Caleb Roehrig and Richard Lawson Discuss Gay YA and Writing What You Know

Caleb: Richard! I’m so glad I get a chance to talk with you about your upcoming debut, All We Can Do is Wait—a gorgeous novel about five characters with distinct voices and individual story lines, who come together at a crucial point in time and affect each other’s lives. I’d love to hear what inspired you, and how you went about developing your different narrators and their backgrounds!
Richard: Caleb! It’s so nice to talk to you. I just devoured your twisty, sexy new thriller White Rabbit and am dying to ask you questions about it. But first, should we should reveal to B&N’s readers that we’ve known each other for over ten years, and yet have never met in person? Eh, maybe our old Gawker commenter days are better left in the past. Moving on to your question: I was really important to me that the kids in AWCDIW felt like real kids, and the best way for me to go about achieving that was, frankly, to mine my own past. Which meant setting the story in my hometown of Boston and taking bits and pieces of people I knew at school, at summer jobs, and in my neighborhood and synthesizing them together to create these five characters. I’ve always thought that “write what you know” is a sort of limiting bit of advice. But in this case it was immensely helpful, and probably my only way into the story. I think something our books share is that specific sense of place. I love how you write about Burlington, Vermont, and the Lake Champlain area. How important to you was it that the book be set there? And how much of your story—minus, I hope, the murder—is reflective of your own teenage years? 
Caleb: It cannot have been ten years; neither one of us is that old. And I promise no one will learn from me that we were both commenters on Gawker at the same time! I SHALL TAKE OUR SECRET TO THE GRAVE. As for the setting of White Rabbit, I knew from the outset that I wanted it to take place in a smaller town; it suited the quasi-claustrophobic feeling I was aiming for, with my main character trapped in a tight orbit with people he wishes he could avoid. I’ve also always loved the “evil in a small town” subgenre, exemplified by narratives like Twin Peaks—and have a soft spot in my heart for Vermont—so choosing a wholesome place like Burlington for my sordid murder mystery was a no-brainer.
I definitely mined some of my own drama for Rufus’s experience. Growing up gay in a smaller community meant falling into toxic symbiosis with career bullies, something that Rufus grapples with a lot in White Rabbit; and his deep plunge into Feelings for Sebastian, the tumult of their relationship, and the resulting wounds were all most definitely cribbed from parts of my life.
And on that note! A part of All We Can Do is Wait that really resonated with me on a personal level was the story line involving Jason and Kyle. They’re at different stages of self-acceptance, but both boys were so relatable, and it was refreshing to see a warts-and-all depiction of gay teenagers navigating an uncertain world. What factored into the decisions you made when writing their story, and what does it mean to you to contribute to a growing body of literature that addresses queer issues for young readers?
Richard: A friend of mine recently read the book and said to me, “It’s funny reading your fantasy version of high school.” He didn’t mean the grief and trauma, of course, but instead the summery romance between Jason and Kyle. And I suppose, yeah, there is that at play in the book, me dreamily imagining what it would have been like to be swept off my feet by some charming, magical boy back when I was 17. (So, like, five years ago.) In that way, writing those parts was a bit cathartic, a bit of an exorcism, maybe. I’ll own up to that.
Beyond that personal aspect, though, it just felt important to write a gay storyline that wasn’t expressly about coming out in the “Hey, I’m gay!” sense, but more internal, more about what it means to make your inner life known to those around you. That’s always a risky thing, for anyone, but perhaps more so for queer kids, who don’t often have many, if any, tangible examples of what life might look like once they’ve publicly expressed themselves. I’d hope anyone, queer or not, could relate to that struggle, figuring out how much of yourself you want to show to the world. But yeah, it’s more specifically aimed at a gay experience. I wanted to extend some understanding of that worry, about how the air might spoil this precious, complicated thing inside you, one that you maybe share with someone special, or just with yourself. 
Does any of that make sense? I know there is a lot of queer YA being written these days, and I hope that I’m positively contributing to that. We’ll see! At the very least, it was nice for me to remember that time in my life and work through it a bit more than I already have. (Therapy you get paid to do!) 
While we’re on the topic, we gotta talk about something, Caleb. And that’s sex. Meaning, your characters have it! Which is not always something you read or see in gay male teen narratives. (Or gay male adult narratives, for that matter.) Was there any hesitancy about how far to go in that arena? And, more broadly, what, if any, responsibility do you think any one queer book for young readers has to the general discourse? 

Caleb: When I first started writing, I admit that sex was a topic I avoided, because it made me self-conscious (my mother will be reading this!), but in writing honestly about young people navigating sexual identity, certain questions are inescapable: Do I want sex? Who do I want it with? Am I ready for it? Ultimately, I didn’t feel that the relationship between Rufus and Sebastian would be realistic without them confronting and crossing this particular frontier, but because White Rabbit is not a book about sex, I definitely approached the intimate scenes with a sort of gauzy-blue-filter-montage-with-smooth-jazz-playing-in-the-background sensibility.
The fact is, we are at a particular point in time where queer youth are at growing risk, and they both need and deserve honesty from people in a position to provide it. When I was a teenager (so, like, two or three years ago,) representation of gay men fell roughly into two categories: the sweet, sexless best friend, or the horny, promiscuous best friend. And I couldn’t fully connect with either. So I guess I feel like I have a responsibility to show that there is no road map, no one-size-fits-all way to be gay; writing stories about gay teenagers who have adventures, who fall down or save the day, who have romance or heartbreak or sex, and it’s just Life™, feels like a way I can do that.
(And here I’d just like to say that I loved how you specifically highlighted Kyle’s feminine qualities in All We Can Do is Wait, and made them part of what Jason found attractive about him; it’s past time we rescued femininity from stigma, which I think is another important thing we can contribute to ongoing conversations.)
And since we’re on the subject of messages we wish to communicate with our work, I’d like to hear your thoughts on that! All We Can Do is Wait touches on a number of very serious subjects, and is centered on a tragic event, but there’s a thread of hope that runs through it as well. What do you want your readers to take away from their experience with this book?
Richard: I’m glad you dialed in on Kyle’s non-butchness. There’s this pervasive idea that gay men are fundamentally attracted to a heterosexual ideal of maleness, a concept that presents itself as a sadness for us—all these hunks we cannot have!—and a persistent, sometimes dangerous fear for straight men. But for me, and for Jason in the book, and for many other gay guys, it is specifically gay men who are attractive to us, with all the attendant qualities, which often manifest well outside the tedious bounds of traditional masculinity. That’s part of what’s hot about the whole thing; it’s about way more than the required parts. With Kyle, I really wanted to draw a character who was, yes, maybe a little ludicrously magic the way only fictional dream boyfriends can be, but who was also real and desirable and potent in all his loose, queeny joie de vivre. He’s made up of so many men I’ve known and admired and crushed on. But also, Jason isn’t supposed to be at all butch either. It’s two fey guys falling in love. 
Anyway! You asked me about the tragedy of it all, at a time when everything feels like a tragedy. I wrote the book with something small in mind: I wanted it to serve as a bit of comfort and encouragement to kids who were about to embark on something big in their lives. I’m a really nostalgic person, and it’s always been hard for me to move from one phase of my life to another. It always feels like a little death. So in AWCDIW you have a lot of actual death that I hoped could be a sort of allegory for learning how to divest yourself of the past while still honoring it, still cherishing it. From Skyler finding her own strength in the face of something scary to Alexa rediscovering her autonomy in the midst of such reducing sadness, I just wanted to create a sense of how it can feel to work your way past a thing and be pleasantly surprised by the person you find yourself to be once you’ve gone through that crucible. (The reference to The Crucible in the book isn’t an accident!) In my maudlin imagination, a kid reads this book around graduation time, and—along with all that glorious and giddy nervousness—feels O.K.
But of course then there’s the rest of the awful world and its myriad traumas bearing down on us. So maybe the hopefulness you found in the book (I’m so glad you did) also works on that level. I don’t know. That all feels rather large for a little book to deal with. 
Caleb, I feel like we need to wrap this up. But I’ll ask you one last question that I hope you’ll have a juicy answer for. Or, actually, it’s two questions. In my book I had to figure out who would live or die, but it was in a faraway, almost virtual sense. In your book, you have to actually kill people, and then name a killer. Did you know how that was all going to play out going in, or did the twists reveal themselves to you as you went? 
Caleb: I learned a long time ago that the only way to keep myself honest as a thriller writer was to work from an outline. I wasted a lot of time in the beginning, painting myself into corners by giving all my suspects unbreakable alibis, and having to walk backwards like that kid in The Shining to figure out where I could do something about it. So before I even started on White Rabbit I sketched the complete story in thumbnail form, picking my victims and my killer, and then adding flesh to the skeleton from there. In that way, I was able to plan my clues and red herrings, and give each one what felt like the proper weight. Some details changed as possibilities suggested themselves to me while drafting, of course, but the core elements remained the same!
Thanks so much for answering my questions about AWCDIW! I loved reading it, and am really looking forward to seeing it on the shelves. (Time is a weird thing: I’ve been reading your words since you were a small cat avi on Gawker, and now I’ve read your debut novel with your actual picture on it!) Before you go, what’s coming next from you, and where can your readers go for more of your work?
Richard: That description of outlining a plot is probably as solid a bit of writing advice as exists in this exchange. Thanks for it.
Looking ahead, I will still be writing and podcasting for my day job at Vanity Fair. And then I’ve got another book in the very, very early stages of development. (Meaning, I’ve written a few disparate paragraphs and have some sense of what it’s about.) It’s gonna be gay and about New York City in the mid- to late-aughts and I am hoping I can pull it off.
Caleb, what are you doing next, beyond becoming a millionaire when White Rabbit is inevitably turned into a weekly must-watch TV series?
Caleb: Well, once I become a millionaire, I’m scrapping everything and moving to Crete. Or maybe the moon. But until then! I’m hard at work on my third novel, which so far has no title and defies any kind of concise description, and which will probably be released in 2019. In addition to that, there’s a short story I’m working on for an anthology, and I have a couple of non-YA projects that I’m going to be fine-tuning and hopefully finding homes for! Onward and upward?
All We Can Do is Wait is on shelves now. White Rabbit releases April 24 and is available for preorder.