Will Taylor: Magic Has a Cost but Always Seems Like a Bargain

Will Taylor

Will Taylor cast his first spell when he was 10 years old and has yet to be carried off by a dragon, so it seems to have worked. He is a reader, writer, and honeybee fan, and lives in downtown Seattle. When not writing, he can be found searching for the perfect bakery, talking to trees in parks, and completely losing his cool when he meets longhaired dachshunds. His books include Maggie & Abby's Neverending Pillow Fort, Catch That Dog!, and The Language of Seabirds, which won the Washington State Book Award for Books for Young Adult Readers.

The School for Wicked Witches (Scholastic, $7.99 paperback, ages 8-12) is the first in an ongoing series of adventures following a West Oz witch named Ava Heartstraw, whose magical abilities are deemed too wicked for traditional school, so she is sent to a foreboding academy filled with other wicked witches. Book Two in the series will be released on February 4, 2025.

The School for Wicked Witches takes place in a future Oz, hundreds of years after the events most of us know and love. How did you go about balancing a familiar world with fresh ideas?

I gave up on the idea of trying to re-create what others have done. Oz is such a thoroughly explored territory, but it's also still fresh and vibrant. One thing that struck me about L. Frank Baum's Oz books was how he kept adding on characters and lore with a kind of giddy abandon. It's not like Tolkien where history builds on itself in a highly methodical and cyclical way around a core conflict. Exploring Oz feels more like channel surfing--in a good way--so there's plenty of room for new versions to join the party.

Is magic difficult to write, to make it believable?

It's incredibly difficult. Magic that's too convenient will ruin the story, but it's got to be useful and used often. Magic must have strict rules and limits and follow them to the letter, and it should always come with a price.

From an entertainment point of view, it's also essential that it be aspirational. You want the reader to wish they had the powers they're reading about, like Tinabella's running-in-place invisibility. As a kid that was my favorite part: the thrill while reading A Wizard of Earthsea of imagining what it would be like to call a hawk down out of the sky or summon a magewind. Magic has to come at a cost, but it should always seem worth the bargain. It's definitely a balancing act!

I highly recommend J. Elle's A Taste of Magic and Claribel A Ortega's Witchlings series for examples of magic done absolutely right.

Is there a secret to pacing out a series like this?

One thing I do very deliberately is leave myself crumbs I can play with later. All the odd little details in their first tour of the school in book one, for instance, were me giving myself a stockpile of material to bring back as needed throughout the series. Pre-placing in an off-hand way lets you get away with using it later, since the reader already has a memory of that one weird room or hidden door or random accordion. It's a bit like sprinkling clues in a detective story.

I thoroughly resonated with Ava Heartstraw, whose ambition and self-doubt tug on her every step of the way. How did that character form as you wrote?

I knew right from the start Ava's core character conflict was her determination to show that she doesn't belong at the School for Wicked Witches, no matter how many rules she has to break to prove herself good. That stubborn, cheerful certainty shares strong similarities with Maggie in my first book, Maggie & Abby's Neverending Pillow Fort, and Eilonwy from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, which was fundamental to me as a kid. I loved Eilonwy for her bossy confidence and I absolutely see her influence on Ava, though I tempered it with self-doubt for reader sympathy.

Seeing Ava realize she's completely out of her depth socially when she gets to school, then mess up hard in a cascading series of failures--all that lets us root for her as she starts to gain real power.

What part of the book did you have the most fun writing?

In book one, it would have to be the introduction to Vivienne Morderay at the circus. I knew I needed to refresh the tone around that point in the quest and she was so dramatic and villainous and unbelievably silly. She kept surprising me. I had a blast writing her.

Then for book two, absolutely the Moldy Horse. As I say this, I'm realizing he's a lot like Vivienne: a breath of fresh air right when the book needed it, a silly, adult-lite figure with a ridiculous way of speaking who leads the cast down an unexpected path. I guess I have the most fun writing comically confident disruptor characters! That's probably good for me to know about myself as an author.

What do you think about our continued fascination with wickedness and our love of a villain redemption story?

I think we're fascinated by structures of power and the individuals who find ways to wield it. Misrule is something that we find both threatening and entertaining, maybe because we like to imagine what we would do in that situation. One of my favorite scenes in The Lord of the Rings is when Sam is briefly tempted by the evil ring and imagines turning Mordor into a garden, striding over the hillsides of beautiful flowering plants in all his noble might. Everyone's vision of what they would do if they allowed themselves to be wicked is unique. I think that's why it's fun to look at a person's image of their grand, divine self. If they could do whatever they wanted, and they had all the power in the universe, what would they do?

That's one of the core questions laced through this series: Is there something fundamentally wicked about having power over other people and using it? What if it's unearned, like a child born into magic? Ursula K. Le Guin, my favorite author of all time, brought that up in an essay about writing A Wizard of Earthsea, which she said came together for her when she realized, "A child with power is an idea that contains worlds."

The School for Wicked Witches is a silly fantasy romp at heart, but I hope it contains worlds, too. I've had a great time getting lost in Oz, finding the overlaps with earlier stories and the footprints from other realms that have slipped across the borderlands. Book three comes out next September, happily, so there are plenty more bouncy adventures ahead! --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness

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