Samantha Silva

Samantha Silva is an author and screenwriter based in Idaho. Over her career, she’s sold film projects to Paramount, Universal, and New Line Cinema. Sometime This Century is her third novel, following Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mr. Dickens and His Carol, her debut.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Sometime This Century began life as a screenplay (sold to Universal 25 years ago) called What You Wish For about a young woman transported to Regency England who gets everything she’s ever dreamed of, or does she? It’s hard to give up a title you’ve lived with that long, but my editor thought it didn’t do enough to suggest the time-travel in the book. We brainstormed for weeks to come up with a title that nodded to that or the Regency era or Jane Austen (since my book riffs on hers). Then I stumbled onto a line for my heroine, Annabel Blake, that she utters in an early scene when she’s roundly rejected by her hot literary crush. “Well, it would be nice to be kissed sometime this century!” And there it was, the perfect title.

What's in a name?

Early in the novel, Annabel Blake arrives at Kidlington House charged with sorting out her English ex-pat boss’s “crumbling old pile” of a country home. It’s a good long walk from the village of Wakefield, where Annabel attends her first ever ball. “Kidlington” felt playful to me but also suggests that Annabel and her companions haven’t quite progressed from kids to mature adults when the story begins. “Wakefield” gives both a sense of the countryside, as the town is surrounded in fact by open fields, and signals that Annabel will have an awakening over the course of the story, which is the heart of the novel.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self would be utterly delighted that I had the wherewithal to finish a novel at all! I wanted to be a writer since about age six, then lost the plot and got distracted for years before I turned back to it. This novel would feel like it captured some of the pull I felt between being a straight-A student, bookish, and introverted, a bit lonely, and wanting to be a messier version of myself, a devil-may-care party girl who could do or say whatever she wanted. But it very much has my sense of humor (from wit to broad comedy) and my soft, romantic heart.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I’ve twice written the beginning chapter of a novel that ended up being its ending, so apparently for me they can be fungible! I think the unconscious writer mind knows things the conscious writer doesn’t and it’s worth following one’s nose in the early going but staying open to where it might lead. Because Sometime This Century started as a screenplay, I knew the beginning, middle, and end before I started adapting it as a novel. The beginning and the ending were great fun to write and didn’t change much at all, except to go deeper than one can in a screenplay. The middle, where all the complication happens, is the tricky part, but also offered up rich opportunities for things to go awry, which is all the more satisfying when Annabel Blake overcomes them, becoming who she was always meant to be.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I think writers often pick projects that help them work out their own unconscious longings and issues, so it’s natural that our characters represent aspects of who we are. I’m far more the book-loving, introverted Annabel Blake—the Elinor Dashwood of my novel—than I am Cassie Blake, her party-girl-slash-influencer sister, who has more in common with Marianne Dashwood, of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Annabel is more Sense; Cassie's more Sensibility, or, in modern parlance, Demure and Brat. But as with Austen’s masterpiece, my sisters come to value how the other lives in the world. The sisters become more whole as they integrate that other part of themselves. Living as a woman in the world, with its never-ending conversation about how we ought to be, I like the idea of integration and wholeness, of being both/and, not either/or.

Visit Samantha Silva's website.

--Marshal Zeringue