Anger Is Only a Shadow: A Guest Post by Elizabeth Acevedo

From the beloved author of The Poet X comes a powerful novel of self-discovery and making difficult choices. Lil may be rebellious, but as her world shifts and tensions with her brother rise, she begins to question her future. Read on for an exclusive essay from Elizabeth Acevedo on writing Anger is Only a Shadow.

The girls sat around the table, their purple uniforms tucked in, the snacks they ate before the poetry workshop in varying states of being consumed. Two of the young women had formed a romantic relationship, largely due to the fact that their cell-like rooms shared pipes. In this way they were able to whisper to each other and connect in ways that weren’t restricted and supervised like the rest of their day. 

This is the image that acted as a springboard for the earliest draft of Anger Is Only a Shadow. I was so moved by the way these young women reached for relationships in a space that didn’t always center how much humans need each other. But I didn’t want to glamorize the extreme and inhumane circumstances that force people to bond via plumbing. 

It felt important to have the protagonist be outside, to contend with who she wanted to be under the weight of an ankle monitor that she knew gave her only borrowed freedom. And well, once I put our girl outside of the detention center, the story morphed. It was still a love story but the love became expansive: How did Lil love her siblings? Her parents? Her community? Her old friends and new friends? Herself?

And then the story acquired a different engine, because I had had a very nascent idea of wanting to write about a young man who is in the early stages of mental illness and how the people around him try to understand what is happening. I wasn’t sure at first if these two distinct impulses could share one book binding. I don’t outline or carve out plot points in advance. The earliest draft of this novel was centered on wonder and resisting the urge to write a novel that was prescriptive instead of curious.

I began writing in prose poems, because verse felt too loose for a book that had so many physical constraints involved. And then I had to loosen the yoke between prose and poem and add in verse and mythology. Again, I had to let the novel morph, this time in terms of how it was crafted. But of course, guiding a reading experience means creating rules of the world. Even for novels that aren’t fantasy you world-build and put up the visible clotheslines that lets you hang your text. I was able to find the right fit of different kinds of writing once I knew the characters better and once I understood what felt so right about the block text and prose poems and verse—where Lil felt truest.

How do I hope the book will impact readers? Each novel I write is a commitment to discovery.  In the beginning I have a character, or a premise, or a bit of dialogue and that’s, at most, a shovel aimed at hard rock. But as I dig, I find. I hope readers also feel inclined to want to know more, to unearth the human parts of us that can be found only in story.