Writer Unboxed

Last week, we spoke to YA author Caroline Says, and the hot YA series UPPER CLASS that are giving the Gossip Girls a run for the money.  Says, in partnership with fellow writers Hobson Brown and Taylor Materne, have crafted a series of character-driven novels set in an elite New England boarding school.  These books are impressive, and even more so when one considers that Says, Brown and Materne have somehow managed to take three authorial voices and distilled them into one distinct voice that is both literary and distinctly teen.  (Missed part one?  Click HERE).  I read both novels in a feverish weekend session and came away captivated with their fresh spin on what can be an admittedly cliched storyline: rich elite teens and the trouble they get into at boarding school.  They avoid those pitfalls and weave the lives of four students in a sophisticated, often heartbreaking narrative.

Their latest release, OFF CAMPUS, revisits Wellington’s rarified campus, and pushes the series in new directions.  Says also reveals how one should approach writing for the YA market, and the exciting prospect of seeing their novels adapted into television.

Enjoy part two of our interview with Caroline Says. 

Q:  Your target audience is teens.  What should writers be mindful of when writing for this readership? 

Caroline Says:  Often we forgot–somewhat purposefully–that we were writing for teens, and not adults.  Teens are so savvy today in what they read and watch and listen to, and we didn’t want to dumb it down at all.  What we did try to do, and struggled with, was anchoring the story in the teen’s world, dealing with what’s happening behind the closed doors of the teens in the book, and not acting like adults looking into that world from afar.  We tried to stay mindful of what matters to a teen, what the world looks like from that perspective, and where the drama lies.  The horizon is different.  What’s at stake is different.  There are no mortgages and no career decisions and no taxes.  There’s love and grades and detention and virginity, as well as that tension between craving independence and yet not being quite qualified for total independence.

Q:  Your characterizations are fresh and spot on.  What are some of the things you keep in mind when crafting characters?

CS:  Thank you!  We worked hard to avoid stereotypes and easy teen cliches.  We also cared about not making anyone into a saint or a villain.  Even the best kid screws up, or has occasional bad intentions.  Even the most troubled kid has a lot to give, has dreams, has reasons for misbehaving.  And teens are not simpler adults–they’re as complex and dynamic as any human being.  We took archetypes–the new money Long Island girl, the old-money Greenwich girl, and thought about them from the inside out.  We thought about their own histories, what had happened to make them who they were, what they had seen and experienced so far, and that resulted–organically, we hope–in characters who seem “possible,” as if you might know them, as if they could be alive and walking around somewhere at this moment.

Q:  Contemporary dialogue can be frustrating for writers who don’t want to sound dated in a few years or too trendy.  What’s your rule of thumb when it comes to dialogue?

CS:  This was hard.  There’s definitely a boarding school lexicon, which was, in fact, one of the elements to prep school that made me feel like an outsider when I arrived there for my own first year.  And because prep schools are attached to or entrenched in the preppie or WASPy part of our American society, which is a population that values the past and the status quo, in a sense, that lexicon has changed little.  But the characters in the book don’t all come from that world–Greg is from a West Indian family in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and Gabriel comes from Colombia, and Parker is Canadian.  So they weren’t all going to speak the same way.  On top of that, they’re modern teens, so of course there has to be some sense of contemporary language.  Let’s just say we did a lot of editing when it came to dialogue.  We did a lot of reading aloud. We visited chat rooms and hung out with teens.  And at the end, we downscaled the slang, erring on the classical side, probably giving up some credibility by sacrificing trendiness.

Q:  The subject matter your books deal with can be pretty graphic in terms of showing teens engaging in drug use, sex, and you don’t shy away from dark subjects like suicide or authority figures behaving badly.  Do your publisher/editors ever tell you to dial it down, or are you giving teens what they want in their fiction?

CS:  Again, teens today have access to so much–they see and read relatively extreme material (or many of them do.)  I think teens have probably, individually, always been faced with grave situations–in their own family life, in terms of sexual activity, in terms of drugs and alcohol.  Now they’re allowed to read about it.  When I was sixteen, I was reading almost exclusively adult books, craving an intelligent and sophisticated treatment of life and relationships–the only problem was that the books starred adults, most of the time.  We hoped to treat what teens are doing and are facing with the same intelligence as an adult book.  And by intelligence we largely mean an awareness and acknowledgment of complexity, of gray areas. 

We definitelly weren’t interested in using sex or drugs in a gratuitous way, and while we avoided writing cautionary tales into the books, we paid attention to consequences and pitfalls. No character makes important decisions about sex and drugs, or lying or running away or hazing, in a casual way.  Or if they do, there are usually repurcussions.  Our editors were very open to the content, and rarely asked us to dial it down.  They sometimes excised a four letter word.  I think they believe that teens want “sophisticated” stuff, especially if it’s responsibly written, and not degrading or flippant.

For all the dark material, we tried to write into the stories the pure and innocent experiences of adolescence too.  The first kiss, the best friend, playing field hockey under an October sun, buying records at a thrift store, playing dress up before a formal dance, standing in the snow in nightgowns and coats during a fire drill.  Those were the building blocks of our own high school experiences–the hard stuff and the beautiful stuff.  It’s an extreme time.

Q:  Tell us about your upcoming release, OFF CAMPUS.

CS:  This story takes place in the fall/winter of these kids’ junior year.  Delia is a transfer student, from La Jolla, California, and her reason for coming east isn’t known at first.  There’s a sense that she’s running from something, or has been sent away for some reason.  She gets really close to Nikki, who’s a veteran by now, but still an outsider–being Jewish and Italian, and having already faced some bigotry among her classmates.  Delia starts dating Greg, and since she’s white and he’s black, they face some of that bigotry, too, for being an interracial couple.  The girls bond, and begin to play with fire, flirting incessantly with one teacher, and teasing themselves with the idea of going AWOL one weekend.  They are both girls on the verge of many powers–they’re figuring out that they can be seductive and get what they want.  They overestimate those powers, though–and have a brush with disaster.  At the heart of the story is a profound friendship, and a lesson about gossip, forgiveness, integrity and identity. 

Q:  What’s next for you? 

CS:  OFF CAMPUS comes out April 22.  CRASH TEST, our fourth book, comes out in September.  It’s about one of the female characters, who starts to take too many study drugs, and also gets introduced to Oxyconton.  We’ve had a few really interesting inquiries from production companies and actors about working these books into film or TV, so we’ll see what happens–it’s funny that film/TV was our initial goal, but we lost sight of it while we got into the books themselves.  I’m really glad we ended up writing these books, in fact.  It worked out, as we got to tell more story, in a sense, by writing in prose.  I think we each learned so much in this process–I’m excited to try out a new landscape, a new culture, and perhaps stick with YA for now, and use some of what I discovered during the UPPER CLASS venture to write a new book.

OFF CAMPUS is available now at all online retailers and bricks ‘n mortar stores.

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