In Episode 336 of So You Want To Be A Writer: Meet E Lockhart, author of Again Again. Discover how to build good writing habits in your teen. Watch ‘Creative Conversations' with literary agent Annabel Barker. Learn tips for writing non-fiction for kids. And we have 3 copies of To the Lions by Holly Watt to give away.
Emily Lockhart is the author of eight YA novels including the bestselling We Were Liars and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, a Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book, a finalist for the National Book Award, and recipient of the Cybils Award for best young adult novel.
She has a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University and has taught composition, literature and creative writing. Her books have been translated into ten languages and her new YA novel, Again Again, is out now.
(If you click the link above and then purchase from Booktopia, we get a small commission. This amount is donated to Doggie Rescue to support their valuable work with unwanted and abandoned dogs.)
So, welcome to the program, Emily Lockhart. It's very exciting to have you here. Now, before we get into your new novel, Again Again, which is just out in Australia at the moment, let's go all the way back to the beginning. Can you tell me how your first novel came to be published?
Emily
Well, I was a graduate student in English and Comparative Literature. And I was really unhappy. I had entered graduate school at the kind of peak of enthusiasm in that field for deconstruction and post-colonial theory.
Allison
Oh.
Emily
And I had imagined that I would be immersing myself completely in the novels of Charles Dickens and instead found myself immersing myself in the theories of Lacan. And I was looking for some other path for myself. Much as I respect people who love to do literary theory, I am not one of them.
Allison
Okay.
Emily
And so I began writing a middle-grade – at least as we call it in the States – novel. You know, for maybe eight to twelve year olds, in collaboration with my father who is a playwright. And he had not written a novel for young people, either. And we alternated, we mapped out a story and we alternated chapters. And we somehow managed to get it published. It was a very long road to find an agent, and another long road to get a project that I had wanted to write that I had written a proposal for rejected. And finally she sold this very oddball co-authored novel to an editor who I've now done eight books with.
Allison
Oh wow.
Emily
And so that kind of got me going as a published writer of stuff for young people. And then I…
Allison
So you started out with middle grade?
Emily
… for young adults, yeah. So my stuff for younger kids is not out in Australia. Only my…
Allison
Okay, fine. So why did you move up from middle-grade to YA, then? Was it just the ideas you were having were going to be more suitable for an older audience? What do you see as the difference between writing for that middle-grade audience and then writing YA, the sort of thing you're writing now?
Emily
Well, I actually still write middle-grade, and picture books, under the name Emily Jenkins. But they're not around for your audience. It's very natural for me to write for more than one age group and to write in more than one genre. And this is not a great way to launch a career. It's, you know, much more strategic if you have some kind of clear audience and clear genre or brand or style, and you can write your first couple books, at least, in one mode, and then branch out after that if you find some success.
But I did not do that. I actually published five books and had basically no career because I was all over the map. I published a book of essays, I published two picture books, I published that middle-grade, and I published a novel for adults. And I was just like, how is it that I have five books and no career? And the answer is pretty obvious: because they were all for different audiences. And none of them had particularly been popular.
And so I was kind of desperate, I guess. I was trying to write another adult novel, and I couldn't figure it out, and my editor had left publishing anyway, so there was nobody who was waiting for it. And I called up my agent and I said, “I don't think I can write this book. It's the wrong book to be writing. But I would just like to write anything you can find me work doing.” Like, I would ghost write a cookbook or an advice book, or I would… There's a lot of writing for hire, for children's series, for television tie-ins, and things like that. I was like, as long as it's writing, if you can find me work, I will do it.
And she said, “I'll call you back in a week.” And she called me back and she said, “I have something much better for you than writing for hire or ghost writing. There's an editor who has read your adult novel at Random House, and she's looking for something very specific that I think you can do and she would be psyched to hear from you.”
And the editor was looking for Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants but much edgier and cheekier.
Allison
Right.
Emily
And so I wrote a book called The Boyfriend List. And I sold that to my US publisher for a two-book deal, and that was the first time I'd ever had a two-book deal. And I was a little nervous because I didn't really know how I felt about writing for teenagers. But once I began to do it, it was very clear that I was doing the best work that I had ever done, that this was better than anything I'd written, and that I was really in my element. And that book found a nice audience and had a bunch of international sales and kind of launched me into writing for young adults, which became an audience that I care so much about.
Allison
What do you think then, like, you said that you felt like you'd really found your sweet spot with YA. What do you think is the key to that? What's the key to getting it right? Is it the voice that you love? The themes, the language? What is it about it?
Emily
Well, I do think that one of the things that's so amazing about writing teenage female-identified characters is that, you know, linguists know this, it's common that language changes start with young women. And that they are the early adopters of all kinds of slang and changes in usage that happen in language.
And so I really love kind of creating an idiolect or a very specific vocabulary and mode of speech for the characters that I write. And that is something that, you know, not unique to teenage female characters, but specific to them. It is definitely part of what people do in real life and something that you can tap and play with in YA fiction. So yeah, a lot of it is about voice.
But it's also just, to me, this is such a fascinating time of life. People who are young adults are separating from their families of origin. They are suddenly able to earn money, to drive cars, to vote. They are suddenly sexual and might have sexual relationships. They begin to question the institutions alongside the family that raised them, like the church or the sports team or the school. And they begin to become themselves as separate from all those things that shaped them in childhood. So this is like the most fascinating time of life to me and I love to write about it.
Allison
Fair enough. So what's your writing process? Are you someone who plots everything out in advance? Is it taking you two years to write a book? Is it taking you six months? How does your writing process work?
Emily
Well I like to pretend at the beginning of a project that it will take me six months, but it always takes me two years in real life. But I think, oh, this one, this one will be manageable! This one I'm just going to knock out and it's going to be fine! And that is one of the little tricks I use to get myself to write. I think that if you can convince yourself that a project is manageable, then you can sit down every day and work on it. If you say, “oh my gosh! It's going to take my two years to write this crazy project that I am clearly overwhelmed by!” then you're going to go and watch television or do something else.
So if you think, “oh, if I just plod along and I do 500 words or 1000 words a day, I'm going to be fine, then I'm going to get to the end, this one I really understand, this one is not so hard because of X, Y and Z” then you suddenly at least come up with a rough draft that you can then work on.
Allison
Right.
Emily
I forgot the rest of your question. Haha.
Allison
Haha. So you tell yourself it's going to take six months, that's a good motivator. What do you do next? Are you plotting the whole thing out in advance? Or are you someone who comes up with a character and starts writing? Or how does the next bit work?
Emily
I usually come up with a bunch of themes or subjects or milieus or something that I think are interesting. And like with Again Again, for example, I knew that I was interested in trying to write about how hard it is to see somebody that you are romantically involved with, maybe you're obsessed and crushing on someone or maybe you're actually involved, but either way it's really hard to see that person accurately. Because you see them through the lenses of your fantasies, of your wounds, of your neuroses, of your issues and your baggage.
And so I was thinking about how I could write about that, you know, pretty universal experience of kind of mis-apprehending the desired object in a way that would feel true and fun and also be romantic.
So I knew that was a theme of mine. And at the same time, I just kind of felt that all these art exhibits that I'd been saving pamphlets from somehow went together with this. I didn't know why or how it was going to go together. And it ended up that these art exhibits become a big part of the heroine's emerging consciousness and understanding of identity and self and creativity that she's struggling with as she goes on the journey of the novel.
So I knew that those two things went together, but it was like a collage. Like, I didn't know how they were, you know what I mean? I put them together and I started chopping them up into bits but I didn't know how they were going to start to relate to each other until I began actually writing.
Allison
Okay, so let's talk about Again Again, because I haven't quite finished it yet so I can't talk about the ending, which is probably not a bad idea. I've been reading it. I'm reading it, you know, obviously you always read as a writer and I'm reading it and the whole time I'm thinking to myself, “how is she keeping all of this straight?”
Because of course, here you are, playing with structure and character and narrative, and there's a lot of different things going on. And as you talk about the journey, Adelaide is the main character, you're talking about her journey through the book, well, she has several. I was actually describing it to my family at dinner last night saying I was interviewing this morning and my younger son, who is thirteen, is like, “so is it a choose your own adventure book?” And I'm like, “not quite.”
But there is that sense of it. So how did you… Maybe tell us a little bit about that structure and how you managed that as far as the writing of the book went.
Emily
Well, I do not recommend writing your books this way. But what I did was… Well, I work in Scrivener, and I wonder if people… You know, you've done so many interviews on your podcast, if other people have talked about the Scrivener software?
Allison
Yeah, we have a lot of fans of Scrivener. There's a big Scrivener community, yep.
Emily
Yeah. And if you haven't tried it, there's a free trial for a month. So you can have a go and really get to know the program and see if it works for you without any financial investment.
So Scrivener lets you see your work from kind of a bird's eye view. That's one of its many functions. So that you can kind of see the big chunks of your plot and maybe your subplot and you can colour-code things. But then you can also move them around as if you were moving index cards on a table and you're actually moving the whole chunks of your novel around.
So I now write all my books in Scrivener, at least for several drafts. And that really allows me to write a book like Again Again which takes place in multiple universes, or a book like Genuine Fraud which is structured backwards, that I don't I could write without this software because I can really see the architecture of my plot in a way that I never could using a typical word processing program.
Allison
Yep. Okay, that makes sense.
Emily
With Again Again, I actually thought that the structure of the book was going to be five, I think actually originally it was six, interlocked, six stories of Adelaide's summer. So Adelaide has this summer, she becomes completely obsessed with this boy named Jack, she is mourning this big family tragedy that's happened with regard to her younger brother that she feels very angry and precarious about. And she's living on the campus of this boarding school that's mostly empty and so there's a lot of time to get super obsessed with this one boy that she's interested in.
And I imagined that the best plan for this book was to write six basically short stories about this summer, each of which went from the beginning of the summer to the end, beginning of the summer to the end, beginning of the summer to the end. And this turned out… So I wrote all these different versions and there were certain key events that happened in each story. For example, Adelaide meets Jack at the dog run where she is walking five dogs for people who are on vacation. And she reencounters him at a party. And the things that happen in the party might go differently from story to story. And etc, etc. Then there's another point where he picks her up and she's walking on the street in the rain at night and he picks her up in his car. And other things were different from story to story, and the way that each of those scenes went down was different from story to story. But it was still the same party, the same meeting, the same car pickup.
This was a terrible book. It was so boring. It was interesting to me as I was writing it, because it was basically a formal exercise, but a formal exercise is not a novel. And there is a moment when you have to be like, oh, I have done an interesting formal exercise and nobody will want to read this.
Allison
Is that a bad moment?
Emily
Yeah, it was a bummer. Haha. It was no fun. I have this wonderful editor and she… You know, most editors, at least in the States, write a letter. So they read your manuscript, the draft that you have decided to turn into them, and they write usually a very long letter telling you everything that's wrong with it, and what they liked, making suggestions for revision. But my editor, Beverley Horowitz, with whom I have worked for many years now, does not do this. She calls you up and has you come in and she feeds you some baked goods in her office.
Allison
That sounds nice!
Emily
And offers you a fancy coffee. And usually my agent comes too, just in case things really go south, my agent is there to make sure that she knows what's happening. And then Beverley talks to me for like two hours. But she says things like, “well, Emily… It's moving really slow.”
Allison
Oh right.
Emily
What can I do there? And then I'm just like, oh. And she's like, yeah, there's a lot of repetition. And then she says, like that's all! She just leaves it hanging and it's up to me to be like, oh, okay, I see that that is now true and what am I going to do to fix it? It's on me to fix it. Do you know what I mean? She'll say, “oh, I love the character, oh, I'm really interested in the theme. But this is just… What are we going to do about this?”
And it's me who has to figure it out. And I go home and I fuss and fume and have a lot of internal drama. And then eventually, in the case of Again Again, I was like, oh, this is a story that takes places in multiple universes and it needs to be structured like a novel. And that means it needs to create mystery, create curiosity in the reader, create emotional investment in the reader and rise to a climactic moment and have a twist where something surprises you. And all of that.
And I realised that if I could chop up my six stories and create multiple universes that you engage with throughout, you could have actually a very classically structured novel in terms of Adelaide's journey through her misery about what's going on in her family, through her misery about her previous break-up, through her obsession with Jack, into a climactic moment, through a twist, and into a new way of being. Which is that's the structure of a million novels, right?
Allison
That's right.
Emily
But I realised that I needed to take my whole thing apart and put it all back together and that it would work much better that way. Which was a very painful process but then when I was done I had an actual novel and not a formal exercise.
Allison
Okay. It actually makes sense to me that you wrote each of those stories separately first and then worked out how they went together. Because when I was reading it I was just thinking, how did she know that she needed to put this? It was that kind of thing as I was reading. And so it makes sense that you knew everything about each of those stories before you started and then you worked out what the reader needed to know to make a novel, basically.
Emily
Yes. Yeah.
Allison
The other thing I liked about the narrative was the way it unfolds. So you open the book and you start reading and you've got all these other universe things happening up front. There's no real explainer. Like, this is why this is happening. It's just kind of, here it is, and it's up to the reader to get their head around what's going on, which obviously gets easier as it goes because you can start to see the various things unfolding.
But I feel like it takes a bit of experience to be able to trust that the reader will get it. Because I think that that's something that often when new writers start out there's that need to make sure the reader doesn't miss anything and so you're going to explain it to them and you're going to belt them over the head with it, often, which is pretty much what I did with my first novel. So I'm just wondering, do you think it takes experience to give the reader that trust that they're going to figure it out without you heavily labouring the point?
Emily
Well, yes and no. I mean, I was teaching creative writing for children and young adults for some years at Hamline University in this program. And one thing I noticed my students often have trouble with was actually signposting. I would often say, just signpost. Don't… Because we're so often told to show don't tell.
Allison
Yeah.
Emily
This is like a chestnut. And it has a lot of validity. But sometimes emerging writers are so busy showing instead of telling that they don't just say, “my parents were divorced and my stepmother was really mean.”
Allison
Yep.
Emily
You know? Instead they're so busy trying to make sure that they show that the parents are divorced and show that the stepmother is mean, and sometimes there's a whole… Because some of that might not be that important. It might be in the way way background and just a minor irritant. And you have to spend a whole lot of pages at the start of your novel showing a) that there's a divorce and b) that the stepmother is… Oh, whatever! You can just weigh your exposition down when you can get through that stuff in two sentences.
Allison
Yeah, okay.
Emily
So sometimes you just want to lay it out so that people can go forward into the meat of the story. So that the effort that it takes to show not tell sometimes is really hobbling… That's not the metaphor I want. Is constricting or not useful for the writer.
So in this book I wrote a couple of years ago called We Were Liars, the opening of the book is like, this is our family. We're like this. And then we're also like this. And this is our issue and we are like this. So, all right, are you ready for our family? Come on in, this is what's going on. You know?
Allison
Yeah.
Emily
That exposition is just laid out on page one from the very beginning of the novel because if I was trying to show every detail that was laid out in that single page, it would have taken me 30 pages of boring stuff that nobody wants to read because it's like, we don't need to know all that. We just need to know the facts so we can get into the real story.
So, Again Again starts with, I can't remember what the exact first line is, but I think it says, “This story takes places in multiple universes, but mostly in two.”
Allison
Yeah.
Emily
So it's saying, here you go. This is the thing that you are going to be dealing with. And yes, it is challenging to then sort out your multiple universes and get oriented and understand what you're reading. But I don't think there's anything wrong with saying to your reader, “Here's a signpost so that you know where you are.”
Allison
Okay.
Emily
You can relax and enjoy the book then.
Allison
So let's talk about We Were Liars, because that one, I mean, you've had a lot of bestsellers and award winners. That one came out in 2014 and it was one of those books that was everywhere. Like, my son who is now sixteen has it on the shelf as we speak. What do you think it was about that book that struck such a chord?
Emily
Hm… It's hard for me to say. You know? Um… I'm very fond of that book but I don't know that it's better than Genuine Fraud or better than We Were Liars or better than the Boyfriend List. At least from my perspective as creator, I can't tell.
Allison
Okay.
Emily
You know? It's a romantic tragedy. That is definitely a genre that people like. People like to have a good cry. And it is maybe more traditionally romantic than anything else that I have written. Um… But it's also much more stylised than anything I had written up to that point in terms of structure and prose style and stuff like that. My later books, you know, subsequent, Again Again and Genuine Fraud are also very stylised in different ways.
So I expected that that kind of aggressive style, the purpose prose of We Were Liars might be off putting to a lot of readers, and I'm sure it is to some readers. But I wouldn't have assumed that that book was going to be popular because of that. Because the heroine is also, you know, a super wealthy Percocet addict heiress with a chip on her shoulder. So not everybody's cup of tea.
So I didn't know writing it that it would reach so many readers. I'm just grateful that it did.
Allison
So in that book, the main character Cadence Sinclair has been described as an unreliable narrator. How do you as a writer keep that tension for the reader between trusting that what she's telling you is true, but also questioning along the way?
Emily
I don't think she is an unreliable narrator. I mean, I get this question a lot, and you're absolutely correct that many people perceive it that way. But the way I handled it as a writer is that Cadence is telling you absolutely honestly everything that she knows to be true.
Allison
Right, okay.
Emily
So to me…
Allison
Gives it authenticity.
Emily
I'm never breaking that trust with the reader. She's a narrator and she's going to tell you the trust as she knows it. You find out the truth when she finds it out.
Allison
That makes sense. And that allows the tension without you, as you say, ever breaking trust. So there it is.
So that book, being such a big success, does expectation on subsequent releases, does it add a different kind of pressure to your work these days? Do you have to think about that as you're writing the book? About the success of that book and actually matching it or living up to it or any of those things?
Emily
Well… Only a little bit. A little bit. But… You know, Genuine Fraud, which is the book that I wrote after We Were Liars, is kind of a clear thriller. So We Were Liars is also a thriller of sorts, Genuine Fraud is definitely a thriller, but Genuine Fraud does not have this romantic or tragic component to the story. Again Again kind of flips that and has the romantic and tragic components but not the thriller element. Truthfully, I just can only write the story that I have in my head to write. Do you know what I mean? I… I'm lucky enough to stay employed and the success of We Were Liars definitely helps me stay employed and means that I can pay my mortgage and stuff.
Allison
All the good stuff.
Emily
But I just don't seem to be the type of writer who knows how to do another one but different that is what their readers are gonna want. You know what I mean? Some writers are wonderful at that. I love to read those guys. And I'll read everything by somebody who is going to consistently deliver me the same experience over and over, if I love that experience. But I… Argh! I'm not good at that. I'm sure I would be a much wealthier woman if I could.
Allison
So why do you write your YA under E. Lockhart, not Emily?
Emily
Oh, well Lockhart is my middle name. And when I started writing YA, like I said, I had a two book deal and I'd never had a two-book deal before and I'd had five failures. Right?
Allison
Okay, yep.
Emily
I had books in different fields that were failures. So I was just like, let's put my middle name on this and give it a chance. You know, it's a very different audience than I'd written for before and let me get a fresh start.
Allison
Excellent. Okay, so obviously you're promoting your work at the moment under quite different circumstances to what you would normally be doing, given the state of the world. How are you, what sorts of things are you doing to promote the new book that you perhaps wouldn't have been doing, you know, had we not been in lockdown and various other things?
Emily
Well, honestly, here in Brooklyn, New York, where I live, and all throughout the US, we are really struggling with issues of terrible racial injustice. And starting, I think, really fully… The week that Again Again came out here, people in my community and all across the States have been protesting the murder of George Floyd and calling for police reform and other reforms to increase the racial justice in the States. So I have not done anything.
Allison
Yep. Fair enough.
Emily
That has been the priority in terms of, you know, stuff that I might have been doing on social media, the Instagram Lives, and stuff like that. I mean, I still had to answer a bunch of blog questions and the usual kinds of things that you would do in any situation. But I just thought this is way bigger than my book launch.
Allison
Yeah.
Emily
This matters so much more. I would rather protest and use my social media to advance this cause that means so much to me and my neighbours and my friends and my community as a YA writer.
So it's been sort of strange. I actually only announced the book on social media yesterday, which was about almost two weeks after the book came out. And I'm not doing a whole lot. Like, I'm just going to trust that the book will find its readers and that if that's a slower thing than it might have been otherwise, that's okay.
Allison
That makes sense.
Emily
I would rather have the world be changing in the ways that I hope it is than hit the bestseller list.
Allison
Fair enough. And you know, we all have our fingers crossed and we're with you on that, basically.
All right, so we're going to finish up today, thank you very much for your time. And I just want to finish up with our last question that we ask all of our visiting writers, and that would be your top three tips for aspiring and emerging writers.
Emily
Oh, thank you for asking! Um… All right, well my first is, I think I told you that I wrote my first novel together with my father who is a playwright.
Allison
Yes.
Emily
He taught me something that I still say to all my students, and still think about on a daily basis as I write my own work. Which is, “just write it stupid.”
Allison
Ha, I like it.
Emily
And “just write it stupid” means you do not need to worry about writing the great American or the great Australian novel. You do not need to even worry about writing anything halfway decent. You have something in your head, a scene you're supposed to write, a chapter you're supposed to write, just write the stupid version of it. Just don't even try to do anything more. Don't paralyse yourself with this kind of ideas about awesomeness. Or even confidence. Just write the stupid version and later on you will fix it and maybe actually in the stupid version there'll be something that turns out to be cool that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. But your whole job when you sit down to write is just to write the stupid version of your thing and move on. And this was so freeing to me, so I highly recommend it.
Allison
Okay.
Emily
My second favourite tip is “kill your grandma.”
Allison
Okay!
Emily
“Kill your grandma” does not mean kill your real grandma. But when you are writing, if you are thinking about what your grandma is going to think, or what your dad is going to think, or what your partner or your spouse is going to think, or what your children are going to think, you are not going to be able to write. Especially your YA about maybe sexual things or murder or misery or drugs or something, right? You are not, you are going to be completely unable to write this if you're worrying about your children reading it, or your grandma. So you kill them.
And you just, you know, let your desk be a world where those people do not exist. They do not need to read your thing, they are not going to read your thing, they are not going to judge your thing. Nobody is seeing your thing that you care about.
And truthfully, my grandma never read a single book of mine, ever. She was just very happy to see my name on the cover of the book. She did not need read it. I told her she did not need to read it, and everything was fine. So this can actually happen in real life without murdering your grandma.
But you really cannot write your full self if in your head all those people that you care about are judging your sensitive weird thoughts. So kill them off.
And my last piece of advice, I think is just… I am rewriting my books 15 to 25 times.
Allison
Wow.
Emily
Everything is rewritten, over and over and over. Sometimes, I mean, it's not always I've gotten to the end and now I start again, and I do that, start again, 25 times. I'm often rewriting the first quarter of the book than I might be writing the rest of it. You know what I mean? But I am pulling out big chunks, putting in new things, changing characters, eliminating characters, changing over to present tense, moving back to past tense, restructuring the whole thing in Scrivener. And it really, I mean, I'm really not exaggerating when I say 15 times at least.
And I think that a lot of people think that they write their rough draft and then do a revision and then they're done. And I think that is the difference between, you know…
Like, when I was in college, I took one creative writing class and managed to sort of bypass introduction to creative writing and write a short story that got me into this advanced narrative writing class. And it was the most miserable thing because I was the worst person in the class, and the teacher let me know it all the time and the other students didn't think much of me either, and they were all better than me, and a lot of them seemed like they were going to be amazing literary stars. And, you know, it was just…
Allison
Awful.
Emily
It's not an encouraging situation. And, you know, 45 books later, here I am, right?
Allison
Yep.
Emily
And the difference between me and those people was absolutely not raw talent. Because they clearly, at least as college juniors, had a lot more raw talent than I did, a lot more style, a lot more insight, a lot more command of fictional conventions and techniques and a lot more to say and just a lot more of whatever that is, that ineffable something.
The difference between me and them is that my books are finished. That I wrote my whole book, and I rewrote it 15 times, and then I rewrote it again for the editor maybe another six times. It's a nose to the grindstone thing. I was determined to learn this craft, I was determined to get better at it. And I think I really didn't start with anything more than anybody else. And in fact, less than a lot of people in that creative writing class, in terms of whatever that raw material of fiction-making is.
Allison
Do the work. Brilliant. That is fantastic. Thank you so much, Emily. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. And thank you for being so generous with your tips and your experiences. And I hope that everyone has a crack at Again Again because I'm certainly enjoying it, and it's been a really interesting, interesting journey in many different ways for me. So I hope it goes gangbusters for you.
Emily
Thank you. Well, let me know what you think of the ending.
