Filipino author Samantha Sotto’s fans can now breathe a sigh of relief. Her best-selling book “Before Ever After” survived the dreaded “Once upon a time” opening.Sotto is a Communications graduate of Ateneo de Manila University and her love for reading books is something she grew up with.“I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t reading stories or being told stories by my parents,” she relates. “I would say that they were the ones who nurtured my love for books and storytelling.”
The success of the book is phenomenal to think that she wrote the novel just to while away her time in a coffee shop. Other best-selling authors described the book as “a page-turner, romantic, exquisitely written, and inventively told.”
Sotto is a full-time mom and she drives her son to school coast to coast, all the way from Paranaque to Katipunan. “I could save up on gas and toll fees if I just wait for three hours,” she says during the book’s launch at National Bookstore Glorietta 5 last month.
Sotto is a natural-born reader so she decided to come up with her own story and her own characters drawing up inspiration from her travels to Europe and from the tomes she read in the past.
“I didn’t think about the technicalities of writing when I wrote the book,” Sotto explains. “I just wanted to tell a story. It was a matter of putting one word in front of another.”
Sotto feels that the biggest challenge she met while writing the books was trying to figure out how to start. “I stared at a blank page for a long time,” she says. “At one point, I thought of writing ‘Once upon a time’.”
During the process of writing the book which took one school year and three months, Sotto consciously didn’t read any book because she didn’t want to “inadvertently copy someone else’s style.”
She likes renowned authors David Eddings and Neil Gaiman.
Sotto confesses that as a writer, she is so connected with her characters especially Max and Shelley. “Before Ever After” is “a modern fairy tale about true love, happy endings, new beginnings, and everything in between.”
She admits that writing interesting characters wasn’t in her agenda but to write believable ones. “In order to make them feel authentic, I tried to give them flaws, strengths, and quirks. As I got deeper into the story, they felt so real to me that I eavesdropped on their conversations and wrote down what they said.”
“The book is a platypus—it crosses over genres,” Sotto explains. “It has elements of history, fantasy, mystery and humor, but at its core, it is a love story. (I probably should have added a song and dance number while I was at it.)”
The book also travels to various places in Europe aside of course from its romantic angle and recipes. Sotto tried to remember her travels there with her family and sought the help Google maps.
Sotto let her mother read the first draft. “I would not have written this book if not for her,” Sotto shares, “She’s sort of my editor.”
When asked what’s her favorite part of the book, Sotto jokes, “You mean apart from typing ‘The End’?” Sotto says she loves the chapter about Slovenia. It’s the one of the darkest parts of the book. “It was a challenge to write. I felt a huge sense of accomplishment when I finished it,” she says.
Even if she was already writing the book, virtually visiting places in Europe, and including flaws in her characters, it was not until she finished it that Sotto thought of having it published.
Sotto couldn’t contain her happiness during the launch. She struggled in her first sentence and finally shed a tear on the second.
“I feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone,” Sotto says. “I’m overwhelmed and humbled by all the support I’ve been receiving. But while I am grateful for it, I also feel that it adds a lot of pressure. I wrote the book for myself and my husband and I pursued publishing it for our children. I thought that when the book came out, my job would be done. Now that people write to me and tell me how my story has inspired them, I feel that I need to work extra hard so that I won’t let them down.”
(Published in Sunday Inquirer Magazine, October 2011)
