Interview with Gayle Forman

http://gayleforman.com

Let’s get some of the typical interview questions out of the way first. When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?

Not as soon as you might think. I have been writing, or maybe I should say composing, stories, since before I could write. And I of course wrote lots of Very Deep Poetry in my teens and then short stories in my teens and twenties. But it wasn’t until I started college (in my twenties; I took a few years off in between high school and college to travel) when I started studying journalism (this after pre-med didn’t pan out) that I started thinking about becoming a writer. And then it wasn’t as a novelist; it was as a journalist. Initially, the idea of writing fiction, when you could pluck your stories from thin air, without the parameters of fact, seemed too difficult. I was a journalist for ten years before I began writing fiction.

Can you tell us a little bit about your road to publishing?

I spent my first five years as a journalist working at Seventeen magazine, first as a senior writer then as a contributing writer. I did the kind of “serious” stories that people (i.e. adults) never believed that magazines like Seventeen ran because they never believed teenagers read them or had interest in them. Of course, we know the truth. Teens are an amazingly engaged readership. Anyhow, from there I became a freelance journalist and eventually traveled around the world for a year and wrote a travelogue called You Can’t Get There From Here: A Year On The Fringes Of A Shrinking World. But it was only after that book was written and I had a baby that I wrote my first YA novel, Sisters in Sanity. Coming back to writing for teens felt like coming home.

Tell us a little bit about either your latest or upcoming release. If you could only tell your readers one thing about the story that had to convince us to buy the book, what would it be?

If I Stay is a story is about a seventeen year old girl named Mia who finds herself in the most devastating of circumstances and has to make the most profound choice of her life. But ultimately, it’s a book about love. And choices. And music. It’ll make you laugh and make you cry.

What, or who, has been the greatest inspiration for your stories?

My husband. Music. And I think the teen girls I have met throughout my years at Seventeen have truly inspired. Meeting teen readers and bloggers again just reminds me again and again how much girls this age kick ass. And those girls inform my characters.

Let’s hear about your family, who I’m sure are thrilled to have a published author among them!

My four-year-old daughter Willa is probably the most into my books. She knows the names of all of them and of my characters. She knows If I Stay is about a girl named Mia who has to decide whether to stay with her family, which seems like an age-appropriate description.

My sister, Tamar, is my biggest cheerleader. She calls me every day (or I call her) and whenever any good piece of news comes about the book, she says it’s like getting a birthday present over and over again.

I think my parents can’t quite believe the trajectory this book has taken. I’ve written two other books and they were proud but no one much paid attention to those books, but this one, well, people seem to be paying attention. They have bought a zillion copies, single handedly upping the Amazon rating, I’m sure.

And my husband. He is into these really obscure Eastern European writers with impossible-to-pronounce last names and he was never that into the stuff I wrote. Until I started doing YA. Then he became a fan. That was a clue that maybe this was something I might not suck at.

Now for some fun facts. What’s your greatest comfort food?

Lasagna and black bean soup. But not together.

What are the first three things you do when you wake up in the morning?

Get my kid ready for school. Make coffee and a smoothie. Turn on the computer.

If I came to your house and looked in your closet/attic/basement, what’s the one thing that would surprise me the most?

How all of my clothes come from Forever 21 and consignment stores. When I was 12, my mom gave me 100 bucks and said, “Here’s your back to school money,” and ever since I’ve been a budget-shopping queen. When the book’s movie rights sold, my friend Sean asked me if I was going to splurge and buy a Fendi bag. I laughed. That is so not me. I did, however, buy a pair of Fendi sunglasses. From Costco. They were $75. For me that is a HUGE splurge.

Everyone asks the question about “if you could be a tree, which tree would you be?” so I want to know: If you could be a color, which color would it be, and why?

Red. It’s power but also cheering and happy and seems to be a chatty color. It’s also a color that’s not very restful and I think I’m a lot of things but probably not a very peace-inspiring person.

Who is your favorite cartoon character?

Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes. And Enid and Rebecca, the two girls Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World.

Which cartoon character is most like you?

Bossy like Lucy in Peanuts. A little weird like Enid in Ghost World. Lost in my own fantasy world like Calvin.

If you could beam yourself to anywhere in the world (“Beam me up, Scotty!”), during any time in history, where and when would it be—and why?

I kind of like being where we are now. In a way things seem pretty awful, but it’s usually times like this that give bloom to something amazing. I would not have said this a couple of years ago. Our times seem ripe with potential.

So what’s your favorite type of music to listen to? Favorite musical artists? Do you listen to music while you’re writing?

I listen to kind of dreamy indie pop. I seem to love the Icelandic bands like Sigur Ros and Mom. Also singer song writers like Regina Spekter and Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver, two of my favorites at the moment. I also love old school stuff from Jonathan Richman to the Velvet Underground. I don’t really listen to music while writing though I did have to listen to the song “Falling Slowly” from the movie Once before I started work on If I Stay. It always made me cry and put me in the right mood to write about Mia.

Do you have any favorite T.V. shows? Movies you watch over and over again? What was the last movie you saw at the theater?

Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Friday Night Lights. The Wire. Sex and The City. Battlestar Galactica. I could watch Cluless and Roman Holiday over and over. Also, I'm OBSESSED with Mad Men, having just watched season 2 on DVD.

As for last movie I saw in a theater? I just saw Julie & Julia.

You have the chance to give one piece of advice to your teen readers. What would it be?

Teen readers who want to be writers should just worry about writing and not getting published.

Teen readers, and I know this sounds dopey and hokey in general, but when things in life seem really crappy, think about the things in life that you are grateful for—your friends, good music, a sunny day, whatever. Write them down. Say them aloud. Or just think them to yourself. Feeling grateful actually feels really good. It took me a long time to realize that.

One last question. What stories can we look forward to from you in the future?

Lots more books. I wish I could tell you what’s next but I just spent the last six months working on a novel that I’ve realized isn’t meant to be, or isn’t meant to be at this point. It’s kind of becoming a joke with me that I have to write the wrong novel in order to write the right novel. I have an idea for the thing I want to do next, and that gut feeling that tells me it’s right (which I didn’t have with the other book). But it’s too soon to tell. But I’ll keep you posted.

Again, thanks so much for joining us at TeensReadToo.com!