Interview with Nicole Kronzer

Nicole Kronzer is the author of YA books Unscripted and The Roof Over Our Heads. Below, we discuss navigating multiple voices in a narrative, writing process, the small moments of magic that occur while writing a novel, and much more!

Natalie Martell: I’d love to know how you arrived at writing YA. At what point did you know that’s what you wanted to write?

Nicole Kronzer: This is a question I get a lot — I think a lot of YA writers do. For me, it’s a several-pronged answer. First, I teach high-school English. My days are filled with teenagers, and I love them. They’re my favorite people. So when I sat down to write, I didn’t really consider anything else. I was like, of course I’m going to write for them. 

I heard Kate DiCamillo speak a few years ago, and someone asked her, “How do you tap into being an 8-year-old?” And she said, “Well, there’s a part of me that never stopped being 8.” I feel that way too. There’s a part of me that never stopped being 17. Probably that same piece drew me to teach high school. It’s like, “I can do this.” Even though high school wasn’t always great for me, there’s still something about that time that’s really exciting. As a high school teacher, you’re in this incredible position where you get to hold the space for people who can see their childhood from where they’re standing and also their impending adulthood. It’s this dynamic, dramatic time in a person’s life.

Another thing I said recently is that it’s a disservice to call the genre “young adult” because teenagers are not young versions of adults. They are their own thing. And that thing is awesome. The genre really should be called “teen lit” because it is for teenagers.

My first book was rated 14 and up and the second was rated 12 and up, but it’s about a 17-year-old. And then middle grade, which is aimed at ages 8-12, is always about 12-year-olds. So there’s this lack of literature starring 13 and 14-year-old characters. We have it again with early adulthood. “New adult” has tried to get a foothold, but publishers haven’t really taken to it. What do you do with people in college? Some of those early college stories are being treated as YA, but what about a 21-year-old? There’s just nothing. Publishing is fascinating because writing is art, and we’re telling this story, but publishing is a business. Sometimes those two things do not butt up against each other in a way that is productive. And sometimes they do.

NM: I was working on a YA novel a few years ago that had a 14-year-old protagonist, and I kept being told that it sounded like middle grade because it had this 14-year-old voice. It lived in that in-between space where the subject matter was too old to be middle grade, but the voice felt too young for YA. It’s interesting how those categories can impact the types of stories we tell.

NK: They absolutely do. 

NM: On the craft side of things, what is your favorite aspect of the beginning stages of a novel? What is the most exciting part of starting a new project?

NK: I love the characters. That’s my favorite part. I do enjoy finding the story too, but that part is harder for me. You can see over my shoulder — let me walk you over to show you.

This is the fourth iteration of a book that I’m writing. I’ve known who the people are for a long time, but finally I had to lay out this Dan Harmon story circle.

In the first quadrant of the story, the protagonist is steady and she feels in charge, but then she dips down and she feels unsteady but still in charge. Then, she’s unsteady and vulnerable, and finally, at the end, she’s steady and vulnerable. It maps out the quadrants and the story, and I have different-colored post-it notes for all of the major characters and major things. There’s a lighthouse in the book, so the lighthouse goes through changes. It’s a simplified version of the hero’s journey. 

There are a lot of theories about plotting, but in order to plot, I have to know who the people are. So that’s my favorite part, coming up with the characters and figuring out what they want. What do they think they want, but also, what does their heart need? Sometimes it’s elusive for a while, but I always know when it’s right. I get this feeling like I’ve unlocked them. They’re waiting to be discovered, and it’s my job to get to know them. It’s less that I’m creating people and more like I’m finding them and getting to know them. 

NM: I love your post-it story circle. I’m a visual person, so that really resonates with me. I also like that you brought up how a character is unlocked to you at a certain point and you understand them. I was wondering what stage of the writing process that usually happens for you. 

NK: I took this class with Nina LaCour called “The Slow Novel Lab.” In it, she has you do a lot of exercises that are not going to end up in your book. One is to take a couple of minor characters and throw them into a conversation together. I get to know their voice that way, by intentionally having them talk to each other. But with Unscripted, my first book, there’s a lot of characters in there. I did the audiobook for Unscripted and Julia Whelan told me to highlight all of the dialogue in different colors for each person. I did that, and I realized I had 33 distinct voices in Unscripted. Sometimes it was really late in revisions, and I was realized, “Oh, Paloma would never say that. That’s totally a thing Hannah would say.” But it took a lot of time to get to know those minor characters.

Especially if I’m struggling to figure out who somebody is or who two people are with each other, I just do dialogue back and forth. I was a professional actor before I was a teacher and an author. I sort of see my books as movies in my head, so the dialogue is the most prevalent part. A lot of times, feedback from my editor is like, “Can we get some more interiority?” Even my main character in The Roof Over Our Heads, she’s like, “I’d love to know what Finn is thinking.” Of course, when you’re writing or reading plays, there is no interiority. You only get what people say and do. Your job as an actor is to show the interiority. So that’s something that comes late for me and that I have to work at. There are many things that are hard about writing, but figuring out characters and voices feels really organic, and I think it’s because of my theater background.

NM: That makes sense. I’m reading The Roof Over Our Heads, and I definitely notice the great use of dialogue. You mentioned having a lot of different characters speaking, and I think you manage to have different voices for each of the characters. I was wondering what your process is for crafting the unique elements of each voice.

NK: So, I love Jane Austen. When she lived in Chawton with her mother and sister Cassandra and this friend of the family, Martha, she was allowed to do nothing during the day. They did all  the housework, and she wrote all day. As a trade-off, in the evening she would read her work—what she had written that day—out loud to her mother and sister and Martha. They would relax and sew, or whatever they did to chill in the evenings in 19th-century England. But because she read out loud, she was revising all the time. That ended up being an important part of her process. I thought, well gosh, if it’s good enough for Jane Austen, it’s good enough for me. So that’s a thing I do a lot, read out loud what I have written. I can’t count how many times I’ve read the entire book out loud.

As human beings, we can go through an entire life and never read and write, and it doesn’t matter. We send our children to school to learn this because it’s not an inherent skill we have. But talking, on the other hand, is. It’s in our bodies. The average human being just figures out talking. So when you take this non-human thing, writing, and you put it in your natural human body and say it out loud, major revision and magical things happen. 

I can’t say that I have, necessarily, a process, like giving everybody a catchphrase, or having a character speak in short sentences. You could do that. You could say, “This guy is going to use slang, and this guy is never going to use slang, and this guy is never going to use contractions.” All of that would achieve different-sounding voices for each person, but I just read out loud a lot. I can hear Andre, and how he’s different from Kendrick. It’s a little bit magic.

I prefer characters to say things out loud rather than to think them. Probably because I’m an external processor. I almost don’t think a thought unless I say it out loud. That’s why Finn has Noah. He needs a boy to talk to because it wasn’t working for me to give Finn a bunch of thoughts spinning around in his head. But other people are internal processors, and they need to think by themselves before they can make sense of the world. Those writers are probably better at interiority, and maybe that’s why dialogue comes more easily to me, because my natural human state is talking.

NM: I was thinking about the importance of performance in your books. I would love to hear your thoughts on dialogue as performance versus the interior voice of the character, and how they talk to themselves. Especially for a teenager who is still figuring out who they are.

NK: In The Roof Over Our Heads, there are some scenes with Finn and Jade that I spent more time on than anything else. The parts I sat with were conversations where Finn is thinking one thing about Jade, but saying something else. So, it often manifests on a technical level as repetition and “ums,” in those placeholder sounds.

I was proud of this one part that is a one-sided phone call Andre is having. I read that out loud a million times, imagining what the other person might say, and how he would react. We aren’t in Andre’s head, so it’s just Finn trying to make sense of this thing being said that’s only half-there.

NM: I think that’s so exciting in character-driven stories, when drama and tension come from these subtle dynamics between people. Something misunderstood, something overhead, something not said, and there’s so many opportunities there for creating suspense from these seemingly small dynamics. I think you do that really well in your writing.

So, you have two books published, and I read that you had written another manuscript prior to your first publication. I am curious how your process evolved over writing these different manuscripts. How was the experience different for you with the various projects you’ve written?

NK: That’s a great question. The first one, I had no idea what I was doing. I just knocked it out, and nothing happens for the first 40 pages. There’s so much backstory, and the protagonist doesn’t really want anything. Even though I’m a creative writing teacher, the difference between telling someone how to write and then actually writing is like an armchair quarterback saying, “All that guy had to do was catch the ball!” But you put that guy out on the field, and is he going to catch the ball? No. It’s a similar dynamic. It’s easy to tell people what to do, and actually doing it is a separate thing. 

When I sent that first book to literary agents, I got a lot of, “I like your voice, and these characters are really well-rendered,” but also, “You have some plot problems.” So with Unscripted, I planned it. I did more outlining. Up until I started outlining, I could never finish a project. I’d been trying to write a book for years, but I would always get 20,000 words in and be like, “What happens now? I don’t know.” 

When I learned about the Dan Harmon story circle, that cracked things open for me. I used that to write Unscripted. Between Unscripted and The Roof Over Our Heads, I discovered Save the Cat. It’s great, and so is Story Genius by Lisa Cron. It’s about brain science and story. I went on sabbatical from teaching between Unscripted and Roof, so I had time to read books. I also did so much research with Roof, because the characters dress up like it’s 1891, and they live like it’s 1891, but it’s modern. There was so much that I had to research.

Somewhere in between my first project and Unscripted, I heard E. Lockhart (Emily Jenkins) talking about this novel-writing software, Scrivener. It’s like 50 bucks, you download it once, and it’s amazing. I went directly home and downloaded Scrivener and taught myself how to use it. It really helped with organization and keeping track of things. 

But the thing I’ve learned too, while writing all these different projects, is that every book wants to be written its own way. I hand-wrote the entire first version of Unscripted. I tried to do the same thing with Roof, and I got 9 chapters in, and it did not want to be handwritten. I had to switch to the computer. The project I’m working on now, I’ve been going back and forth. Some of it is hand-written, and I get to this place where I need to go and type it again. And maybe I take some time away and hand-write a scene, then type it up and revise as I go.

Books are weird. Everybody talks about how you think you know the process, like with two books in the world, I totally know this. It’s like children, really. I have two kids, and they were birthed by the same two people, raised in the same house, and they are so different from each other. The same thing is true with writing novels. Each book is really different.

I’ve done two graphic novel scripts, too. As a performer, as an actor, it was so fun to write a graphic novel script. You are the actor and the director and the set designer and the costumer, and I don’t have to worry about interiority because you don’t get to know that in a graphic novel, unless you’re doing a voice-over thing. So that’s part of the fun for me, like, “What’s this book going to want?”

NM: I’m curious about which YA authors most influenced your work, or just some of your favorite YA books right now.

NK: I’ve talked about this in many places that I wouldn’t be a YA author without Nina LaCour. 

NM: I love her work.

NK: I love her work so much. She visited my school and really encouraged me, and she taught me what I needed to do to get a literary agent. I owe everything to Nina. We’re very good friends, but we’re so different. Our books are so different. I like to say that Nina is paddling a canoe and it paddles from one beautiful, sad thing to another beautiful, sad thing. And on that same lake, I’m a golden retriever running off the dock for a tennis ball. And then Claire Forrest, who I love and whose book just came out [Where You See Yourself]—which I highly recommend—Claire said to me, “Where am I in this lake?” I love the idea of all sorts of YA authors all being at this lake in the woods, all having a role. I said she was the sarcastic lifeguard who was like commenting on what people were wearing. [laughter]

When I read Eleanor & Park and then Fangirl, something lit up inside me. I wanted to write books that made people feel how those books made me feel. There was something cellular and seismic that changed when I read Rainbow Rowell’s works. I also really love Maureen Johnson and Brandy Colbert. Justina Ireland—historical fiction with a twist, and it’s wry and her voice is so strong. In terms of romance, I love Nicola Yoon. Jordan Ifueko is doing such cool things with fantasy. Kristina Forest’s YA rom coms are awesome. I particularly love her debut I Want to Be Where You Are—I found it transcendent.

Elana K. Arnold’s work is awesome. I love Becky Albertalli so much. She could write a grocery list and I would buy that grocery list, because I admire her a lot. Locally, Julie Schumacher is just wry and funny, and her YA novel Black Box is from the point of view of a girl whose sister is suffering from major depression. I loved that book. Oh, and Alison McGhee, also local, and brilliant. Alison is a novelist who also writes picture books and books for adults, and everything she writes is poetry. I’m probably leaving out some important people. I love Karen McManus. And Ari Tison. And Geoff Herbach!

Learn more about Nicole Kronzer and her books by visiting her website: https://www.nicolekronzer.com