Interview with Eliza Andrews
I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO RECENTLY CHAT WITH ELIZA ANDREWS. ELIZA’S DESCRIBES HER WORK AS FALLING SOMEWHERE BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY FICTION AND ROMANCE. SO, IF HER BOOKS WERE MADE INTO MOVIES, THEY’D PROBABLY BE CLASSIFIED AS DRAMAS BUT WITH CRITICAL ROMANTIC SUBPLOTS. HER FIRST LESFIC BOOK, “TO HAVE LOVED & LOST,” WAS A #1 BEST-SELLER IN SEVERAL AMAZON CATEGORIES FOR ABOUT THREE CONSECUTIVE WEEKS, GARNERING OVER 170 REVIEWS.
ELIZA ALSO WRITES YOUNG ADULT FICTION AS R.A. MARSHALL. HER YA BOOKS ARE SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY—PERHAPS BEST DESCRIBED AS ‘SCIENCE FANTASY’. SHE HAS TWO INTER-RELATED TRILOGIES: “GUARDIANS OF THE PORTAL” AND “LOST CHILDREN.”
DO YOU WRITE FULL-TIME OR PART-TIME?
Now THAT is a good question! I used to write only part-time, but I quit my job recently, not because I wanted to write full-time, but for other reasons. So I’m giving myself the next six months to really make a go at writing full-time. My results over the next few months will determine whether or not I write full-time or part-time going forward.
THAT’S TERRIFIC. CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR WRITING PROCESS. ARE YOU A “PLOTTER” OR A “PANTSER?”
Definitely both. When I first started writing, I wrote by intuition alone. But I have to confess that I hardly knew what I was doing. When I look back on my first novel, I grimace and think, Learning curve! Now I understand how we are hard-wired as Westerners — and maybe just as humans — to hear and process stories in a certain way. We actually *want* familiar archetypes, and, to a certain extent, tropes. These days, I try to plot pretty thoroughly. It makes the writing itself much easier.
With that being said, I still find that my characters take the story in directions I didn’t always expect or plan for. So although I make a thorough outline at the beginning, once I actually sit at the computer and begin to write, sometimes things happen that I didn’t plan. That’s kind of fun, though — makes me feel like it’s my characters’ story, and I’m just following along behind them.
I LIKE TO ASK THIS QUESTION, BECAUSE I LIKE IT SO MUCH, HOW DO YOU NAME THE CHARACTERS IN YOUR BOOKS? DO YOU CHOOSE THE NAMES BASED ON LIKING THE WAY IT SOUNDS OR THE MEANING? DO YOU HAVE ANY NAME CHOOSING RESOURCES YOU RECOMMEND?
How I name characters depends upon the character. The names of main characters are important to me, because I want the name to fit the personality of the character. For example, for my first novel, which is a young adult novel with a sort of superhero bent to it, I wanted the main character to be a real “everyman,” an average guy. So I named him Jon, because what could be more commonplace than that, right? I was having trouble coming up with his last name. At the time, I was watching “Spider-Man” on mute, so Jon became Jon Parker, after Peter Parker.
As for name choosing resources, I really like the name generator in the software I use to write my novels, which is called Scrivener. It will spit out a list of 50 or 100 names to choose from, based upon settings you give it. I use that a lot for minor characters whose names I don’t really care much about.
WHEN YOU WERE LEARNING TO WRITE, WHAT DID YOU FIND THE MOST USEFUL TOOL? AND WHAT WAS THE LEAST USEFUL OR POSSIBLY EVEN THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE TOOL?
The most useful tool I’ve discovered is the four-part plot structure. By far, this has helped me to improve my plotting over the past few years more than anything else.
As for most destructive… hmm. I think what slows me down the most is when I stop writing for myself and the love of writing and start writing with an eye to what other people are going to think. Because THAT, of course, invites the self-doubt gremlins. The voices in your head that say, “This is stupid. No one’s going to like this. Where did you come up with this idea? You think this is compelling? Ha! So NOT compelling!”
WHAT PROJECTS ARE YOU WORKING ON AT THE PRESENT?
Right now, I’m trying hard to finish my novel “Anika Takes the Long Way Home Up Soul Mountain”. It’s a follow-up to my previous novel, “To Have Loved & Lost”, which came out at the beginning of November 2016.
“Anika” is more of a spin-off than a sequel; it follows one of the side characters from “THL&L” into the future, about fifteen years after the end of the events in “THL&L” (two years after the Epilogue). I should’ve finished Anika’s story back in February or March, but then my life took an unexpected turn, so Life has sort of derailed Writing for the past few months. It’s ironic, because “Anika” is a story about someone’s mid-life crisis, so I find it fitting that my own life would become stressful and weird at the same time as writing a story about someone else’s crisis.
EVEN THOUGH IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU DIDN’T EXPECT IT WHEN YOU STARTED THE NOVEL, HAS IT BEEN CATHARTIC TO WRITE ABOUT A MID LIFE CRISIS AS YOU GO THROUGH ONE?
Yes, writing is always cathartic to me. I’m pretty sure it’s the way I self-medicate! Some people drink, some people eat, some people exercise. I write.
WHAT ABOUT YOUR OTHER BOOK, “TO HAVE LOVED & LOST?” DID THAT ONE REFLECT YOUR OWN LIFE, TOO?
In a certain way, yes. “To Have Loved & Lost” is about two women who’ve both lost their partners in tragic accidents. So even though it’s a romance, it’s also a lot about grief and how we process grief in both healthy and unhealthy ways. And it did reflect my own life. Not in the sense that I’d lost a partner or someone I was close to — I have been fortunate that most of the death I’ve experienced in my life hasn’t been of the tragic variety. But I was grieving in other ways; it’s complicated and personal, but basically I was grieving the loss of my own love life, along with the loss of other things in my life, and my own grief process definitely came through in — and was aided by — writing “To Have Loved & Lost”.
WHAT DO YOUR PLANS FOR FUTURE PROJECT INCLUDE?
Once Anika’s story is finished, I have to finish a young adult trilogy, but after that, I want to get to work on a novel I’m currently calling “Apart”. It’s another book about tragedy and grief — don’t know why this keeps coming up in my work! — but this time, the reader isn’t going to know exactly what the main character is grieving until about halfway through the novel.
I kind of know how I want “Apart” to feel; it should be a little like that unsettling feeling of walking down the stairs into the basement in the dark while you fumble for the light switch. You’re not “scared,” exactly, but you’re not comfortable, either. Have you heard the podcast S-Town? I want this book to feel a little like that.
The other thing about “Apart” is that it’s my ‘ode to the South.’ I grew up in small-town Georgia and have spent most of my adult life in Atlanta and the Carolinas. It’s an uncomfortable thing to be an obviously gay woman in the South, but at the same time, there’s something about the deep South — the way it sounds, the way it smells, the cadence of people’s speech — that I just can’t quite resist. I’d like bring some of that out in “Apart.”
WHAT PERIOD OF YOUR LIFE DO YOU FIND YOU WRITE MOST OFTEN ABOUT?
I find that whatever I’m going through at the moment definitely bleeds into what I’m writing. Have you ever seen the movie “Shakespeare in Love?” It has a young William Shakespeare running around after a girl, and throughout the movie there are these little jokes for Shakespeare nerds, where other characters say things to him like, “never a lender nor a borrower be” and so forth that are all lines from Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Sometimes my writing makes me laugh, because it’s just like “Shakespeare in Love” — it’s like my subconscious mind is sucking up the things around me, processing them, and then spitting them back out as fiction. I’ve fictionalized people I’ve met, situations I’ve been in, and sometimes entire conversations.
SO, LET’S SWITCH GEARS AND TALK ABOUT YOUR READING HABITS.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE NOVEL THAT YOU FEEL IS UNDER-APPRECIATED?
I have two, and they’re actually series rather than individual novels. The first is Philip Pullman’s His “Dark Materials” series. OMG, I love these books! They tried to make a movie out of them and did a poor job, because the books are actually kind of dark and creepy and quite complex, and the producers tried to simplify it down into something that would be mainstream enough to sell. In so doing, they wrecked it, and I think gave people the wrong impression that the books are as bad as the movie.
My other favorite under-appreciated series is “Marie Lu’s Legend” series. I don’t understand why the “Divergent Trilogy” hit all this Hollywood, box office success, while the Legend series hasn’t even been made into movies. Divergent was so-so at best; Legend was way better.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE CHILDHOOD BOOK?
I can only pick one? I’m sure that if I thought about it, I could come up with dozens, but the one that made me want to write was Robert A. Heinlein’s “Tunnel in the Sky.” (See what a sci-fi nerd I am?) It’s a sort of obscure book, so briefly: A group of young inter-planetary rangers gets sent to a wild, inhospitable planet for their final exam, but something goes wrong and instead of being retrieved in only a week, they are left out there to survive on their own for MONTHS. I liked this book so much that I read it two or three times, and I didn’t want it to end, so I started writing my own sequel, just so I could keep reading the story. I was about ten when I wrote my “sequel,” but I probably wrote maybe fifteen or twenty pages before I got tired of it and gave up. Not bad for a fifth grader.
I KNOW YOU ENJOY MOVIES. SO, IF YOU COULD CAST YOUR CHARACTERS IN THE HOLLYWOOD ADAPTATION OF ONE OF YOUR BOOKS, WHO WOULD YOU CAST?
Okay, I love this question. Hmmm… Well, I don’t know, but I can tell you who could play just about anyone: Tatiana Maslany. “Orphan Black” is one of my favorite shows, but it’s not as good as Tatiana herself. I think she could play just about anything or anyone!
THAT IS TRUE. SHE COULD BE ANY ONE IN ANY OF OUR NOVELS
SOME OF TOPIC QUESTIONS FOR OUR READERS TO GAIN A LITTLE INSIGHT INTO YOU …
DO YOU DREAM? AND DO YOU HAVE ANY RECURRING DREAMS/NIGHTMARES?
When “Glee” was still on and Cory Monteith was still alive (RIP), I used to dream that I was Finn Hudson. *shrug* Maybe I shouldn’t admit that. I also dream about the zombie apocalypse with some regularity. Because I am a “Walking Dead” addict.
CHARACTERS OFTEN FIND THEMSELVES IN SITUATIONS THEY AREN’T SURE THEY CAN GET OUT OF. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU FOUND YOURSELF IN A SITUATION THAT WAS HARD TO GET OUT OF AND WHAT DID YOU DO?
Oh, Lord. Truth is stranger than fiction, let me tell you. When I get out of my crazy situation, I’ll let you know.
ISN’T THAT THE TRUTH. SO, THANKS, ELIZA FOR SITTING DOWN WITH ME. I HOPE MY READERS ENJOY THIS, AS MUCH AS I HAVE, AND TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ELIZA’S WORK VISIT, CHECK OUT THE LINKS BELOW.
Author Page on Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Eliza-Andrews/...
Author Website:http://authorelizaandrews.com
Author Facebook:http://facebook.com/authorelizaandrews
