Guest Blog: Alma Alexander
Jul. 18th, 2011 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jpskewedthroneToday we welcome Alma Alexander (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anghara) to the blog! She has a new book getting ready to hit the shelves, Midnight at Spanish Gardens, and she'd like to talk about some of the ideas behind the novel, mostly dealing with "crossroads," all of those paths we could have taken when we made those hard decisions (or even the light ones) in our lives. So please welcome, Alma! And use the links at the end of the post to find out more about her and her books.
Alma:
There have been many attempts to boil down the craft of writing, the act of telling a story to an audience, to a nice sound bite which hopefully encapsulates the whole messy thing into a sentence or two and lets curious “outsiders” into the secrets of the creative world. It’s what lies behind all those “there are only [27 or 18 or 7 or 3 or 1] basic plot(s)” kind of statements. And yes, it is perfectly possible to boil down even the most exciting book into a plot bunny of a few pithy words – and the information you are presented with would be completely correct, and completely useless, completely bloodless. Because the story lies in the telling, in the end. Not in what PRECISELY is told.
I’m not going to wade into the argument of how many plots there are in the universe, but let’s face it, when you cut away all the flesh and flense down to the bare bones there really are only a few basic skeletons on which you can build. What I am going to do, here, today, is focus on one aspect of telling a tale, one single strand of plot, if you like. And that would be that every tale told involves, at its core, a journey.
This does not have to be literal although of course it frequently is – just think of all the Quest Fantasies that have been written through the ages, where an intrepid crew of adventurers travel to the ends of the world to recover or find a magical artifact that’s absolutely essential for the saving of that world from anything ranging from simple peril to Armageddon; “Go West Young Man” stories from more-or-less contemporary America; Murder on the Orient Express, for that matter.
But getting on a conveyance – plane, train, coach, horse or Shanks’s Pony – is not entirely the journey I am talking about. One of the most fundamental of all the story descriptors is that a story is a Character with a Problem – and the journey of which I speak can often be wholly contained within a protagonist’s mind and heart and spirit as (s)he battles that problem, and learns and grows and changes through it. At its heart, a journey like this depends heavily on the idea of crossroads, of taking different paths, of making choices. And perhaps the heart of that heart is a simple question: “What if...?”
I hesitated at THAT crossroads – what if I had turned left instead of right? I lingered over coffee that afternoon – what if I had taken it to go? I broke up with that guy/girl – what if I had married him or her instead? What if I had children/never had children/took irrevocable steps not to be a parent but now regret it? What if I told the truth/told a lie? What if I had got on that plane which crashed – but which I missed (perhaps because of that coffee that I took too long over)? What if I never meet my soulmate and am doomed to die alone? What if I meet my soulmate and don’t realize that I did – because it never occurred to me that (s)he might be of the same gender as myself?
How far can I bend without breaking – how much can I change and still be me?
What defines “me”?
A journey can be as little – or, potentially, as much – as grappling with decisions like these. Decisions that can be perfectly simple and everyday things, decisions which we may not even be aware are fixing our choices for us at the time that we make them because they seem to be the obvious and inevitable thing to do. The act of decision can be so many different things.
I am reminded of a famous bit of Star Trek dialogue when Spock and Sarek glance at one another after an emotional outburst from their very human wife/mother over the consequences (or the potential consequences) of choices and decisions that both men have taken.
“Emotional, isn’t she?” Spock says with a trademark raised eyebrow, and his father affirms that she has “always been that way” – whereupon Spock inquires why Sarek married her in the first place.
“At the time,” Sarek responds, “it seemed the logical thing to do.”
But oh, is that a loaded line – because it is obvious to all the parties concerned that it’s as much of a smokescreen as it is the truth, and that the cool and logical Sarek married the emotional Amanda not because of logic but in spite of it. For a species such as the Vulcans, this is an almost impossible basis for any sort of decision at all – and yet it was made, it could be made, it was inevitable that it had been made.
We humans don’t rely on our logic in quite the same way – but although we will trust our instinct, out “gut feeling”, quite a bit, we do also bring in (one would hope) a leavening of common sense, a lower dosage of that cold Vulcan logic. Some of us make pro-and-con lists. Some of us “sleep on it”. Some of us – with a bit of experience and a perhaps a sense of underlying understanding of the matter at hand – can and do make split-second decisions that can change lives and circumstances not just for themselves but for others, too.
Choices – decisions – were partly what became the foundation for Midnight at Spanish Gardens, the new novel I’ve got coming out in August. I took the characters who showed up for the audition casting call, as it were, and I shoved them into a scenario where they had to make choices. Hard ones. Sometimes almost impossible ones. And then I complicated those choices by adding a Space, and a Time.
The Time was a gift – the Mayan end-of-the-world thing. Choices become that much more urgent, more desperate, if you have a deadline – and how much more of a deadline is there than the world ending (for real, or just metaphorically – but who knows this in advance...?) So my five protagonists meet on the Eve of the End of the World – and the choices start piling up thick and fast, very quickly.
The Place... the Place was another gift, and one that I’ve carried with me for many years. Spanish Gardens is real. WAS real – it no longer exists. But while it graced this earth it was one of the special places, something that at least one person who used to go there has called “a dimension portal”, and more importantly... a place where you could not go very far at all without being absolutely honest – with others, but first and foremost with yourself.
So, there we have it. I had a journey set up for them all. I took my characters to the end of the world, to a place where they could only speak the truth, and I asked them, “What if...?”
They made their choices.
What would you choose?
In closing – a few words about me, and a few more about the book –
My main website is at www.AlmaAlexander.com (take a look at the bibliography page!) and I also have a website dedicated to my YA series, Worldweavers, and you can find a book trailer there, as well as excerpts from those books and also ordering information. I blog regularly atanghara and if people want to get to know the real me that's the more dynamic site right now. I'm also on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/alma.alexander, or https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alma-Alexander/67938071280) and if you want to read more literary and writerly essaylets you might visit StorytellersUnplugged.com on the 30th of every month and keep up with me there.
If you want to look into purchasing any of my books, you can go to several places:
Amazon.com (if you are after actual books) or Amazon.com Kindle (if you're after a Kindle ebook)
Hit Smashwords.com for other ebook editions (and go there to keep an eye on the Alexander Triads project, themed collections of short stories...)
Or visit your friendly neighborhood indie store and ask them to get my books for you if they don't have them...
For Midnight at Spanish Gardens, you can preorder the book here:
Skywarriorbooks.com and it will shortly be available here Amazon.com and here Smashwords.com
anghara) to the blog! She has a new book getting ready to hit the shelves, Midnight at Spanish Gardens, and she'd like to talk about some of the ideas behind the novel, mostly dealing with "crossroads," all of those paths we could have taken when we made those hard decisions (or even the light ones) in our lives. So please welcome, Alma! And use the links at the end of the post to find out more about her and her books.Alma:
There have been many attempts to boil down the craft of writing, the act of telling a story to an audience, to a nice sound bite which hopefully encapsulates the whole messy thing into a sentence or two and lets curious “outsiders” into the secrets of the creative world. It’s what lies behind all those “there are only [27 or 18 or 7 or 3 or 1] basic plot(s)” kind of statements. And yes, it is perfectly possible to boil down even the most exciting book into a plot bunny of a few pithy words – and the information you are presented with would be completely correct, and completely useless, completely bloodless. Because the story lies in the telling, in the end. Not in what PRECISELY is told.
I’m not going to wade into the argument of how many plots there are in the universe, but let’s face it, when you cut away all the flesh and flense down to the bare bones there really are only a few basic skeletons on which you can build. What I am going to do, here, today, is focus on one aspect of telling a tale, one single strand of plot, if you like. And that would be that every tale told involves, at its core, a journey.
This does not have to be literal although of course it frequently is – just think of all the Quest Fantasies that have been written through the ages, where an intrepid crew of adventurers travel to the ends of the world to recover or find a magical artifact that’s absolutely essential for the saving of that world from anything ranging from simple peril to Armageddon; “Go West Young Man” stories from more-or-less contemporary America; Murder on the Orient Express, for that matter.
But getting on a conveyance – plane, train, coach, horse or Shanks’s Pony – is not entirely the journey I am talking about. One of the most fundamental of all the story descriptors is that a story is a Character with a Problem – and the journey of which I speak can often be wholly contained within a protagonist’s mind and heart and spirit as (s)he battles that problem, and learns and grows and changes through it. At its heart, a journey like this depends heavily on the idea of crossroads, of taking different paths, of making choices. And perhaps the heart of that heart is a simple question: “What if...?”
I hesitated at THAT crossroads – what if I had turned left instead of right? I lingered over coffee that afternoon – what if I had taken it to go? I broke up with that guy/girl – what if I had married him or her instead? What if I had children/never had children/took irrevocable steps not to be a parent but now regret it? What if I told the truth/told a lie? What if I had got on that plane which crashed – but which I missed (perhaps because of that coffee that I took too long over)? What if I never meet my soulmate and am doomed to die alone? What if I meet my soulmate and don’t realize that I did – because it never occurred to me that (s)he might be of the same gender as myself?
How far can I bend without breaking – how much can I change and still be me?
What defines “me”?
A journey can be as little – or, potentially, as much – as grappling with decisions like these. Decisions that can be perfectly simple and everyday things, decisions which we may not even be aware are fixing our choices for us at the time that we make them because they seem to be the obvious and inevitable thing to do. The act of decision can be so many different things.
I am reminded of a famous bit of Star Trek dialogue when Spock and Sarek glance at one another after an emotional outburst from their very human wife/mother over the consequences (or the potential consequences) of choices and decisions that both men have taken.
“Emotional, isn’t she?” Spock says with a trademark raised eyebrow, and his father affirms that she has “always been that way” – whereupon Spock inquires why Sarek married her in the first place.
“At the time,” Sarek responds, “it seemed the logical thing to do.”
But oh, is that a loaded line – because it is obvious to all the parties concerned that it’s as much of a smokescreen as it is the truth, and that the cool and logical Sarek married the emotional Amanda not because of logic but in spite of it. For a species such as the Vulcans, this is an almost impossible basis for any sort of decision at all – and yet it was made, it could be made, it was inevitable that it had been made.
We humans don’t rely on our logic in quite the same way – but although we will trust our instinct, out “gut feeling”, quite a bit, we do also bring in (one would hope) a leavening of common sense, a lower dosage of that cold Vulcan logic. Some of us make pro-and-con lists. Some of us “sleep on it”. Some of us – with a bit of experience and a perhaps a sense of underlying understanding of the matter at hand – can and do make split-second decisions that can change lives and circumstances not just for themselves but for others, too.
Choices – decisions – were partly what became the foundation for Midnight at Spanish Gardens, the new novel I’ve got coming out in August. I took the characters who showed up for the audition casting call, as it were, and I shoved them into a scenario where they had to make choices. Hard ones. Sometimes almost impossible ones. And then I complicated those choices by adding a Space, and a Time.
The Time was a gift – the Mayan end-of-the-world thing. Choices become that much more urgent, more desperate, if you have a deadline – and how much more of a deadline is there than the world ending (for real, or just metaphorically – but who knows this in advance...?) So my five protagonists meet on the Eve of the End of the World – and the choices start piling up thick and fast, very quickly.
The Place... the Place was another gift, and one that I’ve carried with me for many years. Spanish Gardens is real. WAS real – it no longer exists. But while it graced this earth it was one of the special places, something that at least one person who used to go there has called “a dimension portal”, and more importantly... a place where you could not go very far at all without being absolutely honest – with others, but first and foremost with yourself.
So, there we have it. I had a journey set up for them all. I took my characters to the end of the world, to a place where they could only speak the truth, and I asked them, “What if...?”
They made their choices.
What would you choose?
In closing – a few words about me, and a few more about the book –
My main website is at www.AlmaAlexander.com (take a look at the bibliography page!) and I also have a website dedicated to my YA series, Worldweavers, and you can find a book trailer there, as well as excerpts from those books and also ordering information. I blog regularly at
anghara and if people want to get to know the real me that's the more dynamic site right now. I'm also on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/alma.alexander, or https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alma-Alexander/67938071280) and if you want to read more literary and writerly essaylets you might visit StorytellersUnplugged.com on the 30th of every month and keep up with me there.If you want to look into purchasing any of my books, you can go to several places:
Amazon.com (if you are after actual books) or Amazon.com Kindle (if you're after a Kindle ebook)
Hit Smashwords.com for other ebook editions (and go there to keep an eye on the Alexander Triads project, themed collections of short stories...)
Or visit your friendly neighborhood indie store and ask them to get my books for you if they don't have them...
For Midnight at Spanish Gardens, you can preorder the book here:
Skywarriorbooks.com and it will shortly be available here Amazon.com and here Smashwords.com
