Elaine Vickers On Inspiration & Writing With Friends

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Elaine Vickers, author of Fadeaway. Elaine is an award-winning author of picture books, middle grade, and young adult novels that aim to help readers of all ages find connection and belonging. .

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

This book began with a character—and I think this is the first time that’s been true. Just a kid missing his older brother, Jake. Where was he? What happened to him? He didn’t know, and neither did I. Over the next few months, we figured it out together.

 Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

Not long after that initial character appeared, I attended a youth night with my son and listened to a speaker tell his own powerful story of addiction and struggle and love and redemption. It was like a lightning bolt; although none of the details were the same, the man at the mic had just articulated the core of the story I needed to write. He had helped answer both essential questions of where Jake had gone, and why. But I knew it wasn’t going to be a linear story from a single perspective, because that’s not how addiction works, or how life works, for that matter. From there, I knew that in order to tell this story the way I wanted to, I needed to give voice to all the people who loved Jake—and even a few who didn’t.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

I often know where a story ends and a few guideposts along the way, but the actual journey never ceases to surprise me. For Fadeaway, one of the biggest surprises was how many lives were impacted in really huge ways by Jake’s disappearance. (I ended up with POV characters ages 11-85!) But of course that’s how it would work. Our lives are more interconnected than we realize.

And I honestly never intended to write a YA. Fadeaway started out as a middle grade novel in verse—which I also never intended to write. Nothing I’ve ever written has surprised me as much as this book—at every turn, and in every possible way. But eventually, it became what it needed to be, I think.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I have a note in my phone called Seed Packet where I jot new ideas. At last count, there were about a hundred ideas in there for everything from picture books to plays to novels. Very few of them are actually viable to grow into anything good. Ha! But it’s strange (or maybe not strange at all) how a story seed can seem totally unviable one day and brimming with possibility another. So I go through life, gathering all the tiny seeds of ideas, then open the packet when I’m ready to play around with something and try planting it. Whichever is speaking to me, whichever one I just can’t wait to play around with, that’s the one I pull out.

I have 5 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

Ha! That is truly an impressive number of cats!

For me, writing is largely a solitary endeavor, but sometimes I do love to gather with friends for a writing retreat. (Well, when there isn’t a global pandemic. J) There’s something energizing about the crackle of keyboards and the hum of ideas that happens when you’re all working together. (And the social pressure to keep writing while your friends are being productive doesn’t hurt either.)

Kate Weinberg On Writing From Theme, Not Plot

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Kate Weinberg, author of The Truants, one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Crime Novels of 2020. Borrowing details from the life and work of Christie as the catalyst for its ingenious plot – in particular her mysterious, 11-day disappearance in 1926 – this scintillating novel begins on an otherwise unglamorous concrete campus in England’s gloomy north and ultimately travels to a remote Italian island where secrets and cloudy motives will lead to unforeseen consequences. The result is not a classic mystery in the Christie school, but rather a literary novel of suspense that explores themes of female friendship, love, deceit, obsession, mentorship, loyalty, art, and death.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

How long have you got?! My book started forming itself about 15 years before it was published. I studied in a famous creative writing programme in Norfolk, England, where my English literature teacher, Professor Lorna Sage, became the inspiration for the Lorna in my book. Although I am quite different from my narrator, Jess, and I pushed her relationship with the Lorna in my book into much deeper, darker corners, the spark for the story was the same: I was that student, longing for a mentor and romance, desperate for an intellectual and emotional wake-up that would lay the path for an extraordinary life. 

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

With a huge amount of trial and error! It was like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. I knew some of the characters I wanted (Lorna, Jess, and a love interest); I knew the themes I wanted to tackle – wanting to vanish from your old life and be seen afresh in a new one – and I knew I wanted a murder mystery element because I’ve always loved books with a taut, suspense element. So I was constantly adding and then rebalancing between character and story. I feel like if you could make a cross-section of the process of The Truants you’d find as many layers as you’d have in a thick pastry! 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

With me, it’s more the other way round: I don’t have the plot firmly in place before I get to the writing stage. I have a real sense of characters, themes and a loose sense of the story, and then as I write I have to fix the story. 

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

Plenty of ideas come, but not many stick around. I find one of the most rewarding things as a writer is to excavate old ideas – which have never come to anything – and realise that I can now see a way to making them come alive.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I’m a slow writer, so I don’t have that problem. I’m now working on a second book which has even more autobiographical roots than the first one, so I always knew I wanted to write it. I just feel now that I am ready.

I have 5 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

It depends what stage I’m at. If I am in the first draft I find it really helpful to have another body in the room, and to have set up a structure for a day, with breaks: it stops me procrastinating and seeking out company and connection (annoyingly I am not solitary, or disciplined by nature.) But if I am into one of the last drafts and I have momentum I’m better off working by myself. I can write deep into the night, and when its flowing like that, I never feel lonely.

Nicole Lesperance on Finding Inspiration in Lesser-Known Legends

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Nicole Lesperance, a YA/MG writer and a tech research editor. Her debut MG novel, THE NIGHTMARE THIEF, will be published by Sourcebooks in January 2021. Her debut YA novel, THE WIDE STARLIGHT, will be published by Razorbill in February 2021.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

I read somewhere a long time ago that there were legends about the Northern Lights, saying if you whistled at them, they’d swoop down and carry you away. That concept rattled around in my head for a while, and when I finally started researching the stories, I discovered a ton of different ones from all over the world, from Greek to Norse to Estonian to Indigenous people all over the Arctic. There are all kinds of ideas for what they might be, from horse-drawn carriages to fire foxes to Valkyrie to spirits playing a game with the skull of a walrus.

My head was whirling with all the different possibilities, and when I first started to draft this idea, it was just a short story about a girl whose best friend whistled at the lights, and they came down and touched his hand and changed him in this mystical and unsettling way. I wrote a few pages of that and realized I wanted it to be a deeper family story, and I decided it would be about that girl and her mother.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

This book has been through a few different iterations. I first wrote a version that was set partly in Canada, then ended up scrapping that and changing that part to Svalbard, which is an Arctic archipelago way up north of Norway. As I started researching, I stumbled upon a bunch of Norwegian fairy tales. The only one I was familiar with was “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” but there were all these other stories like “The Tale of Prince Lindworm” and “The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body.” They were so much more gruesome and captivating than the fairy tales we tend to read here in the US. I decided to frame my main character’s memories as fairy tales, and I incorporated a lot of the elements from those traditional stories into them.

So half of the story is those memories, and then the present-day narrative is set on Cape Cod, where I grew up, and Svalbard, which I was lucky to be able to travel to in 2019 — back when we could still go places. At the heart, this is a story about a girl named Eli who lost her mother, and about how her mother struggled to do the right thing but ultimately made a terrible mistake. I poured a lot of my own anxieties and worries as a parent into Eli’s mom. It can often feel like you’re messing everything up all the time as a parent, and her mom’s choices in the book are sort of an evolved version of that. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Yes, I often say that my characters don’t always behave, and in a lot of my writing, I’ve struggled with expecting them to do one thing, but then they end up behaving completely differently once I’ve had time to build out their personalities through writing them. With this book, by the time I settled on the final setting and story, it actually went very smoothly, and that’s probably because I knew Eli so well by then. The fairy tales sort of wrote themselves, which was pretty unusual for me but pretty amazing to experience, and they didn’t change much from first to final draft.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I’m pretty slow to come up with ideas and plots, and I’m super jealous of people who can manifest a bunch of different, wildly creative ideas quickly. It’s actually one of the reasons why I didn’t start writing books until well into adulthood. I honestly didn’t think I was creative enough to write an entire book. But it turned out I just needed to give my ideas a lot of time to develop. Often it takes a few months or even years of setting them on the back burner of my brain and letting them cook until they’re ready. 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

These days I’m writing MG and YA books at the same time, so I feel like I’ve always got a few ideas going, in various stages of development. My agent and critique partners are incredibly helpful for bouncing ideas off, like I might have two or three options and see which one resonates with them. Sometimes just the process of writing a quick description of each idea helps me figure out which one is coming together the best and which one I’m the most excited about. 

I have 5 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

Wow, five cats!!! That’s my dream! I have two cats, and one of them is definitely my co-author. He likes to snuggle up next to me while I’m writing and sometimes helps by adding paragraphs of nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn or ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, to my manuscripts.