This week we interviewed Iria G. Parente and Selene M. Pascual, two young authors from Madrid and Vigo respectively. In 2012 they wrote their first novel together, paper petals, which they posted for free on the Internet and which earned them a great impact on social networks and many readers.. In 2014 they published Alliances, first book of the trilogy Stories of the full moon, selected by Babelia in its list of the best youth readings of the year and winner of a Templis for best national novel belonging to the saga. We asked them about their recent young adult novel stone dreams (nocturnal, 2015).
How do you write a novel between two or more that is fantastic in nature??
It seems very complicated but it is simpler than it seems, we do it as if it were a little theater; First we create the characters' dialogues and from there we create the story. A theater in which you write all the dialogue and then extrapolate it to a Word file and you write the real story, already with the environmental limitations, the thoughts the feelings... This is how you create the novel as such, but the bases are the dialogues. For us, writing is easy because we have been together for a long time., the style has rubbed off on us, We write practically the same since we have known each other for ten years.; more than authors we are friends, there is a complicity, there is a mood to write, Above all, there is a desire to have a good time..
“In the end it all comes down to power - thinks Arthmael -. How people see you, how they react when they hear your name”. Is this really the case in reality too??
Yeah, I believe that the world is governed a lot by power and especially in youth novels where they always talk about power., about how the protagonist comes to achieve power within a world that is not his or hers; after all, the young, In this case Arthmael and Lynnes are halfway there, They are not children, they are not adults., so people don't take them seriously, It happens to many young people; I think they feel like they're not taken seriously.. It is still a struggle for power, for the power of becoming adults, to have that independence, to be able to fend for yourself, to decide what it is you want to do, create your own family.
Power is everywhere, they even educate us for that, They educate us to be the best in the class, the strongest, the smartest. In youth there is a terrible competition to be the most and to have more power depending on what scenarios, but there is always that stigma, but also in the adult world.
If I hadn't written this novel, Is it the one you would like to have read??
Yeah, I would have liked to read it, the thing is stone dreams We started writing it as something we wanted to see., something we wanted to do to have fun, We came from a novel that we had to write with editorial time. This is a bit for taste, We had to write the previous one within a period of two months: 'Write now, write now!’, with an overwhelming date. And we wrote this to forget a little about that pressure, We said: let's write one for fun, to let ourselves go, and we had so much fun that we wrote it in two weeks, but because we were all the time wanting to know what was happening to the characters, we were acting more like readers than writers, in fact we like to reread it.
¿Qué la hace especial dentro del género fantástico que tanto ha llamado la atención tanto entre los lectores como entre los críticos?
Based on my thinking and what they have said, I would say that is the message. In many reviews by young people they say that they appreciate that a youth novel talks about machismo, of prostitution, gender violence, that prostitution doesn't have to be bad, but white slavery is, let people talk about those things, of things that are out there and that youth literature ignores, decide that “no, not calm, that this is not going to happen”. There are very hard scenes and people are not used to that, because in youth literature, in the second chapter, there is a violation. I wish it didn't happen, but it happens, and how it happens let's talk about it. It's not taboo, we don't believe in taboos, is that we believe that neither youth literature nor any type of literature should have taboos or censorship; we censor ourselves and it's absurd. I think that's it, that we have talked about what we wanted to talk about and we have not had any type of problem either in the content or in the tone in which we wanted to discuss it, We have not sugarcoated reality either., if we had done it, for example with prostitution, white trafficking or gender violence, Not only the readers but we ourselves would have felt like we were being disrespectful to reality.. If there are serious topics you must treat them seriously even if that seriousness is crude., yes it is difficult, you must do it.
The novel is set on a fantastic island, Marabilia, a place of legends, The fact that it is an island makes it special, more suggestive than if it were in the middle of a continent.
The fact that it is an island is related to our previous novel in Alliances, in Stories of the full moon, you see a different continent and this novel, although it is not the same place, yes it is the same universe and, somehow, we make many winks to Alliances; If you have not read the book, there are certain messages that tell you that, For example, There are places where there are women reigning, On the other hand, in Marabilia there are none.; in some way we wanted to differentiate ourselves from the other novel, but at the same time, on the same planet there are very different situations. It is not only that in Alliances, For example, There is a queen that everyone respects, is that if there was a queen in Sylphos surely no one would respect her because she is a woman, because it is a very sexist continent. We wanted to make a parallel and at the same time it is a fairly closed site, Being an island that looks much better.
Are there many insecure Lynnes who need someone to encourage them to continue outside of Marabilia?
I read the comments that come to us every day from social networks and I am concerned about the number of girls who tell me they identify with Lynne, It worries me because Lynne shouldn't be a character you should identify with because she's very hurt., it's broken inside, She is a character who does not believe in herself, He is a character who has been told throughout his life that he is only good for being a prostitute.; there are girls who feel like this, not with the issue of prostitution, but they feel like they can't love anyone, that are insufficient for the world, and I say: Girls, no, anyone is valid, everyone has something to contribute.
Many girls believe that they are not good for something and the idea of not being good for something is what is really going to leave them immobile.. So, We have to teach girls and boys – because there are boys who have also identified with Lynne because they tell us: 'I'm very down...' – we have to break that, you have to promote self-love, there is a lot of talk about romantic love, of love relationships in youth literature, but little about self-love and I think it is more important than romantic love.
GINÉS VERA
