Alexandra Diaz's Inspiration

Alexandra Diaz is a Cuban-American author who splits her time between Bath, England and Sante Fe, NM, which makes me totally jealous as those are both wonderful cities. She wrote the recent release OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS and is here today to share her inspiration.

(Photo by Owen Benson.)

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The idea of the book came with the initial statement, “Brent Staple is such a banjo.” Now before you start thinking that the book was heading towards some folk version of High School Musical (hmm, maybe next time...) let me explain what I envisioned a “banjo” to be. A “banjo” was a term my friends and I coined in college and it pretty much referred to someone you would love to hate. My original title was even called The Banjo Diaries. But, sadly, no one other than my college friends knows what a banjo is and even though Pinkie, one of my protagonists, included a Banjo Lexicon with seven different entries for when it's acceptable to call someone a banjo, the idea didn't fly. So even though I think that's a brilliant opening line and it was what inspired the whole book, it was deleted before the book went out to publishers. Fortunately the phrase still worked to inspire the bases of the book. Even though the word was no longer there, the meaning was. Brent had done something wrong, something scandalous, so I had to figure out what, and why, and how the consequences of that action would effect my protagonists, Tara, Pinkie, and Whitney Blaire.

I knew from the start that I wanted three protagonists. I liked the challenge that would bring and liked how the friendship dynamic would change depending on how they each interpreted the banjo that is Brent. Each girl was going to have a different personality and a storyline as a result of that personality. Tara is the athlete focusing on her running instead of her personal life. Pinkie the worrier who likes to keep all her chicks in line. And Whitney Blaire is the drama queen trying hide the hurt she feels inside.

Trying to figure out how everything is going to work is a bit like playing god, You try out moving your characters in one direction only to realize that doesn't work so you try something else. It's half imagination and half luck. At some point, characters and situations just started moving on their own. Once that happened, I just let them take off, make their own choices, and try not to cringe when they occasionally became banjos themselves. I sometimes think they did most of the work of writing the story themselves. I just hit the computer keys, and came up with the original idea!

Review: Of All the Stupid Things

You know what happens when you try to get organized? A family member ends up in the hospital, your computer dies, and the internet eats your calendar. The IBWB Blogiversary will be a little more makeshift this year. (But still fun! It probably didn't help that school trumps the blog any day of the week.)

By Alexandra Diaz
Available now from EgmontUSA; Review copy



OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS is the story of three friends: Tara, Whitney Blaire, and Pinkie. Each of them have issues that could fill a book alone, so it's surprising that they come together in such a slim volume. For the most part, it works. On the other hand, OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS tends to be too shallow.

I found Pinkie to be the hardest to relate too. She's desperate, calling the guy she likes and her friends constantly. Of course, she doesn't realize the guy (an older club advisor) isn't worth it, despite the fact he never once returns her calls. Now, she does begin to pull herself together and act like a sane person. But we're in her head the least, so her reasons for suddenly changing seems arbitrary. I'm all for the changes she makes in her life, but it felt more like Pinkie was following the path a reader would want her to take than acting as a fully realized character.

Whitney Blaire was an interesting protagonist: impulsive, mean, and manipulating. She's the mean girl who is secrectly looking out for her friends as well as herself. Alexandra Diaz created a character who is an interesting mix of self-interest and good intentions, who needs her relationship with her friends to stay the same since she doesn't have one with her parents. Unfortunately, Tara is nominally the main protagonist so much of Whitney Blaire's story is focused on what Tara is doing and how she feels about Tara instead of her relationships with herself, her parents, and David.

The problem with Tara is that she's a little boring. She does have father issues, since her father abandoned his family. At one point she runs into him accidentally, which leads to emotional fallout. Unfortunately, most of the fallout occurs off-page. A novel about Tara and her mother going off-the-grid to recover from the sudden encounter would be more interesting. Instead, the focus is on her boring relationship issues. She breaks it off with her boyfriend because of a rumor. She (late in the book, but the blurb gives it away) starts going out with a girl without much angst.

To be honest, it all comes back to the issue of shallowness. With less than 300 pages and three narrators and multiple issues for each narrator, OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS tends to lack drama. There isn't enough time to really get into a character's head in order to deeply empathize with what they have going on. I understood what I should be feeling throughout their troubles, but Diaz never made me felt it. As things stand, OF ALL THE STUPID things wasn't terrible. It was a good distraction for an hour. But there were glimpses of books that I'd much prefer to read within it.