'Warded Man' author Peter V. Brett writes novel on the F(antasy) train
The cover to Peter V. Brett's novel, "The Warded Man."
Most people riding the subway are reading, listing to music or people-watching. For Peter V. Brett, the author of the new fantasy novel “The Warded Man,” the subway was his writing studio.
Using his HP iPAQ smart phone, Brett, 36, turned out 300-400 words each way on his 45-minute commute to work from Kensington in Brooklyn to Times Square on the F train.
It was slow going at first as Brett became accustomed to writing on the portable device. The process started out as Brett jotting down notes and ideas so he wouldn’t forget them. Eventually, he was able to type faster and faster.
“It reached a point where I had gotten so used to it that I’d get on the subway and just put my headphones on and just get in the zone,” he says. “Epic fantasy books are so long that ... you have to break it up into tiny little chunks or else you’ll never finish. I just trained myself to have those chunks be at 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day.”
The 400-plus page novel, Brett’s first, is set in a world where demons rise out of the ground at night and ravage and kill, and humans use magical symbols — wards — for protection. The book follows three characters who decide they can’t live like that, and begin to fight back.
“The more erudite pitch for the book is that it’s an allegory for fear,” Brett says. “After Sept. 11, I really wanted to address what fear can do to people, after kind of witnessing it firsthand.”
“The Warded Man” is a complete story in and of itself, but it is also the first in a series of novels.
And while Brett’s now writing full time, he still sometimes finds himself back on that familiar train.
“Any time I am feeling writer’s block or have reached a point in the story where I don’t know what to do next, I get on the F train ... and [that] fixes the problem right away,” he says. “It’s really kind of sad to say that my muse lives on the F train, but it may come to that.”
Comments (1)
It still amazes me, as an aspiring writer, to know that Peter wrote much of The Warded Man the way he did - if that's not you-can-write-wherever-you-are proof, I don't know what is! :-)