Samantha Silva is the author of the new novel Sometime This Century. Her other books include the novel Love and Fury. She is also a screenwriter, and she's based in Idaho.
Q: What inspired you to write Sometime This Century, and how did you create your character Annabel?
A: The novel began life as a screenplay I sold to Universal Studios 25 years ago! I conceived it just a few years past the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice adaptation that left us all swooning for more Jane Austen.
Annabel Blake, my heroine, is in some ways me (bookish, introverted, romantic), but I really wanted to write a story for all the women who longed for the civility and romance of the Regency era, as Annabel does. The twist being that when she gets everything she ever wished for, she has to contend with whether she can truly be herself in the that world.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it a “comical and charming love letter to Jane Austen.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s absolutely my homage to Jane Austen, and I hope readers will feel the same.
In the beginning I was riffing on Pride and Prejudice to set up the love story that sweeps Annabel away. Henry Leighton D’Evercy is “the obvious Darcy of the ball,” aloof, arrogant, but maybe misunderstood? And people will recognize other characters from the book as well and the comic send-up of so many of the things we love from all her novels.
But the more I developed the relationship between sisters Annabel and Cassie Blake, it began to feel more like Sense and Sensibility. Annabel and Cassie are the Demure/Brat version (if you will) of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. They change in much the same way the Dashwood sisters do. But because they are time-traveling, there was so much fish-out-of-water comedy to mine. I had an absolute ball writing it!
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: Because I cut my teeth as a screenwriter for 15 years, I’m very much a plotter, a structuralist, meaning I need to know how anything ends before I put pen to paper!
I’m open to changing my mind about all of it because the process presents the attentive writer with so many opportunities along the way, but adapting this to a novel from my own screenplay had enormous advantages. I knew beginning, middle, end and lots of story beats before I started.
As a novel, the language became richer and more layered, scenes went deeper, characters are better developed. But the story changed almost not at all.
Q: Can you say more about the book’s origins as a screenplay?
A: I’d add that when you write a screenplay you’re really creating an economical blueprint for the movie you hope will get made, with a cast and crew on set that bring it to life: director, actors, production designer, set dresser, costumer, etc…
When you’re the novelist, you have all those jobs. You're the one choosing locations, what everyone’s wearing, what the furnishings are, what’s on a side table. You become the researcher, sorting through reams of possibilities (and going down every rabbit hole) to build the world you’re building.
But even more, you’re the one creating the interior life of your characters. Instead of actors and a director bringing their emotion and interpretation to it, you, the author, have to create that experience for the reader. I’ve now adapted two screenplays into novels, and find the process very rewarding.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: When my kids were younger, we had a game around the dinner table. If someone told a great story, you could call dibs on it, but you had to say the genre. Is it a play, a short story, a novel, a movie? I have to laugh at that now, because it sort of describes my career. I want to do it all!
But I will always have a novel in progress. The current one is contemporary and autofiction, so about as far away from “time-travel-rom-com” as it could be. I like a challenge. I like taking on something I’m not sure I know how to do and then suffer through figuring it out! It’s enormously satisfying if you can do it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: A small confession. When I started working on adapting Sometime This Century, I felt a little sheepish writing a “rom-com” since I considered myself a more serious, literary sort of writer. I even thought for a while about using a pen name. Gemma Finch? Poppy Lark? (You get the idea.)
But the more I worked on it, the more I loved working on it, loved the characters, laughed out loud, found myself moved by their situation. I came to a different understanding of the genre and why people are so drawn to it. And I had to do an ego check. This is also who I am, this writer.
My friend Tony Doerr told me, “Nothing wrong with having some joy in making stuff with words, especially in the world we're living in.”
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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