My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.
I never had a connection like that to anyone, where every day you think about what you’ll tell them and you wonder what they’re doing, and you know they’re wondering what you’re doing.
It’s a jagged thing in my throat, how much I miss her.
He felt it too, the air between us, the invisible lines that something or someone had drawn to connect us. That’s the way I remember it.
It’s just so out of control. Life, I mean. The way it flies off in all these different directions without your permission.
I didn’t ‘decide’ to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.
I don’t like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.
I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’ and being so overwhelmed with emotion.
My first published book, Story of a Girl, was the fourth book I wrote.
I grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s. We were part of a church that belonged to the California Jesus movement.
My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
One of my favorite authors is Robert Cormier. He was a devout Catholic and a very nice man, which might not be the impression you get from reading his books.
My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.
It’s hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn’t start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.
I’m always in a place that is sincere but conflicted about different things that come with being a Christian and being an active, churchgoing Christian.
I wouldn’t say I’m stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.
I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn’t room for what I wanted to write.
Family or love or romance, whatever it is, is not restricted to perfect people. If it were, it wouldn’t exist. All of that comes out in my work in some way.
The one reader I’m trying to please as I write is me, and I’m pretty difficult to please.