Written by contributor Amy Jane Lehan
Hi Sera, thank you so much for this opportunity to ask you a few questions about your upcoming release! It was such a privilege to read it early and it’s a wonderful, heartbreaking story.
Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Sure I can (and how do you do, fellow nerds). I’m Sera and I’m the author of two very soft queer tween romcoms, Boy Meets Hamster and Boy Meets Ghoul (as Birdie Milano), and This Can Never Not Be Real, a YA book from multiple perspectives, set during a terror attack at a festival.
I live just a whisker outside London in the UK with my rescue dog and wonky cat. I love theatre, comics, and telling my houseplants they need to let me love them while I watch them slowly die.
This Can Never Not Be Real is wildly different from your Hamster series! Darker and gut wrenching compared to the disaster boy fluff, as well as being for older readers. Can you tell me where the idea for this came from and what readers can expect?
I admit that hamsters to terrorists may not be the most obvious progression, but I like to say I write about love in its various forms, and This Can Never Not Be Real is really a book about love. The idea in its most nebulous, floaty form may have lived with me since the attack on Utøya in 2011 – it was, and still is, the deadliest mass shooting by a single perpetrator and the victims were mostly children. During the trial I followed journalists on Twitter who shared snippets of evidence from the survivors that were full of such strength, courage and humanity it gave me immense hope in the face of such bleak news. I wasn’t considering a career as a writer back then but the memory stayed with me and, as I’ve watched the seemingly endless run of shootings and attacks unfold in the years since, I’ve often felt that what’s missing from the news coverage are the stories of the survivors: the people who had their worlds changed but will go on living. We remember terrorist attacks for the people who carried them out and the number of the dead – what if we remembered them for those who survived?
Readers of This Can Never Not Be Real can expect to meet five survivors of a deadly attack and be taken, minute by minute, through their experiences that night. They may have nothing in common, but they can’t get through the night without each other. Who the attackers are doesn’t matter, and nor do their motives. What matters first is survival, and what matters after that is survival, too.
What’s your writing process like? Super detailed outline and daily word count goals or more winging it?
I tend to equate my writing process to rolling down a hill screaming. Once I get started it’s all a bit of a terrifying blur. But that’s because books take a long time to grow in my head before I start to write them down. I’m not really a planner, but I’m a listener – I’ll spend a few months listening to snippets of conversation or prose that come into my head, noting them down until eventually I have my characters and an idea of their story. Then, usually, I’ll write a very brief sketch outline of the main events and write the actual book pretty quickly.
This Can Never Not Be Real was its own unique process, in that I woke up one night around 2am with the whole book in my head. I sat up, wrote out the whole story as a 3 page synopsis, and expected to wake up the next morning to find it was actually a wild diatribe about why sharks shouldn’t eat biscuits*, as most of my 2am ramblings turn out to be.
But it was a book, and it really, really wanted me to write it. The whole thing took around 1 month from that night, though in that month there were days when I wrote 100 words and days when I wrote 5000.
I do not subscribe to forcing yourself to write every day. I go weeks without putting a word on a page, but I do subscribe to thinking about your work every day. When I’m actually writing I also try to open my word document daily, even if I don’t feel I can write. Because I write intensely when I’m in full flow on a book, I need to live in that world by checking in daily.
*Note: I don’t know if sharks should or shouldn’t eat biscuits. Don’t come at me, shark fans.
We get to move through various points of view quickly, often with the next character picking up the thread of the last one. It’s really well done, and each character has a unique voice. Was it a challenge to move from person to person? Was there a method you used to keep track?
I wish I could say there was a method. I just let the characters talk. I didn’t read back at all as I wrote, so by the end I couldn’t remember most of what I’d written and was startled to find it all hung together so cleanly. I really enjoyed writing in shifting perspectives – sometimes the book changes character sentence by sentence, rather than the more traditional chapter by chapter. I found it was a great way to never get bored, and the ‘conversation’ between the characters helped keep the flow and pace ticking along.
Out of all the characters, is there one you relate to the most?
Every last one of them is a piece of me. There’s something of my experience, and a lot of my heart in all of them.
Was there anything that didn’t make the final version, or anything that majorly changed during editing?
Somehow, the final book is startlingly close to my first draft. I had a similar experience with my first book, Boy Meets Hamster. In both cases I think one scene was added, nothing was removed, and the rest has been more delicate, fine-tuning detail work involving dripping in some extra information here or clarifying a voice there, which is where having a fantastic editor is really invaluable. With This Can Never Not Be Real in particular editing was a tricky call, as there’s a kind of rhythm to the book that I didn’t want to break.
Are there any authors you particularly admire?
So many. Diana Wynne Jones might be most to blame for making me a writer. I greatly admire the way V.E.Schwab and Neil Gaiman write across age ranges, genres and mediums, which is definitely something I’d like to emulate. Tony Kushner, for writing the world’s most heartbreaking, life affirming play in Angels in America (a play which helped me personally survive a lot, and I borrowed its epigraph for my own book as a kind of tribute). C.S. Lewis, who was far more groundbreaking than people think. I’m also reading Just Kids by Patti Smith right now and am completely smitten by her, so Patti Smith too.
I almost cried more than once while I was reading this. For you as the author and without giving away any spoilers, were there any particular scenes that were emotionally hard to write?
I cried quite a lot while writing, and those scenes still sneak up on me now when I’m re-reading. While I haven’t cried at my own work before, and it still feels a teeny bit pretentious to talk about it, I think feeling what your characters feel helps a lot in being able to describe it. As for particular scenes: Moz. Moz.
We have some brilliant representation happening with various characters, all very well done. There is a scene where a character is talking about the size of their arms and that really struck home for me in particular. How crucial to you is varied representation in your work?
It’s vital, but it’s also instinctive. I write about the world I know and live in, and that is thankfully diverse. I’ll probably always include fat, queer or disabled characters in my books as these are aspects of my own life. However, I am extremely careful when writing characters whose identities differ from my own. I wouldn’t want to tell someone else’s story, but at the same time I want my stories to be inclusive. In practice that means taking care with my representation and getting plenty of feedback from professional sensitivity/inclusivity readers and from friends who do share those identities or have experiences I don’t. It’s never going to be possible for one character to be representative of an entire community, but it’s very important to me that the way I write my characters shouldn’t be harmful.
What’s the best and worst writing advice you’ve received? Or any advice you’d want to give writers?
I mentioned ‘write every day’ above and I’m going to bring that up again, along with the idea of having specific daily word counts. This might be a great motivator for some people, but for brains like mine it triggers instant paralysis and an abject sense of failure if I don’t meet the arbitrary targets involved.
My advice is just to make sure you keep living in the world of the book while you’re writing. That might mean 5 minutes in the shower spent thinking through a scene you want to get to, or opening your document and writing 50 words you’ll delete again tomorrow. Just stay present. Ideas can go astray if you don’t keep an eye on them.
The best advice for writers is always ‘write’, but I don’t think writing always has to involve the pressure of a blank page. Let your thoughts percolate, they’ll tell you when they’re ready.
Can you give us any hints for what is coming next from you?
I’ve just finished the first draft on this one, so I don’t have the elevator pitch ready quite yet. But it’s about true love and twisted love, grief, and being star-crossed in all the wrong ways.
It contains my favourite relationship I’ve ever written, and my least favourite, and a dead donkey I’ve become very fond of.
