Why YA? with Cat Winters

Welcome back to Why YA? Where young adult authors talk about their love for the genre, and why they decided to write it.

This week's author is Cat Winters, author of the upcoming IN THE SHADOW OF BLACKBIRDS.

In 1918, the world seems on the verge of apocalypse. Americans roam the streets in gauze masks to ward off the deadly Spanish influenza, and the government ships young men to the front lines of a brutal war, creating an atmosphere of fear and confusion. Sixteen-year-old Mary Shelley Black watches as desperate mourners flock to séances and spirit photographers for comfort, but she herself has never believed in ghosts. During her bleakest moment, however, she’s forced to rethink her entire way of looking at life and death, for her first love—a boy who died in battle—returns in spirit form. But what does he want from her?

Featuring haunting archival early-twentieth-century photographs, this is a tense, romantic story set in a past that is eerily like our own time.

- Amazon

Cat Winters was born and raised in Southern California, near Disneyland, which may explain her love of haunted mansions, bygone eras, and fantasylands. She received degrees in drama and English from the University of California, Irvine, and formerly worked in publishing.

Her debut novel, IN THE SHADOW OF BLACKBIRDS—a YA ghost tale set during the World War I era—is coming April 2, 2013, from Amulet Books/ABRAMS. She currently lives outside of Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two kids.

Visit her online at her main haunt, www.catwinters.com.

Why YA?

Before I started writing my debut YA novel, IN THE SHADOW OF BLACKBIRDS, I had been struggling to break into the adult fiction market for fifteen years. Over the course of those nearly two decades, I signed with two different agents and patiently waited while both a historical manuscript and a contemporary satire involving a vampire made the rounds to publishers. Neither book found a publishing home.

Toward the end of the suburban vampire submission phase, editors started saying, “We only want paranormal novels if they’re historical,” which got me thinking. At one point during my struggling writer years, I had written a paranormal historical set during World War I. I tidied up the manuscript, and in the fall of 2009 I showed it to my agent, Barbara Poelle of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency. Because my protagonist was seventeen, Barbara said she felt the book was trying to be a young adult manuscript, but it wasn’t quite there, and it needed a great deal of work. She loved the 1918 setting involving the war, the Spanish influenza, and Spiritualism, but she strongly encouraged me to take the book in an entirely different direction.

During the same time, an outspoken, scientific-minded character named Mary Shelley Black had been trying to slip into some of my other manuscript attempts. I had also grown interested in the spirit photography side of the early-twentieth-century Spiritualism craze, and I had learned so much more about the almost-dystopian aspects of 1918 America. After that conversation with my agent, an entirely new novel took shape in my head: IN THE SHADOW OF BLACKBIRDS (originally called just BLACKBIRDS).

Barbara encouraged me to make my protagonist sixteen, and I completely agreed that a teenager needed to be at the heart of the story. Some of my favorite books and movies about history’s darkest moments are told from the points of view of young people (Anne Frank’s THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Markus Zusaks’ THE BOOK THIEF, a WWII-set British film from the 1980s called HOPE AND GLORY). Children and teens can be so much more honest about both the absurdities and the terrors of the world’s worst hours. They see the humor and the pain and the gray areas between right and wrong, and they aren’t afraid to reveal their true emotions. Adults tend to be more guarded and one sided.

The Mary Shelley Black character who had already tried making herself known to me seemed a perfect fit for the BLACKBIRDS narrator, so she became the novel’s sixteen-year-old protagonist.

Choosing to write a YA novel proved to be the wisest choice I ever made in my writing career. IN THE SHADOW OF BLACKBIRDS sold to Amulet Books two years after I started writing it.

Will I keep writing YA novels? Definitely. One of the reasons my adult manuscripts failed to find publishers was because my books always seem to span several genres. Publishers of adult fiction wanted to be able to categorize my novels as “romance” or “chick lit,” but my work has never fit neatly into one single box. IN THE SHADOW OF BLACKBIRDS is a love story, a ghost tale, a horror story, a mystery, and an apocalyptic coming-of-age tale, yet it still found a loving and supportive publishing home. Writing for young people allows me the freedom to stretch my imagination to its farthest reaches and tell the types of stories I want to tell.

Such liberation for a writer is almost as magical as childhood itself.

Thank you for that, Cat!

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