Heroes of the Valley

Heroes of the Valley is the story of Halli Sveinsson, a boy who lives in a village high in the mountains. Long ago his ancestors fought against monsters in the valley, and drove them up into the hills. Halli longs to do great deeds himself and rebels against his uneventful life. Unwittingly his actions unleashes a chain of misfortune that leads to violence – and soon Halli finds himself setting out on a quest of his own. He quickly discovers, however, that real life is rather different from the stories he adores, and it is only with the help of a girl called Aud, who is just as brave and curious as he is, that he manages to survive at all. Together Halli and Aud they begin to piece together the secrets of the valley – but what they uncover threatens to destroy them…

BEGINNINGS . . .

I began thinking about this book in 2006. I’d recently finished the Bartimaeus Trilogy, and I wanted to try something that still had lots of jokes and good action, but which was different in tone and setting. The Bartimaeus books are set in London and have lots of magic and overt fantasy from the outset. I wanted my new novel to be set in a rural location, and treat supernatural things in a more subtle way.

I’ve always liked reading Norse myths and legends, and the Icelandic Sagas, written in the Middle Ages by the descendents of Vikings. The Sagas are interesting because they mix ordinary domestic stories about farms and families with sudden bits of supernatural stuff, featuring ghosts and trolls. The fantasy never takes over, but it never goes away either; it’s just taken for granted by the people as something on the margin of their lives. I was keen to try a saga of my own, which would explore themes of story-telling and family life, and began jotting down a few fragments of story. Click here for the very first bit of writing I did.

I was further inspired by a Bartimaeus tour I made to New Zealand in May 2006. I had a couple of days off in Queenstown, in the Southern Alps, and sat around looking at the mountains. I began making notes right then about a story set amid vast mountains.

THE QUEST . . .

Writing a novel is rather like a heroic quest: it’s a long journey full of set-backs, adventures and struggles, and you never quite know whether it’s going to end well. It took a long time for me to figure out how my saga was going to work, and I wrote parts of the book many times over. To help figure things out I made many pages of notes, as well as maps and diagrams to flesh out the world I was creating.

On the left are some of my early notes (click for full-size). Around this time I imagined the story would end with a fight during a flood: you can see a sketch of the boathouse here.

I drew up versions of Halli’s family tree so that I could work out who he was and where he came from. Below is an early version (click for full-size). A lot of his male ancestors died in unfortunate ways – you can see my notes about this in green.

(click for full size)

It was important that I visualised the Valley that Halli lived in – its shape, its dimensions, where all the different people lived. Click the image left for early drawings of its layout. You can see the boundary cairns (where all the ancestors are buried) in red, as well as the river, sea and Houses of the Heroes.

I worked on the story for more than a year and a half. Many times I thought I had the book cracked, then realised something major was wrong. For a long time there were three main characters, for example – Halli, Aud, and a boy called Einar. It didn’t work, but I couldn’t figure out why. Then, one night, I woke up knowing the answer. Einar was the problem. He didn’t add anything to the story, but only slowed it down. He had to go. This was good, but it meant I had to rewrite the whole thing over again.

FINISHING . . .

Even late on, when I had the story pinned down, I kept having to alter the details and remove scenes. In order to help keep track of what I was doing, I kept reworking chapter synopses and structural notes, some of which you can see here.

(click for full size structural notes examples)

Some whole chapters disappeared late on. If you want to read a ‘lost chapter’, featuring Halli breaking in to a grave mound, click here.

I finished my first official draft in early 2008, and handed it in for my editors to see. Over the next couple of months we made revisions, until by the summer of 2008 Heroes of the Valley was ready to go to the printers. This was a big relief – it had taken longer to create than any of my previous novels, but I was very proud of the result.