BRoP Presents Alma Alexander Part 3
Section #3: The Creative Process
I'm really excited about this interview. The Blog Ring of Power had invited Alma, via Terri Bruce, and when Alma excepted, Terri gave a great big fan squeal, and for good reason.
If you haven't read the interview from the beginning check out Terri's page.
Then check in with T.W. Fendley for her part,
I'm section 3 this week.
Sandra will have section 4 for your reading pleasure,
and D.C. Rich will top it off on Tuesday.
Please read each part of the interview. Alma's answers are great.
And now, I want to welcome our newest guest to the Realm!
Alma Alexander was born in Yugoslavia, grew up in Africa, and went to school in Wales. She has lived in several countries on four continents, and is quite comfortable in the new continent of cyberspace. She was living in New Zealand when she met a man on an Internet bulletin board for writers, married him and moved to America. She now lives with her husband and two cats in the Pacific Northwest, in the city of Bellingham (directions to her home include the phrase "Aim for Canada and just before you get there, turn right").
Alma: I have an idea tree in my back yard, and when one is ripe I
just go out and pluck it… What, you don’t believe that? How strange….[grin]
Every so often we writers will get faced with an eager soul who comes up and
says something that’s a variation of, “Say, I have this WONDERFUL idea – how
about I tell you about it and you write it and we split the profits?” The truth
is, ideas are the cheap and plentiful part of this equation, and most writers
have more of them than they will be able to deal with in a single lifetime.
Sometimes a word is enough, a stray phrase, something overheard in a bus, or
just a glimpse of an odd headline in the papers; sometimes an image, or a piece
of music; sometimes an issue that is close to our hearts and that we feel would
be served well by forming the theme of a story. Where do I get my ideas? From
reading, from writing, from talking, from dreaming, from being alive and from
being human. And that’s an inexhaustible source of them.
Alma: You tend to be blocked on a single project, not on
EVERYTHING. So – go write something else instead for a while instead of the
thing that is being a problem for you. Or go read someone else’s book. Or go
away from words altogether and take a long bath, or a long walk, or go
someplace new for a cup of coffee and people-watch for an hour or two. Relax
your mind. Sometimes you can be too tightly wound over something, and the best
thing to get around that is to just learn to LET IT GO, at least for a little
while.
Alma: Since
they tend to wander into my office and into my mind – often uninvited – always
fully formed or damn close to it – I don’t have a formula. I tend to sit down
and flex my fingers and prepare to take dictation. Other writers will scream at
this scenario and tell you that YOU are in charge of your characters and not
vice versa and that my way is a recipe to certain disaster. You can go take
your pick. Different ways of doing things work for different people. But I am
constantly surprised by my people and my plots, which leads us into…
Alma: GOOD GOD am I a pantser. Outlining a piece of fiction kills
it stone dead for me. The way I’ve explained this to people is that what I have
is a story seed – and I shove it into the ground and then I watch and wait, and
I have as little idea as the eventual reader does as to what it will turn out
to be. I may have a cabbage on my hands, or a redwood – I won’t know until the
first shoot comes out, and sometimes barely even then, because my stories have
careened wildly from where I thought they might be going and I’ve wound up in
quite a different conclusion than the one I thought I was trying to steer
towards. I have several so-called “sales synopses” that were created as part of
a book proposal to pitch to a publisher – and the books that have eventually
resulted from these things bear shockingly little resemblance to what the
proposal pitch summary says they were supposed to be. I am absolutely best at
writing a synopsis AFTER I’ve finished writing the book or the story – I very
very rarely know where I am heading, when I start writing, and yes, I really DO
make up things as I go along – or if you prefer to look at it that way, the
story knows best, and all I do is listen to what it wants to do, and obey. So
far, that has served me well. I am a horror at convention panels where they ask
“do you outline or not” because most of my answers to questions along the lines
of “but HOW do you write” revolve around values of “I don’t know”. With me,
it’s an instinct, it’s voices in the head. If I listen and let them have their
head, they tend to end up in a good place in the end. It’s weird, but the
concept of having a “map” which defines the story and constrains it within certain parameters,
hamstrings me completely. At best, I will have a set of directions, and often
they’ll be weird ones – “turn left at the empty lot where they are planning to
build the library” kind of thing, and how I know where the library is being built
without any hint or signage, well, that’s one of writing’s little mysteries for
me. I wouldn't have it any other way.
BRoP: Do you use critique
partners or beta readers? Why or why not?
Alma: They are helpful. A writer is always too close to the work
at hand to see it really clearly – you know what you MEANT to say, and that is
often what your physical eye will present you with, no matter what is actually
on the page. Someone else, a cold-reading person who doesn’t know anything
about the story except what is there on the page, will save you from a thousand
blunders. My absolute favorite when it comes to my own work is the catch that a
beta-reader made when I wrote, literally, this sentence: “The deaf servant,
summoned by the noise, rushed into the room…” Yeah, I’d written that. And I’d
read right over it. I knew what I MEANT, dammit. But it’s just as well that
particular blunder never made it into the actual book for real readers to snort
and giggle over. All hail beta readers.
Alma: Depends on the book, and if it is required I will do HEAPS
of it. For “Embers of Heaven”, I counted – I read forty seven books to write
ONE. It was necessary. I don’t regret a line or a syllable of all that reading.
This is the iceberg theory of writing – only a fraction of all this stuff found
its way into the book directly, but because I had learned all the rest it gave
the book a sort of depth that gave the reader to understand that I knew what I
was talking about even if I wasn’t infodumping the sum total of my research
onto them in a great big pile. Writers have been known to do this – the “I’ve
done all this research, and you WILL know about it!” approach – and it’s always
to the detriment of the book. But if you get the feeling that you can
buttonhole the author and ask a question that is NOT directly addressed in the
book but that you have no doubt that the author will know the answer to – that
is something else entirely.
On the other hand, with things like my high fantasy – stuff
that lives in my own head and nowhere else – I find out what I have to know, no
more, no less. I do try to avoid common problems like treating horses like
animate motorcycles and making them impervious to heat, cold, hunger, or the
kind of loads that would break any self-respecting equine’s back. But the rest
of it is my own creation, and lives by my own rules.
Wow Alma! Thanks so much for visiting. I loved your answers on not only mine, but the others Blog Ring of Power posts as well! I can see why Terri gave the fan squeal when you said yes. LOL
MIDNIGHT AT SPANISH GARDENS: On the eve of the end of the world, 20 December 2012, five friends meet in Spanish Gardens, the cafe where they had celebrated their college graduation 20 years before. Over Irish coffees, they reminisce – and reveal long-held and disturbing secrets. Each friend in turn is given a curious set of instructions by an enigmatic bartender named Ariel: “Your life is filled with crossroads and you are free to choose one road or another at any time. Stepping through this door takes away all choices except two — the choice to live a different life, or return to this one….” Each in turn passes through the portal and are faced with new lives and challenges. Their decisions show a new life — or something far worse. At the end of the world, it’s a chance for redemption, or a chance to learn something about themselves.
RIVER: It begins. Somewhere. An insignificant trickle of water. And it changes. And it grows up, and gathers a history, and finds its way into atlases and maps, until it finally reaches the sea, and vanishes into its vastness. You might think it of no importance. That it does not matter. But you follow where it leads… Rivers have always been very important to humankind. They’ve been explored. They’ve been navigated. They’ve been called gods. They’ve been blessed and cursed and venerated and used and enjoyed and exploited and polluted since the beginning of recorded history. They’ve been sung about and dreamed about and followed on epic journeys of discovery. They capitals of empires have risen on the banks of rivers – and so have a thousand fishing villages, and river landings, and water mills. There is only one River. Really. And it’s all of them. Every river is dfferent – and yet they’re all the same, vast and full of life and death and mystery and history and adventure and quiet dreams. Full of life. Full of mystery. Full of stories. Stories by: Mary Victoria, Tiffany Trent,Jay Lake, Deb Taylor, Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Jacey Bedford, Joshua Palmatier, Brenda Cooper, Seanan McGuire,Ada Milenkovic Brown, Nisi Shawl, Joyce Reynolds-Ward.
MIDNIGHT AT SPANISH GARDENS: On the eve of the end of the world, 20 December 2012, five friends meet in Spanish Gardens, the cafe where they had celebrated their college graduation 20 years before. Over Irish coffees, they reminisce – and reveal long-held and disturbing secrets. Each friend in turn is given a curious set of instructions by an enigmatic bartender named Ariel: “Your life is filled with crossroads and you are free to choose one road or another at any time. Stepping through this door takes away all choices except two — the choice to live a different life, or return to this one….” Each in turn passes through the portal and are faced with new lives and challenges. Their decisions show a new life — or something far worse. At the end of the world, it’s a chance for redemption, or a chance to learn something about themselves.RIVER: It begins. Somewhere. An insignificant trickle of water. And it changes. And it grows up, and gathers a history, and finds its way into atlases and maps, until it finally reaches the sea, and vanishes into its vastness. You might think it of no importance. That it does not matter. But you follow where it leads… Rivers have always been very important to humankind. They’ve been explored. They’ve been navigated. They’ve been called gods. They’ve been blessed and cursed and venerated and used and enjoyed and exploited and polluted since the beginning of recorded history. They’ve been sung about and dreamed about and followed on epic journeys of discovery. They capitals of empires have risen on the banks of rivers – and so have a thousand fishing villages, and river landings, and water mills. There is only one River. Really. And it’s all of them. Every river is dfferent – and yet they’re all the same, vast and full of life and death and mystery and history and adventure and quiet dreams. Full of life. Full of mystery. Full of stories. Stories by: Mary Victoria, Tiffany Trent,Jay Lake, Deb Taylor, Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Jacey Bedford, Joshua Palmatier, Brenda Cooper, Seanan McGuire,Ada Milenkovic Brown, Nisi Shawl, Joyce Reynolds-Ward.
BRoP: What format is your book(s) available in (print, e-book, audio book, etc.)?
Alma: Yes {grin] As in, yes, most of the above. E-books are available both on Smashwords and on Amazon (and on B&N, for that matter, some of them); print books are available via Amazon or through ordering them via your friendly local indie bookstore. Contact me directly if you want a signed bookplate for your copy of anything, or you want to buy a signed copy of some of the out-of-print first edition hardcovers of a selection of books, some of which I still have on hand.
BRoP: Please let us know where your readers can stalk you:
Website: www.AlmaAlexander.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/alma.alexander (Facebook Fan Page:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alma-Alexander/67938071280 )
Goodreads author page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/36343.Alma_Alexander
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander
Amazon: http://amzn.to/p0ikzy (Kindle store) or http://amzn.to/mQrHkc (Alma Alexander Books)
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/anghara
Other: 30th of every month: www.StorytellersUnplugged.com
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