Guest Post – Lisa Tucker

8 September 2009

Today I am pleased to host Lisa Tucker, as part of her TLC Book Tour for A Promised World.

lisa tucker

Lisa Tucker is also the author of The Song Reader, Shout Down the Moon, Once Upon a Day, and The Cure for Modern Life, and her work has been featured in Seventeen, Pages, and The Oxford American. She has advanced degrees in English and Math, and she has taught creative writing at the Taos Conference and at UCLA.  Lisa Tucker lives in Pennsylvania.

Yesterday I posted my review of Lisa’s wonderful new novel, and today she shares part of the development of A Promised World.

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How I Accidentally Wrote A Suspense Novel

When I started writing The Promised World, I knew only two things about the story: that it would be about siblings and that one of the central characters would be an English professor.  All of my previous books (except Shout Down the Moon) were concerned in some way with the intense bond between siblings, but in The Promised World, I wanted to push it further by creating not only the twins Lila and Billy, whose secret history is the main mystery of the novel, but also William and Pearl, Billy’s children, who are at risk in the present time of the book.  Making Lila an English professor allowed me to focus on the power of words in a way I hadn’t since my first book, The Song Reader.  It was also very natural to write about a character who has the same background I do: from her job as a professor to her fascination with nineteenth-century American literature.

As the writing progressed, I discovered that Lila’s husband, Patrick, and Billy’s wife, Ashley, needed to tell their stories too, and the book became more centrally concerned with marriage than any of my other novels except Once Upon a Day. There are two flawed romances in this story, only one of which can have a future.  In this way, the marriage stories are similar to the sibling stories, and similar to the central relationship between Lila and Billy.  They’re also similar to the two stories of motherhood in The Promised World: one told by Ashley, and one that Lila is desperately trying to figure out.  In every “doubling” in the novel, only one side can still be saved.

Though the story starts with a suicide, I think of it as about the tremendous power of love.   The family can save your life in this novel, but they can also fail you when you need them most.   If love can be an incredible force, then the lack of it can be incredibly—and sometimes permanently—devastating.  While I never intended for The Promised World to be suspense, I think I understand why early readers have said that it is.  Part of it is the mystery of Lila and Billy’s past, but the other part is that readers can sense this incredible conflict between love and its absence and they turn the pages to see which force will win in the end.

While I was writing the book, I asked everyone I ran into if they think “evil” is real.  Of course we can see it in history and in the world, but can we see it in the family?  Doesn’t every family member have reasons for how they behave?  I think the answer is yes, every family member has their reasons—at least in the world of psychological novels—but this doesn’t mean that someone in a family can’t act in a way that is inexcusable, callous, terribly destructive and maybe . . . well . . .evil.  Certainly if the word applies anywhere, it has to apply to the mistreatment of children.  So maybe the suspense of the novel also comes from the decision I made that I wouldn’t try to excuse or explain away the behavior of anyone who acts in a way that is vicious and cruel.  Because of this, The Promised World is the first of my books to have a true “bad guy” who is central to the story.  The novel is about siblings and words and marriage and motherhood and love, but it’s also a struggle between good and evil.  This is the final and most central pairing or “twinning” in the book—good and evil—both of which I’m pretty sure I believe in now.

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Thanks Lisa!

And be sure to visit all of the tour stops for A Promised World:

the promised world

The Promised World
Atria, September 2009
Hardcover, 336 pages
Available at B&N, Amazon and Powells

 
6 Comments
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6 Responses to “Guest Post – Lisa Tucker”

  1. Melanie says:
    September 8, 2009 at 5:49 pm

    The fight between good and evil is always interesting to watch. The Promised World sounds like a very interesting book.

    Reply
  2. Susan B. Evans says:
    September 8, 2009 at 5:58 pm

    The book looks intriguing. I think I’m going to have to check it out!
    Susan B. Evans´s last blog ..Teaser Tuesday My ComLuv Profile

    Reply
  3. nat @book, line, and sinker says:
    September 8, 2009 at 6:01 pm

    is it just me or does every reader love to know how authors actually go about their craft?! reading this guest post was so interesting to me–i love how tucker ‘discovers’ things about her characters…they dictate plot develops to her! the characters sound so dynamic when she describes them and their development.

    thank you so much for hosting an author guest post! i haven’t yet had one on my blog but do enjoy reading them. :)
    nat @book, line, and sinker´s last blog ..The Agony and The Ecstasy: Summer Reading My ComLuv Profile

    Reply
    • softdrink says:
      September 8, 2009 at 8:24 pm

      I agree…I always find it fascinating, because my mind doesn’t even go there. I’d have no idea how to structure a story, or even what a plot was if it bit me on the ass…or a character threw it in my face.

      And I’m always surprised by how many authors say they let their characters drive the story.

      Reply

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