Tide Magic Series by Clare Harlow
Author Clare Harlow shares some insights into her series, Tide Magic and her three incredible characters on the blog today!
Three is the magic number: Clare Harlow talks about how Ista, Nat and Ruby – the trio of friends at the heart of the ‘Tidemagic’ series – came into being.
We don’t need to adventure through life alone. In fact, adventures are often much more fun if they’re shared. And for me, there’s always been something particularly magical about a trio of friends in a middle-grade story.
Having said that, I often begin my process with worldbuilding. The ‘Tidemagic’ books are set in a world where magic ebbs and flows with the tide. When the river rises, people get temporary superpowers called ‘Tideblessings’. But monsters appear too, and they are making people vanish. Once those pieces were in place, Ista strode out of some corner of my imagination, and I had no choice but to follow her into the mist and work out exactly what was going on with the monsters and whether the missing people could ever be found.
But what magical power would be most useful for a character trying to solve a mystery? I thought of mind-reading, invisibility, and the ability to sniff out a lie, but in the end I gave Ista the ability to transform herself to look like anyone she’d ever laid eyes on. This made it easy for her to sneak around and provided dramatic potential by creating a danger that she might get caught behaving suspiciously or even bump into the person she was copying.
Ista’s character stemmed from there. I thought that seeing the world without often being truly seen would give her a keen sense of right and wrong. I made her brave, because I wasn’t feeling very brave myself, so I needed her to be. I decided that someone with these qualities might also be reckless – the sort of person who would rush to action without considering the consequences. I realised, too, that Ista’s magic might make her lonely because not many people would know the real her. I was cruel, in a way. I made Ista’s dad disappear. Her quest to find him is what drives the story. Her emotional journey, though, is about her realising that she doesn’t need to be lonely – that, in fact, she has a lot of people she can count on.
Ruby is as brave and compassionate as Ista but a little more grounded, perhaps because Ruby is a devoted big sister and used to shouldering more responsibility. She is also the only character who hopes for a future away from Shelwich, where the books are set, although I gave her a Tideblessing that places her magic and her ambition in opposition. Ruby dreams of being an acrobat, but her magical ability to ‘always land on her feet’ means that she has failed her audition for a troupe of performers because they feel she has an unfair advantage. I drew on my previous career as an actor when constructing this backstory. A creative life can be so full of rejection, and Ruby is learning to deal with that for the first time.
And then there’s Nat, who has no Tideblessing, but who has plenty of other skills that make him a crucial part of this trio when it comes to cracking clues and solving mysteries. In many ways, Nat is the character who most closely resembles me. He watches, and he listens, and he’s the person who, whenever Ista and Ruby are ready to leap into a seemingly bottomless chasm or run headfirst towards monsters, says ‘Hey, wait a second. Let’s think before we do this.’ He’s also extremely stubborn and sometimes infuriatingly bossy. At the same time, he cares deeply about his friends, and their bravery makes him brave too, just as his determination stops Ista and Ruby from losing hope.
Overall, the friendship at the heart of the ‘Tidemagic’ books changes each member of this central trio for the better. In fact, there’s a moment near the start of book 2 where Ista finds herself lost and alone, but she knows just what to do – because she knows Nat and Ruby so well that she can imagine their advice without them even needing to be there.
