I HEART DAILY INTERVIEW

I Heart Daily: What inspired you to write a sequel to Girl?
Blake Nelson: On impulse, I stuck a cliff-hanger, sequel-hinting ending on the end of Girl. I don’t remember why. I guess to force myself someday to write a sequel? I hadn’t really thought about what she would be doing… I just knew she would not be a typical college student, she would definitely have some sort of indie-alternative-artsy experience….

IHD: What was it like for you to follow Andrea to college?
BN: It was fun. And a little bit sad. And really interesting. It was like I was going back to college myself, remembering all the little details of that first day, first week, first month. I had never been anywhere when I left to go to college. It was a huge moment for me.

IHD: You say F. Scott Fitzgerald has had a big influence on your writing. How so?
BN: He did everything I want to do. He was romantic, but also coldly realistic. Also, his characters were so clearly the cool-kids of his time. The “fast” girls, the crazed overly romantic boys, the ambition, the class striving. My favorite of his books might be his obscure second novel The Beautiful and the Damned… the title kind of sums it up.

IHD: Are you surprised that the Young Adult genre has gotten so popular?
BN: Yeah, I am. And it’s also interesting to watch it struggle under the weight of that popularity. It seems to lurch around from one trend to another. First Vampires. Now Dystopia. I would like it a little better, if it wasn’t such a gold rush. But so many amazing books have appeared during the YA boom, you can’t complain. And there’s a lack of pretension that I really appreciate.

ROOKIE INTERVIEW

For a certain subset of readers, the story of Girl's publication, first as excerpts in Sassy magazine, is the stuff of '90s alt legend, but for those of us who were in single digits at the time (or not yet born!), can you tell a brief version of how that came about, preferably using early- to mid-nineties slang?


Girl was my first novel and it was about a suburban teenager discovering the alternative music scene in the 1990s.

When I finished it, I sent it to publishers and they were like: “We don’t understand this.” The rejections came pouring in.

So then I tried sending it to Sassy magazine. Of course, they understood it and published several chapters.

Meanwhile, there was one book editor who was still considering Girl. But she couldn’t decide. She kept saying: “But who’s the audience? Who’s going to buy it?”

So then Christina Kelly, at Sassy called and said: “We’re getting all these letters from readers who like your novel.”

So I ran up to the Sassy offices and got this stack of hand-written letters from thirteen year old girls in places like Oklahoma City, and I ran across town to that last editor’s office and put them on her desk and said: “Here is the audience! These are the people who will buy it!”

And that’s how it came to be published.



When did you decide you wanted to write a sequel? Did you ever worry about messing with the sanctity of the original story?

I wasn’t worried, I thought if the sequel sucks, I’ll just throw it away.

It was about six years after Girl when I wrote Dream School. Since she was now in college, Andrea had to be more mature, less chatty then she was in Girl, but I still thought she was interesting, and it was still fun to follow her around and see what she did.

Also describing college was fun. I was really pleased with that. Dream School shows what college is like for smart people. It’s so lame how people portray college as just sororities and guys with beer cans strapped to their heads. College can actually be really great.


Now a lot of your work, including Girl, Dream School, and your other new book, Recovery Road, can be found in the Young Adult section of a bookstore, but I've read that you didn't necessarily begin with those intentions.

It’s true. I didn’t intend to be a Young Adult writer. And a lot of my books fall into a middle ground, of not totally YA and not totally not.

But that’s okay. The books find their way. Recovery Road which I worried was going to be too extreme for the YA crowd, has been embraced. And rightly so, because it’s the best kind of YA book, not preachy, not “message-y” but still a solid story that’s honest and real.


When did you start writing and what were some of your early influences?

I was a musician in my teens and early twenties and most of my energy went into that. I wrote a lot of songs, which was good training for writing fiction. I learned how to keep trying even if your first attempts are terrible!

I didn’t start writing seriously until after my band days, which was my mid-twenties.


What did you read as a teenager?

I read stuff like Jaws or The Doonesbury Chronicles. Just whatever I happened to pick up. Then when I was in bands, I had a lot of free time. That’s what happens when you’re a musician, you sit around a lot. And people started turning me on to better stuff: Kerouac and Henry Miller and Tom Wolfe.

I also re-discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald. He’s been the biggest influence on my career. You could take any F. Scott Fitzgerald story, replace “flappers” with “punk rockers” and you have a Blake Nelson story.



When did you realize that you were good at writing for teenagers?

When Girl came out I got a lot of mail from teenagers. I guess I thought the audience would be a little older. But the letters were great. I was so impressed by them.

I hadn’t planned to write YA books but after that it made sense to. And plus, I like teenagers. I like thinking about that time in my own life.

One thing about me: I didn’t hate high school like some people. I was an odd kid and suffered the usual miseries, but I never got too worried about it. I’d get a big zit and I’d see it in the mirror and I’d laugh. I’d be like: “I’m a teenager! I got a zit!”

I would do things like kiss girl’s hands when I was introduced to them. I seemed to be living in several different centuries at once. I was weird. But I enjoyed my youth.



Sort of in the same vein: Who is an ideal reader for the stories of Andrea, as in what age, gender, and sensibility? I gave my little sister (who I think is very different than me in a lot of ways) Girl as a high school graduation present, but I've been too nervous to ask her what she thought of it, or even if she read it...

Yeah, it’s hard to know who’s gonna like what.

I told one group of high-schoolers the other day: “If you think Keds are cool and Uggs are not, you will like Girl.”


You and Andrea share a lot of biographical details (hometown, college, profession): Is she you? If so, why not just make her a dude?


I did write about boys around that same time. But the 90s was a very girl-oriented time. People really wanted to know what was up with them. “What do teenaged girls think about?” That was the question that was in the air. “Why are girls so cool?” “Have girls ever been as cool as they are right now?” It didn’t seem like they had.

A lot of that was the flowering of feminism, and just the way things worked out. Generation X got screwed in a lot of ways but we had amazing girl-culture. Kathleen Hanna, Sassy, all the great zines…. I was just exploring the same things as everyone else.


How did you inhabit the head of a young woman for the first time and how did you get back into that mindset to write Dream School?

I just tried it. That’s what you do as a writer, or any kind of artist. You try things.

With Girl that female voice just instantly worked. It was so fun to get Andrea talking. She had so much energy, her sentences would loop around and reconnect to things, or end in these funny non sequiturs, or just tail off into total confusion. Her voice felt exactly right. It was thrilling.



If I was hoping to get my brain to a place like that, besides reading Rookie, I would be way into the blogs of teenagers on websites like Livejournal and Tumblr. Girl and Dream School have a real diary quality to them that might remind people reading them today of what they see their peers do daily on the internet. Do you ever find yourself going down the teen blog rabbit hole? What do you think of the pro-sharing culture outside of fiction?



I love to read teen blogs. I go on scouting missions to Lookbook and from there find interesting blogs that I check back in with. Tumblr is great, but it’s so visual, there’s not as much writing, but that’s okay. I love how certain blogs just set a mood. Young people are so inventive and interesting, especially if they are left to their own devices….




Are there any parts of Girl or Dream School that women have taken issue with? For instance, Andrea's first orgasm, or other parts you biologically or emotionally could not have experienced? Did you do research or reporting for stuff like that?

No research, I just made it up. And I got a lot of it wrong I realized as I got older. But one thing I’ve noticed is that people are insecure about sex so if a female character says: “Whenever I kiss a boy, my ears tingle”, the female reader thinks: “Oh no! Why don’t my ears tingle?” Instead of thinking: “That doesn’t really happen! This is a guy writing this, not a girl!”

Also, I think in some cases, if you have a good story going, people will go with it. It’s like when you hit a wrong note as a musician. If you’re really tearing it up, nobody cares if you make a mistake.

Surprisingly though, I still meet people who have never seen my picture and think that “Blake Nelson” is a girl. That’s weird.

VANITY FAIR

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Dream School

by Blake Nelson

Giveaway ends December 02, 2011.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Christina Kelly and I talking about SASSY and GIRL

CHRISTINA: I first met Blake Nelson in the early 90s, when I was back at Sassy, and we published excerpts from his awesome first novel, "Girl." That book is now beloved by an entire generation. It tells the story of a suburban girl named Andrea Marr who discovers punk rock and alternative culture.

Blake had an amazing ability to write in the voice of a teenage girl, even though he was a 20-something hipster guy. He has gone on to write a total of 12 books, which is both impressive and gives me book envy. Finally, in December, "Dream School," the sequel to Girl is coming out. It’s about what happens when Andrea goes off to college.

You guys, it’s really good! I recently asked Blake many annoying questions about his books and writing, which he graciously answered ....



Christina: I've been thinking about how we first found "Girl." An intern, Christine Muhlke, who used to screen all the fiction that came in, put it on my desk with a note that said "Evil Genius." I read it and loved it. That much I remember. What I'm more hazy on: Did we run your stories as they were, or did we edit them? Do you remember? Was I a bitch? I hear that I was a bitch back then.

Blake: You were not a bitch, you were a taskmaster, and you had to be, because you were suddenly at the center of the hipster universe. Everyone wanted a piece of Sassy, which you seemed to find amusing but also very stressful. Your overall response to the pressure seemed to be: EVERYTHING HAS TO BE GOOD. And of course everything isn't always good, so I'm sure you had to disappoint a lot of people, hence you are a bitch....

But backing up to how we met: I was of course a huge fan of Sassy. So I wrote a short story called "Cybil Shaves Her Head" and sent it to you. You rejected it, but you called me in Portland and told me that in short stories for magazines: "The character has to change."

So then, since you'd actually called me, (CHRISTINA KELLY CALLED ME!), I thought I might have a shot with an excerpt, and when I finished the book, I went through it and found sections I thought could stand alone as stories, and had "people changing" and I sent them in.

Your editing was very light. I understood the parameters. It was really effortless, which made it hard to drum up excuses to come to your offices, but I still managed go there a lot. I had huge crushes on all of you guys. And I loved your grimy offices. Every time I walked out of there, I was like floating on a cloud.

And then the best part of the story: When the excerpts ran, you got a bunch of letters from readers and you gave them to me -- it was a pretty good stack -- and I was down to one book editor who was still considering the book, so I took the letters to her and that convinced her to offer me a contract.

I still tell young writer types: "Christina Kelly once told me: The character must change."

Christina: Yes, I think it is coming back to me. I remember you visiting the offices, and I remember once going to a Roger Manning show with you and some of the other staff. I didn’t know about the crushes though. So, why did you choose to write in a girl's voice? How did you know what goes on inside a girl's head?

Blake: It started with "Cybil Shaves Her Head" which was supposed to be an updating of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." So I thought one of Cybil's friends should tell the story. A girl. In that first story, I mostly made fun of the dumb suburban mall girls, and how they talked. It was very satirical and pretty unkind to the girls and teenagers in general.

I found though, as I continued with my more serious attempts at literary fiction, that I kept thinking about Cybil and her gang. They were such lively, fun characters. They had really come to life. So I went back and continued their story.

As for knowing what girls think about, that has never been hard. In the midst of the first draft of "Girl," I asked a room full of women from the bookstore I worked at, "What did you think about in high school?" They all, in unison and unprompted, said: "Sex!" I think I more thought about “boys.” But I was very innocent.

Generic author picture of Blake until he wakes up and sends us a better one.

Generic author picture of Blake until he wakes up and sends us a better one.

Christina: Is there anything of yourself in Andrea?

Blake: Oh, Andrea is me. Totally. I mean, the "boy" parts of my character are my worst qualities. I'm egotistical, competitive, selfish ... So Andrea is like me with all the good parts and none of the bad. Which really freed me to let her be herself in the story.

She didn't have any demons really. She's a genuinely good person. And her "journey" is very similar to mine too. Starting off in boring suburbia, discovering, incrementally, that there's this bigger, more interesting world. Taking those first steps into going to your first "show," wearing your first thrift store clothes. It was really fun to relive that stuff. And as a writer, if you're having fun writing it, the reader is going to have fun reading it.

Christina: How much of "Dream School" is based on your own college years?

Blake: A lot. Especially the beginning, that first year or two of college, that's pretty much my experience exactly. I was pretty out of my element at a fancy college like Wesleyan (Wellington, in the book). But probably most people feel that way.

I especially enjoyed writing about those first months when every little detail matters. When you're noticing what kind of watches people have and how they organize their dorm room. And people are reading The Economist and you're thinking, "Oh my god, I don't know anything about the world." Also the loneliness of it, and that sense that "your life is starting." You are truly on your own. It's a real test. It's a real "rite of passage" moment, especially if you didn't already go to boarding school or Exeter or whatever

Christina: When did you write "Dream School"?

Blake: I wrote it somewhere between 1998 and 2000, I think. I don't actually remember. I wrote it at the exact wrong time, in terms of getting it published. It was too late to do a series type sequel and it was too early to do a retrospective type thing. I must have had a lot of faith in it though, because when I dug it out years later, I though, "Oh, I'll have to fix this up" but it was actually very polished and solid and ready to go.

Christina: How did the Figment serialization come about?

Blake: I met a woman named Lauren Cerand who is a very sharp book person and when I told her in 2008 that I had written a sequel to "Girl" that was in my drawer, she got very excited. She thought we were coming into a cycle where people would be very into that. She thought about it, and encouraged me to think about it, and then the Figment people, who were also very smart, appeared and they started thinking about it. And slowly we hatched a plan.

My Figment editor and I are already discussing a third book. Andrea goes to New York and gets her first novel published. I think that would be great. I want to read that.

Christina: In general, do you plan out your books in outline form or do you write them off the top of your head? I write off the top of my head but maybe that's why I can't finish any book. Blake, how do you do it??? How are you so prolific? I need help.

Blake: No, I'm not a planner. It's the characters for me. Finding a character who is interesting enough to hold the readers attention, (and mine), and then introduce that person into various situations or conflicts. I have been getting better at plots, but I don't care that much about plot.

Christina: I don’t care about plot either. Boring! Am I right that "Girl" was not written specifically as YA fiction? Back then YA was not the healthy publishing category it is now. It was more of a ghetto, as I remember.

Blake: Yeah, "Girl" was not YA originally. I didn't even know what YA was at the time. I thought of it as more like "Less Than Zero," or something like that. Or like F. Scott Fitzgerald, that's actually probably the biggest influence. "Girl" has struggled as a YA book, actually. It is a hard sell to paranormal fans and the kind of romance-y type fiction that plays well at the moment.

I have found it an interesting sociological experiment watching today's readers react to it. We are in such an escapist period right now. And very sheltered. I am always warning parents about it. I'll be at a reading or something and some 12-year-old girl will pick it up and I'll have to snatch it away and say: "It's for older teens." Of course, a minority of smart kids really love it, it's like an oasis of something. But a lot of kids don't even understand what the point of it is.

One woman on Goodreads said she would recommend it: "Only to people who like frozen yogurt and casual sex."

Christina: So, like, everyone, then!

Got to see my favorite graphic novelist/zine person NICOLE GEORGES last night, talking about her work at the super fun Hollywood (Portland) Public Library. Oh my god, she is so awesome.

Martha Grover was her co-presenter, reading from her zine SOMNAMBULIST, her piece was the minutes of her family meetings during a period when her whole family was basically living together, as adult children or whatever. It was really funny. And then it turned out that these three cute women in the back, were her family, the people we had just heard about.

So yes, this post is mostly just an excuse to put up a drawing by Nicole, her pet portraits are amazing, but I am going with the self portrait....

WHAT DOES ANDREA MARR LOOK LIKE?

So everyone is gearing up for the big release of DREAM SCHOOL, the long awaited sequel to GIRL.

One of the fun questions that comes up is what does ANDREA MARR actually look like?

No cheating, the movie doesn't count, though I thought Dominique Swain was about right, minus the bizarre pseudo-90s hair they stuck on her, that no one in the 90s actually had, except for the weirdos on MY SO CALLED LIFE, who when we look back now, look so fucking ridiculous, it wrecks the show.

Needless to say, in my mind, nobody had hair like that. They all had normal punk rock nineties hair which was just bobs and color or longer or bangs, or weirdo bangs or whatever....

This is what one person thought, and I think this is pretty good too .... black hair, that was the one thing I always had pretty clear in my mind ... other than that it is pretty open to interpretation ....