Lisa
was born August 25, 1971 in Houston, Texas. After graduating from Vassar
College, she lived in Guatemala City, Guatemala, where she taught English in a
bilingual school. When she came back to the United States, she moved to New
York City, where she worked a series of editorial jobs at various publishers,
including Scholastic, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers, Disney Press, and what is
now Alloy. She then decided that I wanted to be a big-shot businesswoman and
enrolled in New York University’s Stern School of Business, but after a year,
she decided that big-shotting wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, so she left
to write full-time.
What are you reading right now?
EVERYTHING! I’m an MFA student at
Vermont College of Fine Arts, and I have to read approximately a book a day.
Right now, I’m studying verse novels. I recently read LOCOMOTION, EXPOSED, and MAKE
LEMONADE—all of which are fantastic. Also A STEP FROM HEAVEN, which is utterly
beautiful. Drop everything and read it right away!
What first sparked your interest in writing?
Reading. I remember reading THE
CHRONICLES OF NARIA and thinking, Someone—a
writer—wrote this. I want to do that when I grow up.
What do you love the most about writing? The least?
What I love most about writing is
the dreaming/ reading/ thinking part. I love imagining characters and how they
feel and their thoughts. What I hate is getting reviewed. When you spend years
working on something, to have someone dismiss it with a sentence is extremely
painful. And even when people like your book, being reviewed has an unpleasant
beauty-pageant feeling to it. It turns the book into a thing to be evaluated,
rather than a work of art to be pondered.
Tell us a little about your writing process.
First I need an idea. I never know
when it will pop up, but when it does, I never bother to write it down, because
if it’s good, it will hang around and try to meet other good ideas. Next comes
general staring out a window, followed by reading a few books that I can
reasonably claim as “research.” Then, hopefully, a second idea will show up.
You really need two ideas for any book—one for a character, one for an incident
or conflict or ending. Okay, once I have my two ideas, I try to rub them
together. Then I stare out the window some more, maybe go for a walk, maybe
chat about the idea with someone. If other people are interested, I know it has
potential, so I’ll start working on an outline. For me, an outline is a scene-by-scene
breakdown of everything that happens in the novel. It is, frankly, easier to
muck about rearranging things and changing them in an outline than it is after
a draft. Then I start the long slog through the first draft. Then I revise.
Then I revise again. Repeat until done!
What are your passions?
Social justice, writing, reading,
dogs, my darling daughter, my sweet husband, the Oxford comma, and Martha Stewart Living magazine
(embarrassing, but true).
What inspires you?
What inspires me are fans. They
write me E-mails, and sometimes they tell me that they bought the book with
their own money. When I think about that—about a reader choosing to spend her
money on my books instead of someone else’s, or something else that she might
want—I know I have to work as hard as I can to make sure she cares about the
characters and enjoys the book.
Why fantasy?
I love fantasy. LOVE! It’s the
oldest genre (think mythology), and I think a lot of people sort of have it in
their DNA, as I do. Unfortunately for me, I don’t really pick and choose the
stories I write—they just come to me in pieces, and I start putting them
together, and I get interested in them and then I can’t stop. I also write
humorous tween books (which I also love to write) that sell really well, and my
editors, of course, always want more of that. But…oh, well. I also write
fantasy. I can’t help it!
>Why young adult?
I don’t really believe that “young
adult” is a writing genre. It’s more of a marketing
genre. If your book is about young characters, it’s now published as young
adult. If GREAT EXPECTATIONS, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or—arguably—WUTHERING
HEIGHTS published today, the editors and marketers would want them in the YA
section. Well, after that ramble, I guess the real answer is, “I dunno. That’s just
my brain!”
How was SIREN’S STORM born?
SIREN’S STORM jumps right into the story with a peculiar car
collision and a tragic backstory. Did the book always begin there or did it
take numerous drafts to find the right starting point?
This is an excellent question,
because it gets at something that is always a challenge for writers (and by
writers, I mean “me”)—finding a good opening. The way I work is different from
most writers, in that I am a hard-core outliner. Still, I often find that the
opening scene I had planned in the outline just isn’t compelling once it’s
written. So I try not to worry about the first scene until the second draft. I’ll
just write a junk opening and then go back and find a better scene after the
whole novel is done. That said, SIREN’S STORM is one case in which I saw the
opening right away and very clearly, and I still think it’s one of the best
scenes in the book.
Obviously, you didn’t create the concepts of sirens or Furies,
but in what ways did you take literary license and tweak these beings for your
own world?
I went back to the original
ODYSSEY and was shocked to discover that a Siren wasn’t a mermaid at all—it was
a creature with the body of a fierce bird and the face of a woman. Over time,
others changed them to be half-woman, half-fish. Every author tweaks these
creations, I guess. For the Sirens, I wanted to get at their backstory, to
think about how it might be that some people could think they were birds, some
fish. I created a tale-within-a-tale about their evolution. As for the Furies,
their history is extremely vague and even conflicting. I tried to simply take
the nugget of the idea there and then re-create the Fury out of whole cloth. I
combined it with the mythical Phoenix, which rises from the ashes, and
discovered a creature I really found intriguing. Like I said above, the fun is
in turning the puzzle pieces around and seeing how they might fit.
Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
As a former editor and present
author, I have TOO MUCH advice! The two most important things I would say are:
do not give up and remember that rejection of your work/suggestions for ways to
improve it are just part of the process. Every step leads forward.
Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?