Today I have the author of Chosen, Chandra Hoffman, here at The Book Bag. I posted my thoughts on her wonderful book yesterday. Read them here.
I posed this question to her~~
I posed this question to her~~
"I have heard other authors
say that they 'hear voices in their head' and that is how they write
their books, the characters are telling their stories. Not being a writer, that idea has always intrigued me.
When some people hear voices, we
get them medical attention, other people become writers. Does that happen to you? How do you come up with your stories?
Great question, Susan. Thanks so much for having me and reviewing CHOSEN!
When I am in the thick of it, it’s difficult to describe what happens without sounding hokey, but it's like being a medium. The words come, the story flows, I hear the characters and my mouth actually moves along with their dialogue; I just try to keep up. On days when I can't go there, when I know I can’t mentally still be in a women's prison or describing the smell of flowers in Maui while picking my kid up from piano, I try to do something technical, like outlining or editing.
Great question, Susan. Thanks so much for having me and reviewing CHOSEN!
WRITING PROCESS
When I am in the thick of it, it’s difficult to describe what happens without sounding hokey, but it's like being a medium. The words come, the story flows, I hear the characters and my mouth actually moves along with their dialogue; I just try to keep up. On days when I can't go there, when I know I can’t mentally still be in a women's prison or describing the smell of flowers in Maui while picking my kid up from piano, I try to do something technical, like outlining or editing.
As far as editing, I'm a big believer in beat sheets, and in
getting a listener whose opinion you value, who is not your target audience,
who also might have a short attention span, and reading them sections out loud.
I find myself editing, rewriting, rephrasing as I read. I think it's because
growing up, I was the middle of five kids and there was always some anxiety
about not getting enough airtime, losing my audience.
ON INSPIRATION
My first novel, CHOSEN rattled around with me for several
years. The story grew out of three defining experiences: the first was
my time in Romania post-Revolution as an aide worker in the infamous Orphanage
Number One. It was
overwhelming—I was given fifty infants my first day—but inspiring to see the
human spirit surviving in spite of the bleakness. Romania led me to the second
experience, a job in the United States as the director of the domestic adoption
program for a private agency, the sole caseworker managing birth and adoptive
parents. My goal was to create happy endings, everything I hadn’t been able to
do in Bucharest.
There is a social aspect to this novel: In everything I
write, I strive to shine a light on the complexity of scenarios that we
encounter regularly -- in the case of CHOSEN, I selected domestic adoption as
the backdrop for the novel. When I took the agency position in Portland, I was
surprised by how many agendas there are to what seems like a simple equation,
how many sides of the adoption story. I chose unique voices for the multiple
points of view, the grieving birthfather, one potential adoptive father, the
jangled single mother, the green social worker, to underscore this fact.
I wanted to share an inside perspective on domestic adoption
with characters who were human, flawed, and sympathetic, because the truth is,
adoption is the creation of a family in a unique way, but there is a darker
side, both the business aspect, and the fact that at every birth, someone is
going home empty-handed. All parenthood is a risk; adoption ups the ante.
I also learned that when you take into account the business side
of adoption, it was very difficult to meet the needs of everyone. I left the
adoption world when I became a mother myself—my skin had become too thin.
This was the final defining point that shaped this novel: our first son's birth and an unexpected diagnosis, nearly losing him as an infant. (Hayden's Story) As a new mother to a child with huge medical hurdles, I pondered some of the deeper issues that form the backbone of CHOSEN: How does parenthood change you? How will the challenges you face shape you as a couple? What happens when your expectations of parenthood are so far from the reality? What makes a good parent? A good person? What happens when you get what you thought you wanted?
The story is fiction--characters and settings and scenarios are
as though I took a handful of my life experiences, threw in a
well-marinated childhood paranoia about abduction, seasoned them with the salt
of my vivid imagination, put them all in a bag and shook it up. From all
of this, CHOSEN grew.
WHAT'S COMING NEXT
With the book I am working on now, it really was a moment of
creative inspiration. Last year, I was on book tour with my three little kids
all tucked around me in a hotel in Santa Monica. We had been traveling for two
weeks, and it had been months since I had done any creative writing. I had a
few stories that I figured I would work on after I got home and the dust
settled, but that night, something happened. We had left the windows open so we
could hear the ocean and I dreamed an entire novel, a love story peppered with
obstacles and tinged with grief and loss, set in the islands. I had to get
through a day at Disneyland and hustling everyone on to a red-eye flight before
I had four uninterrupted hours to write it all down, but I knew it was the next
story. I can't wait to share it with readers.
Thanks Chandra - And I can't wait to read it!
**Everyone who leaves a comment on Chosen's tour page will be entered to win a $10 Amazon gift card! If you purchase your copy of Chosen from
November 26 - December 19 and send your receipt to Samantha (at)
ChickLitPlus (dot) com, you will get five bonus entries!**
It's fun to hear other authors respond to this question!
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