Reese's Book Club Author Rainbow Rowell on “Slow Dance”

Published Aug 27, 2024, 7:01 AM

Best known for her hit young adult novels "Eleanor & Park" and "Fangirl," Rainbow Rowell has been called “the best thing to happen to young adult literature in ages” by Vox. Today, she joins The Bright Side to discuss her new book “Slow Dance,” the Reese’s Book Club pick for August.

The New York Times bestselling author opens up about who inspired the characters in her latest novel, the health scare that made her think she might never write another book, and the vital importance of unflinching storytelling for young people, especially as her early work continues to be banned. You can find “Slow Dance” on Apple Books or wherever you get your books.

Listen to Rainbow’s playlist for “Slow Dance” here.

Hello Sunshine, Hey, besties. Today on the bright Side, New York Times bestselling author Rainbow Rawl joins us for this month's edition of shelf Life. She's been called the best thing to happen to young adult literature, and she's here to share how music inspired her new book, Slow Dance, plus the importance of storytelling now that her early work is the subject of controversy. We'll get into that and so much more. It's Tuesday, August twenty seventh. I'm Simone Boyce.

I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, to laugh, learn and.

Brighten your day.

Okay, Danielle, Is there a specific soundtrack, album or song that just really lights you up creatively gets the juices flowing?

Okay? Creatively?

No, Because when I'm creative, I can't hear music.

I need silence. I have to be in my thoughts. I can't even hear other people's voices.

Not even in instrumental music.

M mmm. I just like complete silence. But I have soundtracks to my life. You're gonna laugh. The first one is Lauren Hill Love. I think that was my first album ever, Oh.

Such a good first album.

I love that I flew to Toronto to see her for one night because I missed the LA concert and I was like, I'm not missing this live.

I don't know, but the soundtrack incredible Pink Misunderstood.

Mm hm.

I played that over and over and over again when I was a kid and my mom took me to see the concert, and I remember thinking, like, this is what a woman is like. It was just like, oh my god, she was so strong and amazing. And this is kind of funny, but Broadway Broadway is a soundtrack to my life, Like all the shows remind me of my childhood, and my mom would take me to these plays and I just have such great memories of that.

They make me smile, like which shows for you?

We saw so many like Sweet Charity, Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, Lion King, like I literally saw everything, and I saw Donnie Osmond was my first real I always say that John Stainless was my first crush, but the realty is that Donnie Osmond was my first crush. And I would beg her to see Joseph and the Technicolor dream Coat.

Because of him. That's amazing.

How about you save me from this embarrassment.

You know, I think it's interesting that you brought up your youth and the soundtracks that you still listen to as a kid, because to this day, those are still the songs that generate the most emotion, passion, heart within me. So I think about the soundtrack to The Parent Trap, that movie I loved so much, and I just takes me back to watching that film with my friends and all the inside jokes that we had from that movie. I also would agree Broadway shows Rent is like a soundtrack to my high school five hundred and twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes we all saying that at my friend Erica's house growing up. It's how I learned math. Yes, that's really where it all started. And then it it evolves and it changes, you know, Like lately, I've really loved this song by The War on Drugs called I Don't Live Here Anymore, and it just I don't know, this is going to sound so corny, but I don't know how else to explain it.

It just has main character energy.

It's such an energizing song that just makes you feel really empowered and like you're you're the star of your own movie.

You know what's.

Interesting you say that is I always find like when I date different people, they bring new music into my life. And like, I had never listened to gospel music before, and I dated someone who loved gospel, and now every Sunday here I am listening to gospel and it puts me in such a peaceful place.

Yeah, it's really inspiring music. Really, it can change our mood so quickly, change mood, change your life, our guest today. She also uses music as a source of inspiration. Rainbow Rowl is an award winning author who incorporates music into a writing process by creating specific playlists for each of her characters. I love this so much because I love creating a specific playlist for cities that.

I really do and then I walk around and listen to them. You have a Paris playlist, a London playlist.

Well, you might recognize her as the author of the number one New York Times bestseller eleanor in Park. It's a love story about two Starcross misfits, and she made separate playlists with an A side and a B for both of those characters.

I really loved Eleanor in Park.

That was the first Rainbow Rawl book that I read, and I read it so many years ago. I actually didn't know it was Rainbow Rawl, like I was just reading a book. And so now we get to interview her. It's a pretty cool moment for me. But she's such an accomplished author. Eleanor in Park was her second novel after Attachments, and some of her other bestsellers include Fangirl and carry On. So these and some of her other books became canon for young LGBTQ readers.

And here's something to note.

In recent years, Eleanor in Park has actually been the subject of controversy. It's been banned in some school districts. It's part of that larger book band that's been sweeping the country. What's pretty upsetting to me is that a lot of those books that are banned center around LGBTQ characters and people of color. So I definitely want to ask her about that.

I can't wait to hear what she says about that. And she's clearly not letting any hater solower down. Just this summer, she released Slow Dance, which she considers like a sister book or a companion piece to Eleanor in Park, and it follows the love story of a boy and a girl, Shiloh and Carrie, who, as teenagers, promise each other that their friendship will never change. Everyone thought they'd end up together too, but as the years go by, things inevitably change, and Shiloh and Carrie go fourteen years without speaking, and now, as adults, the two reconnect and try to find their way back to where it all began. I really enjoyed this one, and there's of course a playlist to go along with the in true Rainbow Rale fashion, which we'll be linking in our show notes.

All right, let's bring her in, The Woman, the Myth, the Legend, Rainbow.

Oh Raoul, Welcome to the bright Side.

Thank you, Thank you so much, Rainbow.

Before we really get into things, I have to tell you what a big fan I am of yours. We get to have a lot of conversations with authors on this show, and I don't think I've ever been so excited for one.

Oh, I love your work. Oh, thank you Rainbow.

We were just chatting about your connection to music, and I think that's something that really defines you and distinguishes you as an author. And your latest book is called slow Dance.

That's right. Can you share the significance behind that title? How did you land on it? Oh?

That's interesting because sometimes I have the title from the very beginning, and then I get very jealous and guarded of the title because I feel like someone else is going to steal the title before my book is done.

This time, I did not.

I was just calling it now and then because the book is sort of split into things that are happening in the now and things that were happening then. And no one liked that title. Literally, no one liked it, and so I had to come up with something. And it's so difficult to come up with a relationship be title because there are infinite relationship be books. It's interesting when you come up with the title, you're not actually looking for a title that no one has had before. Titles can be repeated, but you wouldn't want to pick a title that like, because you know Twilight and everyone knows. So I'm surprised that there were not really very many books just called slow Dance. And I thought it worked great because well, first of all, there's literally slow dancing in this book. It's not a lie it's not a red hearing. And also it really describes who they are and what the path their relationship takes. It's a slow burn for them.

So the idea of music is interesting to me with your work because you incorporate it into your stories and you've said that music becomes the soundtrack to your books. But do you listen to music as you write them as well?

I do, And I now know that that's kind of unusual that many writers can't listen to anything with lyrics as they're writing because the lyrics get in their heads. I've always been able to do it, and part of it is that I don't hear the lyrics, So I can listen to a song a thousand times and not really know the words because I just I'm just hearing kind of the vibe of it.

I don't clock the lyrics, So yeah.

I do. I try to find a song always that fits the feeling of a scene, and then it becomes an emotional key for me because you cannot stay in the scene the way that you want to, especially if you're writing something difficult. So I would really use music as like, I'm always going to listen to this song when I write a certain scene and would help me kind of fast track into that emotion.

Again, the playlist that you crafted for your latest book has everything from Joni Mitchell and You Too to Journey and Outcast.

I mean, you are running the gamut. I love your range.

So how do you incorporate a song into a scene or a character?

Specifically?

What comes to mind is when Shiloh and Carrie are dancing to Hey y'all.

So usually there's not music already playing in a scene. In that case, I'm trying to think of the song that would play in the soundtrack of my head as I'm writing this movie, right, Yeah, But then in this book, there's a lot of times when music is playing, and so it's fun to think about what song is playing at that moment, at that date, and what it's going to be to the characters, you know, what meaning will to them. So in that scene, Hey y'all really doesn't fit where they are. They're having this very tense emotional moment and they're slow dancing, and Shiloh doesn't even realize they're slow dancing to a very fast song. So does this seem to be like the perfect song to show the dissonance she was feeling like if you can't hear heya, you are really in your own head.

Yeah. So I do a lot of work with an organization called Family Equality, and their mission is to advance equality for LGBTQ plus families, And just this past weekend I did a shoot with them for one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. It's called the Rainbow Book Bus. So the Rainbow Book Bus, just to describe it, is literally a school bus painted all rainbow with artwork by LGBTQ artists like murals, and it's filled with bann books from LGBTQ plus stories characters. And these two guys drive around the country and stop in cities where these books have been banned. So I get on the bus and it's covered in rainbow raul books.

My books are banned in a lot of places.

Well, I was going to say you're a rock star on the bus. I was actually going to say, like, you are the Oprah of the Rainbow Book Bus.

That's awesome.

It was so cool, and I knew I was about to interview you, so I was so excited. But your stories means so much to people. What does it mean to you to create a world that people can really see themselves in.

When you're writing, I think you I have to shut out the world, and I try to make the story as specific as possible, because I think that the stories that connect are not the stories where you say, I want as many people as possible to relate to this and understand it. And it's more like, make the story so specific, specific, specific, specific, that the characters feel real. And then I think those specific stories are actually the stories that click hard with people. So I'm really closing people out as I'm writing, and I'm trying not to think of what people will say so that I can write something that feels real and authentic and true. And then I push it out and hope and I just hope. And for me, the biggest compliment is when someone really picks up what I'm putting down, when they get it, not even that they like it, but when I can just tell they get it by the way they're speaking to me, that it's harmonizing with them, it's resonating. That is the best feeling. It feels like I accomplished something.

You mentioned that a lot of your books are banned in certain places. They are so I read the other day that the American Library Association is tracking a record number of book bands across the country. Most are targeted at people of color and the LGBTQ plus community. And part of the reason I love books so much is I was able to see myself in stories when I was at my lowest or my highest point, and I think these book bands strip that from people in so many ways. There were thirty three hundred books banned last year. What are the consequences of book banning?

What I think the worst part is is that people need the freedom to think and to feel, and so when you're restricting what people can read, you're really trying to restrict what they can think, and you're also kind of gaslighting them about what reality is. And I don't think that my books are appropriate for every kid. Eleanor in Park is my most banned book. I would not hand my book to a twelve year old. But I think when you have kids who are sixteen seventeen, the same age as of the characters, they're experiencing the things that the characters are and they want to process it, they want to think about it, they want to have feelings about it, or they're watching other people experience these things. And I think if you're like, you can't even read a book about that, it's almost like you're telling them that their reality is not allowed to exist, that they're only allowed to be reflected in this false way and they're not allowed to process what's actually happening to them. The reason Elimore Park gets banned is because of her stepfather is harassing her. And I think when Eleanor in Park gets banned, you're really telling girls like Eleanor what's happening to you is too ugly for you to even speak about. It's too ugly for anyone else to empathize with. Your story is just too foul, too ugly, too hard. And I think at sixteen, at fourteen, at fifteen, at seventeen, at eighteen, you need to start being able to process and think and talk about things. You might not be in a position where you can talk to your parents or even a teacher about it. So to be told that you can't even read about it, yeah, I feel like it's restricting the way that people think.

How did you react when you found out that your book was banned?

Yeah, the first time, I was really devastated, and everybody wanted to talk to me about it, and they wanted me. I felt like people wanted me to have this sort of fighting spirit and to be proud a little bit, like people kept saying it was a badge of honor, and I felt really horrified and I felt I think I said earlier that the biggest compliment is to feel understood, and so the very worst thing that can happen is to feel like people don't understand what you're doing. And so to see my words and to see Eleanor's story being called pornography, oh, I felt really deeply, deeply upset by it. And it took, you know, maybe a year to get to the point where I felt like I could talk about it and without getting very defensive and personally feeling attacked. And even now sometimes last year, Eleanor in Park was read at in a Canadian legislature somewhere and someone sent me the clip and they were reading out of context to this scene, and I just went right back to how I felt in twenty fourteen.

I just felt so under attack.

And to hear my words being used against librarians, you know, that's the worst too. It's like the librarians who recommend my books are being called out for recommending them and just to see myself being twisted that way. Oh, it was just awful and I don't feel like maybe I'll ever really get over it, and I think it makes me not a good warrior for it. You know, you want to be someone out fighting for books and fighting for banned books, and I don't feel like I can always be that person because I get too much like I'm under attack. So then, what do you think is the best way to fight back? We all have different roles to play. I think the people in the front line are the librarians, and I find them to be so courageous, and you wouldn't think that a librarian should be fighting for their job by recommending a book. I feel like as parents, it's important to be active and to talk and to be part of what's happening at our schools. For authors, I think maybe the best way to fight back is to continue to write your stories and not to hear those voices telling you not to. Because you don't want your life to be hard. You want to feel like your books are going to be in libraries. It's very easy to hear those people in your head and think, oh, well, I'll just leave that out, or it'd be easier if this character didn't make this choice, ord be easier if this didn't happen. So one of the things I feel like I need to do is just keep writing things that feel true to me.

We need to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more from New York Times best selling author Rainbow Rowl. And we're back with Rainbow Rowl.

Rainbow, just like so many of your characters who take this hero's journey, I read that you took one yourself. You were diagnosed with a thyroid disorder and it made you question whether you'd be able to ever write again, And in an pointerview, you said it made you unable to trust your brain again. I'm wondering what that was like and how you think about it now.

I had hyper parathyroids disorder, So the parathybroid kind of sits next to the thyroid, and it's your monitor for calcium, So if you need calcium, it sends it into your blood. And basically my lever was stuck on go go go, So I was just being flooded with calcium all the time, and it was starting to build up all over my body and it was being robbed of my bones, so the tumor was sending it out of my bones into my body and it was kind of clogging everything up. I was getting weird deposits, my bones were breaking and not healing. And then the mental thing that was happening is I was just losing. Like I would have a conversation with someone and then the next time I saw them, I'd have the exact same conversation and I wouldn't realize I was repeating myself and they would. So it was just sort of felt like holes were opening up in my brain and no one could really tell me what was wrong, and so I just started to be very quiet about it. And I did feel that maybe I couldn't write a novel again. I was just physically I had very little samina. Mentally, I felt like I couldn't hold a novel necessarily in my brain. It's a lot to hold an entire novel. And it was strange because your brain is who you are.

Well, the good news is that you were able to fully recover.

How did that come about?

You know?

It was a detective nurse practitioner who figured out what was wrong with me.

I'm a fat person.

And I think it was very easy to look at the things that were going wrong with me and assume that there must be like, you know, we'll change your diet, exercise more arrest. Oh, you must be under stress. So it was this nurse practitioner who noticed that my calcium was persistently high and had me get it checked. And then this tumor was discovered. And when you have a tumor on your parathyroid and it's removed, you bounce back almost immediately. And you have a couple of days of going through withdrawal because your body is used to heavy, heavy calcium. You feel like you're you're actually shaking because you think you need calcium and you don't. But then it was just like, within a month, the bones that had been fracturing were healing again and I wasn't in pain, and I felt almost like lights were going on in my head just like And I don't really understand how you're able to bounce back from it, but I did feel like I could write again, I could think again. I'd always had a brain that could hold a lot. I was lucky, yeah, and it was my strength right, And I did feel like I was just feeling stronger and stronger and stronger to where I could write a complicated novel again, and I could work on four different things at once, and I didn't feel like I necessarily had to check my notes as much.

I felt like this return to strength and air and oxygen and vision.

I read that during that same period you thought that perhaps your best work was behind you.

Definitely.

Now that Slow Dance has been released and with such a warm reception, what does this book symbolize for you?

Yeah?

I did feel that way. I felt that way conclusively, Like it wasn't just like I suspected it. I felt pretty sure of it. I would look back on a book like Eleanor and Park and think, I don't think I'm ever gonna have that. Do you ever feel like you don't have dexterity in your fingers, maybe out your cold, and you're trying to do something you normally do and it's like, oh, my fingers aren't quite working the way they did. I felt like I'd lost my dexterity for language and for describing things, and that I could still be a pretty good writer, but maybe I would never be able to handle characters with the same deafness that I had in the past. Honestly, I felt pretty good about it.

Anyway.

The Wind Blows my book, which came out a few years ago after my surgery, I did feel really good.

About that book.

But I think this book I felt very much in my full power. I even felt like I couldn't have written this book before, if that makes sense, Like maybe in some ways I'd gotten more powerful or more deft, or that I had a better depth of understanding of certain things. And I felt when I was writing this book really full throated, like the connection between my lungs and my brain and my voice and my hands were just if I were speaking this book, it would have been in a really loud, clear voice that everyone could understand. I felt like this power was rushing through me. That's not to say that it's like the best book, but I did feel like for me, it was as good as anything I'd written, and I would be just as proud of it to hand it to anyone.

I'm going to switch up the energy and brag about you for a second, so you know. I'm a big Rainbow Rawul fan, and I saw a Vox article with this headline, Rainbow Raoul is the best thing to happen to young adult literature in ages and she signals the future.

Wow, I don't recall that well.

I think that you've in many ways redefined the genre of YA. But what I find really interesting is that you didn't set out to write YA novels.

I did not know I was writing adult and I thought that eleanor in Park was an adult novel. It was published as an adult novel in the UK before the.

US, and so how did it turn into this genre that is so synonymous with you?

Right?

I had a very difficult time selling Eleanor in Park in the US. My published Sugar who published Attachments, passed on it and it was delayed, and for a while it looked like is it even going to come out? And then so the editor who bought it in the US, her name is Sarah Goodman. It was her idea, and it was partially because of the weltnar Stars YA was shifting a little bit and she had this idea of you know, maybe this could be a YA book. And it's funny now, but the question then was, well, it's set in nineteen eighty six and we're not sure that teens will be able to understand what's happening and will relate to it, and so maybe it should be adult because of that, because of the nineteen eighty six and I remember thinking, like, a teenager can read Little Women and not be like where are the cars?

Why are they lighting candles?

Like the idea that a teenager would read a book set nineteen eighty six and be so confused or so put off by it. I knew that was not going to be an issue, but I hadn't thought of it as a teen book book. Of course, I was like, sure, whatever, you know, let's try it.

And it was a huge success.

It was.

I think it was much more successful as a white book than it would ever have been if had it been published adult.

Well, your latest book is your first adult novel in ten years, and I know that you bring a bit of your own story into every book that you write. So how is Slow Dance reflective of your own relationships both as an adult and as a teenager. I was thinking about this this morning. You know, in the Bible, God takes Adam's rib to make Eve. That's a little bit what I do.

I try to find some part of me that I can take and build a character around and sometimes it's a bigger part than others, and definitely with Slow Dance, I was thinking about my own relationship with my husband. I met my husband when he was eleven years old. I was almost thirteen. We were in middle school, and we were just friends pretty much from middle school on all the way through high school through college. We didn't date until after I graduated from college. And I had been thinking because I'd hung out with my husband and a friend from high school, Paul, who was an artist now, and we hadn't hung out all together for a long time, and we had this weekend where we hung out, and I realized that my husband, when he was around Paul, was more like who he had been in high school, and that it had totally changed our dynamics. So when the three of us were hanging out together just it was like I got a time machine where I get to go back and experience him as my friend again, not my husband.

I felt like a real gift.

So that set me thinking about what would have happened if we had never started dating. And that's where Kerrie and Shilah were born. These two characters who they're so close everyone thinks they should be together, but they never cross that. They never figure it out. I feel very lucky to have eventually figured it out, but what if I hadn't, And that's really where that came. So they they're definitely parts of them that are my husband and me and our friend, but then they become totally different characters as I built the world around them.

We need to take a quick break, but when we come back. Author Rainbow Rowel reads an excerpt from her latest novel, Slow Dance, and she answers questions from you Don't go anywhere. We're back with Rainbow Rowl. Okay, Rainbow, I'd love to ask you to read a little from Slow Dance for us.

Shure, We've had such a serious, serious conversation, like about really deep stuff, and now we're going to read kind of a light section of this point.

Here's the thing.

We also talked about how you are a rock star on the Rainbow book bus, so we're going to even it out true true.

Oh, I wasn't complaining. I like to have deep conversations. Okay, so let me set it up a little bit. So Shiloh and Carrie we're best friends in high school. They graduated nineteen ninety one, both of them come from really poor families and kind of a rough part of town. They really were like there for each other in very fundamental ways. But they haven't talked in fourteen years, and we don't know why they've been invited to this wedding. It's their like their third musketeer. Their mutual best friend is getting remarried, and Shiloh still lives in Omaha. She lives within her mom's house. She's a divorced mom. And about Carrie, he's been away in the navy, and Shiloh knows she's going to see Carrie, and we know that she really wants to, but she's really nervous and she's very afraid for him to see her. Like if she could, she would just see him without being seen, that would be ideal. She's afraid he's going to judge her. So they see each other and Carrie asks her to dance, And in the past, Shiloh is someone who would never say yes to to dancing with anyone, let alone Carrie. Shila's like your friend who never hugs you. That's who Shiloh is. So they're dancing and it's a little awkward because she has a hard time relaxing. They're both headstrong and they're kind of both trying to lead this dance. Okay, this is Carrie starting the conversation. We're still dancing, right if you want to, she said, I want to. He stopped them. Here's good by the wall, away from the speaker, you know, Shiloh said, we could just be talking comfortably at a table.

We could.

Carrie said, he didn't like a dancing is better? Why because you can talk when you're dancing, but you don't have to. Then nobody else can interrupt. Somebody could cut in. Nobody's going to cut in. Do you think that nobody else wants to dance with me? I think that when two people are slow dancing to Hey y'ah, everyone leaves them alone. Shiloh frowned. She looked around. Now that you've called attention to the song, it's actually hard not to dance. Carrie smiled. Oh, yeah, yeah, sort of. He pulled her closer and started to sway faster in time with the music. Shiloh laughed. Carrie held her tight, moving his shoulders back and forth to the beat. Shiloh tried to move her shoulders too. She was clumsier than him. She was laughing and blushing. This better, Carrie asked. He was grinning with his mouth closed, his eyes were light. Shiloh was laughing too hard and quietly to answer. Her face fell forward. She let him move her hand to the music. She rocked back and forth with him and tried to relax her neck. Hey yeah turned into grooves in the heart, and then to Shiloh's dismay, Marky Mark and the funky bunch. Carrie kept them moving. It was easier if Shiloh didn't look at him, but she couldn't not look at him.

Was short.

She lifted up her chin. He looked like he'd been laughing too. Who are you, she asked, I'm a grown man. Carrie said like that was an answer. Shiloh laughed some more, letting her forehead rest on the far edge of his shoulder. She was glad they didn't have to talk, because this was a lot to take in, so much more than she'd been hoping for tonight, more than just a good look at him and a warm conversation, and it wasn't over yet. To keep it going, all Shiloh had to do was keep her self consciousness at bay. Her self consciousness and bone deep desolation. She could be desolate tomorrow, and the next day she could table her on wheat. Shiloh was getting another hour with Carrie, a bonus hour in his arms. Her teenage self could never have predicted or even comprehend it how precious this would feel. That seventeen year old had a glut of Carrie hours, all the Carrie she cared to eat. Carrie was her day in, day out, her standard operating procedure. Shiloh hadn't been able to conceive of a life without Carrie until That's what She had a whole life without him, years and years, with no sign of that ever changing. This night was an aberration, this dance. Shilah closed her eyes and kept her shoulders loose. She kept track of everywhere that Carrie was touching her. Thank you so much, Rainbow Oh, thank you for asking me. It's fun to read.

I loved hearing it.

It's our favorite part of having authors on our show, is it Okay?

Yeah, it's really really cool. Thank you.

Our second favorite part is when we have some listener questions, which we have right now.

Great.

Great, We have a question from a listener named Carrie from Los Angeles.

Hi, this is Carrie from Los Angeles. I am such a big fan of your work, Rainbow. You are a go to author for me. I love how you read about the complexities and nuances of all the different kinds of relationships people have in their lives. There was quite a bit of time between Slow Dance and your last adult novel. Was there something specific that sparked the idea for this book and Shiloh and Carrie's stories that made you think this was the one you wanted to put out next, And also, nostalgia plays such a big role in the book. Was there perhaps a particular high school memory of years that brought on the idea for this book?

Okay, that's a good question.

I had gone ten years between writing for adults, writing an adult a clearly adult book, and also ten years without writing a contemporary book set in the real world. I've been writing about magicians and vampires in my Simon Snow trilogy. I think part of it is what we talked about earlier, that I really slowed down. I took four years off from writing novels completely around the time of my diagnosis and surgery and before and then part of it was I just was very consumed by the Simons No Books. I really love those characters, and for a while I just kept feeling like the Simon and Bass story was not done. And then I needed to stay very close to those characters while I was writing them, and so I just felt like I was dancing with them for so long. And then when I looked up again, and it had been ten years, and I'd been writing Simon's No Books for ten years. So it wasn't really intentional. It's more like my brain just doesn't usually stay in one genre, and it doesn't stay with adults, it doesn't stay with teen I'm always thinking like in character, and it had been a while since I had an adult character whose story felt like one I wanted to tell. The question about nostalgia. Part of my job is to talk to teen readers for these years, and I think that has kept me a little bit closer to my memories of what it was like to be a teenager. You know, if if you never run into any teenagers, maybe you can forget what you yourself was like were like as a teen. But for me, talking to teenagers brings back the sort of person I was, and I was just was remembering that I was kind of a pill, you know, I was. I'm very strong opinions, I was a very binary about everything. I thought that right and wrong were very clear things, and that I was really dialed into what was right or wrong. So Shilah really was born of those memories of myself as a teenager, and I kept thinking of like writing a character who had to look back on themselves and had to reckon with their opinions and with their behavior as a teenager with one of their closest friends.

Up next, we have Alisha, who was curious about how you write female characters.

Hi, this is Alicia from Salt Lake City, and I have been a fan of Rainbow's writing going all the way back to Attachments, and I think the thing that I love the most is the way that Rainbow Your characters feel like people you've known your whole life, going all the way back to kindergarten, people you went to high school with, people you had your first job with. And I'd love to know how you write women that feel so lived in, feel so seen, feel like people that I recognize myself in, people that I recognize my friends in, And how you just write people that seem so so real.

That's a really kind question, but also kind of a tough question. Human beings are so much more complex than fictional characters. You have like a million pieces of you, so you kind of have a lot of things you can take out and build around, and you can make a million characters that are sort of like you, but not really, because you know, we're just so much more conflicted. A fictional character behaves with consistency, a human being really doesn't. So often I'm taking a little bit of me, and I'm kind of taking my problem or my thing, and I'm giving it to this character to see if they can work it out better than I could. But then also sometimes I'm thinking of other people in my life, and so I would say, like if there's like an actual process that I use. I pay a lot of attention to people's voices. I was a reporter for many years. When you're a reporter, as you both know, you spend a lot of time listening to other people talk. It's not really your job to talk when you're a newspaper columnist or reporter. And so I got very good, I think at hearing people's voices and their patterns and the sort of things that make a person sound specific. And so I think I'm pretty good in my dialogue when i'm writing it at being enough inside of the character that that person feels like the same person talking. When I'm writing a scene with a lot of people talking, I want you to be able to tell who's talking, even if it doesn't have the tag, Even if it doesn't said, he said, she said. Jones said, so, I spend a lot of time thinking about dialogue. I spend a lot of time reading my books aloud, and I'm always asking myself, would so and so say that? Or does this sound like it would really happen. I think I'm hard on myself and that I want it. I want things to feel real. And I don't know why I'm so hung up on that because it's fiction, it's not the newspaper. But yeah, maybe that's the thing.

This has been a masterclass in writing novels. I mean, what a treat. Thank you so much for joining us today, Rainbow, of course, yes, thank you for having me.

Thank you. It was great to talk to both of you. Thank you. Rainbow.

Raul is the author of Slow Dance, the August pick for Reese's Book Club.

It's available wherever you get your books. That's it for today's show. Tomorrow. Author and psychotherapist.

Catherine Morgan Schaffler's here.

She's telling us how we can harness our perfectionism as a superpower. Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Simone Boye.

You can find me at Simone Voice on Instagram and TikTok.

Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok.

That's ro Bay.

See you tomorrow, folks.

Keep looking on the bright side.

The Bright Side

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