Interview with Noah Mugrage

Hi, TWNers! Wow, it’s been a long minute since I’ve posted, but I’m hoping this will be the last time I have to give such an introduction addressing my absence because while we’ve been gone, the Team here has been in discussion for ways and plans to revive the site and comeback as awesome as ever. I don’t want to say anything too soon unless things don’t work out, but we’re already looking to have an awesome lineup of posts coming just this month alone. Hopefully, it’ll be the first of many! So, if you want to stay in the loop, you can subscribe for email notifications through the form on the right side of the page in dashboard (at the bottom of the page if on mobile) or follow us on Instagram!

I’m so excited today to bring this interview with my good friend Noah. He shared some sold insights into the writing world and has some great advice for fellow writers. We also discussed his current serial on his substack called In Sunlight and Frost. If you’re a reader who loves fantasy with historical inspiration and well-done character development, might I recommend heading over and checking out his substack. Without further ado, I’ll let Noah take the spotlight. 😉

#1. What first inspired you to become a writer?

Well, that is an interested question that I have never given much thought to before. I suppose, like all introverted kids, I enjoyed telling stories either to myself or to my stuffed animals. I never wrote any of these early tales down, but from what my mother told me they were quite involved and detailed. I have always had somewhat of an active imagination, and I think that aided me in developing tales. I never seriously attempted to write down these stories until about middle school. That was when I discovered the Lord of the Rings written by a man named Tolkien who I am sure that you all know of at least in passing. As an aside, I realize how cliché it is at this point for a self professed writer of fantasy to say that Tolkien started him on the journey to becoming a writer, but it is the truth. Anyway, discovering Lord of the Rings and then the deeper lore in the Silmarillion lit a fire in me and made me want to create mythology of the sort Tolkien had. I tried creating various fantasy worlds after that, with shall we say varying degrees of success. Some of the aforesaid worlds were original and creative, some were hopeless Tolkien clones, and some will never see the light of day. I had almost given up trying to write anything of lasting merit around 2023. I felt like nothing I wrote was any good and it was all derivative hackwork. Then in May of that year, I had an idea come to me and a voice in my head which I am fairly certain was the Lord telling me to write to my strengths as a student historian and base the world of the story off of what is good and true rather than trying to copy what made other people famous. This idea ultimately became my novella Last Light of Outrymer which I am hoping to revise and publish  after I get my current serial finished. So in summary, I am inspired by history and the great masters of high fantasy who came before me. My style right now is definitely inspired by more classic literary works and real world history, but I am hoping to return to the kinds of stories that got me started on this road all those years ago, and create stories that are more traditional high fantasy. 

#2. Can you describe your writing routine?

What routine? (winks mischievously) In all seriousness, I write in the evenings mainly. After I get work and school done and have dinner with my family, I usually have an hour/hour and a half to write before bed. I usually aim for about a scene per working session. For this project outline, a scene comes out to about 560 words. That is my goal per session. Oftentimes I am coming short of that goal. I work in a grocery store and oftentimes I am tired in the evening and getting 500+ words done in a sitting is too much for my brain. Sometimes I will reach the goal and realize that based on the content of the scene, it needs to go beyond 560 words to not rush the character interaction or pacing of the story. (That is an increasingly common thing that happens.) So in that case I hit my word count goals but don’t get a scene done. Very rarely I will bust out a scene in a session and those are good nights. The point is, I don’t always get the progress I want, but as long as I get words on a page and don’t let my inner demons take control, I’m winning. The moral of this chaotic and haphazard routine, I would say, is to trust God and accept his vision for what you get done in an evening. It’s also good to have goals, but it is also good to give yourself grace for when life happens/you’re dealing with your fatigue. 

#3. What was something you wished you had been told about writing when you just started out?

I’m going to sound like Captain Barbosa from Pirates of the Carribian here, but I wish I was told that there are no hard and fast rules for writing, there are only guidelines. This is something I have to remind myself of over and over because I feel like the current market and even the book market of my youth pushed a particular mode of writing, such as deep third-person POV, limited description, showing and not telling, and absolutely no info dumping. For so many years I beat myself up for not being able to meet what I felt like were these iron-clad standards. Then, about the time I had the voice in my head tell me not to give up and go forward with writing Last Light of Outrymer, I also had an epiphany. What audiences want is a good story. They don’t necessarily care about what the market wants or what sells right now. This is not to devalue the importance of being able to craft a well told tale. You need to know the basics of storytelling to be able to succeed, but believe me when I tell you that the “hard and fast rules” of story telling are less frequent than you think. All you have to do really is know how to have a beginning, middle, and end that satisfies readers. I could go into more depth on this, but I think I could write an entire essay on why there are only a few craft rules that actually matter.

#4. Where did you first get the idea for your Substack serial In Sunlight and Frost?

So the idea came from this French novel that I love to hate called Charterhouse of Parma. It is historical fiction and while it is regarded as a classic by famous writers like Balzac, there are aspects of the book that I personally do not like. So the serial started as an attempt to improve on Charterhouse of Parma. The other thing that inspired the serial was a failed project of mine  known as The Duel. This was a prequel to a project I’ve been developing called Last Knight. Konstantine the other male lead in In Sunlight and Frost was the main character in The Duel and the point of the project was to show how Konstantine ended up the broken man he will become in Last Knight. That being said, I wrote the first twenty pages of The Duel and realized that Konstantine is not a compelling enough character to be the hero of his own story. Also, The Duel as I planned it out was very dark, like Konstantine committing cold-blooded murder dark. So I wanted to reimagine Konstantine as a good man who would become jaded and bitter over the course of the story, rather than an outright psycho from the beginning. Adding that need to revamp Konstantine’s character and backstory to my desire to “fix” Charterhouse, and you pretty much have the genesis of this project. 

#5. Do you have a favorite character from your serial?

My favorite character so far is Fabrizio. He is very much inspired by me and has all my social awkwardness. As I’m writing him, I occasionally want to slap him, even though it is not his fault he inherited my stubbornness and romantic cluelessness. Though honestly, Issabelle, this question is like asking a parent to choose between their favorite kids. I love both the male leads, and since they are both inspired by aspects of my personality, it’s kind of hard to choose. 

#6. Is there a book you would say has most influenced your writing?

Geeze Issabelle, I have to pick just one? The most influential book for this project would be Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, which is a historical fiction novel from the 1840s. I will admit that I love this story, despite the fact that all the protagonists are extremely immoral and some are kind of stupid. On top of all this, the book has some serious structural/pacing issues, especially towards the end, where plot crucial points are rushed and summarized. The other major gripe I have with the last third of the book is that the main male lead suddenly falls in love with this girl out of the blue and obsessively pursues her throughout the last part of the story in such a way that it is a little disturbing. And to top it off, the girl does not feel the same way about him and sees him as tempting her. So in short, Charterhouse influences the serial through opposition. I began writing the serial to improve on the structural and character deficiencies that I saw in Stendhal’s novel. 

#7. What is something you hope audiences will take away from your writing?

Well, first and foremost, I want it to be entertaining. Second, I want audiences to come away from the story with a renewed hope that there is a vision and a master design for their lives and even if they can’t see that right now, if they push through and keep trusting in God eventually they will see that all the hardships they go through serve the great master plan of the novel of the universe. That is why I write the flawed heroes I do. I believe that the principal benefit of storytelling is to show us a picture of redemption in an accelerated fashion. Think about it this way, if you are reading a book, you are getting the experience of an entire character’s arc in at most a few months of real world time. In real life, you cannot experience the arc of your own journey that fast. Thus, stories offer us a chance to look to the end as Solon puts it and see the results of a character’s actions and then use the vision provided by the actions of the character to either motivate us to keep persevering or get us to change our course so that we do not meet with a bad end. Finally, I want audiences to come away with a different perspective on romance and the eternal truths that surround this high human endeavor that contrasts sharply to the narrative of mainstream media. 

#8. Do you have any words of wisdom for the aspiring teen writers reading this?

If I were to condense my wisdom for the aspiring writer into a response that is not an essay in its own right, I would say you must enrich and entertain in equal measure and above all you must do no harm. By enrichment, I mean you must give the reader something to ponder on and by entertainment, I mean you must not make the story solely about the truth you are trying to convey. Too much enrichment and the audience feels like they are being preached at, too much entertainment, and you have not really done anything for the audience. What I mean by that corollary of do no harm is that you must bear in mind that every word you write will affect someone. So many of the stories read by our youth today harm their minds in subtle but insidious ways. Ultimately as a Christian writer you will be held responsible for every word you pen and Jesus said it would be better to drown than harm the souls of the next generation. I don’t say this to make anyone reading this afraid, but to remind you of the responsibility the writers in this audience have, both to God and their fellow man.