Image from GirlsLife.com.
1. Please tell us about your upcoming book, We Weren't Looking to be Found.
It’s a story about two teenage girls from very different backgrounds who end up at a residential treatment facility after each experiences a personal crisis. Wealthy, outspoken Dani quickly clashes with her more guarded roommate Camila, and both girls determine they have nothing in common other than the fact that neither of them wants to be there.
But when they’re assigned to clean out the facility’s Lost and Found, Dani and Camila stumble across a music box filled with mysterious letters written from a past resident. Together they fall down a rabbit hole of intrigue, determined to find the letters’ author and learn her fate, which just might be connected to their own.
2. What inspires you to write for youth?
I’m mostly drawn to YA because I enjoy writing about adolescence. Developmentally, it’s a uniquely salient period in one’s life—there’s so much possibility and impending transition that it’s fun, as an adult, to re-explore it. But as to what inspires me about writing for youth, I would have to say it’s an aspiration for honesty.
As adults, I think we’re often afraid to let children know the truth about the world, and so we curate and distort the stories we tell them based on these fears. When I was a teenager, I remember feeling endlessly frustrated by books that were supposedly written for me that wouldn’t let me see harsher realities or unhappy endings. Then I read Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War and felt that, finally, here was an author who had the courage to tell teens the truth about authority and corruption and powerlessness. I want to have that courage, too.
3. What strategies do you use for unlocking the inner lives of characters?
In a book like We Weren’t Looking to be Found, which alternates between two first-person perspectives, I knew the voices had to be distinct for the story to work. Fortunately, the personality contrast between Dani and Camila is one of the central conflicts of the narrative, so that gave me a starting point.
Initially, I focused on defining each character’s core values, as well as their unconscious beliefs about themselves, their relationships with others, and their relationship to the world around them.
Dani, who is rich and rebellious, is defined by her oppositional nature. She criticizes everything, believes she’s too good for everything, and she’s also privileged and entitled in ways she doesn’t recognize. But being oppositional also means she doesn’t have anyone on her side, which is a lonely place to be.
Camila, on the other hand, is a loner who is hyper-focused on her own personal success and failure as a dancer. She doesn’t need others and believes that such neediness can only lead to weakness. But repressing her emotions and refusing to show vulnerability means she doesn’t know how to ask for help when she needs it.
By defining these central traits and beliefs up front, I was able to get into the character’s heads and understand how they would respond to a given situation. For example, walking into a room full of strangers, Dani would be able to clock the status of everyone around her; she’d generate snide internal comments about who was trying too hard, who wasn’t fitting in, and she’d also draw others toward her by the sheer force of her confidence and personality.
Camila, in contrast, would walk into the same room and immediately ruminate over her own low status, her perceived inability to adjust to any social demands, and her resentment over having to be in the room in the first place. If anyone approached her, she would assume it would be out of pity or that they wanted something from her.
4. Any messages for teachers who use your books in their classrooms?
Thank you! It’s really an incredible honor, and I love hearing from students who are reading my work.
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