Jessica Verdi's Blog, page 5

Puzzle Piece Plot, or Index Cards For the Win!

Lately I’ve been hard at work on my third contemporary YA novel, and, while I love the story and love my protagonist, this book has been giving me trouble, my friends. Right here in River City. (Okay, New York City, but whatever.)

I know every book is different, and that’s all part of being a writer, but sometimes I feel like the universe played a cruel joke on me — the plot of My Life After Now came to me so easily, and now I can’t help feeling like every book should be that effortless to write. Meh. For this current project, I have all these random ideas floating around in my head, all these plot points, all these character possibilities, but it’s taking a loooong while for them to form some sort of shape. I’m growing antsy. 

But here’s the thing: I know it will be fine. I will finish the first draft and then I will have a better idea of what the overall structure of the book should be, and then I’ll be able to go back and revise, revise, revise until I have something I’m happy with. And you know how I know this? Because it happened with my second book too, The Summer I Wasn’t Me. I was pulling my hair out with that one, and that’s when I discovered the BEST WRITING TOOL EVER. Index cards.

Normally I’m not an outliner. I’m one of those writers who usually doesn’t know what’s going to happen until she sits down in front of her computer and the words come out. But when you’re dealing with a lot of characters and a complicated plot, something’s gotta give. I’m getting old — my brain just isn’t able to retain and organize things like it used to. So I started writing down my ideas on index cards. One card for each plot point, no matter how big or small. Then, once the idea was out there, written down, I didn’t have to worry about remembering it anymore and therefore my mind was free to come up with new, better ideas. So those new ideas each got their own index card, and the old ones got thrown out. (I mean recycled. Save the planet!)

Once I had a stack of all the ideas in my head, I spread the cards all out on the floor and moved them around until I had them in the order I wanted them. This is the best part of the index card method, because if you’re a visual learner, like me, you can see it. You can see where things should go, you can try out different places, different orders, and see where you still have holes and where you still need to focus your attention. Suddenly, the story comes together right before your eyes.

Then I just kept those handy little index cards in a handy little stack, all in order, and flipped from card to card as I wrote. Voila! A book. Amazing.

It worked so well with The Summer I Wasn’t Me that I’m doing it again with this new book (as yet untitled). I’ll let you know how it goes!

Why I Loved ‘Why We Broke Up’

This past New Year’s Eve, my dear friend and fellow YA author Corey Ann Haydu said she had a “must read” book for me. She’d read it over the holidays and had fallen completely in love and knew I would feel the same. The book was Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, with illustrations by Maira Kalman.

The first thing I noticed when Corey handed me the book was how heavy it was. In a good way. It’s a beautiful hardcover, with thick, glossy pages and stunning illustrations that add both vibrancy and a sweet melancholy to the book — the overall effect is to create a complete reading experience. Don’t read this book on an eReader — you’ll miss out.

The story is simple — Min is breaking up with Ed. She has a box filled with “treasures” from their time together, and she’s on her way to his house to give it all back. Each item has a letter attached to it, and we learn through these letters written from Min to Ed the significance each object held in their relationship, and the part they played in the relationship’s ultimate demise. It’s a quiet book, written in an extremely compelling voice, and it just has just an aura around it. I kinda wished I could crawl inside and live in it for a while.

It’s incredibly difficult to pull off what Handler (who also writes kid lit under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket) has done here. You know how the story ends before it even starts, the whole thing is told in letters (à la Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower — the only other epistolary novel I’ve seen pulled off so well), Min is obsessed with old Hollywood movies and actors no one has ever heard of before (because they were made up by Handler for the sake of the novel), and the voice is highly stylized (Handler must have had zillions of little green squiggles under his words as he wrote). Even just one of those things is hard to get a reader to go along with, and Handler somehow manages them all at once.

You know how I know I really loved this book? I didn’t want it to end. So if you’re looking for a quick contemporary read, something different than everything else out there, check out Why We Broke Up. It’s wonderful.

Welcome to My Brand New Blog

Welcome to my brand new author site and blog! This is the place where I’ll be blogging about all things YA — writing, my experiences, my thoughts on the industry, the books I’m reading now, and a lot more.

But let’s face it — I won’t just be writing about books. I’ve also been known to be something of a television junkie, so I’m sure there will be several occasions where I just won’t be able to stop myself from sharing my thoughts on the latest episodes of my favorite shows. Actually, as I write this, I can’t stop thinking about last night’s Vampire Diaries. Seriously, that fire at the end? My heart is still broken…

Anyway.

This is the space where I’ll be blogging about the various topics that skeet their way through my brain, so I hope you’ll continue to come back from time to time to read and comment. In the meantime, I also blog over at Teen Writers Bloc, a YA and MG blog started by The New School Writing for Children MFA class of 2012. The opinions over there are just as varied as the topics, so check it out!

Thanks for visiting my website. Until next time…

Jess