Q: So, you’ve charged out of the starting gate with an outstanding teen novel and now we need to know where this debut novelist has come from. Tell us why YA fiction.
A: Thank you so much! Whenever anyone asks why I write YA fiction, I can’t help but think why would I write anything else? I mean, I’m an adult, and my real life is pretty boring. I go to work, I wait in line at the DMV and I buy breakfast cereal with extra fiber. Who wants to read about that? Really, I just think our teenage years are so interesting. It’s this amazing, emotionally-charged time of self-discovery. As we grow up, I think sometimes our feelings and reactions get dulled by experience and apathy, but when we’re teenagers, everything is so fresh and raw. For me, that’s compelling to write about.

Q: Kind of Sort of Fine follows one male, one female through a tumultuous senior year of high school. Why did Hayley get awarded the first chapter (i.e., why a female kickoff?), and what inspired you to do alternate chapters in first-person point-of-view?
A: Originally, I didn’t plan on doing alternating points of view. I started with just Lewis, but the more of his story I wrote, the more I thought it would be fun to have someone else there to challenge him and create some conflict. So I started thinking about what type of character might be fun for that sort of thing, and Hayley slowly came into form. In terms of who to start the book with, that’s something I went back and forth on for a while. In the first couple of drafts, Lewis always had the opening chapter, but as it became clear that Hayley was dealing with more emotion at the beginning of the book, it seemed fitting to move her to the opening.

Q: Was one of these two characters easier than the other to write?
A: Yes, I did find it a little easier to settle into Lewis’s voice. That probably has something to do with the fact that I actually used to be a teenage boy, but I’ve never been a teenage girl. Ultimately, I think Lewis is more of an open book, whereas Hayley is more closed-off. She has her defenses up, so it took me a little longer to figure out what was going on with her.

Q: What got you through your own adolescent years, and how messy were they? Was humor always a strong arrow in the quiver?
A: Looking back, I view my teen years as pretty messy. I think I had three personalities fighting for dominance. On the one hand, I was an aspiring writer who spent plenty of time listening to emo music and writing poetry about girls, but I was also a theatre nerd, so there was this other side of me that was extroverted and wanted to make people laugh. And lastly, I was also a church kid who was very involved in youth group and took spirituality very seriously. With all of that swirling inside, I never truly felt like I fit in 100 percent anywhere, so humor became my go-to tool for coping and getting by.

Q: What’s the game plan now? More YA, more contemporary character-driven stories, or any inclinations in other directions?
A: No official plans, but I definitely hope to keep writing funny stories about teens.

Q: You handle teen humor and teens’ turbulent emotions with equal aplomb, not an easy roller coaster to operate. How do you manage to channel teen life and why do you think teens reach for stories with plenty of humor?
A: Thank you. For me, channeling the teen experience is about remembering how I felt during my teen years. Even though trends change and technology evolves, I think a lot of teenage experiences remain universal: heartache, feeling awkward, feeling like no one understands you. For me, it’s relatively easy to think back to those times and remember what that was like, and then I just try to write honestly from there. Music can help too, since it seems to have a transportive power. If I listen to some of the albums that I had on repeat during my teen years, like Dashboard Confessional’s “The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most” and Death Cab for Cutie’s “Transatlanticism,” it’s like a time capsule and I find it easier to slip back into those emotions and experiences.
While I can’t speak for everyone, I think humor is one of the easiest ways for me to connect to a story or another person. If I’m laughing, I’m usually invested. I think humor is especially powerful in teen stories because I think having a healthy sense of humor is the only way most of us survive our teen years. I know when I was a teen, I was awkward and brimming with self-doubt. So inevitably when situations arose where I was freaking out about something I said or did, having friends to ground me and laugh about all of it with is what helped me through.
- P.W.