A verse novel about heartbreak, trust … and a stolen kiss

After I finished the final proofs of Pure, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to work on next. So I went to my trusty editor, and she  had some ideas in mind for me. One of the most intriguing things she suggested was a novel in verse, which I hadn't actually considered  before. We talked about some other ideas too, including love triangles. About half an hour after that I was working on some decoupage, and suddenly I started to get this idea of a love triangle story where the three characters involved spoke in three different types of poetry. I jumped up, started writing down some thoughts and ideas, and After the Kiss was born!

Writing a novel in verse was really tricky though. My actual writing  background started in poetry, and I studied it fairly seriously in college. I revere poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Charles  Simic —poets who have this amazing command of image and language— and at  first I was striving to make every poem in After the Kiss  something similar. But then I realized I was going to have to let go of some of my expectations, because this was a novel, and I had to make  things happen. There had to be action and dialogue and forward movement,  not just a bunch of well-wrought images and emotions. So that was a  little bit tricky at first, but eventually I got the hang of it, and it  turned into a lot of fun.

Much of the fun came from flipping through my giant, underlined, broken-in Norton's Anthology of Modern Poetry and other poets' books to find things that Becca would mimic in her own work. One thing you get told a lot as a beginning writer is, “The best way to learn about writing is to find a writer you like, and emulate their work.” And I thought that was advice that Becca, being a serious writer, would take seriously. So, all of the poems that have “(with  apologies to…)” after the title are Becca's interpretations of actual  poems by real people. I hope that some inquisitive readers may try to track some of those down!

Besides getting to share and exercise my deep love for poetry, writing After the Kiss was also important to me because of the situation between all three  characters. I feel like we are so quick to judge people and their relationships, to make assumptions about what's going on in them,  especially if there's any cheating. But the truth is, in those situations, there are three different people involved, and all three of them have their own feelings about what's happening. All three of them contribute to the situation in different ways, and all three of them are affected in ways we don't understand from the outside. (Sometimes the people involved don't know or understand everything, either.) Human relationships are incredibly complex, and I wanted to explore that in a way that was really honest.

Read my interview with Miss Print for more insights.