how I come up with my ideas.

So, for example, for the 'Fence' comic, I love sports comics. And I was imagining that I really want to read one. But I used to fence in high school and university.

LESLEY: So in the 'Dark Rise' series, which is definitely one of my favourites, I found myself really interested in the characters of Will, and Violet, and also James. And the side characters were distinct, like Cyprian definitely had his own motivations. Additionally, all the other characters in your books throughout whatever you've written were all really diverse, like Nicholas in 'Fence' who had his motivations of becoming a star fencing player and winning competitions. And then there was also Violet who was a fighter for Will and what she believes in. As a writer, how do you develop your characters in your stories?

C. S. PACAT: So I try and develop not only-- well, I start with thinking about what kind of person creates the most interesting set of dynamics and problems within this world. For Nicholas and the world of fencing, I obviously thought an outsider to that world. So he's like the natural rookie character.

I think within that series, a trope that I often see in sports series or even dance series is there'll be the natural rookie. And they're always set against the perfectionist that has trained their whole life to excel in the sport. And I never really liked the way that they would go head to head and the natural rookie would win because they had heart. I always thought these 2 both have something to learn from each other.

So once I had Nicholas, then I started to people the world with characters around him that I thought could draw out interesting parts of him. But 'Dark Rise', because that book is so much in conversation with those English fantasy novels like 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Narnia', I was thinking about the characters that I often see in those books. And in those books, the hero is always like a straightforward, young British guy. And he's always named like Will or Harry. And I wanted to take a character like that and see if I could really put a huge twist on it, which I won't give away 'Dark Rise'.

And then when it came to building the surrounding characters, I was thinking about Who don't I see in this type of fantasy very often? What kind of characters have I always wished would be there but have never seen before? So when I was building the surrounding cast, I was really looking for types of people, archetypes that don't always get to partake in heroic fantasy.

LESLEY: Well, I think those work very well.

C. S. PACAT: Thank you.

LESLEY: OK. So seeing Will grappling with his identity and self, I thought it was written very well, the way he's almost constantly at odds with who he is now and who he was before.

C. S. PACAT: Yeah.

LESLEY: He obviously had many, many problems in accepting who he was before, which is a common struggle among people in the community. Did anything from real life past influence such a realistic description of his struggles?

C. S. PACAT: Yeah. When I was growing up, there were not a lot of books on shelves that had LGBTQ heroes. And so the place that I was seeing that type of character, and so therefore the place that I was seeing myself most often, was in villains because there were so many villains that were like coded as queer. So, for example, every Disney villain like Scar, Ursula, Jafar, Maleficent, all of them.

And so I was really interested in what happens when the narrative is telling you you are the villain and what does that do to your identity. How easy is it to accept yourself when everyone's telling you you're the villain in the story. You're destined to be bad. You're destined to be a bad person. And so that was the set of my own experiences that I was drawing on when I was writing Will.

LESLEY: I think that really came through in the character of Will. Yeah. So in 'Dark Rise', Will and Violet have a very close, tender relationship, which touches my heart. And seeing the large emphasis on their friendship, Did any relationships in your life inspire such a close relationship between them?

C. S. PACAT: Yeah. I think most of my-- I think my most important and longest lasting relationships in my life are my friendships. So there's no relationship that I've had that's been longer lasting than that of my best friend. And therefore, they know me better than anyone else because they've lived my life alongside me for decades.

And so I think often in young adult fiction, especially when that's the types of novels that might have a romance or focus on romance, then there can be this like feeling that your love interest is your most important person. [laughs] But, for me, while that might be the case, friendships are just as important, sometimes more important.

And so I really wanted to write a really foundational and beautiful friendship between a male character and a female character in the series that didn't turn into a romance, which is the way I so often see it-- I can see it go in other novels. But I think we've all had either the experience of the only person that I can turn to is my best friend right now, or I wish I had a best friend that I could turn to right now. That is a role that is so fundamental to everyone's life.

LESLEY: Friendships are all very, very important. So I've heard that your 'Captive Prince' trilogy first started off as a fan fiction. When you first started writing online, Did you have any idea how popular your books would become?

C. S. PACAT: So actually, it did not start out as a fan fiction. So it was never fan fiction. When I was in my early-- probably from about 12 to about age 20, I was writing fan fiction. I used to write in a lot of-- it was long, long ago, so a lot of really old fandoms like 'Interview with the Vampire'. But when I started to write 'Captive Prince', it was completely original.

But back then, there weren't a lot-- like I was kind of saying, there were not a lot of LGBTQ fantasy novels on shelves. So I didn't imagine that if I-- I really wanted to write a gay fantasy original, but I didn't imagine that it could be a book, because I'd never seen it before. And so I just-- but I had seen a lot of queer fiction online. I'd read queer fan fiction. There was a bunch of queer web comics and stuff that we're around at that time. And so I was like, ah, the internet's where you write this kind of story. So even though it was original from the beginning, I was serialising it like a fan fiction.

I had no idea that it was going to become popular. [laughs] I thought no one would read it. And I remember so clearly the first time anyone commented on it, on one of the chapters of the story, the first comment that I ever received on any of my original work, and the comment was just, oh, interesting. [laughs] And I actually read that comment over and over so many times and I really treasured it. I felt like someone thinks my writing is interesting.

And so I found that a really-- even though it's an unusual path to publication, I found it a really great environment because I think when you write on the internet, especially when you write under a pseudonym, you write very fearlessly. You think you can write anything. You're not thinking like this has to be a book. And so there's a lot of things in 'Captive Prince' that I might have been scared to do if I'd been thinking of it as an original novel back when I started.

LESLEY: It was very polarising.

C. S. PACAT: Yeah. It's a very polarising book. Yeah.

LESLEY: So how did you feel when you finally did publish it?

C. S. PACAT: When I first-- so again, the path to publication was very twisty. It went viral online. And it had millions of hits, hundreds of thousands of returning readers. And I thought at that time like maybe this can be a book. Maybe I can get this published. So I sent it out to every agent and publisher that I could think of. And I think I sent it out more than 100 times. And the kindest response that I received at that time was we just don't think there's a market for this kind of book, because people were just not publishing queer novels.

And so I thought like, oh well, I was right. This is not a book that can be on commercial bookshelves, so I'll self-publish it because all my readers kept asking me for a paperback copy. So when I self-published, it went berserk. It started hitting number one across lists. And finally, that was when a US agent approached me and said, I think I can-- I'd like to try and sell this book. And she managed to sell it to Penguin Random House in the US.

And so the way I felt about it was shocked [laughs] and surprised. By that point, I thought in a million years it could never be published. And then when it was published, I felt very-- I felt very grateful. But also it was a kind of a scary feeling because I was exposing a book to the world and attaching it to my name that I'd never really thought would be out there. It's a very extreme novel. And it's got a lot of very intense themes. So that was quite confronting.

LESLEY: I did incidentally read the book.

C. S. PACAT: Did you?

LESLEY: Yeah. I got through one and a half books before I had to put it down.

C. S. PACAT: Yeah. It's very, very adult and very, very dark in places.

LESLEY: Yeah. Well, the response from online regarding your writing must have been a great influence on trying to write more series. Have you always known you wanted to be an author deep down in your heart or was it as much of a shock to you as it was anybody else?

C. S. PACAT: I think I've always known I wanted to write. Again, when I was younger, the idea of being an author was almost like wanting to be an astronaut. It was I thought like someone can be this but not me. I didn't understand that there was a path to becoming an author. And I didn't understand that, yeah, I just didn't think it was something that I could do.

So I would write all the time. I was writing fan fiction, then I was writing just online original serials. But I was not thinking of myself as an author yet. But I think that makes me think of writers who are up and coming or aspiring writers that's like, don't underestimate your own potential and don't gatekeep yourself. [laughs] You never know where writing can take you. So I suppose I did always want to be an author, but I didn't understand that I could be one for a long time.

LESLEY: I'm pretty sure we've all been there at some point.

C. S. PACAT: Yeah. Yeah.

LESLEY: So you told me you did fencing and that influenced your decision about fencing.

C. S. PACAT: Yeah.

LESLEY: The graphic novel. So what was your experience fencing in high school?

C. S. PACAT: It was great. Fencing is one of those sports where it's an individual combat sport at the end of the day, so it's very competitive. I do think there's people that, like, are drawn to team sports and there's people that are drawn to one-on-one sports. So it does attract a certain personality type. But it's really fun, really athletic, and very, very, very competitive.

I used to fence epee. So there's 3 weapons in fencing. There's foil, epee, and sabre. I fenced epee, the true weapon. [laughs] But the thing about fencing is it's so fast. And it's very hard-- it's a very tough sell as a spectator sport if you do not fence yourself because you can barely see. It's so fast, you can barely see what's going on.

And then it's so intricate that there's a huge learning curve to understand what is going on. And I think that's one reason why I thought like a comic is the perfect place to put this sport, because you can slow everything down panel by panel. It's easy to clearly see what's going on. So the comics are like a way of learning about the sport and make, at least I hope, make the sport much more consumable, so that just the average layperson can get the same excitement from it that I feel when I was fencing.

LESLEY: So did you win anything?

C. S. PACAT: I won nothing. [laughs] And Australia-- How can I put this sensitively? We are not known as a great fencing nation. So in the same way that we're not really known as a great like figure skating nation. So to suck in Australia is to really suck.

LESLEY: Yeah. So as an avid fan of your books, especially your fantasy novels, I speak for more than myself when I ask you, are there any sneak peeks you can give into your next book?

C. S. PACAT: So the book that I'm working on right now is the third book in the 'Dark Rise' series. And what I can tell you about that is, ah, we're going to a brand new location, that now all secrets will be revealed. We're going to learn everything that we want to know about the past and its secrets. And I'm really hoping to make the ending of the trilogy even more demented than the endings of book 1 and 2 So I hope you'll enjoy it.

LESLEY: I'm sure I will. It sounds very interesting. Well, thank you so much for letting me interview you today. It's been amazing talking with you. I hope everyone watching out there enjoys reading your incredible novels as much as I did while they work to complete the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge.

C. S. PACAT: Thank you so much for having me. This has been really great.

LESLEY: Yes. It's been really great for me, too.