Oh MG & YA Canada, Interview and Giveaway Nelsa Roberto

I interviewed Nelsa Roberto after reading her book Illegally Blonde for Oh (MG &YA) Canada . Her book is now a highly recommend from me for those who love Sarah Dessen, Sarah Ockler and those who recently read and enjoyed Janet Gurtler's I'm Not Her. A strong female character, contemporary setting-dealing with some hard truths and issues. All Lucy wants to do is be a Canadian kid going to her first prom with the boyfriend who is going to take her away from the restrictions she lives with thanks to her family. Easy enough, right? After all, Lucy is Canadian. Her parents moved from Portugal when she was a baby. One problem. The move wasn't legal and now they have to go back. Talk about making it difficult for a character to achieve her goal! This is also a book I'd recommend to anyone wanting to craft a novel. This is one to read for enjoyment, then read to study. In my opinion, Nelsa does is all right. Oh yes she does. Now--on with the interview. As for the giveaway--all you need to do is comment. Open to Canada and U.S. and you're in for the random org draw. Closes this Saturday night at midnight.

About the book from Good Reads:
Sometimes discovering your roots is about more than watching your real hair colour grow in …

When seventeen-year-old Lucy do Amaral comes home with bleached blonde hair she expects a major lecture and another grounding from her strict Portuguese parents. What she doesn't expect is the shocking news that her family are illegal aliens who've just been told they're being deported in less than a week. Lucy's furious at being forced to leave her boyfriend and miss prom to go live in some backwater village in a country she knows nothing about. But as Lucy discovers, intentions and reality are sometimes worlds apart — or an ocean away.

I loved Lucy. A somewhat difficult character in the beginning (as you mentioned), but at the same time completely and utterly likeable. For me that was because of her love of family, her sense of humour and seeing that she had a boyfriend who was quite possibly backing out of his promises of love ever after. Did you struggle with making her likeable, worry that she might not be likeable enough?

When I first began writing Illegally Blonde, I knew I wanted to make Lucy feisty, sarcastic and with a little bit of attitude. I let all of her frustrations with her overprotective immigrant parents out and her intense reactions to situations left unchecked. Lucy is full of passion - she doesn't just accept things. For the story to work, I needed to show that passion even if it came across as a bit self-centred and misguided at times. I couldn't have a character whose reaction to finding out her family are illegal immigrants and that they are being deported in less than a week be a stoic 'whatever will be will be' . That is so not Lucy! But I also knew that she had a good heart and I needed to show that in order to make her more likeable. Hopefully I did with her loving relationship with her mom and how she treated her young cousin Carlos. Lucy is also not immune to feeling guilty about what she does - and that guilt is a symptom of moral conscience. While I know not everyone will connect with Lucy, I do hope that her actions are believeable for who she is - certainly not perfect but someone who believes fate is what you make it.

How did you plot out this book and characters? I found all the sub plots worked perfectly with Lucy’s own struggles with family and wanting to be free and learning what family can do and sometimes destroy.
Thank you! I really wanted the sub-plots to mirror many of the issues with which Lucy is struggling - the love and constriction that family gives you, the idea or thought of what 'home' means to a person, the struggle for independence and belief in yourself and what you think you can do. So I'm so glad to hear that you thought those sub-plots worked in enhancing those themes!

The plotting of the main story - Lucy's desire to come back to Canada and what she's willing to do to get back home, was fairly easy. I had my lightbulb moment for the story in 2006 when the crack-down on illegal Portuguese workers happened in Toronto. There was a picture in the newspaper of a teen girl helping to pack up her family's kitchen and she looked so sad and resigned to her fate I thought "What's going to happen to that girl when she goes back to a country she probably doesn't even remember?" And so Lucy was born.

As for the sub-plots - Lucy's relationship with her cousins, the romance with Filipe, the story-line with Filipe's mother - all of those sub-plots actually arose organically (meaning I didn't plan them out from the beginning!) from the main plot and theme of Lucy fighting for her independence while still feeling those loving, yet restrictive ties to family.

As for characters, I don't really set out to make each character a certain way. I don't typically do character studies or anything for the characters before I begin creating them. Something they say or do early on in the drafting of the book usually twigs their personality for me. For example, as I wrote Filipe he became the slightly sad, very responsible only son to a domineering mother out of one line in his first meeting with Lucy at an old abandoned church when she asks him:

"Why are you here? Don't you believe in ghosts?"

He looked around. For the first time in the conversation his expression turned serious.

"Depends on the kinds of ghosts we're talking about."

At that moment, I knew his relationship with his mother was just as complex and constricting as Lucy's was with her family. Only he dealt with it in a very different way than Lucy. The same thing happened with Carlos (Lucy's cousin). I didn't know he was born with a cleft palate until I wrote "I could also clearly see the ragged scar that cut across his top lip toward his nose..." But when I wrote it I knew that one detail was critical to understanding Carlos' personality and behaviour.

As I go through the second or third drafts of my books I start to see and enhance how the character's actions and words reflect the themes of the book. The choices each of the secondary characters in Illegally Blonde make all relate to those themes of independence and family and what it means to make your own choices and the impact those choices make, not just on you, but on the people who are your family.

Do you have a current project you are working on? What is your writing time like for that? You’ve discussed on your blog, finding that balance.

I'm always working on a project! :) Whether the work is 'working out' or not is another thing!

I'm about to receive my editorial letter for my second contemporary YA called THE BREAK (out with Great Plains Teen Fiction in Spring 2012) so I'm excited to dig into that story again. I've also just finished the first draft of another YA and I'm about to enter into the revision of that over the summer. When I do first drafts I write them long-hand into a notebook and then type the 'second draft' into the computer. But for the first draft I usually write on the subway to and from work, at lunch, waiting for various children's activities to be over - wherever and whenever I can get ten or more minutes to write I take it! I'm also more of a night owl and, at least when I first started writing, would write from 10 pm - 1 am at night - every night (that was my obsessive, first love stage with writing). I can't do that as much anymore. Too tiring!

When you do have that time to write, is there a particular spot, routine that helps you get into the zone? What do you do when you aren’t in that writing zone, when you feel like you’d rather go out and watch grass grow?
Believe it or not, my favourite writing spot that immediately gets me in the zone is the subway. I think it's because there are no distractions like TV or the Internet to lure me away! Even when I don't feel like it, if I pull out my notebook and I just start to read over the last couple of pages I wrote the previous day, it gets me into it and before my thirty minute morning commute is over I've found I've written two or three pages. Same thing on the way home (luckily, I usually get a seat on the subway! I couldn't do it otherwise)

When I really don't feel like writing I tell myself to just write a paragraph, a couple of sentences, anything! I don't go into it thinking I need to make a five page quota - that would probably freeze me up. I usually find that when I give myself the leeway to only write a few words I end up writing much more.

My book club is filled with aspiring writers, ages 8 to 13 and I’m gathering advice for them. Anything you would like to share? A fun tip or maybe a writing exercise for them to use and stretch with?
I'm so impressed with people that young already learning the craft of writing! For that age group, the best advice I could give (besides reading voraciously of course! :) is to keep a journal. I kept a journal of my daily activities for many years (I think I started in Grade 6). I stopped writing journals when I was a teen (silly me!) but picked it up again in my twenties and wrote for ten years. Coincidentally, I only stopped writing journal entries when I decided to write fiction. I find journal (or, if you prefer: diary) writing to be really helpful because you're writing what you know best (you!), learning how to express your feelings, making observations about the people around you and, most importantly, getting into the habit of writing every day. Once you can describe your own life and the lives of people around you, it becomes much easier, I think, to then create a fictional world.

Speaking of my book club kids. Anything you'd like to recommend they read or we get for our library? Something that is a recent read, or a book you loved when you were a child?
Oh, my goodness! I can never answer this kind of question because there are SO MANY awesome books out there. I do think that Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games is one of the best books that combines an amazing plot, excellent writing and a depth of characterization from which all writers could learn. However, I'm sure you already have that book! Seriously, if your book club is 8-13 I would recommend many of the Middle grade and younger skewing YA books created by the fabulous writers in the Torkidlit writers group (they have a Facebook page). You can't go wrong with reading anything by those authors and, bonus!, they're all Canadian! :)


I love that group and seeing what they are all up to!

Okay, I have to ask one last, random question. I see your dog, Hudson, looks like my dog Buddha. Where does Hudson sleep while you write?
Ah, are you a Golden Retriever owner? I'm obviously biased but I do think they are the best dogs in the world (except for the shedding hair!) Since I tend to write mostly in transit and out of the house, Hudson is usually at home, probably lying in the kitchen waiting for scrap food to fall from the kitchen counter. But when I do write at home, I'll probably be in the living room and since he's not allowed in there (that shedding hair again!), he'll lay down at the entrance to the room watching me with his big brown eyes and patiently waiting for me to finish when I know he's thinking, "Enough writing already! I need to go on a walk!"Dogs are in our lives to make us less self-centred, I think. And, by the way, Buddha is an AWESOME name for a dog.

Thanks so much for asking me to do this interview, Deb! Your questions were amazing!


Well, thank you back. If you want to learn more about Nelsa, check out her blog.

Tina Nichols Courey brainchilded Interview Wednesdays a while ago and now here we are! This week is being hosted by Lizann Flatt over on her blog, so go there when you are done here and see what else is happening for this event.  Happy reading!