Alexandra Sokoloff - Lessons from the Back Seat

As a screenwriter, Alex has sold original mystery and thriller scripts and written novel adaptations for numerous Hollywood studios. Her debut ghost story, THE HARROWING, was nominated for both a Bram Stoker award and Anthony award for Best First Novel. Her second supernatural thriller, THE PRICE, was called “some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre” by the New York Times Book Review, and her short story, “The Edge of Seventeen” is currently nominated for a Thriller award for best short story. Her third spooky thriller, THE UNSEEN, is out now, and is based on real-life experiments conducted at the parapsychology lab on the Duke University campus. She is currently working on a fourth supernatural thriller for St. Martin’s Press and a paranormal thriller for Harlequin Nocturne, and is writing a book on SCREENWRITING TRICKS FOR AUTHORS, based on her popular workshop and blog. http://thedarksalon.blogspot.com/

Lessons from the Back Seat
By Alexandra Sokoloff

Since I am on the road touring for my new book, THE UNSEEN,
http://alexandrasokoloff.com/unseen.html and I will be doing God only knows how much driving in the next month, including today (from Virginia to New York, for Book Expo America, with several dozen bookstore drop-ins along the way)… I thought for my guest post I would be extremely faithful to the title of Kaye’s great blog, here. “Meanderings and Muses.” That just says it all. That’s maybe the story of my life – inspiration from traveling. Only, as you’ll notice, I changed it around to suit my own, um, tendencies and got: “Lessons from the Back Seat”.

I know that there are other life lessons generally associated with the back seats of cars. And okay, I’ve had a few of those, too. But for me, I really believe that the back seat was where I learned how to write.

My father is a peripatetic kind of guy. Because of various revolutions and natural disasters and immigration restrictions, his family moved from Leningrad to Tokyo to Mexico City before he was three years old. (We think we live exciting lives - but if you ask me nothing we do holds a candle to what our parents have lived through.) That sense of movement never really left Dad; he got into the U.S. when he was 15 and rode the rails all over the country before he was 18, and I’ve never seen him happier than when he’s behind the wheel of a car (“King of the Road” is one of our family songs).

Though when he married and started a family he put down roots in California, Dad and my mother are both educators, and at the time my siblings and I were growing up, schools still had those three-month long summer vacations. And we spent those long summers on the road, driving all over the country, different routes every year, because Dad and Mom thought that we should see the country. All of it. Intimately. You might even say, would definitely have said if you had seen how grimy we all got after two months on the highway, that we became one with it.

So some of my earliest and most enduring memories and sensations are – movement. Perpetual movement. Constantly changing scenery and huge contrasts: endless brutal deserts turning into palm oases. Towering craggy mountain ranges with pockets of ethereal fields of wildflowers. Geysers and glaciers… and grizzly bears trying to claw their way into the car.

I don’t think it’s any surprise, then, that I’m a sucker for big visuals in my reading and my writing, or that I crave stories that have a constantly moving pace and surprises around every bend. I definitely picked up those rhythms and preferences on the road.

But as everyone knows, road trips aren’t necessarily a thrill a minute. Especially in portions of, say, Oklahoma and Texas, where the same kind of flat landscape seems to go on for days. Oh, right, that’s because it DOES go on for days. So I did a hell of a lot of reading along some of those stretches, and sometimes would read the same book several times in a trip, which was great training for writing, because with multiple readings you start to see the mechanics of it all. I could recite whole sections of my favorite thrillers and mysteries to my family. I also learned to make up stories to entertain myself. What if that car following us was full of CIA agents? (Oh, right – the car behind us sometimes WAS full of CIA agents. My father is a scientist, and Russian, and that was a suspicious combination when I was a child).

But what if they kidnapped us? What if I was the only one who could get free?

What if those dinosaurs in Dinosaur World suddenly came to life? (Okay, Michael Crichton beat me to that one)

What if there were real ghosts in that ghost town?

You have a lot of time for those “What ifs” on the road.

And God knows all that traveling – the national parks, the different cities, the museums and art galleries and reservations and ghost towns along the way, gave me a whole lifetime of fodder for different stories.

I’m eternally grateful for the traveling because it’s made me not just unafraid about doing research traveling, but eager for it. I write supernatural thrillers and the PLACE of a ghost story is sometimes the most important part of the whole deal. I always want to visit and explore the city or region I’m writing about, because it’s the best way to give a reader a true and complete experience. I need you to believe in the reality of the story - to feel and smell and hear things - so I can sneak in there and scare the pants off you.

And the traveling was especially good preparation for THE UNSEEN, interestingly enough, because it gave me an angle on how to write realistically about the South (the book is set in North Carolina) even though I’ve lived in California my entire life and wouldn’t begin to pretend that I could speak from a Southerner’s point of view.

But I sure can write from the point of view of a transplant, a fish out of water, because I have been that, in so many places, for so much of my life.

In THE UNSEEN my main character, Los Angeles psychology professor Laurel MacDonald, has a precognitive dream that makes her aware that her fiancé is cheating on her. It shatters her life, of course, but also her whole sense of reality. She decides to take the “geographic cure” and moves to North Carolina to take a professorship at Duke, where she becomes obsessed with the long-buried files from the Rhine parapsychology department there.

Laurel is so out of place in the South that she’s a good observer, which makes her a perfect person to solve a mystery – but also, being in a strange new place with people who look at her as an outsider contributes to her sense of alienation and disorientation – a great undercurrent for a supernatural thriller.

All that traveling also prepared me for the author’s life – although I never would have known that going in. I don’t think anyone can possibly realize how much traveling is required of an author: the conventions, the book signings, the workshop gigs. It’s a wonderful gypsy life – you go to different cities every year for Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime, Book Expo America, the Public Library Association conference, Thrillerfest, Malice Domestic, Romantic Times – and all your friends are there, including your agent and editor, so you end up doing business in all these different cities. It’s a huge traveling circus, really.

And it helps me with dreaded book promotion that I have no problem jumping in the car and driving all over the state – any state – to stop in at bookstores and sign stock. I’d prefer to be driven, but driving itself is relaxing to me, and a welcome break from writing, so I find it a great balance – exhausting, I won’t lie about that, but also rejuvenating.

I don’t panic if I get lost, I don’t worry when little things go wrong, and I really do end up enjoying the ride. And I never, ever forget how lucky I am: I always wanted the kind of life that would take me to new places all the time, and now, well, I’ve got it – in spades.

Thanks for having me, Kaye, and I hope I see you all on the road!

Alex

http://alexandrasokoloff.com