An Interview with Alma Alexander, Author of the Worldweavers Trilogy - Page 2

Having said that, however, I do weave in a few Eastern European folk tales into these books towards the end, too. It is a big, wide, wonderful world out there, and it's full of stories.

How did you get started writing young adult fiction? Do you prefer it to adult?

These particular books had their start when I attended a YA panel at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis. At the time I had no plans to enter the YA market, and certainly no ideas in that field, but the panel had several writers on it whom I really like reading and who do write YA fiction - Charles de Lint was one of them, and Jane Yolen another. Some five or ten minutes into the panel, someone from the audience brought up Harry Potter, and Jane Yolen sighed and said, "I was wondering how long it would be before that particular elephant walked into the room." She said she wasn't entirely happy about the way that the Potter books treated girls... and I was off and running. I didn't really hear the rest of that panel, I was too busy getting to know Thea in my head, and thinking about the Last Ditch School for the Incurably Incompetent to which she would be sent because she was not the Boy Who Lived but instead the Girl Who Couldn't.

My primary goal has always been story - and that doesn't change with the level of the intended reading audience. I believe that the YA readers deserve, and want, stories that are just as complex and layered as an "adult" book - and I believe that these young minds are quicker, more agile, and far better equipped to actually deal with a certain amount of complexity. I have no interest in providing something simplistic, or characters who have only two dimensions and would flap in the wind like so many flags. I want real characters, real people. The fact that I have magic in my story doesn't make my characters any less real, it just gives them a different set of problems.

I don't prefer either genre to the other. They complement each other, rather than square off as antagonists.

What was one of your favorite books growing up? Do you think that it has affected your writing?

One of my favourite books? ONE of? That's hardly fair, asking a question like that of someone who spent her formative years buried between book covers of many many MANY books. I'd have to put Tolkien's Lord of the Rings up there - but then I'd have to ignore authors like Ursula le Guin, and Madeleine L'Engle, and Lloyd Alexander, and CS Lewis, and... look, see what you've done now?...

Article Author: Katie Trattner

Ms. Trattner works for a non-profit agency where she is thankful for any internet time she can squeeze into her day. In her free time she reads one of the thousands of books stacked in her tiny apartment.

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