6 Questions with Anne Ursu

Feb 25

Anne’s work has been selected as a National Book Award nominee, a Kirkus Prize finalist, and as a best book of the year by Parents Magazine, NPR, Bookshop.org, and Publishers Weekly. I’ve read and loved Not Quite a Ghost, The Real Boy, and The Troubled Girls of Dragonmir Academy.

What was a significant challenge you've had in being a writer? How did you address that challenge?

I had a five year period after The Real Boy was published where I simply couldn’t seem to write a good book. And it was awful, because this is how I’m supposed to make my living. During that time I submitted drafts of two different books and when I got feedback from my editor I realized that they were both just broken in a way I didn’t know how to fix, and I couldn’t find a new idea. I was afraid I was done.

Several times during this period my editor told me that he felt there was a really strong core to the first broken book, which was a story about the particular bond between two twin sisters. Of course, I ignored him, wrote the second irreparably broken book, and after I recovered from that, sat down to do some exercises from The 90 Day Novel for a different book idea. A few days into that I suddenly realized that my editor was right, and went back to the story about the twin sisters. That book became The Lost Girl, the final draft of which is barely recognizable from what I first gave him in 2015—though that core was still the same. Having other people see what you can’t helps a lot. As does trying something you haven’t tried before—those exercises I did for a different book idea unlocked this other story for me.

Writing is so often about resilience and perseverance, and what I discovered is that even if you can go through periods when you don’t have either, you can claw them back. Those abilities don’t vanish—even if they hide for a bit and need some coaxing to come out.

I've often been told that in every scene, a character needs a proactive, concrete goal. But Not Quite a Ghost is full of compelling scenes that don't have those elements. For instance, in Chapter Nine ("Get It, Millicent"), you have girls in a cafeteria arguing about the merits of shaving legs and gossiping about another student. When characters don't have proactive, concrete goals, what do you do to make sure a scene is compelling?

So, I don’t really subscribe to that theory, as you can tell, at least for character-driven stories. For me, a scene is a narrative unit where something emotionally significant happens to the protagonist, and where this is some kind of emotional change, and making the scene work is about dramatizing the emotional arc of the scene. I think it matters that characters have desires (for the moment, and broader desires for the book) and fears, but these are often desires and fears that they themselves can’t articulate and maybe don’t even recognize.

So that scene you spoke of is about Violet feeling really uncertain about her place in her new friend group and gradually finding her way, and the work for a scene like this is all in developing the subtext. That’s where the movement of a quiet scene like that comes from. Sometimes I have things that I need to happen for plot reasons, but the scene won’t work until I craft the emotional story of the scene, which may or may not be related! If I’m struggling, I ask myself what she wants and what she’s afraid of, and that usually lets me find my way in.

You do a great job creating a diverse cast. I know many writers are afraid to have diverse characters in their stories. Any advice you have for writers who want to create diverse casts with characters who do not share their identities?

Thank you for saying this! It’s important to me to give kids books that reflect the world around them. And now when books by queer authors and authors of color are being removed from library shelves it feels even more crucial to be thoughtful about how I populate my books. Lately, I’ve been aiming to have my main cast be about half people of color.

But of course, you want to do it well, and you don’t know what we don’t know. My son is autistic so I’ve seen first hand how much of the popular consciousness of autism is influenced by stereotypes, and how directly harmful those stereotypes are. Mostly, I want to be thoughtful, compassionate, and humble. I have very smart people who read for me, and if they point something out, I listen. I would urge people to approach having a diverse cast not from a place of fear, but out of humility and respect.

For me, what’s crucial is that every character feels whole and interesting and three dimensional. Make sure your characters feel like people. For me, characters feel tokenized when they’re given an ethnic name but not a personality.

What are you most proud of in your writing?

This is a hard question to answer! I know this sounds goofy, but I am proud of my protagonists, because I gave them emotional baggage to overcome and eventually they do it! There’s a point in every book where I start to feel like I’m writing for them, because they have something they need to heal or conquer, and it’s my job to help them get there.

In terms of the writing itself, I am proud of the revisions that I’ve done. There’s always a period after I get my editorial letters where I think I cannot possibly do what needs to be done, so I might as well hang it all up and go farm alpaca. But then eventually I do it. Some of my books have had massive overhauls, and they’re so much better for it. Now, as I’m writing a draft, I know there are problems, but I know that eventually I’ll be able to fix them. It never really gets easier, but you get more confident the more times you do it.

What do you know now about being a writer that you wish you'd known when you were starting?

That the only job of a first draft is to exist. You write it to discover your story, but after that comes the work of turning that story into a novel that works. And that takes time, and smart readers, and maybe some despair in there. But when the book works, it's really gratifying.

What's a middle-grade speculative fiction book you've read recently that you loved?

I loved Tracey Baptiste’s Boy 2.0, a sci fi mystery that brilliantly uses speculative elements to talk about extremely real issues facing Black kids in America.

Peter Zuckerman