Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.
Today’s guest for the WHAT is Tara Sullivan, critically acclaimed middle grade and YA author whose novel TREASURE OF THE WORLD (Putnam; on sale February 23) is about child labor in an impoverished Bolivian silver mining community, inspired by current-day conditions at Potosí, Bolivia's mountain Cerro Rico, also known as The Mountain that Eats Men.
Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?
I grew up in Bolivia—all my childhood memories are there—and I’ve always been fascinated by the history around the silver mines of Potosí. Once I was a published author, I knew I wanted to tell the story of the kids who worked those mines… but finding the right story to tell, and the right way to tell it, took me over five years!
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
I wrote a first draft of Treasure of the World and then took a research trip to Bolivia. There, I interviewed the mothers and children who worked on the mountain as well as the lawyers, teachers, school counselors, and aid workers who tried to help them. I stared into the maw of the mine mouths, sat through a school day, and walked the streets of the city at its base. I was devastated to realize that the story I had written didn’t accurately reflect the realities that existed on the mountain: I had assumed that certain basic opportunities would be available on The Mountain That Eats Men. They weren’t.
So I returned home and tried again. I wrote drafts with different endings, different supporting characters, different plot inflection points. I rewrote it in 2017, 2018, and 2019: again, and again, and again. None of them were the right way to tell the story. I ended up having to put the manuscript aside for over a year while I grappled with how to do better.
I kept running up against the rock-hard wall of reality: there were few to no options on the mountain. The women and girls I had spoken to didn’t have a hope for a better future: the government didn’t prioritize the region, foreign aid had been kicked out, and even the organizations I had interviewed were shutting down. Mining operations had been “privatized” into cooperatives, each their own fiefdom with no liability or protections for their workers.
The story kept tugging at me, needing to be told. But, for the longest time, I honestly could not imagine a world in which the Mountain didn’t win. In the end, this was the crux of the problem: I had to find a way to stay true to the realities I’d learned, but I also had to find a way to make the fiction work. This wasn’t a documentary; it was a novel. To put it in craft terms, in addition to all the normal things that needed to be fixed in the manuscript, it needed a tone re-write.
Tone is a funny thing. Everyone knows it when they hear it, but it is so, so hard to define. For the record, it is even harder to fix. My own hopelessness, faced with the reality of life on the mountain, had percolated through the entire book: it had seeped into the sentence level in word choice and phrasing. I found, in my tone edit, that I couldn’t even cut and paste paragraphs of scenery description. I needed to start again from page one and re-write the entire book through a lens of hope and the support of family. So I did: I aged my protagonist down from sixteen to twelve (because, by sixteen, all the girls I’d interviewed had given up hope in a different future for themselves and I needed to stay true to that). I made her brother younger rather than older than her so that he couldn’t dominate her choices. I leaned into my female characters—Ana’s mother, grandmother, and friends—to give Ana a more supportive supporting cast and rewrote conversations to really dig into the beauty and history of Bolivia.
With the addition of this hard-won hope, the Treasure of the World that is finally hitting shelves this month is so different from the draft I wrote in 2015 it’s almost unrecognizable. But it is how the story needed to be told, no matter how long it took me to get there.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
Oh my gosh, yes! This is such a thing for me. I usually start out with a vague idea of where I want the story to go, but I’m a “headlights” writer: I only ever know the bit of the story directly in front of me. I have to write that bit before I can figure out the next bit and I’m constantly surprised by characters taking my stories where I wasn’t expecting them to go!
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by? How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
I always struggle to choose what to write next. It’s not like there’s a lack of material—unfortunately, there are many human rights crises ongoing in the world today—but there has to be a story resonance to it, and I have to feel that I have a place in telling the story.
What I mean by resonance is that there has to be something to build the story around. As an author, my “brand” is telling stories based around contemporary human rights issues. My debut, Golden Boy, dealt with the mutilation and murder of people with albinism in Tanzania due to a belief that their body parts are good luck. The core injustice in that story is that someone might be hunted and killed because of an accident of recessive genetics, even today. My second book, The Bitter Side of Sweet, asks how we can accept a world where children in one place must work, unpaid and unfree, to produce a sweet treat (chocolate) for children in another place. My newest book, Treasure of the World wonders at how it’s possible that the biggest silver mine in the world can be the setting for abject generational poverty.
Needless to say, these aren’t the easiest books to write. The only way I make it through the long, emotional process of researching, drafting, and editing, is if I feel deeply about the core injustice behind the book: writing is a form of taking action. But even that is only half the question: even if there IS a core injustice around which to build a compelling fictional story, is it my place to tell that story?
It's a hard question to answer. I choose to write books about human rights issues where people’s voices are going unheard and where those with direct lived experience of the specific trauma has not yet found access to the agents and publishers that serve an American readership. I hope, one day, that these books won’t need to be written because these injustices have ceased to exist, or because enough attention has been drawn to these human rights issues that the coverage is exhaustive. Until that day, my goal as a writer is to raise awareness for issues of global injustice, do the best I can to portray the reality of those living with these injustices, and encourage readers to deeply investigate our world.
I have 5 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?
For all of my previous novels I have had a writing buddy: my old Aussie mix, Liam. He is a great writing buddy as—unless a squirrel, the mailman, or some other ferocious invader approaches the house—he tends to flop at my feet and let me work. However, we just recently added a puppy to our family, Luna, who always wants to play. I have a feeling no writing will get done at all around her until she is older and has settled down a bit!
Luna, definitely not sleeping. Liam, sleeping while I worked.