With his first YA novel, We All Looked Up (Simon & Schuster, 2015) recently optioned by Paramount Insurge, and a deal for the post-apocalyptic Anchor & Sophia trilogy in the works, Brooklyn-based musician and author Tommy Wallach has been busy. His latest novel, Thanks for the Trouble, arrives on bookshelves next week and tells the story of a nonspeaking teen with a penchant for writing, who meets the enigmatic Zelda Toth and has his life changed forever. Wallach spoke with Bookshelf about his latest novel, a recent social media fracas, and the current state of YA literature.

You’ve written for adults in various publications prior to We All Looked Up. What was the catalyst that led you to write young adult fiction?

I was actually writing an adult book and I had the idea for We All Looked Up. It was a much, much better idea than the one I was writing. It wasn’t some kind of big decision like “I will write for young people rather than adults.” It was just I had this next idea and it starred a cast of young people, which would make it a young adult book.

In both We All Looked Up and Thanks for the Trouble, you play with narrative structure, be it embedded stories or multiple viewpoints. What led you to tell stories in these ways?

I remember reading, I think it was Ian McEwan, saying somewhere that he didn’t believe in first person because he thought that it meant that the author didn’t develop their own voice. I think that’s probably overstating it a little bit, but I do understand the point. When you write first person, you’re effectively writing a really long monologue. As someone who comes from a theater background and writes screenplays, it’s a different form. I do think that’s true. When I wrote Thanks for the Trouble – you’re inhabiting somebody’s voice and you just write in their voice. It’s not as if that’s easy. I just mean that you’re not being yourself as a writer; you’re taking on somebody else’s voice.

All of which is to say that certainly with We All Looked Up, I really liked being in third person. With Thanks for the Trouble, I really struggled with wanting to write it in third person, but it kept coming back to first person. Every time I tried to write it, [the protagonist, Parker] just wanted to be speaking in first person. It was annoying and I turned it into a little joke inside the book. The first chapter of the book is called “Third Person Fail” and the book actually starts with Parker trying to describe himself in the third person and it falls apart so he switches to first person. That was really my own struggle in the book. In the future, I think I will stick to the third person from here on out. I did the one.

You’re a musician and an author. Can you speak to the similarities and differences between the two composing processes?

I literally haven’t written anything in a year, musically I mean. It’s bizarre. Music is just way more fun and enjoyable in every possible way. I always tell people that writing is just horrible. I think most people who do it know that, but I think there are a lot of people who dabble it in and when you dabble in it, it’s really fun. It’s like a nice, expressive thing. But when you have to do it every day, 365 days a year, and half that time you’re working on something that feels really not good, it’s just no fun at all. On the other hand, I never tried to make my living as a musician. I think if I were scoring TV or something, [it] would probably turn into the same kind of thing, where a lot of it was just unhappy grunt work. [But I play music] whenever I want to, and if I don’t want to do it, I don’t do it. It’s cathartic, it’s relaxing, and it makes for a nice counterpoint to the writing, which is very intellectual and heavy. I think they complement each other nicely.

Last November, you encountered a backlash on Twitter over your comment about being an atheist following the terrorist attacks in Paris. Can you talk about that, and how much would you say your beliefs factor into your novels?

That was so very surprising to me and I have so many feelings about that. A lot of people I think tried to make that about something other than just atheism. [The U.S. is] a very religious country and YA, I think, is much more religious than literary fiction and there are great things about that. Probably the majority of my favorite writers were very religious people. At the same time, atheism is inherently skeptical of religion. You can’t recommend not believing in anything without saying that there are problems with believing in certain mythologies, so I think that people were offended. I understand that, but at the same time, I’m certainly not alone in it. It’s a big community. I think that it’s an important viewpoint that young people need to hear and I don’t think they hear enough of it in this country.

That said, in terms of how it informs my books, I’d like to think that it informs them. We All Looked Up is interesting because I think anybody can tell from the book that I have a pretty healthy respect for faith. The good character in that book is a Christian. He’s a pretty obvious Jesus parable. Not to give away the ending, but it’s a real parallel there. I’m a big fan of Jesus. He was a good dude, so I certainly have a lot of respect. I would like my books to promote the other side of things as well: mainly, that it is possible, and in my opinion, more probable, that one will be a good person if one doesn’t subscribe to particular ideologies that we use to separate the world out and that creates all of this conflict. I think we can create better morality.

For the trilogy I’m writing now, it’s much more on the nose about that. It’s about a society that forms many thousands of years post-apocalyptically, kind of in a little nod to We All Looked Up, in an asteroid situation. It feels like pioneer times again. It’s not a crazy, pitted, fiery hellscape like a lot of dystopian things. It’s just like pioneer times in America. But the society the protagonists live in practices a modified form of Christianity that is anti-technology. They come into conflict with this society – an atheistic society – that is promoting technology. So, it’s about the conflict between the two. I’m hitting it more on the nose in the future. I don’t know if that will be good or not. Hopefully good.

One of the characters in Thanks for the Trouble is named Zelda Toth. Are you a Fitzgerald fan and does that inform your work in any way?

Yeah, historically I have been super-obsessed with the Fitzgeralds. There’s a whole bit about Scott Fitzgerald in We All Looked Up and it’s sort of a green light reference that comes up a couple times. I’ve always been much more interested in Zelda. I wrote about her book for Tin House. I wrote an article about Save Me the Waltz that she wrote when she was in a sanatorium. It’s a really interesting, beautiful book. It doesn’t totally work, but it shows that she was a serious writer and it makes you wonder how much help she gave Scott in his work. And then I also have this book of her paintings. She was a talented painter. She made these elongated figures, a lot of dancers. They’re quite lovely. And then she was also a dancer herself. The range of her talents is just stunning. She’s such an interesting, wonderful character. So that is absolutely my homage to Zelda Fitzgerald.

So in regard to the relationship between Parker and Zelda in Thanks for the Trouble, are you making a comparison to the Fitzgeralds?

No, that’s not something that was on my mind. Something I have heard a lot already about the book is people saying “Man, I hope this isn’t another one of those manic pixie dream girl things,” and then people who have read it have mentioned that manic pixie dream girl trope. It makes me so angry because it’s two things. First of all, I think people have forgotten what a manic pixie dream girl is. A manic pixie dream girl is a poorly written female character. It doesn’t mean a girl who is energetic and interesting and changes the life of the protagonist. Because that is every love story there has ever been. Darcy is a manic pixie dream boy. Very much so. He absolutely is. He does weird, energetic things and he changes the protagonist. He is there to change the protagonist. And you don’t really get a sense of his desires or needs ever. That’s how a love story works unless you’re telling it from both sides. You get the protagonist and then who they are in love with who changes their life. That’s a love story. A manic pixie dream girl is a female character who has none of her own desires or needs. She only exists as a foil to the protagonist. And it really sucks because the only way I can talk about this with Thanks for the Trouble is if I give away the ending, which I don’t want to do. All I can say is, if you know the ending, it is very clear that Zelda has her own stuff going on and that Parker is, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly important to her. And I mean that in a nice way. They have a nice relationship, but he is not important to her in the long run.

What books influenced you when you were growing up?

It’s hard to remember because most of what influences me now I came to later. I feel like the Philip Pullman books have been really important as a writer. When I was younger, though, it was probably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and classy stuff like the Forgotten Realm novels. As I got older, even in high school, Nabokov and Martin Amis both became really important. I read everything that both of them wrote. As I got older I moved towards the literary stuff. And then it shifted back towards the middle in adulthood.

How would you describe the YA landscape today? Where do you think it is headed?

I’m always skeptical of trend pieces in magazines and newspapers. There are so many things published that there aren’t really trends. You can just point to something and call it a trend. It’s like what Bill Cunningham does. He takes three people wearing yellow and says, “Yellow’s a thing!” That was three people, Bill Cunningham. The short answer is that the landscape is vibrant and wonderful. There are more great folks being published in the space then there have been before. There are probably more bad books being published, too. There are just more books being published. The part that matters is that more good books are being published than ever before. I think that we’re winning over a lot of people, both readers and writers. I think writers are drawn to it because there is an audience and there’s money, but so what? There are still good writers coming over, and I think that will make it harder for the [critics] who try to call the whole thing horrible.

Have you encountered any surprises in writing a trilogy versus a stand-alone?

Yes, it’s the worst. That’s the surprise. It’s the worst thing that there is. It’s horrible. As soon as I sold that trilogy, I swear every writer I met after said, “Oh, you’re going to be so sorry you did this.” And I said, “What? What are you talking about? Don’t tell me that.” It’s just really long and it’s getting really hard to do. I would go so far to say that I think the vast majority of published trilogies don’t work. That doesn’t mean that they’re bad or not fun to read, but in terms of getting to the end and [thinking] “Wow, that was an incredibly satisfying ending to that narrative,” that’s really hard to do. I actually have a growing respect for the third book in The Hunger Games trilogy because of how it is all about the media. But there’s a weird sort of thing where the climax of that book falls flat. They’re running towards the bad guy’s house and the character passes out, wakes up, and that guy’s captured. That’s a weird way to do it. Then she ends up killing somebody else that you didn’t really even care about that much. And again, I think it’s interesting, but it kind of falls apart. I think the final book of Harry Potter totally falls apart. The movies are actually really good but [in the] last book literally the most important magical items in the world are called the Deathly Hallows and you’ve never heard of them before. Never heard of them in a single book! [Rowling] has six books and if she knew all along, she would have mentioned them one time. One time! I think it’s really hard to do. I’m sure I’m going to fail – but the question is how badly will I fail. That’s the only real question. So that has been surprising to me – just the largeness of the bite that I have bitten off.

Are there any unspoken rules for writing a YA novel?

I don’t think that there are any hard rules. It used to be that you had to have a normal plot. That was a pretty hard rule in YA, like it is in a mystery novel. But you look at Andrew Smith’s books, and others. There are a lot of people that are like, “No, we’re just going to do weird, surreal, experimental stuff in YA and we’re just going to do it.” So that [a traditional plot] isn’t a rule anymore. But I personally have a problem with how little sex there is in YA. I think it’s problematic. I just met Judy Blume who famously was talking about all of these sexual things explicitly quite a while ago. You have a novel about a couple that fall in love and have sex. They decide they can’t be with each other and the girl likes another dude – and that’s the story. That story is still hard to tell in YA. There’s still a strong censorship out there for those kinds of messages. So that’s something that I still don’t know the rules of. I’m learning. I was out to dinner with David Levithan and some other people. They gave me a list of graphic YA to read. So I could be wrong. There might be a lot of those out there and I need to take a look at these books.

I think the field is pretty wide open right now. And that is part of what makes it so fun.