There’s a new interview of me up on the B&N.com blog Unabashedly Bookish. Jill Dearman has questioned me about what noir influenced the noir you’ll find in DANI NOIR, my writing process, and my many distractions.
Here’s a snippet from the interview:
JD: How do you switch gears between YA and adult fiction?
NRS: I used to write only adult fiction, but switching gears to YA was far easier than I expected—and felt so natural. For me it’s two things: Being true to the voice, and the point from which the story is being told. If I’m writing an adult character, I’m writing an adult story. If I’m writing a teenager, it’s likely I’m writing YA. I always write in first person—it’s my favorite voice to try to capture as a writer, and also my favorite voice to read—so it’s my characters who decide what I’m writing more than I do.
But there’s more to it than the voice. For me, when I’m writing for adults I feel more removed—I tend to write those stories as if looking back from a distance. I think I could set out to write the same coming-of-age story about the same girl, but if I decided to write it as an adult story it would have a far different flavor than writing it as YA.
Dani Noir, for example—which is technically tween, not YA—was so in the moment, it came out in present tense. There’s no sense of the future, no perspective, and I think that speaks to my character more than anything else. You watch her make her mistakes as she makes them; only later does she gather any wisdom about what she’s done.
Right now, I’m still all about writing in the moment. The novel I’m in the midst of writing, called Imaginary Girls, is YA and it feels so alive, so exhilarating to put down on the page, that sometimes I think I’ll never go back to writing adult fiction. Not to mention that the YA community is so phenomenal, I can’t imagine living without it. So we’ll see. I’m happy here, so I think I’ll keep my gears where they are for a while.
For the rest of the interview, visit barnesandnoble.com!
