7 Questions I Always Ask +1: Shannon Lee Alexander
Today for 7 Questions +1 I have debut author Shannon Lee Alexander, whose new novel (brand new this week!) has been compared to John Green’s THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. YA contemporary fans, LOVE AND OTHER UNKNOWN VARIABLES is probably one you want to get your hands on! Onto the questions:
Entangled Teen, October 2014.
E. Kristin Anderson: What was the first spark of inspiration for your latest novel?
Shannon Lee Alexander: I was revising this amazingly crappy manuscript that I should probably delete from my hard drive just so it can’t accidentally leak out, causing me to have to create an elaborate story about possession by an illiterate demon determined to smear my good name, when the voice of this teenage boy cut through the chaos and caught my attention. Charlie Hanson walked into my writing space (which was then a corner of my toy strewn family room), flopped down on the couch near my desk, and started whining to me about his new English teacher.
His voice was so compelling and earnest, how could I not listen?
EKA: What kind of planning do you do before you start writing?
SLA: I didn’t do any planning before writing Love and Other Unknown Variables—at least not any planning on paper. I spent weeks just listening to the character’s voices in my head, trying them out in new situations and seeing how they’d react. Before I started writing, I knew each of their quirks and hopes and needs, but I didn’t know exactly how to get them to the end of the story.
I wrote an entire novel length manuscript about Charlie and Ms. Finch that, essentially, was trashed so I could start over and write the story I was really trying to tell. Planning ahead of time, would have saved me the trouble, but I don’t regret it because in the years it took me to write Love and Other Unknown Variables, I’ve learned so much about not only the craft of writing, but about myself, my strengths and weaknesses.
Now, I make myself write a loose outline to be sure I’m telling the story that needs to be told. I whine an awful lot about making the outlines though. I’m a pretty big baby about planning, but I know it helps me stay on track, so I do it. It’s like eating your vegetables, I guess.
EKA: If you could have lunch with any writer living or dead, who would it be?
SLA: Writers are like rock stars or movie stars to me, so the idea of having lunch with one is really intimidating. I’m pretty sure I’d end up babbling like a crazy woman to quell my anxiety. I’m dating myself here, but remember Molly Shannon’s character on SNL, Mary Katherine Gallagher? That’d totally be me. I guess if I have to choose someone to make a fool of myself in front of, I’d pick Rainbow Rowell because she seems so genuinely nice, and I think that maybe she wouldn’t judge me too harshly.
EKA: What is the first book you remember reading and enjoying as a young reader?
HarperCollins, Reprint Edition, December 2004.
SLA: My second grade teacher was this tiny, African American woman, with a sharp nose and a soft voice. Her name escapes me, but I vividly remember her perching on the edge of her desk to read aloud to us from CHARLOTTE’S WEB. When she read the chapter with (spoiler alert!) Charlotte’s death in it, I remember my eyes got teary and I hid my face in my hands, mortified because I didn’t want my classmates to see me crying over a book. But then I heard this strange warble in the teacher’s voice and when I looked up, she was crying, too. I loved her for that. And to this day, I love that story because it was the first book that showed me how stories can connect us to each other.
EKA: If you could go back and time and tell your teen self ONE THING AND ONE THING ONLY, what would it be?
SLA: Always choose kindness (and that goes for how you treat your hair, too, so walk away from that spiral perm, young Shannon! Walk away).
EKA: If you haven’t had a book challenged or banned, would you want this to happen to you? Why or why not?
SLA: I’d LOVE to have my book honestly challenged, and by that I mean the challenger had actually read the book prior to issuing the challenge. At least I’d know it had sparked some emotional reaction in someone. That’s one of the goals of sharing your writing, to make other people feel something.
EKA: What kind of book do you really want to try to write, but haven’t ever attempted? And what do you think is holding you back?
SLA: I’d love to write a fantasy novel. I even have characters and pieces of the story mapped out in my mind or on scraps of paper. Fear is holding me back because to write fantasy well, you have to be a world builder. You have to be comfortable creating your own universe and the rules under which it’s governed. And you have to push limits. I’m still figuring out the rules of the world I live in. I can’t imagine coming up with my own! And I’ve never been one to push limits. I’m more of a nudger by nature.
One day, though, one day, I’ll scare up enough courage to do write that story.
EKA: A lot of teens seem to hate math. (I hated math as a teen myself.) What made you want to include math as part of your story? Do you think that your characters might make math less scary for math-fearing teens?
SLA: I didn’t want to include math as part of the story, but Charlie was adamant about his love for it. Like you, I hated math as a teen. I’d hated it since the fourth grade when my math teacher said I was dumb because I sucked at taking the timed multiplication tests every week.
As I got older, I was in advanced classes, so I was obviously not the idiot my fourth grade teacher said I was, but I mostly sat in the back of the room and tried to blend in. Math was for boys. Math was for geeks. Math was for kids whose brains worked differently than mine. All of this, I’d tell myself just before sneaking my novel out of my desk and hiding it in my math book. I was drawn to the arts, writing and drama specifically, and considered math too “right brained” for myself. But really, I was afraid to fail again.
I grew up thinking I could either be good at math or good at English. I could be logical or idealistic. I could go left or right. I could go north or south. What I discovered while writing Charlie and Charlotte’s story is that math and art aren’t polar opposites. They are really two sides of the same coin. Or Charlie would say they are like complementary angles (warning: REALLY bad math joke—math and art are complementary because when you add them together you don’t get a wrong; you get a right—feel free to groan now).
Mathematicians, scientists, and artists are all trying to understand the essence of the universe. They just use different mediums. Once I realized how interrelated they are, I could see beauty in both math and art. And that made math seem a lot less foreign and a lot less scary to me. I hope that when people read Love and Other Unknown Variables they can see that too.
Shannon Lee Alexander.
Shannon Lee Alexander is a wife and mother (of two kids and one yellow terrier named Harriet Potter). She is passionate about coffee, books, and cancer research. Math makes her break out in a sweat. LOVE AND OTHER UNKNOWN VARIABLES is her debut novel. She currently lives in Indianapolis with her family.
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