Alma Alexander, pen name of Alma A. Hromic, was born in a country that no longer exists, met her American husband on the Internet, and writes about worlds that never existed. She’ll bring her award-winning talents to a writing workshop, “ Creating a History: World-Building in Fiction,” on June 24-26, 2005, in the San Juan Islands, Wash.
 All of us live on the same earth but we live in our own world, Alma says. “World-building is part of the reason why we enjoy writing fiction so much. In world-building, you get to pick what’s important, to build the scaffolding on which you are going to hang a story. And stories are heavy. But in fantasy, you have absolute freedom.”
Her father’s travels working for the United Nations and the World Bank took the family far from her birthplace in Yugoslavia, but it had its advantages. “It just opened the world. There are a limitless number of possibilities but half the time people never move from the town they are born in or the city they grew up in … and they find the world weird and strange and frightening. I don’t think anything scares me anymore, not in the sense of new experiences.”
Alma cites one of the best books that she’s read in any genre, Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Tigana,” which deals with a powerful wizard who punishes a province by taking its name away. “No one can hear it or say it except those born in the country before the war. When the last ones die, so does the country. I come from a country cut up into little bits. A lot of that cuts so close to home that I don’t know how he knows it,” Alma says.
Although she has a degree in microbiology, and has written scientific articles, Alma’s writing is mostly fiction. “You can tell the truest things by lying. The fantasy aspect lets you tackle some really hard stuff without being preachy, without offending anyone’s sensibilities outright. You can put across ideas and wrap it up in silver tissue without them realizing you’ve done it.”
 Her newest novel, released internationally in the spring of 2004, is “The Secrets of Jin Shei,” which deals with a magical parallel world to Imperial China, focusing on eight women’s relationships. As Alma Hromic she has published numerous other books, including “Letters from the Fire,” a contemporary novel wholly told in e-mail format, coauthored by her husband Deck Deckert.
She also wrote “Changer of Days” (HarperCollins, New Zealand), an acclaimed fantasy duology to be released in the U.S. (renamed “The Hidden Queen” and “Changer of Days”) this spring. “Changer” won a Word Weaving Award for Excellence and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.
 “ ‘Changer of Days’ was an interesting book in the sense that it was actually written more than a decade before I found a publisher. It was one of those things … 10 years of leaning against a brick wall before it fell down. Talent, persistence and luck are the three main ingredients for a successful writer.”
When she wanted to write “The Secrets of Jin-Shei,” Alma started reading voraciously “to get my facts absolutely straight. It was my version of Imperial China … It was important that I know as much as possible. A lot will never make it into a book. But the level of background is important. You can tell when an author knows something about it or is making it up as they go along. I know it’s a fantasy but it’s important to me that I have realism. You have to obey your own rules. A lot of writers set out the rules but then don’t obey them. The temptation to give somebody absolute power is right there – but what’s your story?”
 Why a world parallel to China, a country that she hasn’t visited? “China chose me. I started writing and it just took over. That’s what it wanted to do and where it wanted to be. When I just started typing “Jin-Shei,” my husband walked in. In one minute I had 10 paragraphs of 10 characters. He looked at it and said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, “It’s my next novel.’ Then he said, ‘I hate you!’ before he asked what it was about. I said, ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
A friend sent her an article about a woman’s language in China, and the last woman who spoke it. “She was completely illiterate in anything other than this
language. She was in her 90s and dying. It was like those characters sat up and said, ‘Hello, that’s the story.’ I wrote 4,000 words the first night and 200,000 words in 3½ months.”
When she was a 15-year-old budding writer in boarding school, a published author visited. “She was really quite good and she did not sugarcoat any of it. She told us about all the B.S. and the frustration and the waiting and the loneliness of a full-time writer. She said all this with the light of angels in her face and she said there was nothing else she wanted to do. That crystallized it for me.” Alma got sidetracked by going to college and earning a degree in microbiology, but eventually, she said, “None of it mattered.”
 What holds writers back? “I have yet to meet any writer who was any good who liked their work. I have a New Zealand friend who has won awards, who’s been told she’s brilliant, but won’t do public readings because she can’t stand to watch faces when she reads. And you’re only good as your last book. Writers are really insecure. (But) nothing is perfect. There’s always something you can do to improve. After awhile you have to figure out when your toddler is grown up and send it out into the world. It’s insecurity that makes you want to tweak it just one more time.”
Alma has a successful track record with several published books but can be nagged by shaky self-confidence. “I keep on going to bed at night whining that I’m going to screw this up so badly. I suggest that every writer marry somebody like my husband (freelance writer R. A. ‘Deck’ Deckert ) who knows the way to the well of optimism. When you lose confidence, having someone who you love and stands in your corner and says that it will all work out, that is invaluable.”
Alma has written more than 300 book reviews, giving her insight into the good, the bad and the ugly. For too many books, she said, eight deadly words can be applied: I don’t care what happens to these people. “You have to care what happens to them. If you don’t, why bother reading a book? It doesn’t have to be Mother Teresa. The more flawed a character … the more a character touches a chord in a reader. People don’t like saints. They like them to overcome difficulties in a way they haven’t thought about. Having said that, characters are one of the most basic and important building blocks. They also have world-building aspects.”
 Alma tells the story of reading a book by a well-known fantasy writer (“who drives me crazy because his world-building is just so sloppy). “Four hundred pages in, the wizard says, ‘This will stop now!’ I though, ‘If he can do that now, why didn’t he it earlier?’ I threw the book across the room. He was cheating on me! The world has to hang together.”
Alma’s workshop focuses on world-building, a process that works for any genre. For instance, she says, writers don’t use their senses often enough. “It’s very common, in people starting out in writing, to describe a scene (with their eyes). It’s very static. But when you put in the rest of the senses, the world comes alive.
“There are certain things so tied up with certain milieus in our mind: ‘Sshhhhhh!’ and you see a library or a hospital. Blindfolded and handed a sprig of lavender, no two people will have the same memory or reaction but it’s a familiar scent and will make a protagonist remember his or her background. A particular kind of glue, the kind that comes in little pots with a spreader … I can smell that particular kind of glue and I’m 5 years old again. That’s a part of world-building. It’s in the senses, and that’s not tied to fantasy. It applies to the real world, as well.”
 There is value in taking a writing workshop, Alma says. “Writing is a horribly solitary profression. The most important thing do for yourself is finding a group of people who share your passion, different pairs of eyes to look at your work, see something you may have noticed. Not your mother or your brother or your children. Become part of a community is hugely important … Going to a workshop or a lecture is extremely valuable. You can gain insight into how writers do the things they do, and why does it work. It can help you find your own way.”
When workshop participants leave her workshop, she hopes they will take away a number of things, particularly the “ability to look at anything and see things in it they weren’t able to see before,” details in the front door they missed on the way in but will catch on the way out; details about the trees, or the shape of clouds in the sky. And participants will want to tell people about what they see.
“I’m going to make people totally unbearable to their families because they’re going to keep saying, ‘Can you see that? Can you hear that? Didn’t you notice that? That guy has a trace around his finger where a wedding band used to be.’ It’s a way of looking at the world. I’m addicted to this. I can sit with cup of coffee and just look at people. It’s an absolutely wonderful thing for a writer to do. And eavesdropping! (I overheard a conversation) about a woman who went whitewater rafting with her $10,000 ring from Tiffany’s and lost it.” There’s a story there.”
Who : Alma Alexander
What : “Creating a History: World-Building in Fiction”
When: June 24-26, 2005
Where : Shaw Island (San Juan Islands), Wash.
Information: www.songandword.com; info@songandword.com
Alma : Winner of a Word Weaving Award for Excellence … nominated for a World Fantasy Award … speaker, workshop leader and panelist at writers' conferences (including Whidbey Island Writers' Conference, Surrey International Writers' Conference in Canada), and dozens of science-fiction/fantasy conventions in the U.S. and abroad … published in story and poetry anthologies … short story “The Painting” won an international BBC-sponsored competition … first published solo work was “Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories,” a best-selling book of three fables … published under the name Alma Hromic, including the memoir “Houses in Africa.” |
