5 Questions with Eliot Schrefer
Eliot Schrefer, my former advisor at Hamline, is also a New York Times-bestselling author. He also recently released one of my favorite new YA sci-fi romance books, The Brightness Between Us. He has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and he received the Stonewall Honor for best LGBTQIA+ teen book, and received the Printz Honor for best young adult book from the American Library Association.
1. Who is your writing hero? Why?
Elana K. Arnold! She’s able to write emotionally grounded, probing novels that are also total bangers, plot-wise. We exchange manuscripts for feedback regularly, and I’m always looking forward to hearing what she has to say—it’s often totally transformative.
The “title drop” in The Brightness Between Us? Totally Elana’s idea!
2. You’ve said that you’re an outliner. The Brightness Between Us has a complex structure with two timelines. What did your outline for The Brightness Between Us look like?
One nice thing about outlining is that, once the book is planned out, you don’t have to then write the draft in that order. I structured The Brightness Between Us so that each section would end with an urgent question to be resolved—only to go to the other timeline. But in drafting, I wrote all the Earth sections at once, then all the Minerva sections, so that the vibes of each section would have more continuity. I don’t do character sketches. I just make sure the characters are making interesting choices, and trust the drafting to flesh out their humanity
3. What’s the best question you’ve ever been asked about your writing? What was your answer?
A kid at a D.C. school visit asked me “if you’re a writer, why don’t you have a Rolex?” I told him it was a good question, one that hadn’t occurred to me, and that unfortunately I didn’t have a good answer.
4. Your first book, Glamorous Disasters, is for adults. Now you write for a younger audience. What was the hardest part of making that switch? How did you address that challenge?
I wrote about this for The New York Times once: my biggest shift was in cutting out as much authorial indulgence as I could. Really weighing every sentence, asking myself “is this here for the reader, or here for me?” Harder work than I predicted, but I do think it made me a better writer!
5. What do you know about writing now that you wish you’d known when you were starting out?
The intrinsic pleasures of writing, of expressing myself and communicating with others, never go away. The extrinsic pleasures of awards and best-seller lists are really quite short-lived and have a whiplash afterwards of the opposite feeling.
