Best of...Interviews Part 3

I’ve received some great questions from various interviews over the last ten months since Getting Somewhere came out so thought I’d gather a few of the responses in one place. This is the third installment. (And if YOU have a question you’d like to ask, send me a message here at Goodreads and I may post it with my response!)

For Reading Keeps You Sane

Where did the title of your book come from?

I’m sure it happens all the time: the book is written and all that remains is somehow arriving at the perfect title. The title is the book’s face to the world and finding the perfect fit might require long, diligent effort, even a few initial stabs at it that earn just wrinkled noses and noncommittal smiles.

I have to admit, though, that that’s not the way it happened for me at all. In fact, the title Getting Somewhere jumped into my mind even before the first page was completely written, providing thematic guidance for the actual writing of the novel itself.

That classic concept of a ‘heroine’s journey’ permeates the narrative from the very first scene in which the four girls arrive at the farm in the detention-center bus, taking that first step on what will turn out for all of them to be a bit of a harrowing trip. Jenna is prepared to be seriously underwhelmed, expecting the women who run the farm to have nothing to offer her – just like all of the other adults she has encountered so far in her life. Sarah doesn’t think much beyond a warm bed or a full stomach at first, has trained herself to take things pretty much as they come, assuming others will make the tough decisions and let her know about them afterwards. Cassie has rarely been beyond the walls of her grandmother’s trailer, the boundaries of the surrounding yard, can’t even conceive of what she might confront beyond pictures from the books she’s devoured from early childhood. And Lauren? Well, Lauren expects to get whatever she wants, has no intention of doing anything she doesn’t want to do or being anywhere she doesn’t want to be.

Yet, despite the fact that they’ve all converged onto this isolated spot on earth from significantly diverse directions, they’re all on the same road now. What will they make of the trip? How will they use what they know of themselves to discover their strengths and discard their shackles? How will who they’ve been up until now allow (or disallow!) them to absorb these new and difficult – yet potentially life-altering – surroundings, to negotiate the path laid out before them?

I’m fascinated with the process of personal decision-making, with the way that identity is such a stew of our perceptions of ourselves within the framework of our experiences. Sometimes our experiences hinder our ability to move forward. Sometimes what we believe about ourselves – what we’ve been told by others – simply isn’t true. Sometimes, in order to get somewhere, we have to leave an awful lot of stuff behind.

With Getting Somewhere, both the title and the book, I hope to address some of the most basic questions of trust and choice and forgiveness. I am pleased and honored to invite readers along on that metaphoric – but no less real and challenging – journey.

For A Tapestry of Words

Describe your choice to include strong adult characters in the story.

As you may have noticed, there are a lot of dead and missing adults in YA literature. The reasons are fairly obvious. First, YA characters need to be experiencing some kind of challenge, drama, or even trauma. Killing off a parent (or two) is a pretty good way of doing that. Second, YA protagonists are generally learning how to make the transition from childhood to adulthood (the ‘coming of age’ trope) and the experience is significantly more interesting and dramatic without a parent looking over their shoulders. And, finally, YA is, well, it’s YA which means it’s about young adults. The sense among the adults who edit, publish and market these books is that teenagers just don’t want to read about adults.

The truth is, though, that adults are both the primary problem-makers AND problem-solvers in the world. Whether it’s fantasy or real-lit, it’s usually neither workable nor advisable to eliminate adult voices entirely. Think of Harry Potter. He has both Voldemort and Dumbledore. Or Katniss Everdeen with both President Snow (and the Capitol) and Haymitch (‘maker’ and ‘solver.’) There are certainly exceptions but the point is that the world isn’t – or shouldn’t be – divided up by age groups and adults can serve as both excellent antagonists and critical resources in literary settings. In other words, the identity of the teen character evolves either in relationship with or in juxtaposition to the adults in his or her life.

And, in fact, adults represent a ‘future’ that is not possible to develop in any other way. Kids generally don’t get to grow up in YA lit and yet, if we are to explore the psychologically essential (and dramatically interesting) aspects of responsibility and consequences, it is important to represent how those might manifest themselves over time. Adult characters can provide critical tension by acting as models, reflections, or even cautionary tales, sometimes all at the same time. This is the dynamic that fascinated me as I developed the characters and plot elements of Getting Somewhere.

My characters are four teen girls who have committed juvenile crimes and elect to participate in an alternative detention program located on an organic farm. Clearly, something has gone wrong for them. Though we want to know what has happened to them in the past, the setting and the story line pretty much eliminate any significant role for parents right from the start.

And yet, adults do come to play a significant role. Three women run the farm. They are important to the story, (and to the girls) offering that classic conflict between potential resource and flawed decision-making. Though the issues the girls are dealing with start long before they arrive on the farm, the relationships they develop with the adult women – and the relationships between the women – offer a potent context for exploring those exact issues further. Paradoxically, an understanding of the identities and experiences of the adult characters provides an opportunity to delve more deeply into the girls themselves – the impact of experience itself, the nature of emotional resources, how choices are made, how empowerment happens.

And, maybe more importantly, it is essential for our YA characters to grow, to experience some kind of transformation over the course of the story. While the love, nurture and support for that growth can come from some other source – a friend or love interest, for example – having it come at least in part from an adult (or to be visibly absent, forcing the teen to recognize the gap) is rich, powerful, and compellingly realistic.

In addition to that, there is the question of how we perceive of young adult experience, both in real life and on the page. I think younger readers ARE interested in reading about adults. Genuine adults, conflicted adults, flawed adults. Maybe not as primary characters but certainly as interesting, fully-developed, authentically devised secondary ones. Teens are keeping their eyes on us – as well they should! They want to understand motives, access information, evaluate how their decisions are going to play out in the long run. As authors, regardless of genre, it is our job to give that to them.