I didn’t read too many teen novels when I was a teen. Looking back, I see there weren’t as many as there are now, or at least I wasn’t aware of them. But I did read voraciously, and I started with the novels I found on my mother’s bookshelves. That’s where I discovered Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye, which were two of my favorites. I also had a book of my own that I had to replace numerous times after lending it out to friends and never getting it back: Go Ask Alice by Anonymous. This was a book I read over and over again, drawn into the darkening spiral that “Alice” finds herself in. It haunted me. And it fascinated me. I actually didn’t realize it wasn’t an actual diary—that it was fiction—until years after.
Would you say your reading as a teenager has had a distinct influence on how you write fiction now, and why?
I was deeply influenced by the books I read as a teenager, and I was most drawn into stories told in a first-person voice. This has had a definite influence on me as a writer, since the most important thing to me in fiction is the voice on the page. I love a strong, searing voice and I’m always trying to accomplish that in my own writing.
What did you do before you became a published teen/young adult novelist, and how did you come to write your first teen/young adult novel and get it published?
I originally intended to write fiction for adults. After I completed my MFA in fiction for adults, I’d published some short stories, and written two adult novels, but I wasn’t able to find an agent for them. I’d always written stories about teenagers—but I didn’t realize that teenagers could be my audience.
This realization came to me by accident, when I was working as a production editor (or copy editor) at a children’s publisher in New York. Over the years, before publishing novels of my own, I’d worked quite a few jobs in the book publishing industry: at a small-press publisher, at a cartoonist’s art studio, at an educational publisher, at a major comic book company, and eventually for children’s book publishers. It was at one of these jobs that I began reading teen novels, and my eyes opened to all the amazing books being published today… the possibilities. I realized that maybe this was what I wanted to be writing.
I decided to write a teen novel of my own, and my journey to becoming published sped up quickly once I did. Now I look back on my struggles before, and I think it was so difficult because I hadn’t been writing the right thing.
How would you describe your style of teen/young adult fiction or your approach to writing teen/young adult fiction?
I think of my young adult fiction as contemporary stories with a fantastical twist. I love to write stories set in the here and now, in this world with people and places we recognize, but then I like to take a step into the surreal or the otherworldly and push the limits a little bit beyond what’s “real.”
My writing style is admittedly literary because I love language and all the possibilities that come with it. There are so many different ways to describe the same thing—and the way you do, the words you choose and the rhythm you put them in can change the tone, the pace, the feeling that comes upon reading. I get excited by these possibilities when I’m writing and I think it shows.
Who is another author whose teen/young adult fiction you admire and why?
I will always remember the day I read Melina Marchetta’s novel, published in the U.S. under the title Jellicoe Road. A writer friend had insisted I read it; she knew I’d love it, but for some reason it took me a while to come to it. Then this past winter I was heading away to a writing retreat and I packed this book in my suitcase. One morning I started reading it while sitting in a chair beside a window in the cabin where I was staying, looking out over the snowy New Hampshire woods. Within moments and a few pages I was transported to a boarding school in Australia. I couldn’t put the book down. I forgot where I was and what I was supposed to be doing and devoured the book in a single day. I finished reading it in the same chair before the window—now close to evening instead of morning—with tears streaming down my face. Now that’s a book to admire. It completely enveloped me and wouldn’t let me go until the last page.
How would you summarise one of your teen/young adult novels in one paragraph?
In Imaginary Girls, Chloe’s older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can’t be captured or caged. After a night with Ruby’s friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers a dead body floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away—away from home, away from Ruby. But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns home at last, she finds a precarious and deadly balance waiting for her. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood.
How would you describe the appeal of this novel to teen/young adult readers?
Imaginary Girls would appeal to both fans of contemporary realistic novels and paranormal novels because it straddles the line between both. It’s a story that would also speak to sisters and to teens from small secluded towns, and that might fascinate anyone intrigued by the strange occurrences in everyday life, the surreal hidden beneath the real.
How would you summarise a chapter from this novel in one paragraph?
The first chapter of Imaginary Girls opens late one night, on the shore of the local reservoir. Chloe, who is 14, is hanging out with her charismatic older sister, Ruby, and Ruby’s friends. Tonight, Ruby dares Chloe to swim all the way across the reservoir, an impossible feat. Chloe knows Ruby is only putting on a show for her friends, so she goes along with it, willing to fool them. She starts swimming. But Chloe can’t make it all the way across to the other shore, and her imagination takes over as she swims, making her think of the stories her sister used to tell her as a kid about the drowned town of Olive at the bottom of the reservoir where the townspeople are still alive, watching her from below. Just as Chloe gets frightened, she reaches out and finds a rowboat, floating in her path. In this rowboat is a dead body, and nothing can ever be the same again now that Chloe has found it.
How would you describe the contribution this chapter makes to the novel?
The opening moment of a novel—the starting point at which the reader is drawn into the story and introduced to the characters and the situation—really ends up defining everything that happens afterward. So the starting point of Imaginary Girls made the novel what it is. It introduces a mystery that happens when Chloe is 14 and instigates her being sent away, and it hints at what is to come when she returns to town two years later, at 16.
To what extent would you say fiction written primarily for young readers is different from fiction written primarily for adult readers?
I see the main difference as simply a matter of perspective. It’s the moment the story is told from, the lens the events are seen through. A novel for teens isn’t told looking back from a great distance, with the wisdom and distortion and forgetfulness that comes once years pass the way an adult novel might be. It’s told from within the moment. My novels are very much in the moment of being a teen.
Author website: http://www.murdochbooks.com.au/Author/nova-ren-suma-au00711
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