Each year, the Word for Word Literary Series dedicates an event to instructors from Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) online creative writing programs. This year, the spotlight was on young adult literature, with instructors Adrienne Kisner and Melissa Marr reading and discussing their work.
Adrienne Kisner is the author of three novels for young adults, including the award-winning Dear Rachel Maddow and The Confusion of Laurel Graham. She has graduate degrees in Theology from Boston University and graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts with an MFA in writing for children and young adults. She has taught creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University for six years and also tries to convince college students to make good choices in her role as a Resident Hall Director at Boston University. Please tell your cat she said, “Pspspspsps.”
Melissa Marr writes fiction for adults, teens, and children. Her books have been translated into 28 languages and been bestsellers in the US and overseas. Her most recent YA is The Strange Case of Harleen & Harley (D.C. Comics, October 2024), which will be closely followed by a re-issue of her debut books, Wicked Lovely and Ink Exchange (HarperCollins) in both the U.S. and the U.K. If she’s not in the desert she currently calls home, she’s either at the nearest body of water or on her annual visit to Scotland.
The following is an edited transcript of Adrienne and Melissa’s interview.
W4W: There’s a lot of humor and sarcasm in your piece. What drew you to this specific type of young adult writing as opposed leaning into the supernatural or more serious issues that a lot of our youth are attracted to as well?
AK: I like to read supernatural and dystopian, and I’m actually a big fan of Melissa’s, and it’s an honor to be here. I have written forays into fantasy worlds, but I’ve always sort of been most fascinated by the world around me.
The books I tend to write, like Dear Rachel Maddow and Six Angry Girls and The Confusion of Laurel Graham, are all about social activism. And the piece I read from tonight is about union organizing. I think it started in eighth grade civics class. I was student of the month every month. That’s probably one of my greatest academic achievements to date. And I won a Pop-Tarts VHS comedy video. And it just went hand in hand. So I think that started me off on this particular contemporary YA genre.
W4W: You studied theology at Boston University. How does that fit in with your writing?
AK: The first two novels I wrote were YA contemporary, and they had religious subtexts, but nobody was really interested. They were far too secular to be considered contemporary Christian. But they were also too religious to be right in the market. I wrote a middle grade novel as a sort of palate cleanser. In my fourth novel, Dear Rachel Maddow, I put everything that makes me angry in life, every wrong ever done to me in this world, into the book. That’s the one that sold.
W4W: S
o would your advice to our audience be to write it all on paper—no bars held—and then concentrate on the market? Throw it all at the wall and see what happens?
AK: Well, at the risk of being controversial, I would give this advice to people who identify as women. Not for nothing, but angry men have gotten a lot of say in things. Like Six Angry Girls is literally a take-off on Twelve Angry Men. So yes, yes, get angry and put it out there. Is it safe? No. It’s a very vulnerable thing. Carrie Fisher said, “Take your broken heart and make it into art.” And Nora Ephron said, “It’s all copy.” So between those two things, yes, just put it in there.
W4W: Melissa, what about you? Is anger a part of what you write? And if so, how does it come out in your work?
MM: I have a framework where, in my fantasy fiction, I distract people by the story, so they don’t always catch on at first that they’re going to be reading about rage, revenge, equality, volition, those fun things. If I distract them with a fantastic element, I can put in things that matter as well. Rather than admitting that I’m writing about bigger issues, I address the fantastic. And then once readers are in, they’re trapped. And once they’re trapped, I can talk to them about rage and pedagogy and the importance of standing up for your beliefs and your peers and et cetera. But if I don’t have that framework, I don’t reach as many readers. I have to start with the fantastic, like Shakespeare, like Beowulf, like Frankenstein.
W4W: Your debut was a YA. But then you departed from YA and wrote in other genres for other age groups, then came back to YA. You move freely in and out of the YA space. Is that common?
MM: [CHUCKLES] It is not common. And I will tell you that a fair number of my editors and my very patient agent have not approved of my mobility there. But I don’t think I start with demographic. I don’t start with format. I start with plot. I start with a concept. And then as I’m doing that, I decide, well, where does this fit?
I don’t read just YA. I read adult. I read fantasy. I read sci-fi. I love horror. I love picture books. So it seems foolish to say that I have to stay in my lane. I don’t always go to the grocery store the same way. I get lost regularly. It’s excellent. Same deal.
W4W: Adrienne, what genre do you enjoy writing the most? And do you find that the books that you write with joy have a better reception?
AK: I would say that young adult fiction isn’t a genre, it’s a market category. Where will you find these books on the shelf? Who are they trying to market these books toward? I worked at a children’s library, and I was always surrounded by books. When I read The Baby-sitters Club, I thought, I want to work with children with autism because there was a character who does that. I always wanted to work with kids and be with kids. And so it seemed natural to write for them.
My academic work is about spiritual development, and I think that kept me with teenagers. In terms of joy, there is joy in writing. Angst is also there. I think maybe I write for teens because I have the angst. But in terms of story, I start generally with character or just a snippet of an idea, and then it’s like, “What if this happens?”
It seems to be YA contemporary where I have the most questions. The Confusion of Laurel Graham is about birdwatching. One day I was standing at the bus stop, waiting for my kids. I had a bird-identifying app. I took a picture and it’s like, “That is a warbler.” But it was a fire truck. I’m like, OK, this is useless in a city. The idea that came from that was, well, what if somebody had to identify a bird and there was a deadline, and if they didn’t meet the deadline, disaster was going to befall her? That’s the kind of stuff that inspires me. There are moments of joy when I’m like, heeheehee, this is funny. I amuse myself a lot. I don’t know if I amuse anyone else, but I amuse myself. Are those my best books? I don’t know. I can’t tell.
The one I like the best and what seems to do best out in the world varies. In terms of advice for other writers, write what you want and what you need to write. That’s really the only thing you can do to have an honest story, and it will connect with the readers who it’s meant to connect with.
MM: I don’t know if what I like best is what sells best. I wrote Wicked Lovely to pay for my daughter’s schooling. She was 12, and I was teaching English, and we were reading a lot of fantasy together. And she said, why are all these characters so mainstream? Why are none of them, like, tattooed and pierced?
And at the time, I had facial piercings, and I have about 40 hours of tattoos. My daughter’s like, where are people like you? Where are people that don’t want a fate? Where are people that get angry? And so I started writing Wicked Lovely for my kid. They tell you not to do that. You’re not to write books for your kid. That’s not how you write children’s fiction. But there it is.
I wrote a book for her. I sent it out. Wicked Lovely sold in an international deal and earned out before it was printed. It’s sold a couple of million copies. They’re reissuing it in the US, the first two. They reissued the first five. And the self-published prequel I had written in the UK, they reissued those last week. So, I mean, it’s done well. It paid for her college. She got the scholarships and the grants and everything and paid for her graduate school. The love I had for the story was partly writing something that my daughter and I saw as a lack in the market.
My second-best stuff, if we move Wicked Lovely to the side, is a picture book I wrote when my baby was three days old. I adopted a fabulous human when he was a day old. He had died on the day he was born and resuscitated. So, I wrote a picture book promising to love him forever.
And that one has reached 200,000 children, which is cool. I make $0.24 a book, so you can do that math. But I think that what those had is they had my passion. It wasn’t necessarily my joy or my sorrow or– and I have no sense of humor, unlike you, Adrienne. I am, like, incredibly boring. But I have passion, and a lot of writing for me is following that passion.
And the books that I feel the most passionate about actually are the ones that pay the bills. So, trust your passion.
W4W: Dialogue is important in writing, but especially in young adult literature. You want to be able to capture these characters and how they interact with each other and how they bounce off each other and develop. So where do you start with dialogue? And how do you get to a point where you may use new words or dialect to make it feel authentic?
MM: I think it’s a bad idea to try and keep fresh, to be quite honest. Wicked Lovely is being reissued after 20 years. I’m not changing the dialogue in it. I’m not changing the slang. I did want to take out—there was a reference to a pager. We don’t use those now, but that was it, because I used the language. Like, within your friend group, you have diction that is specific to your community. And I think having friend-group slang or friend-group diction is far less dating your book.
If you fall into all the contemporary slang, if you choose something that’s of the moment, if everything is a rizzler and sigma and all those fun words that I’m learning from my now 12-year-old, that means in 10 years, my book has expired. So, what I think is important is thinking about the kid you were and how to create a diction and dialogue that is unique to the slang of the community. Like, are they music buffs? Do they use reference within music?
W4W: Adrienne, how do you approach dialogue?
AK: I have the opposite belief. [CHUCKLING] I think as soon as you write contemporary, it’s historical fiction because it sells two years before it’s going to go out. And even if they crash a book, it won’t be out for ages. But I think it’s so funny to have a little snippet of a piece of time. And that is why I use real places, especially in Western Pennsylvania. All my YA is in a place I think of as mythic Pennsylvania, which is a mix of contemporary Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania of my youth, and utter fake Pennsylvania made up for my convenience.
But Eat’n Park and Sheetz and all—those places are real and they’re still there. Will they be there forever? I don’t know. But I love them. And I love language. And even if it’s not going to be around in two years, it’s a lens on a moment of time. And I live amongst college students, and I now know that I am old. I used to think that I was in sort of a moment of stasis because they both aged me and kept me young at the same time.
And I do watch a lot of TikTok, much to my chagrin. I keep trying to stop, but I can’t. And it’s very cutesy, very demure. And would I put that in a book? Probably not, because that changes too rapidly. But every once in a while, a word sticks around. And I wrote Dear Rachel Maddow in 2015. And when I was querying it, I had agents say, oh, well, Rachel Maddow might not be around in another year or two. Email might not be around in another year or two.
And I’m like, you know, I’m willing to take that chance. They wanted me to fictionalize her because it was inspired by Dear Mr. Henshaw, a book that I truly love. She’s still around though, and so is email. Does it date the book? Absolutely. But all contemporary is going to be historical fiction at some point. So you know what? Go all in.
W4W: I want to ask both of you about your revision processes. I’m going to start with you, Melissa.
MM: I actually start with a synopsis, and I revise the synopsis as I’m drafting the book. That makes sure I’m not wasting time and words. By the time I’m submitting a book for consideration, it’s about 10 pages. So it is very detailed. I’m also doing my comp titles, my pitch, all the things that students learn in our creative writing programs. Those are the kind of things I use as my guidelines. When I’m first writing, I actually draft in Final Draft. I draft in script. I don’t recommend it. My agent tells me it’s a terrible idea, but this is how I draft.
And because I’m drafting in script, I’m making sure that we have action, that we have movement on the page, that we have characters driving the plot instead of just reacting. And that enables me to make sure that the primary storyline is advancing through each of the four acts of the novel in a logical way. The downside of this is I don’t write linearly. I’m incredibly ADD, so I look at the scenes that I feel very strongly about.
I draft those in my script, and I move them around as needed in order to make sure the pacing is consistent. And from there, I go into making sure I have the passes that are interiority, emotion. Character matters. Characters and their internal and external motivations come about as a direct result of their interaction with the plot and the setting. So as I’m going through and I’m doing each of those passes, that’s my drafting.
By the time I get to revision, I have already created a pretty constant and solid draft that I can give my agent. The downside is that because I’m doing it in layers, she can’t read partials of anything. She gets very grumpy with me about it, which is fine. It’s totally an illogical way to draft. But within revision, I’m going through and I’m making sure that because I’ve written non-linearly, I have to pull out things that have been referenced in other sections. So I’m not introducing the same concept too often.
I find it hysterical, because the number one thing that people say about my books is that my worldbuilding is so taut. But that is not where I start. The setting is not where I start. The visuals, that stuff, that’s the very last revision pass before I send it in. That’s one of the benefits of working with an editor who knows your process and understanding your process. And not all books write the same way. I tell you all that because I write primarily fantasy. But if I turn around and look at my contemporaries, they’re written 100% linearly.
The draft is doing setting and worldbuilding and character simultaneously because those are contemporary, and it’s a different process I use there. So that’s my way.
AK: I don’t know if I recommend it, but I write linearly, regardless of genre. Like, I start, and I’m a true pantser. I wish I weren’t, but I just sit there and things surprise me as I go. And when I hit the end, I’m like, I can’t believe we’re here. It’s done now. And it is very rough and ready. And I print it out and then I move away from it and I have a day, one day of triumph, and then I have to go back to it.
I hate revision. I’ve always hated revision. And it wasn’t until my MFA that I started to do it, because I was threatened with academic dismissal if I didn’t start. Movement of time is hard for me, so I plot out every chapter and every event through time. And then I list characters, who’s where, and then I see where the holes are. I have multicolored post-it notes, and I find places in my calendar where there are open dates. Like, there’s a week that nothing is happening in this book. We don’t know. They just are suspended in time. And then I put it in the physical manuscript and I go through and add all the stuff that was missing. And I triumphantly rip off the post-it notes and slam them on the table, even though it technically means nothing.
And at the end of that, I give myself another day and feel very accomplished. And then it’s just kind of like that, more post-it notes, more adding and taking things away because when you don’t have any sort of idea of what’s going to happen before you do it, sometimes you’re like, this is genius. And then you take six pages and I put it into a document that says “for later,” because I must tell myself that these precious moments of my life will be used somewhere else, even if I know it’s a lie.
But it’s fiction, I guess. And I’m always sort of amazed when I get to any sort of thing I would give to another human to read. I’m like, wow, it was almost a fugue there. Again, not the most efficient way. And I do recommend craft books. There’s a lot of different ways to approach writing. I’m on book 14. I think three of them are published. If you write your passion, you also might not make any money, and that’s OK. It is what it is.
I will say this. I struggled with COVID, and it sort of broke my groove. I could write a book very quickly and I had a lot of drafts. But ever since then, I have really struggled to come back to be able to get on the page. And if there are people struggling with that and you’re like, am I ever going to finish anything? Am I ever going to finish anything again? Will anybody ever read this? I feel that.
However, students and fellow authors, know this—just keep showing up. Sometimes that’s all you can do. And maybe sometimes the money will come, sometimes it won’t, but your readers will. And when you’re revising especially, it can feel like a slog to the end for no purpose. But that is important. No matter what you do, know that it is worth it, and your words are worth it. There’s still joy in the writing.
MM: And it’s OK if you like revision too, from the other side. That’s my favorite part.
W4W: You have to find what works for you best, whatever that is. Sometimes it might take a while to find that, but there are no wrong ways, as long as you’re getting the words on the paper, and you’re finding joy in it.
MM: I think it has to be tempered by where you are in terms of contracts and organization. When I was writing Harley, they required x number of pages certain parts apart because I don’t write linearly. I had to write the whole script before I could submit the first part. And right now, because I have books that were sold on pitch, I have to write the synopsis, and I have to write in that order because that’s how it works in terms of my contracts. Part of the evolution of my process is the nature of having contracts. It requires you to adjust your process because they need those check-in documents. The process evolves based also on your publishing relationships sometimes.
W4W: So there’s always going to be those external forces that may be impacting the way one writes as well. Would you say that you shouldn’t get so ingrained in your mantra of writing that you aren’t willing to negotiate or change? Kind of swim or die?
AA: I would say it’s more like Dory in Finding Dory: just keep swimming.
MM: I think the adjustment was part of it. I can’t have a special process to write. I have a soundtrack that puts me in the groove to start a book. I have certain soundtracks for characters, but I have written books in the Overnight Lounge in Reykjavik in Iceland, or at my kid’s football practice. Wicked Lovely was written in the pickup line when my eldest kids were doing gymnastics and lacrosse, and I was homeschooling. So I’m like, here, do these math problems. I’m going to write a chapter. I think most writers, you know, we have lives. We have obligations. So having special process for writing is a pretty fantasy from novelists in the 1800s who were born wealthy, which isn’t most of us.
Having that adaptability, being able to adjust your process, and flowing with your options in your life is important. That’s my belief.
Category: