From the first moment I opened a copy of Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, I was in love. Her prose, her descriptions of the circus and those inside it, the very concept of dueling magicians at the turn of the 20th century, all had me hooked. I could imagine myself inside the circus fence from the get-go, surrounded by caramel and bonfires and “feats of illustrious illusion.” I felt as though I’d fallen into the larger than life spectacle of Le Cirque des Rêves (“The Circus of Dreams”), and I was perfectly content to remain there long after the final page was turned.
Morgenstern grew up as an introverted, bookish child in the northeastern United States, and from a young age, she was supremely conscious of her surroundings and environment. Her views on getting sucked into the environments she finds herself in are well-encapsulated in an interview with Haute Macabre: “I’ve always liked spaces and I’ve always been a bit of a hermit.” Her awareness of her settings has bled into her writing style, and has said that her own environment influences and inspires the writing itself: her first novel, The Night Circus, was written in Salem, Massachusetts, and she believes it to be a very autumnal book that went along with her surroundings. The Starless Sea, her second novel which was just released this month, she considers a wintry creation. This is fitting, as she worked on it in her new home in the quiet, wooded scenery of the Berkshires in New York. Morgenstern has also said that she will often begin developing a story with a setting, rather than a plot. In her work, she strives to engage all five of a reader’s senses when developing a scene, and is known for incorporating lush descriptions of the scents of a setting into her narrative, wanting to properly utilize what is in her opinion an underused aspect of writing. Her prose, especially when describing the surroundings of a scene, is enrapturing and beautiful and detailed without being overly so. She says that her basis for imagining a setting comes down to the smells and the lighting, and this premise is evident in The Night Circus.
“The circus looks abandoned and empty. But you think perhaps you can smell caramel wafting through the evening breeze, beneath the crisp scent of the autumn leaves. A subtle sweetness at the edges of the cold.” ~Erin Morgenstern, The Night CircusMorgenstern’s writing process is less than precise. She is a self-proclaimed “binge writer,” and will have days when she writes pages and days when she writes little to nothing. She says she is still working to truly discover her process, which seems logical given she’s only just released a second book. She does not outline her ideas prior to writing, but rather just begins and sees where the words take her. This strategy is how she happened upon the premise of The Night Circus, by having a group of characters (who she admits she was bored with) attend the circus -- she added this plot point purely to have something new and exciting and unplanned happen. Once she did this, she realized that the circus was far more interesting to write about than the story she had been working on, and was able to lay the foundations of her first book through this insight experience, to use Smith and Ward’s words.
Morgenstern is also a collector: in an interview with Powell’s Books, she says, “I think I call in influences from all over the place.” She takes inspiration from various literature and movies that she has encountered throughout her life. In that same interview, Morgenstern talks about how she drew inspiration for how to present The Night Circus from the storytelling styles of authors like Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll. She focused her mind on Shakespeare and other classic works while she was writing as well, and it shows -- a character in the novel has the stage name of Prospero the Enchanter, a reference to the protagonist of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Morgenstern also recognized after writing The Night Circus that there is a sequence in the book that strongly resembles a scene from Howards End, with which she was obsessed when she was younger and which she alluded to on a subconscious level. Her new novel The Starless Sea has countless literary references in the first 80 pages alone, from Harry Potter to Where the Wild Things Are to The Great Gatsby to Alice in Wonderland. This last title has overarching allusions within the novel, as the protagonist, Zachary, ends up traveling into an underground world (though this world is dominated by books rather than the sentient playing cards of the original).
Morgenstern said in the Powell’s Books interview that “Everything anyone ever told [her] never happened to debut authors is happening to [her],” referring to the unreal amount of excitement and acclaim surrounding The Night Circus, even prior to its release in September of 2011. Fans and critics alike marvelled at her imaginative writing style, her fantastical plot, and, in the words of one reviewer, “[her] strikingly beautiful world, in spite of its darknesses.” Her widespread love for her unique storytelling and prose (as well as the book’s place on the New York Times bestseller list) demonstrates her acceptance by her field and her audience, and her fresh take on the genre of fantasy literature more completely and beautifully captures the physical sensations of a setting than any other author’s style that I have encountered. She truly belongs among the illusionists and story-crafters of the magical worlds she brings to life.
Sources:
Gardner, H. (1993). Creating minds: An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, andGandhi. New York: Basic Books.
Morgenstern, Erin. The Night Circus : a Novel. New York :Doubleday, 2011.
Morgenstern, Erin. The Starless Sea. Harvill Secker, 2019.
Smith, S.M.& Ward, T.B.(2012).Cognition and the creation of ideas. In K. J. Holyoak & R. G.Morrison (Eds.),Oxford handbook of thinking and reasoning. New York: Oxford University Press.
I really liked this blog, especially since I'm also a fan of Erin Morgenstern. I found it interesting how her novels kind of resemble the environment that she worked on them in. It was also interesting to learn the The Night Circus actually started out completely differently, but then Morgenstern switched gears with the characters.
ReplyDeleteThis was a really amazing blog post! It made me really want to read this book. I find Morgenstern's writing process really interesting, although binge writing must be exhausting. Good job!
ReplyDeleteMorgensen's process is pretty intriguing. I wonder what it's like to constantly be observative of the world around you and pay attention to the little details. Thanks for sharing!
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