Well, thank you for inviting me.
What makes up the pillars of your life right now?
Reading, writing, swimming, champagne and, of course, love.
In your brief bio it states that you "first started dreaming about exotic locales at the age of 10, when she first cracked the cover of a small collection of tales and pictures called The Arabian Nights." Can you tell me about your becoming a writer journey?
Hmmm....it was a bit of a chequered path. I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a writer; I put my first story on papter at age ten, but long before that I was telling stories to anyone who would listen. I also loved the other arts, and I dabbled with graphic art for awhile as a child. At the age of 15 I was volunteering in a theatre wardrobe department, and decided to be a theatrical director. From there I decided to study acting—at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Throughout this time I was always writing—stories, letters, poetry. Someone from my
My time as an actor wasn't wasted. The character insight and development that an actor works on translates directly into fiction writing. And I've used the acting world as a background in a book or two. So then one day when I was what is politely called 'resting' or 'between shows'—that is, didn't get cast yet again!—writing began to call a bit more loudly. I had no typewriter, so I was writing longhand during the day and going to my uncle's office in the evenings, where I would type up the day's output, with the help of my cousin. (Since neither of us could touchtype, this tended to be a laborious process.) And one day we forgot the key, but the glass in the office door was cracked down in one corner, and we managed to pull out the broken triangle of glass, reach in, and unlock the door. I then wrote a romantic short story that begins with just that scene—Dear Aunt Martha—and it sold to the first magazine I submitted it to. At the same time I wrote a science fiction short story, and it did not sell to the first magazine I sent it to. I was too green to know that new writers don't often sell to the first publisher they approach, and it never occurred to me to submit the sci-fi to another publisher. I just thought, oh well, I'll write romance, then. So I did.
I'm
going to put Dear Aunt Martha up on
my website as a taster soon. I hope people will enjoy it.
How
many books have you written?
Call it 40. A couple are novellas, so it's hard to give an exact count. You have been publishing books since the 1980's. As an author, what has changed the most from the 80's until now?
When I wrote my first romantic novel, there was no such thing as an Author Tipsheet. That's one thing. You wrote a book, an editor read it, and if she liked it, she published it.
I can still remember my feeling of
horrified disbelief when, on the back of a couple of very successful books, I
went to a newly promoted editor, hot with a new book idea and wanting to
discuss it with her. She looked at me with bland lack of interest and said,
yes, fine, if I would just put it all on paper she would take it to the
Marketing Department and see whether they liked it and get back to me.
She had rolled over and given up her
editorial power without a murmur.
Without even noticing.
The rot would eventually spread
through the industry—and it has meant the death of something very special. The truth is, art is born in
uncertainty, and Marketing by its nature doesn't like uncertainty. Marketing uses Focus Groups to find out what
people want, and then it goes to Production and tells them to produce that very
thing. So if you are going to market books like soap, it follows that you have
to produce books like soap—a
consistent product with a predictable outcome.
The only problem is, what readers
want is to be surprised and delighted by a book, and that just isn't as
quantifiable as cotton whiteness. So the Marketing gurus pick what is quantifiable—they ask their Focus
Groups how much sex they want in a book, how much mystery, how much hero
insight—and they market the books that way.
If you don't think that in the first five minutes of the Fifty Shades phenomenon, marketing
people all over the map were running around screeching, “Readers want
masochism! Get me some masochism!” you don't know Marketing.
So the worst of writing now, especially in romance, but really all across the board, is the rigid formulaic demands of Marketing, delivered via the pale shadows of what used to be editors, who are happily engaged in hammering out their very own 'line branding'—under the illusion that this is what an editor does—and then forcing writers into that mould.
And the less the model works, the
more desperate they seem to be to make
it work: the more limits they impose; the more 'line brands' they perceive a
need for; the more specific and rigid the guidelines become.
In
addition, there's the fact that the universal globalisation impulse has also
infected publishing—big publishers now also burn incense at the altar of Total
Market Share, just like CocaCola, and to realize this they have had to snap up
small publishers and put them out of business. That also negatively impacts the
writer—and the reader.
But
now publishing has been caught by the tidal wave of eBooks and Indie
publishing, which is maybe taking us back to earlier days; all kinds of books
are getting published again. If you look
back at the invention of the printing press—it meant that everyone could buy a
book, everyone could read. The eBook
phenomenon now means that everyone can write
and publish a book. And who knows where that will lead?The problem is for those books to find their audience. There's just so much available now, and it's not so easy for a new writer to find her audience.
What hasn't changed at all?
I hope, the readers' pleasure in a good, well-written book.
I suppose it was with the publication of CAPTIVE OF DESIRE, my second book. That struck a note with readers and I got a lot of fan mail! And I was doing the thing one dreams of—like being flown to New York to appear on talk shows.
You have taught a class on How to Write Romance. Many authors struggle with writing love scenes or romantic encounters. Can you give some tips on being a successful writer in this area?
Even more than in fiction writing generally, you have to lay yourself on the line writing love scenes. That can be hard for a woman at first, because it can make you feel vulnerable. And you are vulnerable, you have to be vulnerable. And you absolutely have to let the scene arise organically from the character interaction. If you're having trouble with a love scene it may be because it's externally inspired—trying to fit into a line formula, for example. The scene has to come from the characters' passion for each other.
I think this has to start right at
the beginning—a man or a woman (character) comes to you, and they want to find
their true love. They, being from the Other world, know that they are one half of a divided
soul, and they want to unite with their other half. You are their means of
achieving that end, that's your job. But you can't grab just anyone off the
shelf—you have to find the right one, their true other half. Once you do that,
then the two characters will, in their deepest selves and whatever stands in
their way, want to realize their union in love. If they didn't want that, they
wouldn't have come to a romance novelist to have their story written. And if you yourself weren't an essential part
of their story, they wouldn't have come to you.
So now, you have these two people
who are each half of a soul that was divided in the time before Time. Their
urgency, filtered through the essence of
your own being, your talent and skill, arrives into the material world, and
will result in love, in love scenes. That is what has to drive you. You can't
take shortcuts, and you can't cheat on using the essence of yourself as the
channel. You have to fling yourself into it, throw your heart over, whatever
you want to call it. Then the love arises organically and finds its way.
Passion must enter—you are the door.
As an author, of what are you most proud?
That I write about love.
What does the future hold for you?
Thank you for asking! I've got three books in the works—the first is SEASON OF STORM, which I've revised (but not updated) for its first eBook release. It's the story of a Canadian Indian activist who kidnaps a lumber baron's daughter to stop her father wrecking his tribe's ancestral homeland—and then falls in love with her. That should be available very soon on amazon. The second is another story in my
What advice do you give to Rookie Writers?
I really don't know what practical advice to give in these days of such seismic change in the publishing world. Publishers are panicking and who can say where things will go next?
Thank you for interviewing with me and good luck in your life and writing adventures.
Thank you again for having me, and good luck in yours!http://www.alexandrasellers.
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Comment on this post for a chance to win a copy of one of Alexandra Sellers books (Captive of Desire, Fire in the Wind, or Season of Storm).
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