Yesterday I interviewed Siobhan Nichols (author of The Darling Rebels, out in ten days on Diversion Press!) and today she’s interviewed me!
-How long did it take you to write ‘Green’?
Well, that’s sort of a tricky question. The idea for the basic identity of Lindy’s character — a high school girl who was literally the embodiment of the universe, of all history — came to me in my junior year of high school, but her name wasn’t Lindy, she was a cheerleader, and the rest of the world in which she lived was very unclear. I tried a few times to write her story, but it never panned out since I didn’t really have any direction.
In college, I focused on writing in entirely different genres and expanding my skill set. I still read fantasy/paranormal romance/magical realism, but in my head, it was never the genre that I intended to write… which was mostly just stubbornness on my part, actually, and an almost religious deference to J.K. Rowling.
Then, about six months after my college graduation, I went back to campus to visit my best friend, who writes comics and whose creativity I envy. I fully maintain that there’s just some sort of fantastical idea-bug in the air wherever she is, because I fell asleep… I woke up at five o’clock in the morning… wrote 25 pages of what was to be Green… and fell back asleep. When I woke at a more reasonable time, I found the pages, reread what I’d written, and knew that somehow, I’d finally found the story I was meant to write!
From there, the rough draft of Green took five months, and the second draft about 90 days. After that it went to the Focus Group, who had it for about six weeks and sent back their suggestions.
-Do you listen to music while you’re writing? If yes, what sort of music? If no, tell me what kind of music do you like anyway?
I’m one of those people who needs to have some kind of built-in distraction to focus, otherwise I go off in search of something with which to procrastinate. I almost always listen to music while writing, or else I watch seasons of TV shows that I’ve basically memorized in the background. Writing Green was a labor of Fall Out Boy’s Folie A Deux, Vanessa Carlton’s Heroes & Thieves, and all of the leaked live tracks by Robert Pattinson… but I wrote a large portion of Green on the New York subway system and Staten Island Ferry, and my iPod Shuffle has everything from Huey Lewis & The News to Sia to Hanson to Bruce Springsteen.
I also watched a lot of The Office (US), Two of a Kind, and Castle.
-What did you dream of being when you were growing up? (Wow, that’s such a cliche question.)
I took the adage “You can be whatever you want when you grow up!” very literally for a long time.
My original goal for the future was to be a Muppet.
Not a Muppeteer.
A Muppet. I really wanted to date Kermit the Frog, or at least Iggy Iguana from Under the Umbrella Tree.
After I learned that I could be anything I wanted within the parameters of “being a human,” I really wanted to be a famous ballerina who wrote award-winning novels on the side, and who owned a “dapple-gray thoroughbred.” I also really wanted to star in my own Disney Channel Original Series because I was envious of Lizzie McGuire’s hair.
I’m still envious of Disney Channel hair, and I’m determined to buy at least one custom Muppet from FAO Schwartz, but I don’t dance anymore and I have no room in my apartment for a horse. I figure retaining a desire for one outta three ain’t bad.
-A lot of authors write the kind of books that they want to read. Would this mean that you like to read supernatural/magical books?
It’s the funniest thing, but I didn’t realize until I was about 35,000 words into Green that I really do enjoy stories that fall into the “fantasy” category. Because I’d never really gotten into any of the more seminal fantasy/sci-fi authors — Tolkien, Tamora Pierce, Asimov, Gaiman — I just figured that my intense love for Harry Potter… and books like Harry Potter… was a fluke. It was when I started putting together my “Recommended Reading” list for my website (which is forthcoming… it’s really, really long) that I noticed that almost every favorite book I’ve ever had has had some fantastical element to it… life as a genetically-altered clone, monsters arriving in the mail, learning spellwork from battered old library books. Even books like The Princess Diaries, which is ostensibly contemporary realism, are fantastic in that way that no one REALLY suddenly discovers in the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo that they’re a princess.
So the short answer is “yes, I enjoy fantasy and magical realism novels.” Haha!
However, I never really like having to call Green “just” a fantasy novel or a paranormal romance or magical realism. There are a lot of elements of realistic historical fiction — which I adore; I used to live for the American Girl books, and I majored in History in college. Even though there are obviously a lot of supernatural elements to Green, I think its greatest strength is that I wrote it with the mindset that it was not about the supernatural, but about the characters’ lives. One of the most unanimous compliments that the Focus Group had was on the relatability of Green and the ways that the fantastical was used, more as a facet of Lindy’s life than a separate element from it.
-Name a strength and a weakness in your writing style.
I think that my strongest suit is imagery… When I was in third grade, I got in trouble for writing my Young Author’s story with too many meticulous descriptions of the heroine’s clothing and home and foods. Normally that’d be fine, if there had been a plot in any way to float them. I’d like to think that I’ve struck more of a balance since then?
I think my weakness is probably either being too verbose at times — shocker! — or writing the dialogue for arguments. Writing interpersonal conflict has always been a weak point of mine, since it’s so much easier for me to write intrapersonal conflict. I do try, though!
-Being a huge creeper, I see that you live in New York City. Are you inspired by where you live and how the people around you live?
I actually don’t live in NYC anymore! I lived there for a year, writing for The Hollywood Reporter and Tommy2.net, working for local indie bands, and makin’ lattes at Starbucks. I did write the entirety of the rough draft of Green there, as well as most of the second.
I think I always expected New York to inspire me more than it did, in a lot of ways. Because I was so young and fresh out of college when I was living there, most of my life consisted of stress and being desperately poor and running around from place to place, trying to find the New York I’d always been looking for.
I did get a lot of amazing writing fodder and life experience out of my time in the city — squatting for four months in Brooklyn in a building condemned by the Health Department on over 250 violations, then roving around from borough to borough every week, couch-surfing… and even spending a week pretending to be enrolled in Monmouth University in New Jersey to sleep in their dorms! Haha! Spilling boiling coffee all over Mr. Big from Sex and the City… going to a party hosted by Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and ending up on The Real World: Brooklyn… having the automated MTA Ticket Booth eat my money at 3AM in the Village after seeing the midnight premiere of How To Be and not having any more and being stuck in Manhattan until the attendant arrived at 6AM, just in time for my two-hour commute back to Staten Island… exploring Times Square at night, waiting for the 1-train, and falling in love a little more each time.
I also did a lot of writing on my four-hour daily commute, so there are a lot of scenes that are prefaced in my notebooks with, “Awkward: Sitting next to someone’s 80-year-old grandma.”
-How did you pick the name Lindy for your protagonist?
Originally, her name was Rian, so that I could make wordplay out of “Rian/reincarnation.” This was back when she was a cheerleader and had no plot.
I didn’t change her name until I was maybe 20,000 or 25,000 words into the rough draft. She just didn’t feel like a “Rian” anymore.
I was on the Staten Island Ferry after a closing shift at Starbucks, so about 5AM, in pouring rain, trying to stay upright while the boat knocked around on the dock and so tired I was basically cross-eyed — and still with an hour to go before home — when a girl in front of me put on a backpack that had a name written on it. It was too blurry to actually see, and I’m pretty sure now that it was just the placard for the company that made the backpack, but it made the name “Lindy Cook” pop into my head.
So if there really is a Lindy Cook out there on Staten Island, I guess she’s very inspirational. I think it actually just said JanSport, though.
-Since ‘Green’ deals with a lot of historical events and people, which one was your favorite to write about?
Ahhh, this is tough because I can’t give away spoilers! It’s also a little like asking me to choose a favorite child, since each of the historical characters took so much care in researching and creating and making sure that I could be faithful to the real girls and women who lived similar lives in those times. A few are actually my fictionalized versions of real historical figures, although very, very little-known, who I wanted to see given tribute and who I thought were unlikely to ever really get the remembrance they deserved. Others are wholly creations of my own, and those were a lot of fun as well.
For some, I visited my parents and said, “Hey, Dad, list ten random years in history and ten random countries,” and I mixed and matched his answers.
Not all of those worked.
For another, I called my grandmother and had her tell me what her experience of the Kennedy assassination was like.
For all, I really wanted to focus on the aspects of daily life would have been like, more than trying to cover any sort of sweeping historical commentary. Their lives and the snippets of them that the reader sees in Green weren’t made of political reforms and shipwrecks and artistic masterpieces, but how those were perceived and affected by them. That’s the part of History that fascinated me as a little girl reading Meet Samantha, and as a college student studying History for my thesis papers. The connections between their lives and the life led by Lindy, now — and hopefully the reader, too — are what I really hoped to come through.
-I saw this question on your blog and I wanted to ask you the same thing, so forgive me for borrowing your question. Which authors, living or dead, would you like to have dinner with?
I’ll answer with the same parameter I asked — three living, three dead.
I’d invite J.K. Rowling, because I really admire her convictions about societal change and her recognition of the kind of influence she has, and how she uses her work so subtly and so effectively communicate the ideals she believes in, and her commitment to really giving her readers a whole, developed world, and using that world to be so respectful of her characters, was really, really inspirational to me in developing Lindy’s universe (pun, a little!) and the people and supernatural creatures who inhabit it.
I would invite Jack Kerouac, because his approach to prose fascinates me. He writes the ugliest people, the ugliest places, with so much beauty that it almost hurts to read it and not get to live it. There’s a passage in Visions of Cody where Kerouac describes a pickup football game of neighborhood boys, Neal Casady, and himself, and it goes on and on with every play and every scraped knee and the sky and the leaves, and it’s about three pages long… in one sentence. It’s remarkable, and beautiful. Dharma Bums is one of my favorite books of all time and is absolutely astonishing.
I think that F. Scott Fitzgerald would also fit in well, because I feel like he and Jack would get along well as drinking buddies, and I’d want to be there when they started to wax philosophical about the state of the modern world and speak in beautiful, sad imagery. The way that Fitzgerald punctuates his long strings of morose narration with stings of dialogue is something that I tried to emulate in college. “You always look so cool.”
I’d round the table off with Meg Cabot, because she would add levity to the table; Jonathan Larson, because I think songwriters should could and because his work is probably the third- or fourth-most influential on mine due to my Rent obsession in high school and the emotionscapes that he can create in so few words; and Carolyn Mackler, because I was really intimidated when I met her and just stood there feeling shy, and I’d like to make a better impression and get to talk to her about how gorgeously honest her work is.
-Do you have a favorite place to write?
I probably write most productively at my desk, but my favorite place to write is the coffee shop next door. Today was actually a heavenly writing day — cool and rainy, sitting at a table in the window with a peanut butter mocha and a chocolate-chip cupcake. I write best in the autumn and on overcast days.
