Macalester College English Professor, Emma T\u00f6rzs, got a cat, saw Joanna Newsom live in concert, read a few fantasy novels, and did a chapter exchange with a friend in October 2019. These events spurred her to begin writing her first published novel.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Four years later, T\u00f6rzs published <\/span>Ink Blood Sister Scribe<\/span><\/i>, on May 30, 2023, and since, it has received glowing reviews, including a Good Morning America Book Club Pick.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n This novel may be the first T\u00f6rzs published, but it is not the first she wrote. She finished her first novel in 2016, and though her agent loved it, publishers did not. After some reflection, she realized she did not like it either.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was really relieved that my novel was not going to get published,\u201d T\u00f6rzs said. \u201cI realized that I didn\u2019t like the book that I had written, and I wasn\u2019t that proud of it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n All of T\u00f6rzs\u2019 publications until 2017 were literary realism, they had no fantastical or supernatural elements. She had interest in other genres, but everywhere she went\u2014especially graduate school\u2014everyone expected her to write literary realism.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI had success from an early age; I won a bunch of literary prizes,\u201d T\u00f6rzs said. \u201cI felt like I had to write a very specific type of novel in order to continue that validation from the literary establishment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Upon reflection on her first novel, however, T\u00f6rzs realized she had not enjoyed the process. While she enjoyed the act of writing, she hated her work whenever she thought about it or read over it. She turned to her childhood to relearn the joy of writing, through reading. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFantasy is the genre that made me a writer when I was a kid and made me a reader,\u201d T\u00f6rzs said. \u201cI pretty much only read fantasy from the ages of like seven to thirteen, and those were my peak reading years.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Years later, T\u00f6rzs returned to her fantasy roots with a Google search. That search led her to Clarion West, a prestigious six-week summer workshop in Seattle, Washington, that writers such as Octavia Butler and Ted Chiang have attended.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n She applied with literary fiction and a personal essay begging the workshop to take her even though she\u2019d never written fantasy, and they accepted her. The experience was life-changing.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Flash forward to October 2019, when T\u00f6rzs\u2019 writer friend\u2014who was on deadline for her second novel at the time\u2014asked her to do a chapter swap, T\u00f6rzs had nothing written. She could have said no, but instead she wrote something.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI wrote a first chapter and sent it to her, and she was like, \u2018I have no comments, just please give me more,\u2019\u201d T\u00f6rzs said. \u201cThat was encouraging.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n From there, T\u00f6rzs\u2019 novel developed. She went through many different iterations of her story with many different characters.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI wrote and then rewrote and tried 500 million different things, so many different things that I don\u2019t even remember how I got to where I am now,\u201d T\u00f6rzs said. \u201cI killed off so many characters. By killed off, I mean I worked so hard at developing them, and then wrote hundreds of pages with them, and then wrote them out of the story entirely. They don\u2019t exist anymore.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The story centers around two half-sisters who were raised to protect their family\u2019s library of magical books. They spent ten years apart but reunite when their father dies. Simultaneously, a young man who lives outside London is realizing the protected way he has lived may have sinister implications. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite all the changes, the theme of sisterhood stayed central throughout.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is a book about sisters,\u201d T\u00f6rzs said. \u201cI\u2019m really really close to my sister, and she has always asked me to write a book about magic sisters. It started out as something that I just did for fun, and then it became, \u2018Wow, I guess I\u2019m actually writing a book about magic sisters, here we go.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Though T\u00f6rzs enjoyed writing her novel and loves the fantasy genre, it is not her only interest. The world of bookselling, however, revolves around brands. Her publishers often ask what the \u201cT\u00f6rzs brand\u201d is, and T\u00f6rzs wants to keep her options open. She does not know what she will write in the future, but she does know one simple fact: there is no sequel.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt stresses me out a little to think that I\u2019ll be \u2018branded\u2019 early,\u201d T\u00f6rzs said, \u201cbut I think that the way around that is to do something really different really soon and see what happens.\u201d<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Daniel Graham \u201826 This piece originally appeared in the Mac Weekly in September 2023, and the original version can be viewed online here. Since Daniel is also an English department student worker, The Words requested his permission, and the Mac Weekly’s permisison, to republish this awesome article for our readers. A big thanks to Daniel and […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":913,"featured_media":0,"parent":5903,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5921","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5921"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7833,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5921\/revisions\/7833"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Ink](\"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/603\/2023\/10\/81dG1Vl44hL._SL1500_-679x1024.jpg\")