The Nevada Sagebrush

Northern Nevada resident Ellen Hopkins is known for her controversial novels that explore teenage drug use, suicide and abuse. Hopkins, whose stories are based loosely on her daughter’s and family’s experiences with drugs, will release her next book “Flirtin’ with the Monster”Tuesday.

If you had to describe your writing to somebody who has never heard of you or read one of your books, what would you say?

It’s edgy subject matter written in verse. It is hard to describe. It’s interesting because it is definitely reaching this giant cross-over market. I hate to describe it as young adult. I hate to describe it as young adult because I don’t like to limit it. I hate to describe it as verse because there are people who go “It’s like poetry?”So it’s like narrative verse, it’s story all the way through. It’s poetry that tells the story in a finite amount of words with a lot of visual interest to it. Cutting edge, how’s that?

How did you begin writing, especially in your genre?

“Crank” is my first novel. At the time I was freelancing. I was writing some children’s non-fiction. And “Crank” is a very personal story because the story is loosely based on my daughter’s story. It was a story I had to tell kind of for me, rather than a wider audience. But while I was writing the book I started to see how important the story was:  Addiction happens to everybody. It touches everybody’s lives. I don’t know anybody that wasn’t affected by addiction in some way. So as I’m writing the story it became a bigger story than me. It became about a wider audience than me. How I started writing in verse is interesting. I started the book as prose, but I wanted to write from Kristina, from my daughter’s point of view. The voice to me was too angry; it was my voice and not hers. Poetry allowed me to pull into her head and tell the story through her eyes, which was important to me.

I wanted to offer insight into the nature of meth. It’s a different nature than other drugs, how fast it works and how fast you can lose someone. The drug starts talking and it’s not always their choice to walk out. Even if it’s happening you can go beyond that. Hopefully the books give hope and insight into the person doing (drugs) and everyone around them.

Can you tell me more about your newest book “Flirtin’ With the Monster?”

It’s not a novel. It’s a collection of essays talking about Kristina’s story. There are essays from a judge, a drug counselor and five from her family:  my husband, Kristina, her son Hunter, her sister Kelly and myself. We all told some of our stories and looked at things from vastly different points of view.

“Tricks”is coming out this summer. That’s about five teens falling into prostitution. That will be out in August. So that’s in production now, so I’m working on proofs and all that. Then I’m writing “Fallout,”which is the third and final Kristina book. Because I don’t want to write the same story I’m writing it from the points of view of three of her kids when they are teens. Dealing with her addiction and desertion and what their lives have become because of that. That’s what I’m doing now.

After that will be “Perfect,” about the drive to be perfect when you’re a teen. And body image to me is a little hazy when you’re a teen anyway. Surgery, self-regulated eating, steroid use, and stuff like that. Then I have a contract for two more after that one, so I don’t know yet. We’ll see.

Did it originally start as something you were writing for yourself and decided to publish later?

Actually as I was writing it, I sat down with an editor and showed her a picture book I had written. And she was like, “This is really good writing. Do you have anything else?” I just happened to have 5 pages of “Crank” with me, which was all I had written at the time. She said, “Send it to me when its done.” So like two months later I had 75 pages done and I e-mailed her and asked her if she would like an exclusive first look and she said yes. And they sent me a contract to finish it, which is pretty unusual to sell a first novel with only the first 75 pages done.

There is a luck factor, especially in the market today. The biggest part of that luck factor was that the editor had just read an article about meth. Crank is about meth. So she knew it was a growing problem in a lot of parts of the country so she knew it would be an important book to publish.

Have you always wanted to be an author? Is this something that came from dealing with everything that’s gone on, or did you always know?

I did know. I always wanted to be a writer. So, there was this big part of my life where I studied journalism in college. I dropped out to marry the wrong guy, had a couple of kids, had my own business. When that dissolved and I met my current husband and moved to Tahoe, I had some money coming in with my business. I was like, oh yeah, writing. I went into freelancing, which is what I did with my journalism background.  I was doing all these things to try and earn a living with my writing. Then this bigger story happened. I think as writers we are looking for where we belong as writers. And that one, I can’t say it fell in my lap, but it slapped me in the face. I do feel like I belong in what I am doing.
I have developed this huge readership in less than five years. It’s interesting because you think they are not going to read poetry but they love the poetry. They’re not going to read big fat books but the books are huge. And then the idea that this has crossed over so successfully. I have a lot of adult readers and I also have readers that are younger than the suggested 14 age. Kids today have it harder than they used to, issues that they we never saw. I never saw self-injury in high school. It was probably there but I don’t think to the same extent. I think we put a lot of pressure on kids to be perfect and get good grades and not do drugs and all these things that we pressure them into and they don’t know how to deal with it. Younger and younger, 11- and 12-year-olds are coming to me and talking about depression.

Once you wrote “Crank” did you realize this was something you wanted to continue? Talking about controversial things that kids are facing?

There’s a certain branding you with a big publishing company. The controversial stuff, it interested me, school shootings were in the news so that subject caught my eye. It ended up not being about school shootings exactly because it morphed into this kind of weirder religious framework. Sometimes when you’re writing your books take off in a weird direction. Your characters tell you, “This is what I am and this is what I need to do.” And its like “Oh, okay, not exactly what I expected but okay.”

Would you say strictly that only the Kristina series comes from past experiences, or do all of them have a little something from your past?

All the books have threads. Its funny because the more I talk about it, as I talk, I go “Oh I know where that came from.”There’s an accident in one that claims the life of somebody that one of my characters really loves. I lost my first love in a drunk driving accident when I was 15 and he was 16. I had an abusive relationship between the loser guy in Albuquerque and pretty much until the guy I have now. So I went through some abuse and I understand abuse, and yeah, I guess that’s probably where that came from. There are threads of real characters in all my books. I have a friend that’s bipolar. I have a younger friend who cuts. Readers are giving me their stories now and so there are threads of those in there too. I think all authors bring life experience to their characters in one way or another. You know, I’ve never injured myself but I understand it and I want to look at it. I just like looking at that subject matter. I think its important that we expose it instead of trying to pretend it doesn’t happen, to try to develop an understanding and an empathy for those people whose lives are touched by depression or suicide or addiction or cutting.

How long do you spend working on a book? I notice that you have so many books out in such a short amount of time.

I blow right through them. I am traveling around 100 days a year right now. So when I am home I try to give four or five hours a day to writing. I’ll take the laptop. I’m not as efficient with it when I’m traveling because it’s an hour here and an hour there. But I love what I do so it’s not a chore. It’s not a job to write. It’s the best part of every day. I’m doing about a book a year now plus other projects on the side. And that’s a comfortable pace for me, it feels good. Plus my readers want books. They’re like, “I cant wait for your next book,” and I’m like, “Yeah! I’ll get it to you as soon as I can.” I also don’t do drafts. I revise heavily as I go. Every page has to be right. And I know within two or three pages if a scene doesn’t need to be there or if it took a wrong turn. For me personally, I have to make sure page-by-page it’s right. I can’t even imagine just doing a draft and then going back and making it all right at the end. For me that won’t work. Just the poetry part of it — each poem builds on each other, so to throw away three or four poems would be a loss. It’s not efficient for everybody to write that way, but for me it is. The biggest revision on any these books are six or seven hours. Some writers will send something in to their editors and it might be a two or three or even longer revision process, but not for me, because I’m anal.

What book have you received the most reaction from? Where are you getting most of your readers?

It’s different for every reader. It depends on their own personal set of experiences. For some, “Impulse” is their favorite because they have considered suicide or have a friend who is bipolar or whatever. For some its “Crank” and “Glass.” “Burned” for some, because of the romance, the really strong pull that first love draws. “Identical” because of the plot twist, for some it’s their favorite. I don’t think its any one book.

What would you say is your regular writing routine? Do you listen to music? Is there a way you go about writing your four or five hours a day?

Yeah I do. I’m up early. I’m a morning person as far as writing goes. So I’m up early dealing with correspondence. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails, etc. It’s a minimum two hours a day. It’s over 200 messages a day. So I do that early like 5:30 to 6:30ish.
I need the house quiet. I actually don’t listen to music. I need quiet and as soon as they are settled I write for the day. Usually like nine to one is my best time for writing. Afternoon are errands or whatever and evenings I try to devote to family.

What would you say is the single best advice you’ve ever gotten as far as writing or getting something published?

You have to keep faith in yourself. Rejection is part of this game — it just is. So if you have a project you truly believe in and you are willing to listen to good critique, that book can and will get published. You can’t give up on it. On the other hand if you are getting the same critique, which is, this book sucks, then maybe you might want to try another book. But you have to really keep faith. But my best advice is to enjoy the journey. You build yourself as an author. There’s a success story in the news a lot, the vampire woman. Her story is, “I had a dream and I woke up and I wrote this book in six weeks and sold it to the first person for six figures.”I’m sorry, not going to happen for very many people. And you don’t always know who you are as a writer until you find different things. I thought I was gonna do picture books and then I thought maybe earlier chapter books but then I ended up writing YA (young adult) because this is where I belong. So you have to enjoy that journey and that learning process because it’s part of it. If you come to this just for money you’re probably going to walk away disappointed. Eventually you can make some money.

You need to develop your own voice. Don’t write like anybody else. Don’t write vampire books because vampire books are big or don’t write verse because verse is big. Everybody’s place in this area is different. Keep trying and keep working at it. As for readers, keep reading. Its interesting that a lot of kids don’t like books, or they don’t think they do, until they find the right book. So if you don’t like books keep looking for the books you will like. Eventually you will find something you will  like. That’s huge too, words are knowledge and knowledge is power. Reading is important on every level.

Are all your upcoming books in verse? Do you have any plans to write prose?

Yes, right now that’s what my readers are looking for so I’ll probably stay with verse for now. Sure I’ll probably try a prose novel again some day. I actually wrote like a 100,000 word prose novel one time. Never actually could publish that book. But maybe if I pulled it out now look at it again who knows. Never say never. For now I’m very comfortable. I really like making every word count. That’s why I think verse is good. Even if I go back to prose I imagine it’s going to be pretty spare prose. Because I learned the value of that.

Where did you get the originally get the idea of shaping the verses?

There are other verse novelists. I started as a prose novel and I saw this other person speak. I’ve written poetry forever, I was like you know I could try that put that together that might work for this book. And then I’m like, “Whoa, I want mine to be different from hers,” actually I wanted it to be better — but we’ll say different. And so the poetry where I pull the words to the side and write the little poem down the side that’s part of the bigger poem is something I wanted to experiment with in my adult poetry, my regular poetry. People in my poetry group were like “Why do you want to do that? That’s a lot of work.”And yeah, that was something I wanted to play with anyway. I realized this is good. It ended up being kind of a signature thing that my readers will recognize my poetry for. I shaped stuff because this is a generation I’m writing for, where the visual is more appealing often than the more cerebral. To give them something visual that draws their eye to the page has worked out really well. Its fun. Its hard and time consuming, but its also fun. With some books I can’t, like books that are in different voices, it’s harder to do the concrete stuff because I’m trying to give each character a signature poetic style, like in “Impulse” and “Tricks,” which is coming out now.

Tara Verderosa can be reached at tverderosa@nevadasagebrush.com.

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