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
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