Dan Solomon is a freelance journalist in Austin, Texas who about sports, politics, music, tech, film, food, science, religion and cultures. He says he likes trying to understand how these things shape our world and lives. Most of his work has been for Texas Monthly and Fast Company; he has also written for the Austin Chronicle, Vanity Fair, Wired and the New York Times. The Fight for Midnight (North Star Editions) is his first novel. He can be found at dan@dansolomon.com.

Q: You’ve transitioned from journalist to fiction writer with a first novel (The Fight for Midnight) that interweaves a startling variety of threads: the confounding topic of political filibustering, the hot – potato issue of abortion, the divisiveness of politics, and authentic teen angst and trauma. Did it ever occur to you that this wild mix – especially a story centered around a filibuster – would be a considerable challenge for grabbing the attention of teens?

A: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of suspense and tension just in what happened with the actual events of the filibuster, so I knew that the story would work with the right characters to emotionally invest in, but also – it is a book for teenagers where the villain is former Texas lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, and his main weapon is parliamentary procedure. It’s not exactly the Eye of Sauron, you know?

But I think that young people today, growing up at a time when the entire country seems obsessed with politics in ways that it wasn’t for most of my life, are interested in the broader topics of the book. That’s abortion, for sure, but also the way politics have sown division in everyone’s lives and communities more broadly. I assume that the ideal reader for this book cares about those things, and probably doesn’t know or care much about the mechanics of a filibuster in the Texas Capitol, or about any of the politicians who work in that building.

My hope for the book was that it would tell a story about where those things sometimes connect – where the grassroots activism that feels much more energizing and urgent can interact with the maddeningly slow, incremental work of capital – P Politics, and how they can affect one another in unexpected ways. The Wendy Davis filibuster in 2013 was the clearest interaction between the two I’ve ever seen – the activists needed her to stand on the Senate floor and perform the filibuster, and she needed the activists to create the conditions that would allow her to do that, and for the filibuster to succeed.

And the only reason politics actually matter is because they impact real people and their real lives. When they say “the personal is political,” that’s what I understand it to mean. So I was pretty confident that if I told that story in the right way, where the personal stuff gives readers a reason to get invested in the politics of it, they’d ultimately find themselves caught up in the drama that happens on the Senate floor, where the byzantine and baffling mechanics of a state – level filibuster play out in really suspenseful ways. That wasn’t just a lucky guess – I saw it happen in real-time during the actual filibuster, when hundreds of thousands of people watched the livestream from the floor, so I knew that my job was telling a story that would make the reader feel the way that those people who followed it so closely back in 2013 felt.

Q: Did the story form in your head as you covered the fight over abortion rights in the Texas Capitol for the Austin Chronicle? Perhaps you got bored, observed some teens and started imagining?

A: It didn’t form right away, but it wasn’t too much later. There were a few things that led me to this story. The first one is that being at the Capitol in the summer of 2013 as this fight went down was genuinely life-changing for me, and I was an adult at that point, when it takes a lot to change your life. I started thinking about what it might have meant for me if it had happened when I was seventeen, when I was still very much figuring out who I was and what my values were. A few months later, the other elements of the story fell into place pretty quickly – I realized that I could tell this story from the point of view of a teenage boy, and write that viewpoint really authentically, and once I started thinking about the circumstances that might lead that character to spend a summer afternoon at the Capitol, I found Shireen and Cassie and Jesse and Mr. Monaghan, and the shape of the book fell into place.

Q: Many a journalist tries their hand at fiction, but why was it young-adult fiction for you? Did your own adolescence provide a treasure trove of memories, emotions or important events on which you could draw, or that influenced you to gravitate to the YA genre?

A: Absolutely. I think the feelings we have when we’re young are really important, and are worth taking very seriously. Part of the joy of writing this book was getting the chance to revisit so many of those feelings. I know that “joy” is a weird word to use when the feelings we’re talking about are the grief and shame that Alex experiences through much of the book, but there’s an intensity to those feelings that’s very satisfying to touch, and to get to understand in new ways.

Q: What were your greatest challenges with writing a first novel, and what came surprisingly easily?

A: The biggest challenge with this book was getting Cassie’s character and viewpoint right. If you read the book, you know where I land on the question of abortion rights – but teenagers are great at detecting bullshit, and they’re great at recognizing when they’re being preached at and tuning out. It’s one of the things I respect most about them. So I knew that the book needed to present the anti-abortion argument as effectively, convincingly and warmly as I possibly could. Otherwise, the whole book is phony – whatever lesson Alex learns or conclusion he reaches could fall apart the moment he hears the argument that the book doesn’t make. So I worked really hard, through several revisions, to get Cassie right. She had to be a character that someone who would show up to the Capitol to oppose abortion would identify with in a real way. It took a long time to really invest in that and stop putting my thumb on the scale, and to give her a perspective that you can’t just dismiss with the usual arguments.

The easiest part was actually just the writing itself. The whole thing came together very quickly – I think the first draft took maybe six weeks. All of the characters sort of neatly slotted themselves into the story once I got started. It didn’t hurt that, because the structure of the novel is based on real things that happened that day, the counters of the narrative were already in place before I wrote a word. I’m sure there are situations where that could present its own challenges, but in this case, it just gave me a lot of room to be creative while having the core already in place.

Q: Your authentic dialogue and sparks of humor in The Fight for Midnight are delightful: “When she sees me, she makes the same face you’d make if you walked past a Taco Cabana dumpster on a hot day.” “I felt a little bit like my vegetarian cousin who ate a bowl of cornflakes on Thanksgiving.” “Hearing her say that stings so bad that I want to shrink down to subatomic size and crawl through the fibers of the carpeting on my way to the ledge of the balcony, where I will plummet to my microscopic death.” Where does that come from?

A: First of all, thanks! I like that stuff too. I don’t have kids, but there are teens in my life – I’ve got nieces and nephews, and I sometimes work with high school students who are interested in journalism, so I think about how they talk when I write. And they’re funny as hell. Teens tend to cut through the crap and they can be absolutely merciless with a takedown – sometimes you direct that outward, and sometimes it’s pointed at yourself, if you’re the self-deprecating sort. I was both, so I just let Alex be funny and observational in that way, whether he’s talking about his own feelings or what it’s like to watch the ridiculous events unfold at the Texas Capitol.

Q: Can you expand on what you most hope readers will gain from the The Fight for Midnight? Your “Author’s Note” says, “I wanted to acknowledge that recognizing the conviction of those we disagree with doesn’t mean wavering in our own. Rather, it’s the opposite – understanding that those we disagree with are no less impassioned, no less sincere and no less determined than we are strengthens our convictions and our values by testing and reaffirming them.”

And your main character says, “I’ve always wanted to believe that if you just have the right people at your side, you can do anything. My problem has always been that I haven’t known how to figure out who those people are.”

A: I guess I’d mostly like for readers to think about their values as they read this – it doesn’t matter to me so much if the reader comes to the same conclusions that Alex does, but the most satisfying moments since the book came out have been when a teenager (or even a few younger readers) have talked to me at events about how they think about abortion, and I can tell that they’ve got some conviction around the issue. I love the idea that it gives these readers the opportunity to engage with what they’re already feeling and thinking deeply by giving them characters and a story to connect those thoughts and feelings to.

Q: Have you got more young-adult fiction on the go? What can we expect from you next?

A: I’m in the middle of writing my next book, which is also a YA novel. It’s less introspective than The Fight for Midnight, and it takes place in a bigger slice of the world than just a single day at the Texas Capitol, but it still cares a lot about teenagers and their feelings, so I hope it’ll connect with readers who like this book, too.

-Pam Withers