By Jim Mcleod 
You know that story about the art teacher who told the kid he couldn’t draw? Jim Butcher’s origin is kind of like that, but with more wizardry and a decades-long grudge against a hat. It all started with a stubborn student and a bet against himself. See, a young Butcher was convinced his writing teacher, Deborah Chester, was full of it. Her rules, her formulas, cookie-cutter crap, he thought. So, at 25, he did everything she said, just to prove how awful the result would be. That spiteful homework assignment turned into Storm Front, a book originally titled Semiautomagic about a wisecracking wizard detective. He figured he’d show her. Instead, she told him he’d finally written something he could sell.
Talk about a plot twist. That was 2000. More than twenty years ago. From that defiant classroom exercise, Butcher built an empire. The Dresden Files sprawled into 18 novels and counting, a universe of hard-boiled magic in Chicago that he almost set in Kansas City instead. He conjured other worlds, too, the Roman Legion-meets-Pokémon epic of Codex Alera and the crystal-powered airships of The Cinder Spires. But it always comes back to Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only wizard in the phone book, a character born from stitching together Merlin and Sam Spade.
Now, here’s the interesting bit. In a new interview, Butcher pulls back the curtain on what happens after you win. The blueprint he drafted as that know-it-all student has been tested, scorched, and reshaped by fire. We’re talking about the upcoming Twelve Months, a book that isn’t about Harry Dresden’s worst weekend, but his hardest year. A year of grief where the problems can’t be punched. A year where the Winter Knight is betrothed to a White Court vampire. It’s a story about what you build from the ashes of the apocalyptic battles he’s already written.
This conversation isn’t just about what’s next. It’s a full-circle moment. We get the master craftsman looking back at the foundations his teacher helped him pour, discussing the “sadism” of reader manipulation, and explaining how you make a wizard feel human after two decades of putting him through hell. He talks about the pride he takes in the complex world of the Spires and the “horrid” cats that rule it. From a smart-aleck kid’s outline to the emotional weight of a long-lived character’s recovery, this is Jim Butcher on the evolution of a universe he once created just to prove a point. The point, it turns out, was proven long ago.
Inside Jim Butcher’s Craft: Dresden Files, Character Grief, and the “Horrid” Cats of Cinder Spires
You’ve mentioned having a detailed outline for The Dresden Files since you were 25. How has the process of outlining and planning a series evolved for you from Dresden to Codex Alera and now The Cinder Spires?
The process itself hasn’t really changed. Start with a large and general outline, and then refine it, bit by bit, until you get down to one or a few specific characters and specific stories.
What’s changed is mostly my sense of what broad elements to begin with in order to ensure a viable story world. Dresden was set in a world very much like our own, while Alera was built in a much more fantastic setting, and the new Spires stories are set in a story even more alien than that. I’m probably proudest of the Spires books, where worldbuilding and outlining is concerned. Their world is the most complex and varied, I get to write a lot of entirely fabricated societies, and I think it has the most vital, breathing worldbuilding I’ve done.
You’ve said the most challenging aspect of writing is making characters feel human so that people care about them. What techniques do you use to ensure your characters, even the non-human ones, evolve in a way that feels organic and realistic over a long series?
There are dozens of craft techniques I use regularly, and I encourage anyone interested in learning them to pick up a book by my own writing teacher, Deborah Chester, called The Fantasy Fiction Formula. It presents, in good and logical order, the fundamentals of writing craft that have served me excellently through a long career.
Beyond that, I think the best way to show characters to readers is really simple—show them making choices, and then make them live with logical, reasonable consequences of those choices. Dresden has made some calls that have wildly upset his life—and SHOULD have. Showing how he lives with those choices, how he deals with the consequences (just as we all must do with our own choices), is what I believe makes him a character that people identify with and enjoy.
Beyond the professional need to write, you’ve spoken about the joy of imagining reader reactions, even joking about a certain “sadism” toward your audience. What specific emotional or thematic payoff do you, as an author, need to get from a story to feel it was successful?
Who said I was joking?
I’ve often said, in response to being accused of being a sadist toward my characters, that I don’t want to torture them. I want to torture my READERS. But there are laws about that, so I have to make do with proxies and get to them indirectly.
One of the things my teacher taught me is that the business of storytelling is the business of manipulating a reader’s emotions. I was infuriated by it at the time, but I increasingly realize how correct she was. I mean, think about it. If you’ve read a story and loved the characters the writer wanted you to love and loathed the characters they wanted you to hate, felt despair at their perils and triumph in their eventual victory?
You’ve loved that story. Admit it. It’s okay. We writers know.
You’ve credited your writing teacher, Deborah Chester, as a significant influence. Are there particular pieces of advice or “rules” from her that you still consciously follow or have consciously broken as you’ve developed your voice?
When I’m smart, I pay very close attention to her rules. You can get away with breaking them as you learn more about writing, but they’re an extremely solid foundation on which to start. I still stick religiously to her teachings about how to present scenes and how to balance them with pieces of emotional and logical introspection, known as sequels. Her outline for how to structure story climaxes is similarly entirely sound, and I try not to move away from it.
Other very successful writers may well disagree with me, and that’s awesome. We all come at our love of the art from our own unique angles, and how boring it would all be if we didn’t.
The magical system in the files is famously flexible and often personal. How did you strike a balance between establishing rules for the reader and allowing for creative, unexpected applications of magic?
The main thing I did was make sure that the viewpoint character, Dresden, always has more to learn (just like all of us always do). He’s never the be-all, end-all authority on magic. He runs into things that perplex him, that force him to find out more, to expand his ideas on the subject of magic, or to seek advice from those more knowledgeable or more specialized than he is.
That way, there’s always something coming that Dresden (and therefore the audience) doesn’t expect. Keeps things fresh.
With such a large and beloved cast of supporting characters, how do you decide whose perspective to explore in short stories and novellas, and does writing from their viewpoint ever change how you write them in the novels?
It doesn’t change how I write them in the novels, so much as it allows me to understand things about them that always existed in my instinctive writing of them, but that I never consciously articulated. It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me that I often don’t understand part of my own story world until someone asks me a particular question about it—and then the answer comes out of my mouth with logic and surety, locking into place like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
It’s possible I lean on my subconscious a little too much, but so far it seems to be working out alright.
The origin story of Codex Alera, born from a bet combining the “lame ideas” of the Lost Roman Legion and Pokémon, is legendary. What was the key moment or connection you found that made you realize this could actually be a compelling epic fantasy?
It wasn’t working for me under the very broad outline, and then I narrowed it down into a historical outline—essentially writing the news headlines for centuries of historical development of this fantasy society. It still wasn’t working, until I narrowed it down further, to a specific region, and then to one particular farm in that region, and one particular kid on that farm. I placed him in a spot where he’d run into a rival culture, gave him a problem that no one else had to motivate him, and built up people around him who would reasonably exist in that culture.
Once I got to that point, I realized I had something that might really take off. I had specific people with problems that really mattered, a unique story world, a simple magic system made complex by how the various elements interacted with each other, and the story was off to the races.
You’ve described the world of The Cinder Spires as “any sufficiently advanced system of magic will be indistinguishable from technology”. How does this philosophy shape the conflict and the roles of characters like the etherealists and airship captains?
I get to take these fantastic elements, like airships powered by electricity-generating crystals that power anti-gravity crystals and energy-projecting weapon crystals, and establish them as the workhorse machines of a society that uses them like we use internal combustion engines.
Once that model was established in my mind, I got to create the people who might reasonably exist alongside those fantastic elements—the captains who command the airships, the aeronauts who sail them, the engineers who design them, the specialists who grows the crystals, and the oddballs who interact with the crystal technology more directly, known as etherealists.
That lets me build a world that feels like it could really exist, because it has such strong echoes with our world.
The cats are a fan-favourite element. What inspired you to create their society and unique, somewhat “horrid,” personalities, and what has been the most fun part of writing them?
When I started writing the Spires books, I had never owned a cat of my own—but I was very, very familiar with cat owners. Since the dawn of the internet, cat owners were a major presence, and it isn’t hard to work out what they like about cats. That they’re perfect little spoiled monsters who can, usually when you most want to murder them, suddenly be incredibly cute and heart-melting.
Writing the cats for the Spires has been an adventure if only because I gained cats of my own, purely for research purposes and found out that they can be equally maddening and adorable. Every cat is completely sincere and believes entirely that he or she is in fact the Ideal Cat Whom All Other Cats Should Envy, and that not only are they in charge, but they deserve to be. They are wonderful, arrogant little monsters, and make fine characters to add to any story.
Even now, my own cat, Fenris, a six pound tabby who bosses around my ninety-pound pit bull like it’s his job, is asleep on my stomach, forcing me to crane my neck over him to see the screen, and stretch my arms around him to type. He is snoring and does not care in the least that he is inconveniencing the person who provides him food, shelter, and protection from predators and is TRYING to be professional and earn money for more freeze dried chicken. Q.E.D.
This novel promises a unique blend of deep character introspection and the classic Dresden Files mix of detective work and supernatural politics. How did you approach balancing the internal, psychological journey of Harry with the need to have an engaging external plot and wit?
The real challenge was writing something that would a) be a credibly genuine reaction to the kinds of loss Harry has experienced and b) NOT be a heavy, horribly depressing drag to read. Mostly I did that by making sure Dresden, even at his lowest, has a brave face to present to the people around him, upholding his ability to shoot his mouth off.
He has his low moments. But that doesn’t mean he’s no longer the man he’s always been.
The title “Twelve Months” inherently suggests a passage of time and a focus on recovery. Beyond the obvious emotional toll, what unique structural or narrative opportunities did a “year in the life” format present that a more traditional, tightly-plotted Dresden novel does not?
I get to hand Harry some problems that he can’t punch or explode his way out of! Most Dresden books are just his worst weekend of the year, and the forces he has to go up against tend to be very straightforward. The problems I hand him here are, perhaps, a lot more like those of the real world. It’s not reasonable to just be able to blow something up and expect it to fix anything. There aren’t any quick or easy answers—and maybe not any answers at all. And even a wizard’s miracles come with some heavy caveats.
The betrothal to Lara Raith, orchestrated by Mab, is a fascinating political move. From a writing perspective, what are the challenges and opportunities in forcing a character like Harry into such a close, necessary alliance with a powerful and dangerous entity from the White Court?
Hah. They’re quite parallel to the challenges I face as a writer presenting a story to the readers. Harry has this alliance with someone he knows could be very, very poisonous to him, and who is absolutely not to be trusted. But Lara simply must gain his trust, despite her reputation as a master manipulator. How does she do that, without running afoul of Dresden’s suspicions and principles? How does she allay his concerns and fears—and thus those of the readers, too?
If I’ve done my work well, the reader should be left both hopeful for something positive and stricken with doubts. But that will be up to them to judge.
With the premise mentioning ghouls preying on civilians, does this represent a return to Harry’s more “traditional” PI roots, just on a larger scale for a wounded city? How does investigating these kinds of threats differ from fighting titans in the streets?
When Harry fought the Titan, he was basically the clean-up batter for a very large and skilled team.
In this book, he’s closer to operating on his own than he’s been for a very long time—and he’s doing it while being at war with grief, with guilt, with loss, and with despair. He needs to be Harry the Wizard, but Harry the man is buckling under the strain. He has to find out what is most important to him, what he needs to cling to—and what he needs to let go of, before he can be what others need him to be.
Looking back across the entire tapestry of The Dresden Files, Codex Alera, and The Cinder Spires, what do you hope is the most enduring feeling or idea a reader takes away from your body of work?
That the most important things in life come from our connections with those we love. That there is good in this world that is worth working for. And that none of us are in this alone.
You’ve been writing Harry Dresden for over two decades. How has your relationship with the character, and your understanding of his world, changed in ways you never anticipated when you wrote Storm Front?
How could I have anticipated decades of thought and interaction with this character, back when I was a kid starting out? How could I have really known about the kind of suffering and triumph I would put him through? Back then, I thought in terms of stories and plot and wiseacre remarks and bad jokes. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about how dark grief is, and how sublime the quietest moments of simple joy can be. Harry has changed from a wiseass kid with high-minded ideals to a snarky adult tempered by sadness, experience, and maybe even a little wisdom; whose dedication to those ideas is both deeper and quieter than it has been before.
As we conclude, can you give us a small, tantalizing hint, a feeling, a line of dialogue, or a single image, from Twelve Months that you’re most excited for readers to discover eventually?
I am really digging writing the new Valkyrie and the new apprentice.
Twelve Months: The Dresden Files Book 18 by Jim Butcher
Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, has always managed to save the day – but, in this powerful entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling Dresden Files, can he save himself?
One year. 365 days. Twelve months.
Harry Dresden has been through a lot, and so has his city. After Harry and his allies narrowly managed to save Chicago from being razed to the ground, everything is different-and it’s not just the current lack of electricity.
In the battle, Harry lost people he cared about. And that’s the kind of loss that takes a toll. Harry being Harry, he’s doing his level best to help the city and his friends recover and rebuild. But it’s a heavy load, and he needs time.
But time is one thing Harry doesn’t have. Ghouls are prowling Chicago and taking out innocent civilians. Harry’s brother is dying, and Harry doesn’t know how to help him. And last but certainly not least, the Winter Queen of the Fae has allied with the White Court of vampires-and Harry’s been betrothed to the seductive, deadly vampire Lara Raith to seal the deal.
It’s been a tough year. More than ever, the city needs Harry Dresden the wizard-but after loss and grief, is there enough left of Harry Dresden the man to rise to the challenge?
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