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Recently, in an interview conversation with my friend and fellow author, Mary Victoria, we talked about the writer’s intention in storytelling and also how stories can evolve independently of that.

We did so chiefly in the context of the recently published Daughter of Blood, but Mary also mentioned the — by and large — matter-of-fact equality between men and women in the Wall of Night series’ Derai society.

She also asked whether I intended portraying “a more or less equal playing field for women, certainly women with martial or magical ability in the Derai world?”

My answer was that I did not start out with that fixed intention, but “it was simply the way the story, the society, and the characters deployed on the page of the first book, i.e. you might say that they wrote themselves that way. To be honest, I wasn’t even conscious of it as a distinguishing feature of my work until The Heir of Night, The Wall of Night Book One, was published and reviewers and readers commented on that aspect of the story.”

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I think of this as the hidden story, a subtext that may be invisible even to the author when she or he is writing the book. It’s certainly not the first time it has happened in The Wall of Night series. For example, when I finally passed over The Gathering of the Lost to my US editor, Kate Nintzel, she commented on how much it was a story about friendship.

As soon as she said so, I realised that it was true — but up until then that particular aspect of the story as theme had been as invisible to me as the matter-of-fact gender equality of Derai society in The Heir of Night.

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Similarly, during the course of our conversation Mary observed that the character of Myr in Daughter of Blood has an “unshakeable moral core.” Although I had fully intended to explore different aspects of what constitutes “strength” through Myr’s arc, Mary’s observation made me think “yes” to an “unshakeable moral core” being a large part of the character’s resilience. But as I pointed out, it was not a tag I had attached to her character from the beginning…

In short, she grew through the telling of the story, but because the process of storytelling is organic, my thinking was centered on the whole character and her natural development/evolution, rather than necessarily consciously breaking that down into component characteristics as I wrote.

Which is how, I believe, the tales we tell can have “hidden stories” that it takes a third party to put their finger on and say, “Ah — it may be about this and this, but it’s also about that.”

Whereupon I, as author, nod and reply: “Yes, of course, it is.”

You may think I am being quite sanguine about this process, but to me it is inevitable that with anything as complex as a book, not only the conscious but also the subconscious mind will be playing a part in its development. The fact that they do and that there can be multiple and potentially hidden layers within a story is all part of the magic of storytelling.