Guest Post: Elizabeth Foote on “The Hero and the Crown”

Beth Foote, a good friend from college who has an MFA (and a YA novel she’s finishing) reviews”The Hero and the Crown” and talks about the author jealousy that sometimes sneaks up on writers.

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley : A Review
Elizabeth A. Foote

When I finished reading Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown,I was distressed. The story of Lady Aerin, who transforms herself from the feared and marginalized daughter of a king and a Northern “witchwoman” to a slayer of dragons and savior of her kingdom drew some eerie parallels to the draft of a novel I wrote during the course of my graduate work in creative writing. Both characters are are princesses; both are only children; both have flame-red hair; both have a special mental “gift”; both must test their mettle and prove themselves fit to rule their kingdoms.

At first I felt a stab of despair–what could I do better and more originally than what Robin McKinley has already done with so much mastery that it earned her a Newbery award? And why didn’t I read The Hero and the Crown back in elementary school like everyone else so that I wouldn’t have bothered with writing a novel that had clearly already been written? I felt like an unoriginal hack.

But once the panic attack subsided, I was able to see things with a little more perspective. I work with fairy tales and fantasy, which is a genre that has been very well-traveled throughout the history of the written (and heck, oral) word. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still ripe for exploration. There is a reason that people revisit the fantastical realms: they resonate with us. They fascinate us. We love to imagine ourselves in Once Upon a Time, fighting our own dragons. Fantasy is far removed from our daily experience, yet so often psychologically close to it. It’s chock full of archetypal imagery. The key to working with already established fantastical themes successfully is putting your own unique spin on them–for you are a unique person, with a unique voice, and a unique view of the world, and you have a story that only you can tell.

McKinley achieves this kind of originality brilliantly in The Hero and the Crown. She sets it in an intricately drawn but fairly standard fantasy world of sword and sorcery and high adventure surrounding the coming-of-age story of her main character, the outcast child of a king. But McKinley takes this well-traveled trope and casts the main character as a girl–and not just any girl, but a girl who does traditionally masculine things, like slaying dragons and fighting on horseback, while retaining her emotional vulnerability. Long before there was Harry Potter with his lightning scar defeating Voldemort and the forces of evil, there was Lady Aerin Dragon-Killer wielding her magical Blue Sword to defeat every enemy threatening her father’s kingdom and earning her place as ruler of the kingdom through her strength, bravery, and will. We love Lady Aerin for her bravery, but also for the love story between her and her friend Tor. She is sympathetic and feminine without giving up any of her strength and agency–a revolutionary idea for the time, and even (sadly) sometimes for today. This now-classic story of feminine power remains an inspiration for girls. Perhaps it set the stage for other coming-of-age adventure stories of strong young women that I loved so well growing up. I may have missed reading <i>The Hero and the Crown</i> when I was young, but I read stories like it, which in turn may have influenced me to write my novel of similar theme two decades later. We are, after all, the sum of our experiences. I am the writer I am because of what I have taken from all I have read and loved throughout my life.

So perhaps the question I should be asking myself is not “How can I do better than McKinley?” but “How can I tell my story the best way that I know how?” Truth be told, even though my story shares some superficialities with McKinley’s, the two stories seek to discover different things. Time will tell whether the journey I write for my heroine’s coming-of-age will be a story that people will be hungry to hear. I can only hope it will be–and also, every night before I go to bed, I can kneel on the floor and say the magic words, “I am not a hack… I am not a hack….”

Hey, at least it’s worth a shot.