Interview with Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Interview by Sara Polsky
Jennifer Lynn Barnes wrote GOLDEN, her first published novel, at age
nineteen. It was released in 2006, her second young adult novel, TATTOO, came
out in early 2007, and her newest series, THE SQUAD, will be published beginning
in February. Jennifer grew up in Oklahoma and graduated from Yale, where
she studied cognitive science, in 2006. She spent a year doing autism research
on a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Cambridge and is now back at
Yale, where she's working on her Ph.D. This interview was conducted via e-mail.
How did you get into writing? What made you decide
to start submitting your work for publication?
I started writing when I was about six or so and never really stopped. For most
of middle and high school, I'd start a book, get three or four chapters in, and
then start a new one. There were just so many stories I wanted to write that I
found it really hard to concentrate on one. Then, my senior year in high school,
I decided that I really wanted to finish something, and that's when I wrote my
first book-length manuscript. Three more (all in the same series) quickly
followed, and I decided to start looking into publishers. Thankfully, nobody was
interested in that first series (and I'm certainly not going to let anyone read
it now), but over the next year, I just kept working at it, and I finally wrote
GOLDEN (which was the seventh book I wrote, but the first I sold) the summer
after my freshman year in college. Once I started really writing, I just
couldn't stop, even when the rejections piled up. I figured that as long as I
was writing (and I couldn't foresee stopping), I might as well just keep trying
with publishers. Eventually, it paid off.
How does your writing process work? Do you have any
particular writing habits?
I'm not much of an outliner. I tend to write high concept, so the premise for
the book (like "girl who sees auras deals with high school cliques" or "friends
get supernatural powers from temporary tattoos") is almost always there when I
start. Other than that, the only other thing I know to begin with is the main
character's name-- everything else I figure out as I go along. I usually write
in chapter-long increments (about 2500 words), until I get to the last third of
the book, and then I write as much as 12,000 words at once, because the action
really picks up and it's hard to pull myself away. More often than not, I write
very late at night (between two and four in the morning), after everyone else
has gone to sleep. For some books (like GOLDEN and TATTOO), I pick one song that
I play on repeat the entire time I'm writing a book, and afterwards, just
listening to the song will put me in the right frame of mind for writing that
characters' voice. In terms of revisions, I do a lot of them (in part because I
often write my first drafts in 2-3 weeks). I'm not the type of writer to get too
attached to my words, so I really hack into my books in revision-- I'd rather
start from scratch on a chapter than tweak it if something's not working.
Because I add new material each time I revise, my books almost always get longer
in revisions.
What's your favorite line or scene that you've written?
Wow. Tough question. No spoilers, but there are a couple of scenes I really like
in my Spring 08 release THE SQUAD, which is about a group of secret agents whose
cover is that they're their school's varsity cheerleading squad. One of the
scenes involves my character (who's a wee bit antisocial and aggressive) being
recruited to the Squad and finding out its true nature, and another one involves
a kiss, but beyond that, my lips are sealed.
What made you decide to write for young adults? Do you
think that, because of your age, people expect you to write YA?
I don't know if people expect me to write YA, but it never really occurred to me
to write anything else. I was still a teen when I wrote GOLDEN, so it made sense
for me to write for other teens. I never really sat there and thought "I'm
writing young adult literature." I just wrote about the things I knew (high
school, being the new kid, etc.), and I wrote the kind of thing I liked to read.
Even now that I'm a little older, the YA audience is still the one I identify
with the most. My dad once told me that he's never felt older than 21, no matter
how old he got, and I think I'm pretty much stuck at fifteen or sixteen for
good.
It certainly seemed to me in reading GOLDEN and TATTOO
that you got the details of high school life right. How much do you draw on your
own high school experiences in writing your books?
I don't consciously draw on my high school experience, but it sneaks its way in
there. I'm sure that people I went to high school with who read the books think
"I wonder who she based that character on," but there's nothing that concrete in
the books that came out of my life. Still, I'm still close enough to all of
those experiences that I couldn't write without them affecting what comes out.
My narrators always have a great deal of myself in them, and my teenage
experience creeps its way in as well.
What books or writers have influenced you the most?
On a personal level, I've been really influenced by S.E. Hinton. Growing up in
Oklahoma and knowing that she wrote this incredible book as a teen was a major
factor in the fact that I never thought of writing or publishing as something
you had to wait until you were "grown up" to do. In terms of storytelling, I
think I've actually been more influenced by visual media (like television and
film) than by any books I can think of. Shows like "Buffy," "Firefly," and
"Veronica Mars" have some really great storytelling, and I've learned a lot
about pacing and character just by watching. In terms of other contemporary YA
writers, it's hard for me to pinpoint influences, because I actually wasn't
reading much YA when I started writing it. Since I wrote my first few books,
I've become a big Meg Cabot fan, and I love Sarah Dessen and Scott Westerfeld,
but I'm not sure how much of any of them you can see in my work.
Watch for the second part of Sara Polsky's
interview with Jennifer Lynn Barnes in next week's newsletter!
