Accidental friends, accidental writers
When friendship and careers become a matter of fate
“What was it that made you click together?” I asked the two affable ladies in front of me. Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian looked at each other and giggled. It seems like they were taken aback a little, the other very much a part of the other’s life that their friendship doesn’t even need explaining. But maybe the question does have merit, and both seem to be making their way back to their college days, figuring out how it all began for the two of them.
“I was working in TV in Los Angeles and just moved back to New York so I could go back to school, and I met Jenny in a random literature class.” Siobhan said.
“She was actually dating this guy from around the corner from where I moved in, so we would write together and spent a lot of time together,” Jenny revealed.
“It was a rent situation,” Siobhan joked.
Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian are, of course, world renowned authors, known both for their beautifully written young adult novels, most especially the bestselling Burn for Burn trilogy where they collaborated. Both were in Manila at the recently concluded 2017 Manila Internatonal Book Fair to meet their Filipino fans. As big as their names have become in the Young Adult genre, it is quite a surprise that both had no intention of going into a writing career growing up.
“I never considered it until I was in college,” said Jenny. “I never had that one big dream, maybe a psychologist?”
“I, on the other hand, loved entertaining people, but only really considered writing as a career when I took up a creative writing class in high school because I thought it was easy,” said Siobhan.
But the literary fire did light both their paths and they eventually found themselves in each other’s prosey company at The New School in New York, and at a time when the YA genre started booming, both found themselves in the thick of this phenomenon.
But what is it about the genre that many find appealing? “I think the first boom was with Harry Potter. Back then, you couldn’t fill an entire bookstore’s section with YA books unlike now,” Jenny replied.
“It’s really about the formative years of your life. It’s about exercising your independence for the first time, and you’re making a lot of decisions at the moment that carries great weight in forming who you are as a person,” Siobhan explained. “It’s a lot of first: First loves, first friendships that fall apart. It’s a rich and dramatic time and teens are living it and adults are remembering those times.”
“It’s a real unifying theme. Adolescence is not easy, it’s a hard time to go through. There are certain elements in it that everybody has in common. You don’t have much control over the decisions that you make, and people find ways in showing who they are through these books,” Jenny added.
But aren’t they afraid that with more and more authors dabbling into the genre, that the theme of these stories can become repetitive?
“All stories are told over and over again,” Jenny replied. “It’s about finding fresh ways of telling the same story. It’s about your perspective.”
“It’s about taking the universal and making it specific.” Siobhan added. Indeed, both Siobhan, with her novels A Little Friendly Advice and Same Difference, and Jenny, with her To All
The Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy whose big screen adaptation is about to be released soon, have found new and imaginative ways to reach out to their readers. But it’s their collaboration in the Burn for Burn trilogy that really set
‘It’s a lot of first: First loves, first friendships that fall apart. It’s a rich and dramatic time and teens are living it and adults are remembering those times.’
them apart from the rest of the field.
“For us, the actual writing of the book is the easy part we really understand how each other work and we understand each other’s strength and weaknesses,” Jenny said. “The harder part was ‘life.’ In the middle of touring for the first book, she found out she was pregnant.”
“Not necessarily something that you want to happen in the middle of writing the series,” Siobhan said.
“Being women and a mother and being creative and having other responsibilities are hard.”
“But we were lucky to have a solid friendship as our foundation. We’re best friends and we were never coming from a place of ego. Writing became an extension of our friendship.”
Siobhan then motioned for the waiter and asked for a diet soda.
“I’ll have one, too,” Jenny followed after.