<Interview With Tiffany Trent>

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An Interview with Author Tiffany Trent

by debbi michiko florence

Tiffany Trent was born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. She has Master’s degrees in English, Creative Writing, and Environmental Studies, and has lived around the United States and China in pursuit of the muse. A former frog wrangler and turtle rescuer, Tiffany currently teaches writing at Virginia Tech. In the Serpent’s Coils in her first published novel, and is the first in the Hallowmere series, debuting at the end of August.

When did you know you wanted to be an author?

I knew I wanted to be an author when I was nine years old. We had one of those classic assignments to write to an author we admired. I wrote to Madeline L’Engle, because A Wrinkle in Time had really spoken to me. And she wrote back! I realized then that these stories came from real people and that maybe I could be one of those people, too.

Tell us about your road to publication. And definitely tell us about The Call!

My road is long and winding. I started out wanting to write fantasy, but I was discouraged from it by well-meaning teachers and family. I worked secretly on an epic fantasy, but as I got into college, I began writing poetry and creative nonfiction. When the nonfiction was well received and won awards, I decided to focus on that. So, I packed my family (my husband and three cats at the time) cross-country to the University of Montana to take my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a concentration in Creative Nonfiction. (I also ended up doing a double M.S. in Environmental Studies at the same time).

While there, I happened to meet a woman in my fiction classes who shared my abiding (very secret) love for fantasy. Her name was Shannon Hale, and we challenged each other after the first year of our program to write a novel that we naively thought we’d get published in the fall. No sweat, right? Her first novel became Goose Girl, and she went on to win the Newbery Honor for Princess Academy. Mine still sits on the shelf, though it garnered some interest at first from agents and publishers before landing back on my shelf in a heap. I’d had another idea I’d toyed with occasionally—a novelization of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” When my editor Stacy Whitman was seeking potential authors for a new dark fantasy series, she happened to talk to Shannon, who pointed her in my direction. We began emailing one another and I submitted a proposal based on the fairytale novelization idea in August 2005. Just before Christmas that year, I got the fateful email that told me I’d made the cut. And now, we’re making history! ;)

What about writing fantasy intrigues you the most?

The fact that I get to tell a story to someone I don’t know—a story that’s completely made up. And if I tell the story well and truly enough, my readers will believe it and maybe even find some truth there that helps them get through something or learn something new or enjoy life more. Those things really make it wonderful.

Tell us about the particular challenges of writing a series.

I’m still learning these! The big one for me right now is holding all the threads together. I made a list the other day of all the plot threads I had to keep in mind as I’m working on Book 3 and it just set my mind reeling. I hadn’t realized all of it until I set it down.

It seems to me that you really need to think a lot like a TV writer. You need to think constantly about which plot threads you’ll tie off in the current book and which threads you want to extend into the next book and which must extend the entire series. It can get extremely confusing as the threads get interwoven and knotted more and more tightly. The thing you cannot do is just *end*. You must leave the reader wanting enough to go pick up the next book. This can be problematic for some readers because they want resolution. But it’s not always possible in series fiction.

Also, if you’re working in shared world fiction as I am, you have to set everything up perfectly for the author who will follow you next so that he or she can easily pick up the threads. Which segues into the next question...;)

While you created the characters and story, other writers are contributing to this series. How do you feel about that? How do you work with them?

I admit to being a little territorial at first, because I really came to love some of the characters and I’d never been in a situation where I had to surrender my characters to someone else. I’m very happy to say, though, that this surrender has been a wonderful experience. The other authors (Gela Ranger, Paul Crilley, and Amanda Jenkins at this point) have asked wonderful questions and have had great insights into the story that I might never have had on my own. They’ve all been a delight to work with thus far.

Hallowmere is set in the Civil War era. What made you choose this time period for your story?

Honestly, as a Southerner, I wonder how I could *not* chose this time period. In many parts of the South, the War has never gone away. I didn’t realize this until I moved away and returned a few years later. There’s a gravity here that you don’t find anywhere else in the country (at least where I’ve been, anyway). There are ghosts and battlefields around every corner. It seemed only natural that I chose an era so full of emotional tension and potential for supernatural shenanigans. In addition, the Civil War had and still has a tremendous impact on so much of our personal and family histories here in the States.

The main character, Corrine, is sent off to boarding school and discovers a strange mystical past, teachers who perform witchcraft, disappearing girls, and the Fey who may or may not be evil. How did you get to know Corrine and her story?

Oddly enough, one of the secondary characters in the trilogy—Mara—came to me first. Corrine was an afterthought, a result of a series of “what ifs?” What if a young girl was orphaned by the Civil War? What if that girl had been reared very gently by Transcendentalist parents, had lived through the repercussions of war, and was then thrust into the heart of a supernatural battle between mortal and Fey? What if she was curious? What if she had to learn to be independent in a way that most girls didn’t in the 1860s?

What’s often been interesting is reader reactions to Corrine’s blend of curiosity and ignorance. Many of these reactions have been very anachronistic. Often, people are frustrated by the lack of information available to Corrine and how she handles that problem. Very few girls were independent in 1865. They were taught not to think much further than the household, that they should be little more than child-bearing, domestic decorations for their husbands’ houses. But some women were starting to get uncomfortable with that and were thinking about how they might have their own livelihoods. At the same time, Native and African American women were fighting for their lives against the tyranny of Manifest Destiny and slavery. I wanted to put all that in a blender and see how the characters responded. Corrine is but one magical ingredient.

What is the best thing about being a writer?

Working in my pajamas. :)

Kidding.

Doing what I love and what I feel I’m best at doing for hours on end. And getting paid to do it! Pretty amazing, that.

What is the most challenging thing about being a writer?

Doing what I love for hours on end so that I can meet a deadline.

Thus far, it’s been challenging to help non-writers understand the writing life. It really doesn’t end. There’s no end to first drafts, umpteenth drafts, edits, revisions, proposals, synopses, deadlines. I’m thinking about writing almost 24/7. Some people don’t get that, nor why everything goes crazy when I’m on a deadline or traveling for promo or whatever I’m needing to do for the work. Thank goodness for understanding husbands!

What advice do you have for beginning writers?

If you feel called to write something, don’t allow other people to discourage you. If you want to write genre, write it proudly. If you want to write literary fiction, write that proudly, too. No one has the moral high ground on what should or shouldn’t be written. Let your heart be your compass and teach you the true north of your stories.

Be flexible. Sometimes the story you most want to write isn’t meant to be written or published right now. But maybe something entirely different *is*.

What are you working on now?

Book 3 of Hallowmere.

Also, a super-secret proposal for another Victorian dark fantasy.

How can fans contact you?

Email me at tiffanytrent@msn.com or visit me on LiveJournal or MySpace. My LJ handle is tltrent.