Alexandra Sokoloff is a California native who grew up in both
Northern and Southern California as the daughter of scientist
and educator parents, which she claims drove her into musical
theater at an early age. She grew up in a house of books – hundreds
of books, stacked to the ceiling, overflowing bookshelves,
in every room.
“You were never more than an arm's length from a book,” Alex
says. “I could read walking home from school.”
And she wrote – kept journals, pages and pages of random
thoughts (during math classes), wrote in the car during family
road trips. Despite this, Alex says she didn’t start
out thinking she’d be a writer.
“I got the acting bug first,” she
says. She acted, sang, danced and played classical piano in
musical theater from sixth grade all the way through high school,
and started directing plays at age sixteen, the year she also
lived in Istanbul as an AFS exchange student and began college.
At U.C. Berkeley, she majored in theater and minored in “everything
that Berkeley has a reputation for.” She wrote, directed,
and acted in productions from Shakespeare to street theater,
trained in modern dance, directed and choreographed four full-scale
musicals, and still managed to graduate Phi Beta Kappa.
After college she moved to Los Angeles, where she made what
she calls “an interesting living” writing novel
adaptations and original suspense and horror scripts for numerous
Hollywood studios (Sony, Fox, Disney, Miramax), for producers
such as Michael Bay, David Heyman, Laura Ziskin and Neal Moritz.
Her adaptation of Sabine Deitmer's psychological thriller Cold
Kisses, co-written with Kimball Greenough and Thomas Reuter,
was filmed in Germany by director Carl Schenkel.
“Theater was a fantastic training ground for writing,” says
Alex. “I worked my way through acting, which taught me
how to create character and connect with an audience; dance
and choreography, which taught me rhythm and pace, fearlessness
and sensuality and seduction – and oh, yes, discipline;
then directing, which taught me design, structure, theme. Writing
was the next natural step -- the ultimate expression of all
those things.”
After college she decided on film writing “through a
process of elimination.” She moved to Los Angeles and
wrote while working her way through a succession of odd jobs.
The transition from theater to film was a natural one, and
it didn’t take her long, she says, to get established.
Her first screenplay won a UCLA Diane Thomas Award and was
optioned. Her second screenplay, co-written with David Arata,
sold to Twentieth Century Fox in a bidding war.
Sadly, Alex says, screenwriters have less and less creative
power in an increasingly corporate industry. “Vertical
integration is the enemy of art. When it's all about box office,
and corporate executives are making story decisions, what you
get is what we've been seeing on the big screen for years now – a
mind-numbing parade of sequels and remakes. And that was really
what drove me to start writing novels.”
The transition from screenwriter to novelist was, to Alex,
another natural progression. But she’s never said it
was easy. “All writing is impossible,” she says. “Writing
a novel was just a different kind of impossible.”
The Harrowing is her first novel and is based on real experiences
from her high school and college years. The psychological undercurrents
of the book are drawn from her experience teaching emotionally
disturbed and incarcerated teenagers in the Los Angeles County
prison system.
The Harrowing takes a bunch of misfit, troubled college kids
and puts them into a situation “similar to Shirley Jackson's
great The Haunting of Hill House.” The stormy Thanksgiving
weekend – based on one of Alex’s true life experiences – was
a natural setting.
“I was always attracted to ghost stories,” she says, and “developed
a taste for being scared senseless. But from the time I was
a very young child I was very sensitive to the fact that there's
a lot of weirdness out there, and a lot of danger from unstable
people. Also, I was almost abducted as a child, so I was aware
that there are people out there who have something terribly
wrong with them, who actively want to hurt and destroy.”
As a teenager, Alex experimented with the paranormal – ESP,
dream interpretation, Tarot, Ouija, spending the night in graveyards. “It
never ceases to fascinate me. And, you know -- there's a lot
more in heaven and earth, Horatio!”
Early on in life, Alex noted a correlation between mental/emotional
illness and paranormal events. “Emotionally disturbed
people seem to have a high level of psychic awareness, and
they attract synchronicities and even weirder occurrences.
I have to admit, though – to me those otherworldly experiences
are never as horrifying as the evil that people can do.”
In writing the book, she wanted to “play with the idea
that the emotional dynamic between [the students] attracts
an equally troubled spirit – or that the whole thing
is just psychological or a prank that gets out of hand and
builds its own momentum.”
Alex says there’s a catharsis in good mysteries, thrillers,
horror and suspense – that “you can work through
those issues of good and evil. You can walk vicariously into
those perilous situations and face your fears and – sometimes – triumph.”
Alex is now leading what she calls a “frenetic” life,
currently living in both Los Angeles and in Raleigh, North
Carolina, finishing her second novel, and sketching out her
third. She goes to a lot of writing conventions. “I love
the traveling and I love meeting people.”
She enjoys adventure travel and all kinds of dance, which she
has also taught. “Next to writing I love dance more than
breathing: jazz, ballet, salsa, Lindy, swing – I do it
all, every chance I get.”
She just finished a term on the Board of Directors of the Writers
Guild of America West, and is the founder of WriterAction.com,
an online community of over 1700 professional screenwriters.
Her second novel of dark suspense, The Price, will come out
from St. Martin's in 2007.
J.B. and Alex, One-on-One:
JB: Tell us why you call your first years
in LA "the oatmeal
years".
AS: I was living pretty much hand-to-mouth, working part-time
at the very minimum of hours I could do to survive so that
I could write all the rest of the time - but I'm a dance addict
and it's an expensive habit, so I made a conscious decision
to spend most of the money people usually spend on food (just
add it up some time!) on my dance classes. So - I ate a lot
of oatmeal. It's cheap. And I really like it.
JB: You had some "seriously odd jobs" during that
time. What was your most unusual job, and which did you enjoy
the most (aside from the writing)?
AS: Well, I think teaching in the juvenile court schools was
the most unusual - especially as young as I was, teaching all
teenage boys. That's just not ... normal. But working at the
Bodhi Tree, the world famous metaphysical bookstore, was equally
unusual and completely wonderful - I couldn't wait to get to
work in the morning. I learned so much about world religions,
mysticism, the occult - and it was a constant state of synchronicity,
like being on Ecstacy all the time. Well, actually ... no,
okay, never mind that!
JB: What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?
AS: Haagen Daz Honey Vanilla. But let's not start talking about
ice cream, okay?
JB: If you could meet one famous person in history (no longer
living), who would it be and why?
AS: Oh, well, Shakespeare. I would give just about anything
to meet the man who had all that in his head. Who WAS all that.
There's not even a close second.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
J.B. Thompson is the author of two novels of romantic suspense currently in publication http://www.jbtauthor.com. In addition to conducting author interviews, she writes book and movie reviews. J.B. blogs at “Let’s Do Lunch – The World According to J.B.”. She lives near Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and three teenagers.
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