Your book, Agent in Old Lace, is being re-released this month. I gather it was one of your earlier works, and that you’ve put effort and care into revising and revamping. This story must be near and dear to your heart. Tell me about it?
This story was originally published back in 2009, and was my fourth book ever. I changed its focus from the LDS market to national while still retaining LDS values, and I added something like five thousand words to the length. I think it turned out pretty well.
The main character is Shannon Tanner, a young woman who works in the financial industry, who finds out that her boyfriend has been embezzling money from her father. He kidnaps her and takes her up into the woods, but she manages to get away. He’s put on trial, but when he escapes custody, the FBI sends in a bodyguard to protect her until he can be apprehended. It’s a romantic suspense with lots of comedy.
You’ve done so much in the authoring world. You’ve been a writer, a professional editor, and now, you run a publishing company. You’ve published with publishers, and you’ve published independently. You have at least three pen names that I know of, and you’ve been successful. You’ve been in the LDS market and in the general market. There are so many questions I could ask you, but I guess I’m mostly curious about this: what would you mark as the high point, so far, in the writing world? And what has been the most challenging thing for you?
Hmmm, tough questions. Let’s see. The high points . . . professionally, winning the Silver Quill from the League of Utah Writers for Secret Sisters. Meeting people I’ve admired my whole life, like Jack Weyland, Anne Perry, Susan Evans McCloud, Dean Hughes, Marilyn Brown. Being able to teach at writers conferences, which is something I love to do. Placing as a bestseller twice on Amazon for my Western romance pen name, Amelia C. Adams.
Emotional high points include an email I got from a reader whose daughter decided to leave the Church. The woman was heartbroken, but she’d just read Hang ‘Em High, where the main character, Ida Mae, has a conversation with her son on the same topic. My reader told me that because she’d seen how Ida Mae spoke to her son, she had some ideas of what to say to her daughter, and their relationship is still intact. That was huge for me.
Most challenging . . . facing criticism, both from myself and others. Navigating relationships in the business world. Learning how to say no and find balance (that’s going to be a life-long endeavor, I’m pretty sure).
On a more personal note: You’re an accomplished editor. It was on your advice that I revised my debut novel, Lightning Tree, to the point where it got accepted for publication. I’ve wanted to enlist your services, but I haven’t yet placed another book since my second I published with Cedar Fort, and now you’re out of the editing gig. So give me a few gems: what are the most common mistakes to look for as I sift through my own manuscripts? I’m not talking grammar and line-item; I’m talking content, plot, and story structure. What advice would you give to us trying-to-breakout-writers?
The most important thing, in my opinion, is to be yourself and infuse your manuscript with your personality, which translates into your writer’s voice. Just about anyone can sit down and write a story, but each person brings to it their own vitality, and that’s what will make your story stand out in the crowd.
I’d also say to make sure that your conflicts are big enough and the resolutions of them are logical enough for the story. If your hero is facing a conflict that comes from outside himself, be sure that you’re also showing the conflict going on within him—there always is one, but it sometimes gets overlooked. Remember that you’re trying to reach your reader on an emotional level because that’s what will make them keep reading even when they have other stuff they really ought to be doing.
You write in several genres. Which do you resonate most with? Or, which aspects of each genre draws you to write them?
I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve done so far. Historical fiction is my first love, and I learn so much whenever I take on a historical project. I love writing cozy mysteries because I can let my sense of humor take over. Writing nonfiction gives me another chance to learn. What’s so awesome about being an author is that you can write about anything you want—the possibilities are endless.
How do you feel about the experiences you’ve had in the LDS writing community? What’s good, and what could do with some change?
I started out in the LDS community, and I’ll always have a special place in my heart for it. These are my people. J The biggest issue I’ve had with it is how very difficult it is to tell a story of faith in a fictional way without LDS readers feeling like it’s too preachy. I feel that we should be able to share our beliefs in our stories—after all, haven’t we been given our talents for that very reason? In the Christian market, they’ll stop the whole plot just so one character can testify to another, and yet in the LDS market, if a character does much more than stop by the church building for a few minutes, the author takes a lot of heat, and that’s just weird to me.
Thank you, Tristi, for adding your voice to the conversation here at AML!
Tristi Pinkston is the author of nearly sixty books in a wide variety of genres and under a wide variety of pen names – Amelia C. Adams, Sandra Norton Flynn, Paige Timothy, and of course, Tristi Pinkston. She is the owner of Trifecta Books, an exciting new publishing company that specializes in clean fiction. She enjoys hanging out with her husband and four kids, and she loves taking really, really, really long naps. You can learn more about her at www.tristipinkston.com and visit her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TristiPinkstonAuthor . You can buy her newest release, Agent in Old Lace, (which is a fun light read–full of humor, danger, mystery and just the right touch of romance) here.
Thanks to both of you for doing this interview. It’s always interesting to hear about the careers of other Mormon writers!
This quote is interesting. “In the Christian market, they’ll stop the whole plot just so one character can testify to another, and yet in the LDS market, if a character does much more than stop by the church building for a few minutes, the author takes a lot of heat, and that’s just weird to me.” I didn’t know that about the Christian market. And now that you mention it, I do often seen the praise “It wasn’t preachy” given in internet reviews of LDS novels. Clearly there must be some novels that are “preachy”. Are they not as popular?
Maybe it’s less that some Mormon novels are preachy and more that some of us as Mormon readers are hyper-sensitive to the possibility of sounding preachy? Tristi, what do you think?
I admit that I’m biased against preachiness in Mormon lit. Christian lit too, for that matter, what I’ve read of it. This is because I think it’s possible to write about Mormonism and Christ in a non-preachy way, and I think the writing is better for it when the writers take that extra effort to do so. It’s the ultimate in show-don’t-tell: show Mormonism, show Christ, don’t just tell us about it. I feel more respected as a reader when I’m not being preached at. But I know not everyone feels that way, and that’s okay too.
I guess my question (and it’s a real question, not just rhetorical) is: how do you distinguish between preachy and non-preachy? What is it that makes something look preachy to you as a reader? I ask this as someone who wrote a Mormon novel that many readers praised as not being preachy, even though it had a lot of overt religion in it.
For me, I will say that something starts looking preachy when a life of faith is shown as removing life’s difficulties and making life easier. In comparison, if a life of faith is something that sometimes adds challenges (as well as adding positives), that strikes me as both more realistic and as non-preachy.
Thoughts?
I think the key in your novel was struggle. All of your PoV characters struggled to make a space for the homosexual teen. It was a struggle, within and without, and mistakes were made.
Also you had different perspectives: the gay Mormon struggling to work out an identity, the friend struggling to absorb the reality, the mother struggling to shelter and support her son, the mother struggling to balance protectiveness and compassion, the bishop struggling to balance policy and compassion. And most importantly, you didn’t dictate a response. You made the problem human, opened minds to the complexities and ramifications of the problem.
Speaking of the problem, you made it clear that the problem was not being gay or being Mormon, but being gay and Mormon, being a friend and Mormon, being a mother and Mormon, being a leader and Mormon.
I wrote this blog post several years ago, when I was in the middle of reading Whitney finalists for the first time:
https://hearingvoices.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/lds-fiction-character-agency-writers-should-be-like-god-not-satan/
I didn’t name any specific problematic books, but the issues I talked about –books where Mormons don’t have self-created problems because the Spirit always guides them away from them, for instance– are based on real books I read during that time.
Good post.
You know me: I’m going to make this technical.
Three Es: Educate, Elevate, Entertain.
The origins of storytelling are so deeply buried in the leaf-fall of time that we can only speculate on them, but it seems reasonable to guess that Education was an early priority: stories of hunt and battle, bush and hearth to share experience and improve the community’s performance. Entertainment was probably an inadvertent byproduct that became a sine qua non of attention.
Then people discovered that tales of wisdom and prowess could help elevate status in the community, hence boasting, fish tales and the like. You could brag and exaggerate all you wanted as long as you entertained.
Whether you were educating the audience or elevating somebody’s status, you had to entertain your listener, reader or viewer, because Entertainment was the immediate payoff at every storytelling and eventually became the audience’s first priority in attending to narrative.
So you can educate me second if you entertain me first. You can also elevate yourself or someone else or some set of principles, standards, values or ideals–if you entertain me first. You’ve always gotta entertain.
You sound preachy if you’re entertaining second or third–or not at all.
An element feels preachy when it isn’t part of the entertainment, or departs from the premise, the concept or the magic system. An element doesn’t feel preachy when it fits the narrative.