Hello everyone!
Today I am so excited to have Robyn Schneider on the blog answering some questions to celebrate the release of The Beginning of Everything that releases a few months back. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of this book, and upon finishing it I knew it was a book that would stay with me for a long time. If you are interested in my thought on the book, my review is here, but no onto the Q&A!

1. Most YA novels are told from a female point of view, why did you choose a male voice? And did you find you learned more from that?

Ezra has always been very easy to write. He popped into my head exactly as you read him on the page, this this broken boy who had miscalculated his destiny and mistakenly placed his faith in a girl as miserable and adrift as himself. I suppose the truth is that I wrote a book, or perhaps a character, who was so emotionally autobiographical that I had to force myself to fictionalize it somehow. Ezra’s inner monologue is very much my own. If I learned anything from writing through his perspective, it’s this: we’re all just stories in the end, and stories don’t have genders.

Ezra tells the story from his first year of college, a place not so far removed from the period of his life he’s talking about. His dialogue early in the book doesn’t match his narration, but as the story progresses you see Ezra become the boy who’s telling the story.
That’s what I’m most proud of. The way his narrative voice is an effect of the story, rather than a passive piece of it.
I loved writing Toby. He’s so fearlessly himself, and so funny, and sometimes I used to think that if I just wrote him well enough he’d walk off the page and I’d get to keep him as my best friend.
I think we ultimately want to find ourselves in the pages of the books we read, and as much as I love stories about magic schools and undead boyfriends, I’ve never truly found the most secret parts of myself in anything other than realistic fiction.
Luke. I have a feeling it would get very Lord of the Flies.

I want to thank Robyn for answering my questions today! And I look forward to reading many more from her in the future!

About the Author

Robyn Schneider is a writer, actor, and online personality who misspent her youth in a town coincidentally similar to Eastwood. Robyn is a graduate of Columbia University, where she studied creative writing, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where she studied medical ethics. She is also the author of the middle grade Knightley Academy books, written as Violet Haberdasher. She lives in Los Angeles, California, but also on the internet. You can watch her vlogs at youtube.com/robynisrarelyfunny and follow her on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram.