When she was merely five
years old, Alex Flinn, now the award-winning author of more than ten books for
young adults, knew she wanted to be a writer and began keeping her own
diary and writing plays for the kids in her neighborhood. Before turning
twelve, she started writing a novel.
That novel was never
finished, and the novel that she wrote after that one—the one that she wrote at
the age of 19—was lost. It took another ten years for her to start writing another
novel, this time with an eye toward publishing the fruit of her efforts. She
was 29 years old. Three years later her first book (the stunning, award-winning
debut, Breathing Underwater) was
accepted.
Looking back on her
youth from today’s vantage point, Flinn observes that she didn’t truly start to
think of herself as a writer until her family moved to Miami. “It was the first
time I was really miserable,” she says, recalling middle school. “I had a hard
time making friends. Art is suffering, people! As it was, I spent a lot of time
reading and writing.”
Flinn, like many
writers of books for children and young adults, suspects that she chose to
write for this age group because she never got over being a child. “In my mind
I am still 13 years old,” she claims, “running laps on the athletic field,
wearing this really baggy white gym suit.”
What she tries to do
in each of her books, she says, is to offer a story to the girl wearing that
gym suit that she might enjoy. “It’s a way of going back to being thirteen,” Flinn
explains, “knowing what I know now.”
The time that Flinn
spent in law school, she says, probably gave her the idea for Breathing
Underwater, which is based
on her experiences volunteering with battered women. What she discovered during
her apprenticeship writing that novel was what every writer needs to learn: she
needed to write what she wanted to
write, not what she thought might sell.
“If you write something that doesn't have your heart in it
because you think other people will like it, it will show,” she says. “It's
better if you're genuinely excited about your subject matter.”
Flinn still
writes her first drafts by hand in a notebook because it “just feels right,”
she says, and because “I get a lot of good editing and adding done when I
retype. Why mess with what works?”
Flinn’s
forthcoming book, Beheld, is scheduled
for release in January 2017. She lives with her husband and daughters a half-mile
from her old middle school in Palmetto Bay, a suburb of Miami, where she was
kind enough to take time from her work-in-progress to share some thoughts on writing.
Wordswimmer: How do you get into the
water each day?
Flinn: Very slowly with a lot of bouncing around to make sure it's warm
enough.
Wordswimmer: What keeps you afloat...for
short work? For longer work?
Flinn: For short work, usually just going somewhere with few distractions and
getting to it. I can write a short story in a day, or I can't write it at all.
(For that reason, I am frequently a last-minute contributor to short story
anthologies, when some other writer hasn't worked out.) For longer work,
sitting there every day for at least some period of time, and planning to write
Wordswimmer: How do you keep swimming
through dry spells?
Flinn: "Just keep swimming," as Dory would say. Not every day is
going to be great, but you have to keep swimming even when nothing is
happening.
Wordswimmer: What's the hardest part of
swimming?
Flinn: The days when the inspiration doesn't come
Wordswimmer: How do you overcome
obstacles, problems, when swimming alone?
Flinn: Write notes to myself, walk my dog. Sometimes, he is well-walked.
Wordswimmer: What's the part of swimming
that you love the most?
Flinn: The
days when it's easy. But, when I look back on the stuff I wrote on those days
versus the hard days, sometimes the stuff I wrote with greater difficulty is
better. My upcoming book, Beheld
(HarperCollins, January, 2017), is composed of four long stories. I struggled
to write the first one. It took me maybe six months to write that. I wrote the
other three in less than a month. But that first one was very, very polished
and needed less editing. Neither is better, and you don't get a choice, but
there are benefits to paddling through the hard parts too.
For more information
about Flinn, take a look at her website:
And for a few more interviews
with her, check out these links:
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