Blogfest 2009

I recently read aloud the first chapter of my new book, The White Cat, to an audience of teenage writers.  A boy came up to me afterward and told me that we wrote about similar things–teenage boys in boarding schools. The difference, he said, is that he would have had the boy thinking about sex the whole time.  I pointed out that the character in question, Cassel, had been about to fall off a roof to his death.  The boy shrugged.

I think we need to reflect reality if we are to be at all believable.  Teenagers are making decisions about lots of important, difficult things and sex is definitely one of them.  If you omit that dimension of teenage experience, I think there is a danger of romanticizing adolescence in a way that will ring false to your audience.

From my perspective, it is definitely harder to write the first book than any book that follows.  There are challenges to writing later books in a series, but the first book is where you make so many decisions about the world, about the characters and about the tone.  Later books get to lean on those, which is a real advantage.  I love writing a first book in a series because everything is fresh and strange and shiny new, but the later books are definitely easier.

A lot of my work is about returning to a certain place and seeing it through new eyes. Spiderwick is about the return of a family to a house that that family, if not those particular people, had abandoned. Tithe is very much about Kaye and her mother returning to the place where Kaye grew up and unravelling the secrets of her past there.  Ironside, in many ways, has Roiben doing the same thing.  In my new book, The White Cat, again a character has been away (this time at boarding school) and has to come home and clean out the garbage house where he lived with his parents and two brothers. But in looking through things, he discovers secrets.

I can remember two times when I left home and then returned (during college and during a summer-long arts program in high school) and how odd I felt.  More than changed from the time away, what I realized was that I’d changed when I was home and just not known it until I was away.  For some reason that theme seems to haunt my work.