On August 12th I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Beth Durst at Northport Books about her new fantasy novel Sea of Charms. We talked about everyday heroism, the healing nature of genre fiction, and getting past the “Doomed Stage” in a rough draft. Here are some highlights from our conversation. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

ELLA: We’re here to celebrate your new book, Sea of Charms. I saw it was an instant bestseller. Congratulations!

SARAH: Thank you. Yes, I had no chill about that. The Wednesday a week after the book comes out, the New York Times list gets sent to your publisher around 4 p.m. and then it gets posted online around 7 p.m. So everybody knows that starting around 4 p.m., the phone may or may not ring. My cellphone lit up with my editor's name, and I got so excited that I forgot to answer. Then she told me the news that it had made the list, and I bounced for the rest of the night. It meant so much to know that my stories are resonating with people, because that's all I want to do: to share stories with people and give them a little hope, and make them smile, and take them away from whatever is going on in their world.

ELLA: Our heroine Marin is a supply runner. She has a lovely ship named the Silver. She makes pickups and deliveries for the Crescent Islands, and she is accompanied by her sea serpent Perri. This is definitely a book meant to be read by the water. So I'm curious, what is your relationship to the water? Are you a sailor? Do you have a sea serpent friend?

SARAH: The sea serpent was totally why I wrote this book. All the books in the Spell Shop world are stand-alones. You can read them in any order, but they grew out of each other. The Spell Shop has a monologue at the end in which Kaz is talking about his creator and is very very sad, and I'm like, ‘I can't leave very very sad. I need to know what her story is!’ So The Enchanted Greenhouse is her story, a librarian who has been turned into a statue as punishment for an illegal spell. She wakes up human again, and she's on this island that's filled with magical greenhouses. For plot reasons, a sailor arrives to deliver goods, and I just randomly gave her a sea serpent. I'm like, obviously, you're my next story. I couldn't just give her a sea serpent and not tell her story. So Perri is really the whole reason this book exists. 

But the water has always been a special place for me. I grew up in Massachusetts, and when you grow up in Massachusetts, you go down the Cape every weekend. Everything is hydrangeas and gray shingles. You have lobster rolls and eat taffy, and you bounce on a trampoline, and then you go home across the bridge. I took sailing lessons when I was a kid, so I do know how to sail. I watched many YouTube videos to refresh myself. I am terrible at sailing; I am not a relaxed sailor. I am convinced that the boom's going to hit me in the head and I'm going to lose consciousness and fall in the water. So I'm much more of a theoretical sailor, but I do know how it's done, and I love the ocean theoretically.

ELLA: Let’s talk a little bit more about Marin. She is a bit different from the previous heroines in this series. She is healing from a past difficult relationship, and she really values her independence and her autonomy. How did her arc come to you?

SARAH: At their core, all these books are very much about healing, which I'm not sure is something I realized when I was writing the first one. You discover what your themes are as you go along. Marin is starting broken, and I wanted to take her to a place where she's healed. I think of these characters' arcs as like the Japanese pottery, Kintsugi, where the vase gets broken and then the cracks are healed with gold, and it creates something beautiful. It's not that the pain is going away. It's that something beautiful is coming out of it. That's the arc I wanted to tell with this story. It was really important to me that we start in a place of pain and shadow, so that I could tell the story of someone coming out of that shadow and into the light, somebody who was so hurt she never wanted to be vulnerable again, yet finding her way to let people into her heart again. Setting sail is her way of being alone. She's got the whole world at her disposal, but she is alone, and she thinks that that's fine, and that's what she wants. I wanted her to discover that no, it's better if you sail with people, if you take people on your journey.

ELLA: It's better to have a crew! Over the course of the book, Marin meets a lovely man named Dax, and he is outrageously talented and kind, but also quite sheltered. He's been living in a prestigious music conservatory in Elysium, where he is training to be a grand master musician. Speaking of healing, I feel like Dax and Marin are perfect for each other because they are both healing, and they have a lot to learn from each other. What do you think makes them such a perfect pair for each other? 

SARAH: I mean, that's why I paired the two of them. She's alone on the sea, and he's surrounded by people yet still alone. His parents gave him to the conservatory when he was four years old with a destiny to become one of the greatest composers this land has ever known. He has a lot of healing too, to define for himself what life he wants. What I wanted with all of these books was to show a non-toxic relationship. People being nice to each other, a relationship built on kindness and respect. A relationship where they don't have to fix each other, they just get to heal alongside each other. They don't have to change it to fit into a certain type, like the end of Grease when Sandy has to change how she's looking at the end. None of that. They get to be more them. That's what I wanted. Two people that had the capacity to grow towards each other, rather than one of them fixing the other. 

ELLA: That's something I pay a lot of attention to in romance: the healthy, supportive relationships, and characters who have been through toxic, maybe controlling or abusive relationships — writing the perfect love interest for them, who can help them heal. Marin is able to identify that Dax has had so many choices taken away from him and help him connect with what he wants. Dax is able to reflect back at her that, like, ‘You're really cool and impressive, and you don't have to be alone, and people will treat you kindly.’ Everyone in this story is doing that to some degree.

SARAH: Yeah, they are. They're all on their own personal journey. Anybody that's lived a certain number of years has had their heart stomped on a few times. By somebody you've fallen for, by a friend, by a family member, by a teacher, by somebody random on the street that yells at you. Everybody's got some healing to do.

ELLA: Technically Marin is our hero, but there are a lot of heroes alongside her and in the background. There is a running theme of people showing up to support and fight for each other, even if they don't know each other. In this book, there are librarians preserving knowledge during the revolution. There are neighbors providing rescue and refuge for people fleeing the violence. 

In a scene I underlined very aggressively, Marin tells Ree the wax myrtle plant, “Sometimes just surviving is heroic enough.” I loved that quote. I'm curious how you think about heroism in this world.

SARAH: That is something I think about a lot. I've been finding myself playing with what it means to be brave, what it means to be strong. My answer that I've been coming back to again and again is: It is an act of bravery, not weakness, to ask for help. It is an act of strength to reach out a hand and hold somebody else's and go through this world together with someone, not even necessarily romantically, just holding someone else's hand and caring about them and carrying them a little, and they carry you. I think that is really beautiful. That is to me what is heroic. You know, Mr. Rogers is heroic. Steve Irwin is heroic. These people make the world better. I think that's what makes a hero. It's not necessarily saving a day. It's making your corner of the world a little better, making things better for the people you care about, for the people around you, for your community, for your family. 

I've been thinking about that in terms of what it means to live a happy life and pursue happiness, too. So often, happiness is held out as achieving your goals, being at the top of your field, hitting these milestones of having X-many kids and doing this-or-that in your community, winning awards, and I don't think that's it at all. That's nice, but those are just moments. I think living a happy life is going for your dreams alongside people you care about. I think it's just that simple and that difficult. That pursuit of hope that the world can be better, hope that you can be better, hope that people around you can be happier. That you can be happier. That is the point. That journey is the point, not the end destination. That's how I've been defining being a hero in these books: people who try, people who take that next step and then take another one, even when things are hard. That's what being a hero is to me.

ELLA: Speaking of brave, I love Ree, our wax myrtle. He wants to be a sailor, but he doesn’t know how to swim and has to learn from scratch. He throws himself in that water. There are these moments of real courage in the book, of the rebels in the background fighting against oppression, but also this plant is just really excited to follow his destiny.

SARAH: I like those moments of quiet heroism. I could have chosen to do this entire series as epic fantasy. I could have made it about the revolutionaries who throw the emperor out the window, and I would have still gotten to use the word defenestration, which is an awesome word. But that's not the story I wanted to tell in this time that we're in. I wanted to talk about people whose world is changing around them in an out of control way. How do they still find happiness? I wanted to talk about ordinary people.

ELLA: This is also a book about music and being a creative person. Dax is hard at work on his opus, and he has hit a block at the beginning of the story. He explains to Marin, “Creative work doesn’t follow a set of steps. You can open yourself to it, use techniques to unlock different sounds, experiment, but sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Like lighting a fire in a cold hearth. Sometimes the kindling doesn’t catch.” Sounds like someone who's experienced writer's block before. I'm curious what your creative process is like, and if it has changed over the course of your career.

SARAH: It definitely has. My very first novel at age 10 was a cross between The Wizard of Oz and GI Joe with 28 protagonists, and they all had telepathic transdimensional lions as their best friends. I spent most of the book naming the lions.

ELLA: Foreshadowing, actually. 

SARAH: I will always have the talking animals and plants. Creature companions are very important to me. But yes, every book has what my husband calls “The Doomed Stage,” where you get to a point and you're like, “Oh, I've made every decision wrong that I could possibly have made, and what are verbs?” He tells me I do this every single book. There's always going to be that moment where the vision in your head is disconnected from what you put on the page, and you're like, “Oh, but it could be so good, and yet it is not.” That's hard emotionally. You know that story is out there, but how do you get your skills to tell it? And oh, what if you tell it wrong? What if you go down the wrong path? What if you made wrong choices? And you just start second guessing yourself, even if it turns out you have made all the right choices. That little voice starts getting louder and louder and louder. All of a sudden, all you can do is eat chocolate and cheese, which helps. 

For me, the way out is through. This is not necessarily true of every writer, but for me, the way is to just keep writing, to tell myself that this will never appear in the real book. I'm just playing. To talk to my characters through my fingers and to go back to when I last liked it and start again fresh from there, saving the paragraph just in case I don't like it that way either, and write my way through it. That's how I've always gotten myself out of every little tangle. Because being a writer is so much about believing in yourself and quieting that voice, and believing that there's a story inside you that is worth telling. 

The thing that no one tells you when you start out is that everyone not only has a story inside them worth telling, but has thousands of stories inside them because we've all had unique lives. When you go home at the end of the day, the very first thing you do is turn your day into stories. You turn it into anecdotes. Everybody is processing an entire lifetime worth of that. So everyone has stories inside them. Everyone who likes books knows what you like in a book. You know what feels right in a plot. You know what feels good in a character. 

It's just a matter of convincing your brain you can do this, and letting it out, and then not critiquing it until you have a chance to fix it. That is extremely important, because once it comes out, it doesn't match what you think you're going to write, and you're like, oh, how sad. But you don't have to show it to anybody, and you get a chance to make it better. Keep the parts you like. Get rid of the parts you don't. Hone the different details so that each detail you choose is evocative of a larger story of a larger world and is heading in the direction that you want.

ELLA: Something else worth touching on is the way that Dax thinks about art and why art is so important to make, particularly in moments of unrest and big political conversations. He tells Marin that “All art—serious, frivolous, and everything in between—exists to say, ‘You are not alone.’ I think it’s equally, if not more important to share joy as it is to share pain.” This felt like a great case for reading and writing genre fiction. 

SARAH: I have to admit, in that quote, I definitely put something I believe straight into the character's mouth, which I don't always do. In this case, he and I really agreed. I feel that to my very soul: the harder the world gets, the more we need stories. The harder the world gets, the more we need joy. The idea of guilty pleasures and escapism being something that's a luxury is ridiculous, because the world is hard. Whether it's hard because the world is on fire, or hard because of personal reasons, you're hurling yourself against this brick wall. Every once in a while, I think you have to step back and let the bruises heal. That's what joyful fiction is for. It is to remind you that there's good in the world. That there's a reason you're fighting. Because people are capable of love! People are capable of peach pie! People are capable of loving the imaginary, of dreaming of impossible things. I think that's what joyful art exists for — to remind us that life is worth living.

ELLA: What else do you hope that readers take away from Sea of Charms?

SARAH: Hope! That's the key word. In every single one of my books, whether it's cozy fantasy, epic, supernatural, thriller, fairytale, or kids' books, teen books, adult books… In all of them, the core is hope. I think that's one of the things that fantasy does better than almost any other kind of literature: It allows you to hope in a time of impossibility. It allows you to see that dark times can be overcome. It is a literature of hope and empowerment. I've always loved when you close one of your favorite fantasy books and it feels like magic is just right around the corner. That if you just look the right way, the magic is there for you. That's what I want people to get out of the book, that idea that magic belongs to everybody. Everyone can have hope in their lives that things will get better, and that they are strong enough to see it through to the next day.