Last week at a Highlights workshop, I was lucky enough to meet Kara Bietz, a YA author whose recent debut, UNTIL I BREAK deals with the difficult and often morally charged issue of school bullying. Kara was kind enough to share her work with me and her insights into her process in the following interview, as well as to give us a sneak peek into what she's working on now. I hope you enjoy our conversation ...

KC: The first thing that struck me about your debut YA novel, UNTIL I BREAK, (after the arresting cover design) is the way you handle the movement of time in the book, jumping back and forth from the present to the past. What were the main challenges of writing with that kind of structure, and how did you go about it?
 
KB: The first draft of this story certainly didn't start off this way! As I wrote that draft, I kept thinking that it would be a much more interesting story if we knew the ending FIRST, and then went back and built on why the heck this kid was standing in the school hallway with a gun. As I worked through a backwards version of what I had already written, I had another thought...that going backward wasn't getting to the heart of what was happening, either. That I also needed an element of "future". It was a very muddy writing process, that's for sure, but when I finally landed on the back and forth structure, the story unfolded easily. One of the challenges I did have once I decided on the structure was making sure that each individual timeline could stand on it's own, as well as mesh seamlessly with the other timeline. 
 
KC: The book is written in the first person POV from the protagonist's (Sam's) perspective. Did you have any difficulties writing a first person narrative in the voice of a young man?
 
KB: When I sit down to write, usually what comes out is the voice of a teenage boy. I don't know what that says about me, honestly, but it's a voice I'm very comfortable with. 
 
KC: The story is fraught with moral complexity. There are no real "good guys" or "bad guys." All the characters feel more like "works in progress," trying to cope with their pasts in a way that helps them to handle their futures, even when their decisions are troubling or morally ambiguous. Thus, they all feel very rounded and true to life. How difficult was it for you to craft characters who are neither all good, nor all bad, but who all make troubling choices?
 
KB: I think we all have those moments in our past when we've made REALLY TERRIBLE decisions that affected not only ourselves but the people around us as well. No one out there is perfect, and I think it's important to show that one bad decision doesn't have to define you. Will it change your life? Absolutely. Can you recover from it? Absolutely. Life is a series of these decisions...sometimes you make the right one and sometimes you don't. I believe it's imperative that, as writers, we write real people. The good, the bad, the ugly, terrible choices and all. 
 
KC: Can you name some of the authors/books who have influenced you most as a writer?
 
KB: My favorite writer of all time is Laurie Halse Anderson. Her book SPEAK is what made me sit down and start writing again after many years of keeping that part of me silent. While there are several authors that write about difficult topics, that book in particular showed me that it was okay to write about the not-so-pretty parts of adolescence. The gritty and real things not everyone wants to talk about. Some other influences were Chris Crutcher, Francesca Lia Block and E. Lockhart. During the early drafting phase of Until I Break, I read Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson. I remember finishing it and thinking HOLY CRAP...THAT'S how you tell a story. That, in addition to Speak, are books that have stayed with me for years. 
 
KC: What are you working on now?
 
KB: I am in the thick of a first draft for a new contemporary YA that will be released from Riptide Publishing in the Fall of 2018. It is called UNAFRAID and it is an LGBTQ contemporary YA retelling of the Marius and Eponine story in Les Miserables, set in a football-obsessed, small town Texas high school. I'm really excited about it and proud to be writing it.

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and your process with us, Kara! We look forward to UNAFRAID!!!!

​When I started writing YA, I was quickly convinced that first person present tense single narrator stories were the way to go. That’s what was big on the market at the time, particularly in the dystopian genre which I loved (still do, actually!) Prior to that, I’d always written third person past tense stories, usually in omniscient POV or occasionally single narrator.
 
What I’d never done was trying ALTERNATING points of view, whether first or third person and whether present or past tense.
 
After being converted to first person, single narrator stories, I was addicted. I couldn’t get enough of them. Even if the present tense sounded clunky and sounded like EVERYONE WAS SHOUTING ALL THE TIME because of the immediacy of it, I couldn’t stop writing that way.
 
Even if I consciously tried to structure my narrative differently, my fingers always slipped back into typing everything from the single character’s POV and usually in the present tense.
 
Verb tense aside for now – because that’s a whole other blog post – a couple of writing instructors started asking me questions like: Whose story is this really? Should we be seeing some of this from another character’s perspective? For the most part they were right, at least for the stories I worked on with them. They suggested I play with alternating POV chapters. Even if I didn’t keep the new character perspective(s) it would still be a great craft exercise.
 
Before that advice, I often wrote the same scene in different characters’ perspectives as an exercise to better understand all my characters. However, I hadn’t ever consciously set out to write a story in multiple POVs.
 
Multiple POV stories have a lot of advantages. Writing this way can be very freeing because you, as the writer, are no longer indelibly locked into one single character’s head.
 
But a number of issues can arise that you should be aware of if you want to write in this form. They include the following.
 
Voice. If you’re writing alternate POVs, you have to create each individual narrator from the ground up which means each needs to have an authentic and recognizable voice. That doesn’t mean one of them should speak with a funny accent and the other shouldn’t, but it does mean you want to think about their speech patterns, their though processes, the way they relate to the world around them.  How do they move? How do their bodies take up space? Maybe create a notebook or journal for each character with guidelines and rules for how they each speak and react. Then in revision, make sure character A’s traits haven’t slipped into the passages told from character B’s perspective and vice versa. A great example of keeping voices distinct like this can be found in The Walls Around Us by one of my favorite authors and MFA advisors, Nova Ren Suma.
 
Page Space. Are you going to give your characters equal page space? There are no rules about this. It doesn’t have to be: one chapter for character A; one chapter for character B; rinse and repeat. Character B could simply interject short chapters occasionally to round out the emotional depth of the story. A great example of this is I’ll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios. If the characters don’t have equal page space, there’s a good chance that they’re not joint protagonists i.e. the one with more page space is more likely the true protagonist (the main character who’s internal conflict drives the story) and the second character is more likely to be an antagonist, ally, or other kind of character who helps support or inform the main narrative in some way.
 
What Goes Where? In revising alternating POV stories, I’ve also found myself confused about which parts of the story should be recounted from which character’s perspective, especially if the two characters are in a lot of scenes together. In fact, if they’re predominantly in the same scenes together, you might ask yourself if the story would better be told from a single character’s perspective. Alternating perspectives probably works best where the second character brings new information to the page from sources unknown to the first character, which will usually involve the second character being in different scenes.
 
Overall Length of the Manuscript. If you’re writing two distinct leading characters with alternating POVs throughout the story (or possibly even more than two), this may well affect the overall length of your manuscript. While a single POV story can easily be told in a shorter book, the more significant characters whose stories the reader has to follow, the more pages this will take. Obviously that’s not impossible and many readers enjoy longer stories with multiple POVs as long as all the characters are sufficiently engaging to hold reader interest. Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology is terrific example of this: longer books with large casts of complex characters.
 
How Soon to Introduce a new POV. This is maybe a more tricky issue, and opinions will vary widely, but introducing a new character’s POV too late in a story can feel jarring to the reader. “How late is too late?” is a subjective inquiry. The answer will depend on your reader and on the story you’re telling. This is an area where a good beta-reader can make a lot of difference. Ask someone else to read the story to see if the new voice is coming in too late. There’s usually a way to introduce a short snippet of the new character earlier in the story that you may not have realized in your first draft, so it’s worth being aware of those opportunities.
 
I’m sure there are tons of other guidelines for writing in alternating POVs and I’d love to hear from other writers as to how they’ve handled the structure. I’ve not yet published an alternating POV novel, but I’m working doggedly away on a couple of drafts, and could use all the advice I can get!