I lean toward anything with a dark sense of humor. And since I've been out of school, the majority of my books have been contemporary; basically, I like my characters to have electricity - even better, a TV.
I'm definitely very interested in doing female narrators that aren't typically feminine or emotional or soft - especially teenage girls - because I have such a hard time relating to so many of them that I read. They feel psychologically cuter to me than I ever was.
For me, one of the most beautiful and rewarding aspects of serial reality TV is that characters can move freely along a spectrum of heroism and villainy.
Irvine, being a planned community, is really good shorthand, especially in a movie or book, for understanding suburban pressures.
Old-school viewers remain adamant that 'The Real World' has deteriorated, as if the original enterprise were some pristine experiment that got sullied as the conditions in the lab got sloppier.
Viewers make online requests to their favorite video-making whisperers to do the things that trigger their head tingles. Everyone's needs are different. It's like an interactive choose-your-own-adventure.
Ultimately, criticism that 'The Real World' has devolved into a lesser enterprise comes from the viewers who came of age alongside it, not the teens of the moment that MTV has always existed for.
I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.
I watched the first episode of 'Survivor' in the spring of 2000, thinking I would hate it. My natural inclination steers me toward the indoors not only in my actual life but also in the settings of the entertainment I read and watch.
I can be like that: forgetting how hard it was to do something after I'm past it.
The second book was probably the result of the relationship I was in at the time. We were only going to be compatible for a minute, and I think we both knew it. It's like how you can be a different person on vacation, but you know all along you're just visiting that mindset.
I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.
Try to remember that decisions are made by individual, fallible personalities, not gods. It's hard. I know.
Irvine is such a safe, stable, planned community, and I'm a person who has a lot of inner longing for drama and romance. So I think in some way the structure of Irvine made me more creative because I had these boundaries, and I thought outside them.
The first time I ever heard professional actors delivering lines that I wrote was completely surreal and was just a gigantic moment in my life. It was just a little bit mind-blowing and completely strange to have something that had been on my computer being said out loud.
I'd go to the library so I could sit in a big, quiet room and listen to pages being turned. There was a boring librarian who everyone in fifth grade hated. But I loved her because when she would read us stories in her soft voice, she'd turn my head into a snow globe.
As a kid, I was only allowed to watch a certain amount of television. But once I was old enough to own my own TV, I would stay up until 4:00 A.M. watching Home Shopping Network night after night. Soft-spoken women talked about the jewelry in very detailed, intricate, precious ways, and I loved it.