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DAY FOUR WITH JANDY NELSON
“I wrote it like I was talking to myself or a friend and it never occurred to me that voice is just that—who you are but on the page…” Jandy Nelson
Today Jandy talks about the simplicity of finding your voice, and how being an agent influenced her writing.
Q. Your writing voice is wildly poetic, funny and charming. Was voice a major factor in shaping your story? Any advice for writers struggling to find a character’s true voice?
“Thank you, thank you. Wow—my head is exploding.
“I remember in one of Deb Wiles’ first letters to me my first semester, her advice was to just: let Lennie rip. That was a gift. So simple. Let her rip. Try not to get in the way.
“Another Deb nugget about this. In my first packet to her, I had written a bunch of poems and also a three page autobiography. I’d labored over the poems all month and spent an hour on the autobiography, if that. In her letter back, she wrote all about my voice, but not in the poems, in the autobiography! It was a revelation for me and maybe the single moment that made me think I might actually be able to write a novel.
“Obviously not because I wrote it quickly, but because I wrote it like I was talking to myself or a friend and it never occurred to me that voice is just that—who you are but on the page, and so it is who your character is too, right? It’s so simple! That floored me! There’s this fantastic and very helpful and inspiring quote about this by Les Edgerton who wrote Finding Your Voice. He says,
‘. . .the point being, no matter what you write, there’s a good chance that someone else may do the same thing better. There’s only one thing another writer can’t do better than you. And, it only happens to be the most important thing a writer can possess. Yourself. Your voice. They can’t get your personality on their page. And, since
DAY TWO WITH JANDY NELSON
"So much of the process is trial and error, just making choices about who your characters are and running with those choices, then realizing this or that doesn’t work and making new choices." --Jandy Nelson
First, a little more on yesterday’s question…
Q. Your narrator, Lennie, is full of grief yet also full of life, and that life bursts out here and there through her grief, shining as her need to love and be loved, even as she struggles with the guilt of surviving her sister’s death. What were the joys and difficulties of developing such a character and setting her on her path to self-discovery?
“What’s so odd is that despite the subject matter, writing this novel was the happiest time of my life. I was falling in love with writing fiction so that in itself was a joy. But more importantly, I feel like I discovered over and again by writing the book the same thing Lennie discovered within the book, that grief and love are conjoined and you can’t have one without the other, and that somehow, love is eternal. I think that’s so hopeful and it filled me with hope as I was writing it and discovering it with Lennie."
Q. Not only Lennie, but each of your characters in The Sky is Everywhere is fun, quirky and full of surprises. Do characters come easily for you? Can you give any help through your own process to writers who struggle with breathing life into their characters?
“Thank you again. You are totally making my day! Some characters come easy, others not. I think (for me) first person narrators take many, many drafts to really come off the page. It’s painstaking, tracking them psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, moment to moment, especially in the beginning when you don’t have a clue really who they are and just need to get the story drafted. I find that uncertainty really disconcerting.
“So much of the process is trial and error, just making choices about who your characters are and running with those choices, then realizing this or that doesn’t work and making new choices. I’m going through this now with one of the pro
Day One with Jandy Nelson
Jandy, thanks for being on Tollbooth and congratulations on your beautiful book The Sky is Everywhere!
Q: Can you talk about your process in taking your novel from dream to reality?
“It’s been such a crazy headlong process. It had never occurred to me to write a novel until I went to VCFA. I’d only ever written poetry before that. The first night of residency, we had a class reading and I read some adult poems I’d written (sounds like porn—but alas no!). After the reading, some of my classmates suggested I write a verse novel, a genre I didn’t know existed until that moment, not since Homer anyway. I got really, really excited about it, despite having gone to VCFA to do picture books.
“When I got home, I immediately read a ton of YA verse novels and other YA and middle grade novels as well. I was blown away by the vibrancy of voices like Laurie Halse Anderson’s, Francesca Lia Block’s, Sharon Creech’s, by the experimentation going on with form, by the overall urgency of the storytelling. I had no idea all this was happening in children’s literature—it was a revelation and I decided I would indeed go for it and try to write a verse novel.
“I had an idea for a story and an image that wouldn’t let me go. The image was of this grief-stricken girl scattering her poems all over a town. I went with it as the germ and frame for this verse novel but realized quite quickly, like after a week, that the novel needed to be written in prose as well. This terrified me because I’d never written a word of fiction, but my advisor Deb Wiles encouraged and inspired me, and very gently, she pushed me off the cliff.
“I had the first draft of Sky done by the end of that first semester. It was a disaster but a disaster I could then cut to bits and reshape and revise and rewrite for two and a half years. I think I wrote ten drafts of Sky before sending it into the world. What was really wonderful about the whole process was that I didn’t think too much about if it would ever get published or not. I just wanted to write Lennie’s story which
This week Vermont grad Jandy Nelson joins us with an honest look at writing, agenting, and the story behind her poetic new young adult novel The Sky is Everywhere (Dial, March 2010).
Jandy has a BA from Cornell, an MFA in poetry from Brown, and her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She’s also a literary agent, a published poet and a devout romantic. She lives in San Francisco.
The Sky Is Everywhere is her first novel. It has been translated into nine languages, and will be published this year in twelve countries.
A little about The Sky is Everywhere…
Seventeen-year-old Lennie Walker, bookworm and band geek, plays second clarinet and spends her time tucked safely and happily in the shadow of her fiery sister Bailey. But when Bailey dies suddenly, Lennie is catapulted to center stage of her own life—and, despite her nonexistent history with boys, finds herself struggling to balance two.
Toby was Bailey’s boyfriend; his grief mirrors Lennie’s own. Joe is the new boy in town, a transplant from Paris whose nearly magical grin is matched only by his musical talent.
For Lennie, they’re the sun and the moon; one boy takes her out of her sorrow, the other comforts her in it. But just like their celestial counterparts, they can’t collide without the whole wide world exploding.
“…Grief is an experience that throws you headfirst into life’s deepest questions,” says Jandy about Lennie's emotional journey in the novel. “No matter how old you are, no matter if you’re prepared to deal with those questions or not. I think it kind of just overhauls the heart and soul. Same with falling deeply in love…”
See you tomorrow for Day One with Jandy Nelson!
