NEW YORK –
Dhonielle Clayton isn’t just a bestselling author of young adult fiction. She is an organizer, former teacher, and founder of the grassroots publishing movement We Need Diverse Books. She’s also the kind of friend who can convince five of her acquaintances to collaborate on a single novel and then come back for another.
Opinions differ on his personal style:
“A little tyrant,” jokes novelist Tiffany D. Jackson, whose books include “Monday’s Not Coming” and “Let Me Hear a Rhyme.”
“A little pushy,” says Ashley Woodfolk, author of “When You Were Everything” and “The Beauty That Remains,” among others.
Or, as Clayton likes to describe herself, “the emcee,” “the center of the circus,” a practitioner of the art of “tender leadership.” “They say I bullied them into doing this. But I have leadership skills and I was persuasive,” she says.
Clayton thought of a group narrative after seeing the 2019 romantic comedy “Let It Snow” and wanted to create a story focused on the lives and loves of black teenagers. It brought in not only Woodfolk and Jackson, who agreed despite having experience writing thrillers, but also bestsellers Nicola Yoon (“Everything Everything”), Nic Stone (“Dear Martin”) and Angie Thomas. , whose “The Hate U Give” is one of the most talked about young adult books of recent years.
In 2021, the six authors teamed up on “Blackout,” a romance about black teenagers during a power outage in New York. Obamas’ production company Higher Ground is adapting the book into a Netflix series. The friends just published a second novel about another city in a time of paralysis: “Whiteout” takes place on a snowy day in Atlanta, where even a couple of inches of precipitation can stop traffic as effectively as a blizzard up north. .
Like “Blackout,” the new book follows a wide circle of young people at various points in their relationships. Clayton helped establish the narrative by sending the other authors a list of what she calls common romantic tropes that she thought were worth dramatizing: exes to lovers, enemies to lovers, forced proximity, best friends to lovers, and kind of. distress (unlike the damsel). endangered).
“Each chapter is about helping a main couple get their stuff together,” says Clayton.
Multi-author stories aren’t new: Clayton previously co-wrote “The Rumor Game” with Sona Charaipotra. But the creators of “”Blackout”” and “Whiteout” organized the books to the point of scientific certainty. If Clayton is the best to get the action started, Woodfolk is the resident expert on Google Docs, tracking the amount of sunlight for certain sections of “Blackout” and placing characters in precise areas of Atlanta for “Whiteout”.
The book’s publisher at HarperCollins’ Quill Tree Books imprint, Rosemary Brosnan, kept her own records. He set up an Excel spreadsheet and called it “Deletion — Continuity and Consistency,” through which he tracked “character details, setting, timestamps, character intersections” and other parts of the narrative. She needed another chart to make sure she knew the location of each scene.
“I’m not familiar with Atlanta, so I used Google Maps to locate where the characters were and then asked the authors to answer any questions about the setting,” she added.
Individual authors rotate chapters, but readers aren’t told who wrote which, except for a series of clues at the end ranging from the easiest to look up (“the only Atlanta native among us”) to the most mysterious (“the grumpy self-proclaimed love of the group”). Keeping identities hidden was part of the fun, the authors explain (“Kids love puzzles,” says Clayton), and a way to keep readers focused on the book itself.
“One of the things we realized about ‘Blackout’ was that people were a little obsessed with who was writing what story and thought of it as an anthology rather than an actual book co-written by six people,” says Jackson. “So there was an executive decision not to say who wrote each story.”
“People are prejudiced against themselves even if they realize it,” says Woodfolk. “So seeing someone’s name automatically colors the reading experience, the book experience.”
“Whiteout,” like “Blackout,” is a page-turning romance, but also a loving message from the authors to their fans that their stories are worth telling and their flaws forgiven. Jackson recalls how rarely she saw people like her in the books she read as a child and how often black characters in romantic fiction were relegated to being “sassy best friends.” Clayton believes the collaborators’ shared ambition helped make what could have been an unwieldy project safe and professional.
“We all understood the mission and that we needed to add our pieces to complete the missions; everyone knew what they had to do,” says Clayton. “We are all in service to children and adolescents. This is work with a purpose for us. So being at the heart of what we do means there is no bullshit when it comes to this work.”