Cover Story: A Whole New Playbook
BB: You’ve done three novels that are being sold as YA, though Leonard Peacock has very mature and timely themes, and you are returning to adult for your next books. Is there a big difference between writing for “adults” vs. writing for “young adults?”
MQ: When my agent [Doug Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic] first asked me to write YA, he said, “You were a high school English teacher, you know teenagers, you should give it a go.” I had a lot of lingering MFA snobbery. My response, and I’m not proud of this, was, “I don’t write genre fiction.” To think that I had the balls as an unpublished novelist to tell someone what I was. A lot of young writers have very preconceived ideas about how the publishing world works, and those preconceived ideas put you at a disadvantage. My agent took a deep breath and sighed. “I’m not asking you to write anything you wouldn’t normally write, but write it from the point of view of a teenager. I remember you saying, Catcher in the Rye is YA.” I remember thinking, “Wow, I could be J.D. Salinger.” [Laughs.] … Having worked at this for six years, I feel as though my mind-frame has really changed radically about all of that. When I sit down to write, I don’t think about how it’s going to be perceived or received. I try to tell the best story I can tell. … I left all that snobbery at the door a long time ago.