Sophie Weston

Interview by Anne Gracie

Sophie Weston is one of my favourite HM&B authors. So when I heard she was coming out to Australia and would be attending the Australian Romance Conference on the Gold Coast [August 2003], I was delighted, and grabbed her for a quick interview.  

Yes it is, although I can hardly believe it. I seem to have so many friends here - God bless email! Actually, I have been promising myself a trip here for at least ten years. Procrastinator? Moi?

You enjoy travel and do it often, I know. What are some of your favourite places? Have they featured in your books?

Well, I'm not really am inspirational traveller like the Young Australians who occasionally fetch up in my spare room, going round the world on a map and a box of kleenex. Not really an adventurous type, me. Never had itchy feet, as so many people did at university.

But I went to work for the Bank of England and they sent me to Latin America for work - and after that I just got fascinated. People really. The most surprising things turn out to be absolutely universal - like famous footballers and prickly heat. And on the other hand travelling reminds you how impermanent even the mightiest works of man are - Troy, and Macchu Picchu and those calendar pyramids in the Yucatan jungle - yet the life of the family, the need to eat and keep out of the cold, stays pretty much the same over squillions of centuries. I find that reassuring.

Favourite places? Well, there's a little ruined abbey by a meandering river in Oxfordshire ... Santa Caterina, the convent village in Arequipa in Peru ... The amazing Iguassu Falls which make you feel as if you're drinking new air ... the university library in Vilnius ... a garden full of plumbago and honey scented daturas in St Kitts ... the Corniche in Doha at night, full of the spice winds off the Indian Ocean ... thirteenth century apartment blocks with trompe l'oeil washing and falling geraniums at Camoglie on the lovely coast between Genoa and Sestri Levante where people sit out to watch the sun go down because it turns the water in the two little bays to gold . . . Aaaaah

Jumping back to the present - yes, they do turn up in my books, of course they do. Some several times. But they are never the starting point of a story. Just sometimes my hero needs to take my heroine somewhere magical and there are the options sitting in my internal card index.

My Caribbean night time garden is in 'Midnight Wedding' for example. And that gorgeous Italian coast played a big part in 'Challenge'. Now my spice winds are coming along in the book I'm writing at the moment ... working title 'His Night' but who knows what it will end up as!

Gosh, thank you. That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.

I suppose I have a sort of frustrated actor - kind of like Robert Browning pretending to be a murderous Duke or a drunken priest in his dramatic monologues. I listen to people - sometimes people I don't know - and think ... if that were me, what would I do next? And then I start to think in their voice - or my take on their voice anyway - for a bit. And sometimes - just sometimes - a story start to curl up, like smoke out of a dying bonfire. It's something that happens; I can't force it. But when it is there, it is unmistakable.

Actually, it seemed to me that the major challenge in writing the serial was technical - the length (10,000 - 15,000 words) and even more the odd rhythm. Normally I expect readers to do what I do - start off a book fairly slow and then race to the finish. When you're dripping it out at a steady 750 words a day, they can't do that. So what I worried about was giving the illusion of speeding up.

My books are always very dense, too - there are lots of set ups. I worried that online readers would have forgotten previous clues, and so not get the full satisfaction when something was revealed. So stuff like Molly's wild hair colour was laid on with a trowel, I felt.

If the freshness you detect really is there - well that came from some bit of my subconscious and I wasn't wholly in control of it. Nice though.

Yes it is, amazing. Gives me hope.

You've also written a number of articles defending the romance genre against its critics. Why do you think there is such prejudice against romance?

Well, I think it's largely Anglo Saxon Puritanism. Anything you enjoy is bad for you; and anything that women enjoy probably rots the brain as well. As for anything lots of women enjoy ... well, that's three strikes, isn't it? Personally, I blame Milton; all that sniffy nonsense about "fit audience though few".

Seriously, though, I think the Collective Unconscious took a terrible battering in the twentieth century - the unimaginable ghastliness of the trenches; the concentration camps; nuclear weapons; chemical weapons; genocide. I think a lot of people despaired and the only way to fight back was post modern irony. We learned to mistrust emotion because it led us into conflict and justified terrible cruelties. So lots of people think that Romance just trivialises the important stuff.

Whereas my own take is that romance offers a small start in redressing the balance. If you can love and trust the one you're with, you can spin that out a bit further and a bit further ... and eventually you're seeing that the enemy isn't the enemy, just someone like you, standing in a different place.

The Independent Bride is out in Australia at the moment. It's part of a series -- where did the initial idea for it come from?

I often find that my characters don't want to go away after their book is finished. The Wedding Challenge Trilogy started out as the story of the adventurous brother of Abby, the Fab Ab, from 'More than a Millionaire'.

Adventurous types are notoriously not good husband material - they put dating on hold when they go off and fling themselves round ice floes. Unsettling for a girl. So I thought - what kind of girl wouldn't be unsettled? And I found her in my Izzy - a woman who has been adventurous and just got away with her tail feathers and some nasty - and very private - emotional scars.

So then I thought - well, why would she suddenly open up to this man when she hasn't opened up to anyone else. And I found that she would do it a) because she is pretending to be someone else and b) because that pretence is to protect her sister. The result was 'The Accidental Mistress', out in Australia in November, I think.

So then I had her sister, the one who needed protection - why? And the moment you ask yourself that, you find there is another story. Izzy was the older sister, plainer and naughtier. Jay Jay - until she got herself into a pickle in her job, as a fashion model - has always been the good and pretty one. They love each other. But they still have secrets. And the right man gets Jay Jay to face her demons. He's gorgeous, by the way; a man with a whole lot of demons himself - second son in an aristocratic English family which always has "the heir and the spare". Niall was born to be the spare and, as a result, he's his own man and always will be. That's 'The Duke's Proposal', out in February or March, I think.

But 'The Independent Bride' has turned out to be the first of the trilogy. It's about their cousin, half American, granddaughter of rich control freak. She's bright and inventive and focused - and absolutely convinced that nobody could love her (including herself) because she's overweight. And as soon as I found her, I knew I had to do her story first. It just spoke to me.

It sounds wonderful. Can't wait. And your description of how you developed those stories is almost a writing article in itself. Your on-line serial, many scenes in your books, some of your articles and your "Day in the Life of" segment on http://www.harlequinromanceauthors.com are very funny. However budding romance writers are warned off comedy. What advice would you offer to those so inclined?

I think it's quite sound advice to warn people off comedy per se. A sense of the ridiculous is one of the things that doesn't necessarily travel all that well. I think it was L M Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables who says that a sense of humour is a sense of the fitness of things - and of course, different things fit in different societies.

But I do think that for some people their sense of humour is part of their voice. Usually it's about the characters setting themselves up, I think. Sort of Wodehousian - the fun is in the difference between pretension and achievement or what they say and what they mean; and often it makes the emotional pain more poignant.

Georgette Heyer does it brilliantly - think of that scene in the rose garden between Diana and Jack in 'The Black Moth'. It's something like:

'I once " - Heavens, how hard it was to say - " I once cheated at cards."

But you know that there is a serious point here, even while they are teasing each other. And at the end of the scene they are both broken hearted.

You do it pretty damn well yourself, if I may say so. Both 'Gallant Waif" and 'Tallie's Knight' are excellent at doing exactly that. But I'm not going to misquote your own words at you.

So I'd say let your natural voice speak. In the end readers buy books for the author's voice. If humour is part of it, don't run away from it. But don't force it - and never forget that in romance everything, including the fun, has to reinforce the emotional truth between the two protagonists.

Thanks for that. And speaking of protagonist, could you describe your ideal hero?

Oh, I like my heroes competent. I don't want them dominant, that's usually the sign of some deep insecurity in my experience. But I want them able to handle life. Wounded, sure, aren't we all. But getting on with stuff. And I like them to have a moral position too - all my heroes know what they will and won't do. So I suppose I like them emotionally mature.

I don't know. Are they? I suppose they are quite often people with responsibilities who try to behave honourably. And they usually have a strong social network - friendship is a big part of my life and it is for them too. Though now I come to think about it, actually, my 'Independent Bride' is an exception there. Maybe I loved writing that book so much because Pepper found friends as well as the love of her life. Hmm. Must think about that.

I think it's just the publisher's way of putting a distinctive stamp on some voices that were already out there. I wasn't asked to write a Tango, by the way. 'The Bedroom Assignment' just came when I thought - 'How does a young woman deal with it when all her friends are sexually experienced and think she is too - and she knows she's not?' I talked about it to my then editor Sam Bell, the originator of the Tango idea, and she said ,' That's one for our new line'. I think what is different in the line is marriage of very contemporary problems and attitudes - being a virgin wouldn't have been an issue twenty years ago! - with the absolute rock solid basis of the need for emotional truth that Harlequin Mills and Boon Tender/Sweet/ Romance line has always demonstrated. Oh, and characters are kind to each other too, even in the ultra sophisticated stories. I like kindness. Should have said I want my heroes to be fundamentally kind, too.

What's coming up next for Sophie Weston?

Well, I love writing romance. But I keep wanting to do something new. So I'm hoping I can persuade HMB to take a book about a real culture clash between two people who are very, very certain of themselves. In my head' it's called 'The Sultan's Librarian' . I've told HMB that if they insist on changing the title, they mustn't tell me until I've finished and delivered, or I will stop dead.

I've also got a couple of short stories coming out in a collection called "Sexy Shorts for Christmas" which is being sold in aid of breast cancer awareness month, out in October in the UK. I had real fun writing those - and I'm in fantastic company with Katie Fforde, Penny Jordan and Robert Barnard among others.

And of course, I always have lots of projects on the boil. It's how writers work, isn't it? For example, there's been my science fiction waiting in the wings for twenty years - anyone interested in a Shakespeare-quoting alien?

Thanks for some great questions. They've really made me think.

Sophie Weston's website is at http://www.sophie-weston.com I particularly recommend her "Why Romance?" article.

Her wonderful on-line serial is at this page on the eharlequin site. 

Sophie also features on http://www.harlequinromanceauthors.com  As well as her bio, don't miss her Day in the Life of -- it's hilarious! Plus earwig in on one of her conversations with other authors, where they discuss "Cowboy Or King, The Heroes We Love" in the  Harlequin Romance Authors Cafe

More information on the breast cancer awareness book is at http://www.sexyshorts.info 

Home

Romance Writers of Australia