Tara Conklin with Wendy Hinman
/Tara Conklin is a writer and former lawyer who worked for an international human rights organization and at corporate law firms in London and New York. She was born in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands and grew up in Stockbridge. Massachusetts. She holds a BA in history from Yale University, a JD from NYU School of Law and a Master of Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Tara now lives in Seattle with her family where she writes, teaches and works with private clients on manuscript development. She is also a sought-after speaker on a wide range of topics, including a writer's life, work-life balance and mid-career pivots. For more information, click here. Her novel, The Last Romantics (William Morrow), published in February 2019, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a Barnes & Noble Book Club Pick, Indie Next Pick, and was selected by Jenna Bush Hager as the inaugural read for The Today Show Book Club. Her whose first novel, The House Girl, (William Morrow) was a New York Times bestseller, #1 Indie Next pick, Target book club pick and has been translated into 8 languages. First Published Feb. 2021
Welcome, Tara, we are so pleased to have you share your experience with our readers.
Questions:
Describe your early influences and how that impacted your storytelling. How has being a litigator influenced your development as a writer?
Like most writers, I was a real bookworm as a kid – always at the library or squirreled away somewhere reading. I think my writing career began in those early moments of magic and wonder as I experienced what a great story can do. Those books – Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, Bridge to Terabithia, the Narnia books, Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Chronicles of Prydain – remain enduring favorites. But of course, childhood wonder and earning a living don’t always go together, so, yes, I went to law school and ended up working as a corporate litigator for a big law firm. And I’ll tell you this: litigation and fiction writing are remarkably similar pursuits. In my law practice, I wrote, researched and developed a narrative. My client was the protagonist, the opposing side was the antagonist, and I sought to persuade the judge (my reader!) that my client’s version of events was the correct, true version. Sound familiar? I see persuasion as a key component of fiction writing. You must persuade your reader of the truth of the characters you’ve created, their motivations and behavior, the world in which they live, the conflicts they try to resolve. From a purely practical standpoint, working at a big law firm also made me very aware of time management and working to deadline. I don’t necessarily recommend going to law school as preparation for a writing career, but it’s not a completely wasted education.
I understand you didn’t originally set out to write your first book House Girl, but that your efforts evolved into one. Tell us about that experience of beginning with stories and interweaving them together.
Since childhood, I’ve been a scribbler of stories – it’s how I process the world and my experiences in it. About 15 years ago now, I read the term “slave doctor” in a biography of Virginia Woolf and the words really stopped me. I wanted to know more about who this “slave doctor” might have been so I began writing a story about a man I called Caleb Harper and one of his patients, a young enslaved woman named Josephine Bell. As I began researching, I recognized just how little I knew and understood about the antebellum period. I was living in London at the time, Barack Obama was just beginning to gain national prominence, and I found myself thinking a lot about race in America and the legacy of slavery. The more I researched, the more I wanted to know about my characters and their world, and the longer the story grew. The House Girl interweaves four separate narratives, but I wrote each one separately over several years of reading and researching. It wasn’t until the final piece – the modern day Lina section – that I began to envision a novel. Splicing them all together into one coherent piece took many more months of editing and re-structuring, but it all began with that first story about Caleb and Josephine.
How have your characters come to you? I read your story about Mumbet and it’s an interesting story. Can you share a little with us here about that? What about your other characters—how have they come to you?
I’m always thrilled to talk about Mumbet! I grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts an old New England town founded in 1739. One of the many historic gravestones in our town graveyard belonged to Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman, an enslaved woman who sued for her freedom in 1781 and won. I studied Mumbet in grade school and became absolutely fascinated with her story. Imagine the courage and strength it must have taken for her to walk into that court in Boston, full of white men, many of them slaveowners themselves, and argue her case. Imagine her determination to transcend the role she was handed at birth. Her spirit really guided my vision of Josephine Bell. Not all my characters have come so easily, however. I like to start with a list of 20 traits to give me a general physical sense of what this character looks like, who she might be, and also sketch out a few significant events in the character’s life, even if they happen off-screen of the novel. But true character development happens as I’m writing. There’s a lot of trial and error, trying to find the right voice and the right motivators.
In The Last Romantics you chose an unusual perspective—that of narrating the story by an old woman from the future. How did you arrive at this decision? What were the challenges of this approach?
I wanted to write a family epic stretching over many years, but I also wanted to look at the problems facing contemporary women and men of my generation. Early drafts of the book had a very nostalgic tone that seemed at odds with the present-day concerns. Something wasn’t working. At one point I remember having a very a-ha moment: what if my narrator, Fiona, was talking to us from the future? It seemed a way to have my cake and eat it too – the epic scope, the backwards-looking tone and contemporary subject matter. Plus, I’d never read a book written from that perspective so it seemed a fun and interesting way to tell a story. I also hoped that readers might perhaps take a cue from Fiona to look at their own lives and relationships and think about what are the key moments that define a life. Fiona does it when she’s 102 years old, but we should be able to take stock before that age.
Sorting out the points of view was challenging – I took a bit of a leap in adopting various POV characters while keeping Fiona as the over-arching narrator. I think ultimately my approach works because we know Fiona is a writer, she’s an imaginer and she’s been watching her siblings since childhood. She also has very close relationships with all her siblings, so it’s reasonable to assume she knows these stories about their lives and would be able to tell them intimately. I also found the future chapters entirely absorbing to write so one challenge was reining those in and not letting the future overtake the book. I definitely want to write a dystopian novel one of these days…
In The Last Romantics you’ve got the perspective of children and those of an old woman. How do you inhabit and manifest those different outlooks?
I use the same approach for all my characters – writing and writing and writing about their experiences and in their voice until they feel true to me. Along the way, I pay attention to vocabulary and rhythms of speech by listening to real people from the same age/gender/ethnicity of my character. I eavesdrop at coffee shops or watch lots of youtube videos or any other place where I might find speech patterns. For me, character development is a complicated process that’s difficult to describe. There’s so much trial and error involved in finding a character’s voice, and every writer’s approach is unique.
How have your characters evolved as you’ve been writing your stories? For example, in an interview about The Last Romantics you mentioned how one of your characters (Renee) transformed in the process of writing. Can you share a little about how that occurred?
In early drafts of The Last Romantics, Renee was an unmarried pilates instructor with no children. In the book itself, Renee is a transplant surgeon who’s married and a mother. Her role in the story changed dramatically over the course of writing so her personality changed too. She was always a strong female character, but in early drafts she became estranged from her sisters. During revision, I realized that she was a stand-in mother figure for her siblings. She was a true caretaker, so becoming a doctor seemed a natural profession for her. The pressures of her career made parenthood difficult in the early years, so she became a mother later in life. Each character trait knocks against another, each decision a character makes impacts another decision later in life – it’s like a set of dominoes. Once you get those first dominoes placed correctly, the rest of that character’s story can fall into place.
What techniques do you use to bring settings alive? For example, in House Girl you have modern day Manhattan juxtaposed against the plantation south.
When writing about a place, I make it a point to use all five senses (as every writing book will tell you!) What does it smell like, sound like, etc. If it’s not a place I’m personally familiar with, I’ll find photos or videos online of that particular setting to give me some real-world visuals. While writing The House Girl, for example, I found an old photo of a decrepit, vine-covered plantation house in Virginia with some shadowy figures seated on the porch. The photo was so evocative that I kept it pinned to the wall as I wrote. I also draw maps – interior maps of the houses where my characters live, maps of the neighborhood (who lives next door? can they walk to the library or do they need to drive? that kind of thing) and sometimes even diagrams of specific rooms that might figure prominently in a scene. I generally don’t end up using all this information in my books, but it helps me envision scenes, situate my characters in place and see them as real people.
Can you describe your writing process?
Put butt in chair, coffee in hand, turn on laptop and type.
What would you describe as your lucky break? How did you go from finished novel to published novel? How long did it take?
My lucky break came when I found my agent, Michelle Brower. She was so enthusiastic about The House Girl from the very beginning that I finally began to feel confident about actually getting published. By then, I had been writing the novel for roughly 5 years (while also working full-time as a lawyer and having two children) After she offered to represent me, we then worked together for 9 months on editing and re-structuring the book. I was incredibly lucky to have found an agent with such great editorial skills and commitment to seeing it through. Once Michelle submitted the manuscript to editors, everything happened very fast – we ended up at auction with about 7 publishers bidding and I signed a publishing contact a few weeks later with Kate Nintzel at William Morrow/Harper Collins. I then worked with Kate on more edits for a few months and The House Girl was released in February, 2013.
What has been the most valuable lesson you’ve learned as a writer? What did you learn that you wish you’d known sooner?
There’s no magic formula and there are no magicians. Successful writers are people who struggle and work hard at their craft. Along these same lines: there is no such thing as wasted writing time. Even if you just stare at the screen for an hour, even if you write 5,000 words and 4,999 ultimately get cut, every minute and every word is getting you closer to the story you need to tell.
What key advice would you give an aspiring writer?
See above. Put butt in chair, turn on laptop, type