Assassin's Apprentice
Assassin's Apprentice
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Robin Hobb on Assassin's Apprentice
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A scrap of envelope, years in a drawerThe idea that became the Skill, the book’s telepathic magic system, did not arrive as a plot concept. It arrived as a single question that interrupted a different project entirely, and she had nowhere to put it yet.
I quite clearly remember, because I was working on something else – and that’s always where you get your best ideas – thinking, ‘What if magic was an addiction, and what if that addiction was destructive, so you really want to continue working magic, even though you know that it’s destroying your mind or your health?’ And that’s the Skill. But I didn’t have much else to go with it at the time, so I wrote it on a torn piece off an envelope, and I put it in my desk drawer. It was there for years, and other bits and pieces of ideas accrued around it.
Choosing a pen name was not a vanity decision. She had spent years building a reputation as Megan Lindholm, and she did fieldwork in actual bookstores before settling on what the new name needed to do.
I went into bookstores and I checked out what shelf was at eye level, and in most bookstores it proved to be the ‘H’ shelf... I deliberately chose ‘Robin’ as an androgynous name, because there are still readers who, you know, if you are writing first-person male they expect the book to be written by a male, so I chose a fairly androgynous name. It gave me lots of room for the reader to step over that threshold and start reading.
She began writing Fitz’s story already knowing where it would end, and she constructed the first book with that destination encoded in it. Readers returning to the opening pages after finishing the series are meant to find a different novel waiting for them.
I always knew where Fitz’s tale would lead; I think if you read Assassin’s Apprentice again, you will find all the hints already there, and there are others scattered throughout the other trilogies.
How she wrote it
When the outline became fictionShe grounded the Six Duchies in terrain she knew from living in Alaska, and the resemblance between the fictional duchy of Buck and the island of Kodiak is close enough to be nearly one-to-one.
Buck definitely takes a lot of geography from Kodiak, Alaska, and the geography definitely affects both places. The steep cliffs, the seismic quakes that affect that region, the port for fishing vessels and trade, so much of Buck could be seen easily as Kodiak. Right down to the mix of fisherfolk, merchants and the military!
She had an outline for the trilogy before she began, but the character of the Fool, a jester of uncertain origins at the royal court, refused to stay in it. What happened next reshaped the entire arc of three books.
I did create an outline for the Farseer Trilogy, but in it, the Fool was a very minor character. He was to encounter Fitz in the garden, exchange some important information, and then step off stage, to be only glimpsed at intervals after that. Needless to say, that isn’t how the story worked out. I find that some characters just have their own ideas about the story, and that if I let them have their way, the story becomes much more interesting, and challenging, to write.
The magic systems she originally conceived were far more elaborate than what appears in the finished book. The principle that forced her to cut them down applies to any fantasy world’s rules.
A tale of three magic wishes works well; an infinite number of wishes is no story at all.
What remained after that reduction were two forms of magic: the Skill, a mind-to-mind telepathy that destroys its users over time, and the Wit, an illegal bond between a human and an animal that carries its own social stigma. Both exact a cost, which is precisely the point.
Her willingness to wound Fitz, the book’s narrator, was not instinctive. It came from a lesson delivered by a letter she received from the writer Fritz Leiber, after she complained to him about something he had done to one of his own long-running characters.
In the early days of my writing I would have a fascinating character that I wanted to write about, but I was too protective of the character... you have to let bad things happen to your characters. You have to let them let misfortunes befall them. You can’t have this magic little umbrella that follows them all through the story. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A villain with a legitimate grievancePrince Regal, the book’s primary antagonist, schemes to destroy Fitz from almost the first pages. Most readers experience him as the story’s engine of cruelty, but she built him from a different angle entirely.
You could take that whole trilogy and rewrite it from his point of view, and he would be a tragic hero.
Regal is a younger prince with no legitimate claim to a throne that his father has openly given to a bastard’s education and potential. That context does not excuse him, but it is the reason she refuses to call him simply evil: he is a man the story happened to position on the wrong side.
She did not arrive at the page with a message about what trauma does to people. She arrived with a way of asking the question through someone else’s life, and the answer she found is the engine behind Fitz’s entire character.
I often think that I write not because I have answers, but because I have questions. And in a story, I can try out different answers to those questions.
What she wants us to sit with
The bastard’s disadvantage as everyone’sFitz is the illegitimate son of a prince, raised in a court that regards him as a problem to be managed. That specific social position is the book’s mechanism for reaching readers who have never stood near a throne.
Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story.
She writes in close first person, which shapes how readers experience everything Fitz endures. She has noted that the suffering itself is not more extreme than what Tolkien put the Fellowship through; the difference is entirely formal.
I don’t think my characters endure anything that is more harrowing than, for example, the members of the Fellowship in the Lord of the Rings. Because I often use the first person, I think that the challenges are perceived as more harrowing or depressing.
The book’s argument about character is also an argument about people. Fitz is defined by what has been done to him, and she treats that not as a fantasy convention but as a description of how identity actually forms.
The things that happen to us change us. Years later, you will recall the boyfriend who cheated on you and wonder if you should trust your present beau. A child who is abandoned by her parents will have a more difficult time being a good parent herself. I think that is actually what makes a character interesting.