Without further ado, here is my interview with Olivia.
What is the
wildest thing you've done to research a book?
One of my upcoming books features a forty-year-old heroine
and a twenty-something, former-tennis-pro hero. My exhaustive pursuit of
literary excellence, then, required staring intensely at my favorite tennis
players as they ran, sweated, emitted grunts of efforts, and bent over from the
waist at satisfying intervals. Sometimes—through endless, hard, Google-related
work—I even located videos of them training shirtless and/or immersed (again,
shirtless) in ice baths after their matches!
I know, I know. It’s sheer lunacy. No one expects writers to
sacrifice so much for their stories, but I am fiercely committed to realism in
my work, down to the tiniest details. I asked myself all the important
questions, such as: How do endless lunges and squats affect the curve of a tennis
pro’s posterior? Also, would he make those same sounds in bed?
You’re welcome.
What is your
writing process?
I’ve always, always worked best alone and in silence. Other
parts of my writing process have changed over time, though. I’ve become much
more of a plotter than I used to be, because—as I’ve discovered—without an
overarching framework for a story, I tend to overlook key elements as I write.
For instance, something story experts call “a plot.”
Before I begin drafting a story, I now write down my story
arc, which gives basic information about the main characters (their
appearances, their backgrounds, their goals and motivations and fears) and delineates
key plot points. It also traces developments in the romantic relationship and
the progression of individual characters’ internal arcs.
I put a lot of thought into that document, so I tend to
follow it somewhat closely when I draft—and if I deviate too much from it, I
often find I’ve written myself into a corner or gone wrong in some other way.
But since I don’t determine the details of various scenes ahead of time, I
still have plenty of room for creativity and improvisation as I write.
The process works well for me, but one of the great joys of
writing, I think, is seeing how radically different processes can all lead to
equally amazing books. So if your process is very, very different from mine,
please don’t question yourself or despair! :-)
What is
your favourite thing to do to relax?
Reading. Always and forever.
Who is your
favourite fictional crush?
This answer changes all the time, but I’ll tell you about my
latest crush.
So here’s the story: I’ve never had HBO, I don’t enjoy
violence, and I need happy endings. Thus, I did not watch Game of Thrones. However. A month or two ago, my Twitter
timeline was abuzz in a shipping frenzy over two characters on the show, Jaime
and Brienne. Idly, I clicked on a GIF of the fictional couple.
You should know that when I re-watched Wimbledon (the movie)
last year, the first time a particular secondary character showed up on-screen,
I gasped and immediately paused the movie to find out what other movies he was
in and—more importantly—whether any of those movies included full-frontal
nudity. That secondary character was, of course, played by Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau. At that point, I must have seen that he acted in Game of
Thrones, but again, the whole HBO/violence thing stopped me from pursuing the
matter further.
But then. But then.
All those Jaime/Brienne GIFs! All those Jaime/Brienne video clips! That FACE! That
face GAZING ADORINGLY AT BRIENNE/GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE!
Dear reader, I shipped them. And here’s the glory of the
internet: I could repeatedly watch a 48-minute supercut of scenes starring Jaime
and Brienne without seeing any of the stuff I didn’t care about or found off-putting.
(Such as, say, twincest. Or pushing a kid out a window. Or anything involving any
of the other characters.)
Basically, Game of Thrones might as well be called Game of
Jaime and Brienne for me, and I’m not even sorry.
P.S. In my head canon, they end up on Tarth, where she’s in
charge of everything important and he devotes himself entirely to her sexual
satisfaction and making her smile with his sly wit and punching anyone who
doesn’t sufficiently admire and respect her. THE END.
And in the
spirit of the ongoing Joss Whedon debate, who would win: astronauts or cavemen?
Oddly, even though I could have written like twenty more
pages about Jaime and Brienne, I have no answer for this. I want to say
cavewomen? Somehow?
Your
technique for incorporating organic and non-distracting description is
amazing. Do you have suggestions for
authors looking to do vivid descriptions with a minimum of interruption to the
flow?
This is very, very kind of you. I want to be clear: I am not
naturally skilled at writing description. In fact, about two or three years
ago, I decided to draft a story specifically designed to push myself in that
area, because I realized descriptive passages were a major weakness in my
writing. (The story was a futuristic gothic, which featured entire chapters
with no dialogue or sex. Dialogue and sex come pretty easily to me as a writer;
evocative descriptions do not, but they are crucial in gothic romances.)
My basic rule is this: Any description has to serve an
important purpose. It is not an end in itself. Sometimes, it’s there to orient
readers and allow them to picture the characters or a particular setting
(especially the first time a character appears or a setting is used). Other
times, it’s there for symbolic or foreshadowing purposes, or because it reveals
something about a character and/or their emotions and/or the plot. I’ll also
include descriptions that are funny, and thus serve the tone of my story.
Even if the description is serving one or more of those
purposes, I generally try to keep it brief, because I worry about pacing. I
don’t want readers to get bored and set down the book, never to return.
Also, the best description is vivid, with punchy language.
It comes from the POV character’s perspective, distinctive to what that
particular person would notice and how they would describe it. I’m still
working on that part of things, and I highly recommend reading Joanna Bourne’s
books as exemplars of POV-infused description. She’s a master.
How do your
story ideas come to you? Do you start
with a scene, a character, a concept or something else?
Different books emerge in very different ways for me. For
example: the book I mentioned earlier, with the former-tennis-pro hero and
forty-year-old heroine? The original idea for that story came from me randomly
watching the French Open and thinking idly to myself, “You know, 40-Love would be a great title for a romance.”
It’s my only story that ever sprang to life entirely from a title idea.
In “Cover Me” (a novella originally published in the Rogue Acts anthology, which I’m bundling
with another story and republishing later this year), I wanted to write a romance
about health insurance and breast cancer. Teach
Me came from my desire to explore (sexily!) how toxic masculinity hurts
people of all genders. So thematic/plot elements sometimes drive me to write a
story.
Sometimes, I’ll decide I want to write a particular type of
character. An absentminded-professor type of hero (such as Thomas in Desire and the Deep Blue Sea), or a
latter-day-hippie heroine (such as Lucy in Tiny
House, Big Love), or…anything that sounds interesting to me.
Other times, a certain plot element might drive me. For the
longest time, I wanted to write a contemporary romance where one of my main characters
would propose to the other—with the expectation/fervent hope of getting turned
down. The other character would say yes, even though they didn’t want to get
engaged either. Then each of them would try to get the other to dump them…even
as they both fell in love. It took me years
to figure out what particular set of circumstances would make that sequence of
events plausible and fun! But I finally worked it out, so I hope to write that
story soon.
Finally, if I end up obsessed with a particular television
show or movie or sport or…whatever? It’s showing up in a book, in one form or
another. :-)
To me, that’s one of the other absolute joys of writing:
Your stories can come from anywhere. Literally anywhere. Obsessive viewing of
tiny house shows? Sure. Ogling Dominic Thiem’s very fine ass? Definitely.
Shipping a particular couple on a violent television show and ignoring
literally everything else about the show, including the on-screen death of half
that couple? Oh, JUST YOU WAIT.
Thank you, Olivia, for being one of my Hidden Diamonds! And if you'd like your own copies of Olivia's books or to follow her on social media, you can find her here.
And thank you for joining us! Come back next month on July 25th for the next Hidden Diamond. Or check out last month's double feature of Rayanne Haines and Barbara Nolan.
Or there's always my previous blogpost about the hidden talents we don't even know we have.
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