Marie Rutkoski

When you are 'world building,' people will oftentimes judge how well you built your world. They want to know: Is the culture believable? Does it feel like it has a history? I try very hard to pay attention to details.

I guess one of the most magnificent things a novel can do is to change your perspective on the world, and to give it some sense of wonder, and that's what I find so exciting in writing fantasy, especially fantasy for children. Because already, I think children have a very special and unusual way of seeing the world.

Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside.

Any consideration of the story we call 'Cinderella' for simplicity's sake must acknowledge that 'Cinderella' has had a dizzying array of personae over hundreds of years, in several cultures. There is no one authoritative tale of 'Cinderella,' only a hall of mirrors with a different face in each reflection.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I pretty much always wanted to write a series, because I love reading them.

There are certainly stories that I used to tell myself as a kid that did influence 'The Cabinet of Wonders.' There's a scene in the novel where there's a flood that bursts through the castle, and one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid at school was imagine what school would be like if there was a sudden flood.

For many, many years, I thought that I wasn't good enough or that I would never be able to create something that could touch other people the way books have touched me. There's nothing better than having a lifelong dream come true.

In some ways, getting published in children's literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It's less hinged on who you might know.

My mother had been blind as a child. And so, blindness was something that has long fascinated me, but also it's something I find really, really scary.

I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.

One of the things that always fascinated me about the Renaissance was that it was a time both of great scientific discovery and also of superstition and belief in magic. And so it was a period in which Galileo invented the telescope, but also a time when hundreds were burned at the stake because people thought they were witches.