‘Darkest Minds’ author is an Arizona native
Arizona author Alexandra Bracken is excited, of course, that “The Darkest Minds,” her dystopian thriller from 2012, hit the big screen on Friday.
With Amandla Stenberg — Rue from the “Hunger Games” films — starring as teenage heroine Ruby Daly, it’s about a near future where a virus has killed 98 percent of humans under age 20 ... and left the remaining 2 percent with superpowers.
Superheroes in dystopia: It fits right in with other YA franchises such as “Divergent.” But in an interview promoting the film, Bracken says her most important inspiration is more old school: “Star Wars.” And she has her late father to thank for it.
“My dad was also a Star Wars collector, and that was my introduction to science fiction and fantasy,” she says. “Between the ages of 8 and 12, all I wanted to read were Star Wars books.”
In fact, Bracken, 31, got her start writing fan fiction, including a story about what happened to the droids left behind when Uncle Owen bought R2-D2 and C-3PO, and was tapped to reimagine the original Star Wars story in her 2014 novelization “Star Wars: A New Hope: The Princess, the Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy.”
From fan fiction to franchise author
Born and raised in Scottsdale, Bracken is a bit of an overachiever. She wrote her first novel, “Brightly Woven,” as a student at the College of William and Mary and published it a year after graduating summa cum laude in 2009.
She is also as pragmatic as artists come. She had planned to go to law school, but when she realized it wasn’t for her, she asked for some help.
“A very kind person in William and Mary’s career guidance center was like, ‘Well, you already know so much about publishing from trying to publish your novels, why don’t you try working in publishing?’ ”
And so she did, working in New York for six years before her publishing income was stable enough for her to come back to the Phoenix area. “Everything in New York is a fight,” she says. “It’s a fight to get on the subway. It’s a fight to go to CVS. It’s a fight to get a cab. And eventually it wears you down. The city is so wonderful and has so much to offer to counterbalance, but I’d been living on the East Coast for 12 years, and I just wanted to be home.”
In the meantime, she’s published 12 books, including five sequels to “The Darkest Minds,” which was optioned for film before it was even published.
Yes, she can offer plenty of career advice, but looking at her resume, it’s clear that the “secret” to her success is a high drive for work. Indeed, she says she got her “Star Wars” novelization because another writer had to drop the project at the last minute, and Bracken’s editor at Disney-Hyperion knew she writes “extremely fast.”
An ‘almost secret life’ of Star Wars fandom
Bracken says she had a “normal” childhood in Scottsdale, except for that one hobby of her father, who died in 2012.
“I had this almost secret life of going to Star Wars conventions, because when I was younger, Star Wars had phased into the uncool part of its life and had yet to become cool again for everybody else,” she says. “So it felt like this secret little side life that I had where we would go as a family to Star Wars conventions and go every weekend to look at antique markets and toy fairs and try to find missing pieces of his collection.”
When the offer came to write a novelization of “A New Hope,” Bracken says she agonized over the decision because she was afraid to re-engage with Star Wars so soon after his death.
“Working on that book ended up having the opposite effect of what I was expecting, because it had this wonderful way of making me feel close to my dad,” she says. “I think when we lose somebody, when we interact with those things that they also loved — like you listen to their favorite music or you read their favorite books — it’s just a way to get in touch with them and your memories of them. So now when I watch Star Wars, it makes me happy.
“So I’ve been into all of the new material and the new films. I know everyone was a little skeptical of ‘Solo,’ but I thought ‘Solo’ was super fun, and I love the idea of not necessarily always doing big epic Star Wars stories, but rather taking a smaller-stakes story and really examining how the universe and how those characters function. So I have been on board for pretty much all of it.”
On what leads to ‘toxic fandom’
So, how does she respond to fan backlash about the latest films? Most recently, a group of fans launched a movement to “Remake The Last Jedi” and remove director Rian Johnson’s film from the Star Wars canon.
“It all stems from everyone feeling protective of the thing that they love so much,” Bracken says. “Everyone goes into seeing a movie or reading a book with expectations, and the creators cannot control those expectations necessarily.”
Recent controversies over the direction of pop-culture franchises, from “The Last Jedi” to the all-girl “Ghostbusters,” are sparking a new conversation about “toxic fandom.” At what point does the ownership that fans feel over a franchise cross a line into something ... unhealthy?
“I have definitely seen a lot of fandoms go pretty toxic,” Bracken says, “and it does feel a little bit like those people feel entitled to getting exactly what they want, or they are resistant to change because any kind of change is painful and requires you to alter this pattern of thinking that you’ve had, or it forces you to see something that you thought you understood and realize it’s not black, it’s not white, it’s actually gray. It really can have a deep emotional impact on you.
“I definitely have readers who still to this day get really angry with me over storytelling decisions that I’ve made. And I made them because they serve the world and the characters and the overall narrative, but they don’t see it. They only see it as not getting the thing that they wanted out of the story. And I can’t really help that. In the end, you just have to tell the story you want to tell and that you need to tell.”