Interview with Geoff Herbach

What makes a voice compelling and memorable? How do we, as writers, capture a teen’s perspective in fiction? First-person narration can be a key part of drawing readers into a story. Through voice, a writer can explore a character’s identity and forge emotional connections with readers. But how does it work, and what goes into creating authentic YA voices?

I discussed these topics with Geoff Herbach, my former fiction professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Geoff is the author of eight YA novels (including the Stupid Fast series, Hooper, Cracking the Bell, and more), a picture book, and a literary novel.

Natalie Martell: Voice is something that has always stood out to me when reading anything you’ve written. Could you talk about your process for creating such strong and unique voices in your YA?

Geoff Herbach: A lot of times, the basics of a story are the first things that I get excited about. For YA, I’ve found that I have no ability to get into the event horizon of the book until I can hear the voice really strongly. The character needs to have their special way of talking and telling it, and that is when I understand their psychology and the choices they make. Voice, for me, is the leader. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think of the premise, because I do. But I’ve written whole books with the same premise without hearing the voice right, and I have to end up redoing them because they’re bad.

NM: How long does it usually take you to find the voice? Do you focus on planning materials until you find the voice or do you write through a whole draft to find it?

GH: I have to be doing work in order for the voice to rise up. I often tell students in novel workshop that you have to write 50-100 pages before you know what the book is. A lot of times, people start over when that lightbulb goes off. For me, it’s searching for the way the character’s psychology gets translated through voice. If I don’t know, then the decisions the character makes feel inorganic. But I have to write in order to do it. So it’s a bit frustrating. Twice, I’ve written almost whole books and then had to go back to the beginning, thinking, “at least I have the plot.” But then the plot completely changes too, after I figure out the voice.

NM: I’m the same way. Every time I’ve written a novel, I had to write through the whole first draft before I really knew the character. It was almost like the character had to go through the events of the story before I understood them, and then I had to go back with all of that knowledge to write the voice from the beginning.

GH: It’s mysterious. And it’s a pain in the ass. I turned in a book to an editor that I wrote fully in third person, believing that because I couldn’t hear the voice, I’d have a narrator do most of the work. It wasn’t a particularly close third; it was kind of a pulled-back third. The editor said, “This is not why I acquired your work. Can you go back and figure this out? I want it in first person.” Seven months later, I sent in a draft that did not resemble, at all, what I turned in the first time. But it was much better for having done it, and for having made myself open.

What happened with the third person is that I closed off the question of voice. I think that book, if I had given it to a regular reader, they would have said, “This is pretty good. I like it. It all hangs together nicely.” It had the stuff you would want out of a novel. But the thing that makes me marketable as a writer was not there.

NM: It’s interesting to think about the difference between voice in first person and voice in third person. Do you have any books that have stayed in third person?

GH: I have not published a book in third person. I’ve written three books in third. One of them I completely rewrote. Steph and I have also written a third-person book together that is on the market, and think that one might go as it is. But it also has a lot of Steph in there, and she’s a really good third-person writer. But it’s close, so you’re really writing the character’s thoughts. 

The other book I have is a mystery that I wrote in third. I thought it was great. But my agent said, “Most of your work has a distinctness about it, and I’m not sure what the pink hair is here.” That’s what she said. “What is the pink hair about this book?” I was actually working this morning on trying to sharpen a first person voice to tell that story.

NM: I’m starting the process of going back to an old manuscript and rewriting it. I have all these different versions, and it’s very different, rewriting compared to the freedom of generating a new project. There’s good stuff in the old versions, but you don’t want to stay too close to it. You want to create something new. It’s a challenging process.

GH: It is, yeah. I’ve tried before to cut and paste scenes and then rewrite, and it doesn’t work. I feel like the best thing you can do is read through the old stuff and remember the events that you like, but then let it unfold from the beginning with your new approach.

NM: Has a character’s voice ever surprised you?

GH: A couple of times. The Stupid Fast narrator—which is by far the biggest book I’ve ever written—that voice came really quickly. It actually started bothering me. You know, waking up in the middle of the night with my own 13-year-old anxiety really loud, all night long. It’s the fastest I’ve ever written a draft because the premise and the voice came together at the same time. It felt like there was someone else talking to me and telling the story, and I was just following that voice. 

So there were surprising moments in the book that felt like they weren’t coming from me. And that was great. He would say things in really weird ways, which would open up different ways of looking at the next scene. He does a lot of repeated phrases and once he starts using language in a certain way, he’ll almost create his own memes, and those memes will take off and create the action of the story. So there’s a lot of pattern and repetition in the voice. It all came from me being surprised by the way he stated things. Except, it was also familiar, because that’s the crap that was flying through my head constantly in middle school.

NM: Has there been another project you’ve worked on where you had to do a lot more searching for the voice?

GH: Yeah. Hooper was a book where I wrote a whole draft with a kid just being normal. I mean, he came from a very Christian family in southern Minnesota and a lot of the challenges in the plot came from him. But his way of expressing things was pretty flat.

One night after getting through the draft and being super dissatisfied, I thought about when I taught English in Poland when I was 23. I knew a girl on the junior national basketball team. It was like she watched a bunch of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies or something. She didn’t know a ton of English, but the way she would express it was like, “I’m the joke and you’re the punch line.” And I played a bunch of one-on-one basketball with her. I played basketball a lot at that time, and she would just kill me and say these funny things in Schwarzenegger English. 

So I thought, what if I were to lift her voice and put in on this character? Make him an adopted kid from Poland. And the book just came to life. I could hear her talking, and I ended up pulling in a bunch of high school girl’s basketball into it because of her.

NM: What aspects of YA or writing from a teen’s voice in particular compel you as an artist? What unique opportunities do you see in YA versus another category?

GH: The reason I gravitate to writing first-person YA is that the characters are dealing with situations for the first time. Their responses to those situations are truthful, but also unreliable. It’s so fun to have them come into a scene with expectations, but be totally unprepared for the outcome of those scenes. And to have them be able to reflect on things they just don’t understand. To be in the middle of the process of understanding is super exciting.

NM: Teenagers feel and believe things strongly, but they’re also constantly having those beliefs challenged. The situations they’re going through are changing everything constantly.

GH: Yeah. Because that process is in hyperspeed, their perspectives evolve quickly. What can seem like a forced epiphany in adult stuff is just real life for teenagers. Like, “Oh my god, I understand this.” That kind of experience is rare for an adult, but it’s a daily thing for a teenager.

NM: I was wondering how you approach differentiating your character’s voices. Your main character’s voice is probably the one you’re focusing on the most. How do you go about creating authentic voices for secondary characters?

GH: I stylize everything, so I’m not trying to mimic real speech. I want each character to have their own unique ways of expressing themselves. I think it’s so important to give secondary characters particular speech patterns. I try to think of the character, then think of someone in my life who’s played that role, and stylize the speech of that person and try to hear it. I think there are times I’m in danger of pulling a Juno and making everyone really smart and verbally gifted. But that kind of thing is also fun to read. I try to method act dialogue and feel what they would be feeling. 

NM: By method act dialogue, does that mean you go around talking like your characters?

GH: Oh, for sure. I say everything out loud. It’s annoying. I do it in coffee shops all the time. I get weird stares, but I’ve gotten comfortable with it. And I’m better now at whispering instead of being at regular volume.

NM: I’d love to hear your thoughts on secondary characters. In my first drafts, a lot of times I’m trying too much to make them different from the main character. I end up focusing on one quirk or unique thing and it makes them feel almost like a caricature because I blow it up too much.

GH: There’s such a weird balance. I think there’s value in writing character biography beforehand. I’m still a fan of doing it, but you have to be careful, too. They can’t just be a set of attributes and quirks. You have to feel them in order for them to sound like an organic part of the book. I think when doing character biographies—and again, I’m working on rewriting that book so it has pink hair—I have to remember, they’re not characters until you can feel their response to things.

NM: I’ve been thinking about the different selves that teens occupy. The feeling of being a different person in different situations and relationships. I want to know your thoughts on the role of interiority in YA versus how the character presents themself, in different versions, to the people in their life.

GH: I do so much first person, so interiority is a weird thing. Interiority in first person is still presentation. They’re still telling their story and trying to convince the reader of who they are. But it’s cool because the voice-y interior narrator can actually communicate that: “In front of Mrs. Johnson, who thinks I’m perfect, I try never to say more than three words because I don’t want her thinking any different.” You see that kind of thing in action. I do that a lot, where the character is reflecting on a relationship, and giving a tell about how they’re playing a role in different circumstances and then act out that role in dialogue. 

NM: I love that you mentioned interiority as a form of presentation to the reader. Do you think that, at the beginning of a book, there’s always an element of dishonesty in the narrator, maybe because they don’t fully know themselves yet, and don’t know how to be honest?

GH: Thinking about unreliable narrators in adult stuff, Gone Girl is such a good example. Both of those characters are straight up lying to the reader. They’re trying to make themselves look good. I think YA narrators are unreliable, but totally sincere. They believe that they’re being honest. They’re not lying, they’re just reading the situation incorrectly.

NM: Having been your student, I know you have a lot of great writing exercise ideas. I was wondering if you have a favorite writing exercise to help develop voice.

GH: I’ve done an exercise with undergrads this semester that has been so funny. It’s so ridiculous. I have students using butter as their topic, defending the use of butter, getting very angry about the use of butter, and writing love poetry to butter. People have very strong feelings about butter for some reason. It was almost a joke the first time I did it, but the results were amazing. I had so many people come back to me later and say, “When we had to write that angry defense of butter, my true self just came out.” It wouldn’t have to be butter, but think about something kind of silly that evokes strong allegiance and controversy.

NM: It’s hard to come across a truly unique writing exercise these days, but that is original.

GH: Yes. It’s not pulled from any famous book, I promise.

Learn more about Geoff Herbach’s work by visiting his website: https://gjherbach.com