LJane Smith is the author of, among others, The Vampire Diaries book series. What follows is an exclusive interview with the author conducted by Vampires & Slayers editor Edward Gross. This interview is an extensive one and will be broken into several parts.
VAMPIRES & SLAYERS: I’m sure this is a clichéd way to begin, but why vampires? What is it that appeals to you about that particular genre?
LJANE SMITH: First of all, you have to realize that I’m dealing with a young adult marketplace—that’s what YA stands for, young adult—and that therefore I have some limits imposed by our culture on what I can and can’t say when writing for 12 to16-year-olds. Twelve and up is what we label young adults in the business, but the truth is that I get just as much e-mail from adults as from teenagers, and a lot of e-mail from the ten to twelve-year-old set, as well. Getting an e-mail from a ten-year-old: that’s something to stop you cold in your tracks and make sure you really are writing the very best role models that you can for young people. It is for me, anyway.
But to get back to YAs—my stories are romances, set against an “urban fantasy” background. In a romance for teens, I don’t feel comfortable going any farther physically than kissing and caressing body parts that you can actually name in these books: hair, face, neck, shoulders. hands. Nothing else. I was a special ed schoolteacher for three years before devoting myself to writing full time and I have all the old schoolmarm values locked inside me, if you’ll believe that.
So how do you write, deep, thoughtful romance that symbolizes the full union of body and soul between two healthy young Romeo-and-Juliets? I found that you do it in the heart. With vampires, first there is the unparalleled physical pleasure of sharing blood—which sounds utterly gross when I write it. Ick! How do I ever get people to buy these things? Well, along with sharing blood the vampire and donor share their minds. Every teenager wants to be fully loved, fully understood, fully forgiven. By sharing minds, you can do that: each character can be completely spiritually fulfilled by immersing themselves in the other.
There’s also the universally understood metaphor—the—er, penetrative aspect of vampirism, alluded to by Terry Pratchett. It has a grip on teenage minds at the moment, and it’s a decent metaphor for sex, without being sex.
As for the glamour of the vampire, well I feel that in a way, all those damned schoolmarm values about sex being naughty are crazy and so are Americans. If sex were treated as the natural function that it is, nobody would use it to sell soap and soda crackers. No one would think about it at all in the sort of compulsive way we all do. They would do what comes naturally and probably use less soap and eat more fattening things than crackers. But for teenagers especially—doomed to think about something they’re not supposed to do—the vampire mystique is perfectly understandable.
The other, short explanation is that I saw Frank Langella play Dracula sometime as a kid, and I saw Laurence Olivier play Richard III (at school, as part of a class of Shakespeare we seniors had lobbied for and got). I try to make all my vampires as gorgeous and sexy as Langella was, and as evilly seductive as Olivier reading the opening speech in Richard III. If—and it’s a big if—I can get something even close to that, I promise that every young girl will melt and not mind if the hero or anti-hero is only interested in her neck.
Part 2 is coming soon.
