Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

THIRTEEN REASONS WHY

by Jay Asher


Young Adult

Razorbill


4 autographed copies will be given away on Friday, August 12, 2011!

New York Times Bestselling Author!

www.ThirteenReasonsWhy.com


About the Book:

Clay Jensen doesn't want anything to do with the tapes Hannah Baker made. Hannah is dead. Her secrets should be buried with her.

Then Hannah's voice tells Clay that his name is on her tapes -- and that he is, in some way, responsible for her death.

All through the night, Clay keeps listening. He follows Hannah's recorded words throughout his small town...

...and what he discovers changes his life forever.

Check out our exclusive interview with the Author!

1) How did you get the idea for the novel?

It was a lucky moment when two ideas that had been there for years suddenly slammed together. The unique format of the novel was an idea I had after taking an audiotour through a mock-up of King Tut's tomb. From then on, I was on the look-out for a story that could be enhanced by a simultaneous dual-narrative structure, where one narration was a recorded voice and the other narration was the thoughts of someone listening to the voice. Around the same time I went on that tour, a close relative of mine attempted suicide. Over the years, she and I talked a lot about how she got to the point where she thought ending her life was the only way out of her pain. Eventually, the format and subject matter came together, and the entire premise was just there. I wrote approximately the first ten pages that night.

2) Your characters seem so alive and real...what's your secret?

Since I was writing in first-person, I felt my job was to let the character's thoughts and words flow without adding my own judgement. If a character was being overly emotional, misleading, or cruel, I had to let the character be that way. Writing characters with flaws, but not always pointing out those flaws, makes readers engage more with the story. I feel writers need to leave some room in a story for the readers. If two people read my book, I hope they view each character in slightly different (or very different) ways. Otherwise, it would've meant I wrote one-dimensional characters.

3) When you start a new book, do you like to outline the entire story or fly by the seat of your pants? What about your characters? Do you figure them out entirely before you start writing or do they reveal themselves to you along the way?

I have to know where I'm aiming to end the book, especially the emotion I'd like the reader to have when the finish the last word. Knowing that emotion helps shape every scene leading up to it. Other than that, I don't like to know very much. For each of Hannah's thirteen reasons, I knew maybe a one or two sentence description, and then I put the reasons in an order that seemed logical. But I tried not to think about the details or how one story would flow to the next. From the beginning, I wanted this to be suspenseful, so it made sense to discover the story as I was writing it, just as the readers would eventually do as they read it. For most of the characters, their voices were very strong immediately. I didn't know much about the characters or what they'd been through, but I knew how they sounded, so I kind of sat back and let them tell the story to me. (I know, that sounds completley psychotic, but it is what it is.)

4) When you set out to write a book, are you usually sparked by a story idea or a character?

It's always a story idea. I love big hooks and concepts. Those are the types of books I like to read, so those are the books I want to write. I honestly don't know how some writers start with a character.

5) How do you come up with your character names?

When I began writing Thirteen Reasons Why, I used whatever names popped into my head and sounded good with the other names. At some point, I realized those names were somewhat common when I was in high school, and even though I'd only been out of school for ten years, I wondered if that group of names would ring as true to a more current high school audience. I went to the Social Security Administration website that lists the top baby names for any given year. Calculating ahead to when my book was likely to be released, and then calculating back to when those characters would've been born, maybe two of my original names were even in the top fifty. So I changed a few of their names so there would be a stronger sense of reality.

About the Author:

Jay Asher's first novel, Thirteen Reasons Why, spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, with foreign rights sold in over 30 countries and more than 1,000,000 copies in print in the US alone. The movie rights sold to Universal Pictures. His next novel, The Future of Us (co-written with Carolyn Mackler), comes out November 2011. Its movie rights sold to Warner Bros. Visit the Author online at: www.ThirteenReasonsWhy.com.

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