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Spotlighting author: Tasha Alexander
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It was when she was a girl, following along with her mother who read aloud from a Laura Ingles Wilder novel, that Tasha Alexander realized she could read. Skipping ahead of her mother and devouring the words on the page were a defining moment. Alexander understood she had mastered the great art of escaping into the written word. It changed her life.
“It was like the world opening up.” A world that would lend itself into defining what Alexander would dream of becoming. “The love of reading naturally goes into writing stories, which is the ultimate reading experience.” Alexander would spend the next part of her childhood writing “appallingly bad short stories,” growing up, getting an adult job and thinking about the worlds that existed only inside the colorful walls of her imagination.
Eventually, all that would change. “I was reading Gaudy Night, a wonderful mystery, and in it the main female character is deciding whether or not to marry the male protagonist. One of her concerns is that marrying will keep her from doing what she wants to do. The character has a conversation with a friend and the friend says, “When you figure what you really want to do with your life, you’re absolutely going to do it.
“When I read that, it was like a slap in the face. For all these years I have been working soul sucking job after soul sucking job, and we have a tendency to define ourselves by our jobs. I was always adding after my job title, ‘but I want to be a writer.’ I thought I have to either sit down and write a book or stop saying that I want to be a writer.
“It is so easy to let circumstances be the excuse. I remember when I was working on the first book, at home with a three-and-a-half year old, it should have been impossible. But it was what I really wanted to do and so I did.” Anything is possible if you believe in yourself and work hard.
Alexander crafted her first novel using the ideas she believed make a story great. “There are two things that matter most when I am reading. The first is the characters. It’s not even that I have to like them, but I have to be intrigued and care about them and what is going to happen to them. If you can set up characters that someone cares about and will worry about, you will not be able to stop reading.
“The second is voice. I have to like the sound of the story being told. If something is written in the way that it engages me, then I will indulge. Even when the story doesn’t work as a whole, if it’s beautiful… I love it anyway. “
Are the characters real to Alexander? “Absolutely. They really are the most fun part of [writing a novel]. At the beginning, you set up these people in a certain way. Then you let them go their way. Once you’ve set up the standards of their personalities, they start behaving in ways that you wouldn’t behave.
“It’s the ways they have to behave - based on those parameters that you set up. You’re in charge of the story, but it sometimes feels like the characters are off doing their own thing. At times I think, ‘Oh [Lady] Emily, what are you doing?’ You feel like [the characters] are getting away, but they are just following the standards that you have set.
“I don’t outline. I always think of it as when you tell a child a story. You make it up as you go and have an innate sense of what comes next. I have no sense of pace when it comes to outlining, but you have to figure out what works best for you.
“When I am writing the books set in a European location, I am more familiar with the research. I feel well versed in Victorian England, but even with that I have to dip in and look for things. It was radically different with writing about Constantinople for Tears of Pearl. What I knew about Ottoman society is botched ideals that came from reading books men wrote about the harem girls lounging about half naked – where outside the harem they are veiled and repressed.”
To gather a factual foundation for Tears of Pearl, “I read more academic histories of the Ottoman Empire going back about 50 years before. Then I began reading journals and letters written by English women who were in the place during the period I wanted to write about. There were two women whose letters really stuck with me and completely changed my perception of Ottoman women. One was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who wrote all these letters about how she would wear Eastern dress and walk through Constantinople. She would go in and speak with the concubines.
“Our ideas of what these women would do and did are so wrong. All the previous stories are written by men who would not be allowed in the harem. The harems are where the family live, and there is this hierarchy of women and children. Your status goes up based on your interaction with the Sultan - to the point of where if you are the mother of a Sultan, you have great political power. In the Ottoman Empire you could be a woman of low station and be brought into the Harem and become educated. They were not vapid, half naked women languishing around all day.”
What messages, besides enjoying a great escape, does Alexander hope her readers take away from her novel? “There have always, throughout history, been women who accomplish something - it may have been harder, but I am continuously astonished by what women have done throughout history.”
What advice does Alexander have for aspiring writers? “Read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read anything that looks even remotely interesting to you. There is nothing that teaches you better on how to write than reading. You get into the mode of storytelling when you are reading. It will show you what works and what doesn’t, and I always write better if I’m reading.”
If you’re looking for the next great novel to inspire you, pick up a copy of Tasha Alexander’s Tears of Pearl today.
For more on Alexander, visit her website at: http://www.tashaalexander.com/
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