top books for young adults

The 3rd, 2nd & 1st Best Thing Kiera Cass Said @ the Blacksburg Public Library / PART 4

(These last three are short so I’m just clustering them together.)

3. “I knew there was something a little off about me; I just didn’t know what it was… but now I own it. I’m okay with being a weirdo.”

If that isn’t the journey through young adulthood, I don’t know what is. Everyone is off, and everyone feels that it’s only them. And then they get over it.

2. CENSORED.

Ok, this one was really odd and funny, but I’m editing it out. For those of you in attendance: no, this was not Keira’s comment about “soft core porn.” It was better than that. But after some reflection, I couldn’t recall with 100% clarity whether or not this was one of the “hushhush secrets not to leave this room” or not. To be on the safe side, I’m just cutting it. One might ask why I didn’t go with FIVE Best Things in the first place? Well, that would have made sense of course, and in a perfect world I would have planned better. Sorry! For now, I just need a placeholder… or a math tutor… or something.

KieraCass (1024x656)1. “Maybe I can be there for your next baby, too.”

This has nothing to do with Kiera Cass the writer, but a good bit to do with Kiera Cass the person. Earlier in the evening, Kiera had mentioned how she was tweeting in the delivery room after the birth of her daughter. When I got my book signed, I told her I would follow her on twitter so I could be there for the birth of her next baby. (Not that she’s pregnant, people… don’t get excited! I mean in the far future, whenever that day should come.) As I walked away, she called, “Maybe I can be there for your next baby too!”

And as unlikely as that is (I have four kids already, which is, let me tell you, a LOT of kids), I thought it was so sweet of her to make that gesture—in essence to say that there might be a world in which we could be actual friends.

The Fourth Best Thing Kiera Cass Said @ the Blacksburg Public Library / PART 3

“Who decides to start a career when you have a two month old?”

I loved this because it is so life.

Kiera was talking about how she was had just given birth and gotten her land-legs as a new parent when she started trying to find an agent to represent her for The Selection. In something of a whirlwind, she found several agents who wanted to sell her book and subsequently received bids from a couple of different publishing houses.

Meanwhile, as she set forth on this new career path, she was also doing all the normal diaper-changing/singing-the-baby-back-to-sleep-at-2-in-the-morning things that infants require. And somehow, it worked.

As I repeatedly tell my husband (usually after he asks me “What were we thinking?!”): if we waited until we were ready to have kids, we’d never have them.

Life doesn’t just stop and present you with a flawless bubble in which to birth and rear your children. Case in point: I am literally nursing my son as I write this blog.

(Sorry if that was TMI, but it had to be said.)

So here’s the nutshell: Don’t wait for the perfect hour to start something. The perfect hour doesn’t exist. Just figure out where your priorities are and start acting on them.

The Fifth Best Thing Kiera Cass Said @ the Blacksburg Public Library / PART 2

IMG_2131“I couldn’t find a place to put it, so I just put it in the future.”

When planning out her setting for The Selection, Kiera Cass (a history major in college) struggled to find the right moment in time for her story. She knew she wanted something with a bit of a fairy-tale gloss, but the whole long-ago/far-away thing just wasn’t working for her. So she decided to free herself from the confines of the past and place her tale in an imaginary future.

This, folks, is problem solving at its best.

Sure, there’s the whole world-building thing to figure out, but there’s also a blessed freedom to the idea of going out into the unknown—in an entirely opposite direction from your own preconceived notions about what should or should not be.

So when life gives you lemons, you don’t have to make lemonade. You can just cut up the lemons and add them to your iced tea. Or juggle them while gargling soda. Or throw them out altogether and pour yourself a glass of bourbon. Whatever works.

Good to remember. Thanks, Kiera.

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The Sixth Best Thing Kiera Cass Said @ the Blacksburg Public Library… plus way too much randomness from me / PART 1

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Kiera Cass @ library book signing

“My soul is seventeen.”

Kiera Cass is a woman with open arms. Open eyes. Open mouth. (And I mean that as a compliment. Open mouths lead to all kinds of good things: understanding, song, the eating of peanut butter M&Ms.) Unlike certain writers I know, she appears genuinely to appreciate the existence of other human beings, specifically young ones.

In the hour or so that she chatted with a smattering of folks at her hometown library on Tuesday, Kiera had kind words to say about the gazillion people she’s encountered in her career as a writer. However, the one (nameless) person about which she did NOT have nice things to say was a young adult writer she met who hated young adults.

Kiera may have been too polite to ask the obvious question—“WHY IN THE HECK ARE YOU WRITING FOR TEENS?”—but it’s a question worth asking.

It’s one I’ve had to ask myself of late. Not because I’m a hater; I happen to adore teenagers and all their energy and intelligence and worry and wildness. The question is one I need to ask myself for the simple reason that I am also writing for teens. So really, why am I doing it?

When I was myself a young adult, I wasn’t exposed to a lot in the teen lit genre. I went straight from Ella Fannie’s Elephant Joke Book to Chronicles of Narnia to Kurt Vonnegut. Oh yeah, I cried me good over some Judy Bloom at some point in between, but that was about it.

Thus, as a young writer, it never occurred to me to write for young people specifically. I didn’t know people DID that. (And at that time, not so many of them did.) Plus, I just wanted to play with language and make up tiny stories and think about true things. Translation: I became a poet. And in good poet fashion, I spent years and years writing lyric observations of the sky that were ignored by everyone and everything, including the sky.

Then I had an idea that was not a poem and was not a tiny story and was not “great literature.” It was fun and light and entertaining (or at least it entertained me). Around the same time I was teaching a class on the American bestseller, and a whole slew of college freshmen started telling me about their favorite books. I started reading the books they were excited about, which were in this new (to me) genre called “young adult.” As a writer, the notion that authors could write books for young people—not for snooty intellectual-types—was quite frankly a revelation.

Suddenly, writing the big bad novel was not so scary anymore. I just needed to focus on the idea of telling an entertaining story and let the rest take care of itself. I didn’t have to impress Kurt Vonnegut or the people who read Kurt Vonnegut. I didn’t even have to impress the people who kept books by Kurt Vonnegut unopened on their bedside tables. I simply had to please myself and my imagined audience. (Oh yes, and my co-writer, the astounding Madelyn Rosenberg… but more about her in a future blog.)

This experience of writing a YA novel has opened a sort of floodgate of possibilities for me. When I was in high school, I may have had the soul of a crusty 80-year-old fisherman… but now, as I have gone forward into life, I think my soul may be aging in reverse order.

I’m not quite sure I could say, like Kiera Cass, that it’s seventeen.

My soul is a little more gawky and hopeful and clueless than that.

Closer, I think, to sixteen.

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** FOOTNOTE: Just want to add that I do not intend to dis Kurt Vonnegut in any way. He is one of my faves. And he had some great stuff to say about the writing process, too.