Write Now With Gayle Forman
Today's Write Now interview features Gayle Forman, New York Times bestselling author of IF I STAY and NOT NOTHING.
Who are you?
I’m Gayle Forman. I’m a professional author. I live in Brooklyn.
What do you write?
I write novels, primarily for children and teenagers, sometimes for adults. Though, I’ve come to realize I am better at writing for children than adults. Maybe because the impulse to be self-important and performative is snuffed when writing for kids who have no patience for such BS. My latest book, Not Nothing, started as an overlong adult novel and improved vastly when I realized it was meant to be a middle-grade novel. It’s the same general story, deals with the same themes, but with more directness and less self-importance. Which is something people don’t know about children’s literature. You can write for a young audience, in a young voice, but you can still grapple with some meaty themes. That’s the challenge, and joy, of writing for young people. And in case it’s not obvious, I love what I do. I get to make things up for a living and then go out and have rad conversations about the work with children and educators. What’s not to love?