Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 8: Nicole Kronzer, YA Author and High School Teacher

Nicole Kronzer is an author of young adult novels, a high school teacher, and a former actor. Her first novel, Unscripted, was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association.

Show notes:

• Nicole Kronzer
• Unscripted
• The Loft Literary Center
• Nina Lacour, Yerba Buena
• Brandy Colbert, The Only Black Girls in Town, The Voting Booth

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Nicole Kronzer is an author of young adult novels, a high school teacher, and a former actor. She has written two novels so far, Unscripted, and The Roof Over Our Heads, which will be published in 2022. As a high school teacher, Nicole writes both for and about her students. She's aware of the daily travails of the teens she teaches, and this informs her novels, which are imbued with the gritty reality of high school life.

But Nicole started out as an actor and improviser. "I always wanted to be a teacher. I thought that I was going to be a high school English teacher who directed plays. And then in college, I went to the theater department first and I auditioned, and they said, honey, you're going to be a professional actor. So I got a BFA in acting, then moved to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and was a professional actor and improviser here for about five years."

But acting has its inconveniences, and Nicole doesn't like to stay up late, and not knowing where her next job is coming from, so she went back to graduate school and got a teaching license, and has worked in the same high school since 2006. But teaching is a sort of performance; "it's like performing a six hour play every day."

Nicole's first novel in Unscripted, about teenagers going to an improv camp, dealing with toxic masculinity. Young adult novels these days can deal with issues that they wouldn't have a couple of decades ago. "I would say that books really change. Maybe ten years ago, I started seeing the normalization of LGBTQ characters. We still have a long way to go in terms of representation but, YA has really taken up this mantle that our books should reflect who kids are. I think that YA is pushing the envelope for a lot of literary genres. And so it's really it's exciting to be a part of that."

We discussed how schools react to books about sensitive topics, and I asked Nicole whether she was worried that her books might be banned. "I always say that, as a parent, you get to decide what your kid reads and doesn't read. But I do not think you get to decide what everybody else's kid reads. So as I was writing my book, you know, those parents were in my head. The specific reason that I wanted this book to be in kids hands was for the discussion around emotional abuse, and all the stuff around gender, and also how a lot of LGBTQ characters are in the book."

Nicole discussed how she got her book contract, with Amulet, an imprint of Harry Abrams. She had already written one novel, and had queried agents, and when the second book was ready, she started sending it out. "And then my dream agent, who had passed on my first book, but was very excited when I said I had another project. She wrote back to me six days after I sent her Unscripted offering to be my agent to represent me."

Nicole writes her first drafts in longhand, in notebooks, then, once she has a finished draft, "I start revising as I type into Scrivener. I set up my chapters and my scenes that way." Nicole takes advantage of some of Scrivener's features to progress as she writes and revises. "I changed the name of statuses to days of the week. So instead of it being first version or whatever, because I've never found that particularly helpful, I changed it to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It's really helped me with my timeline."

She also leverages collections. "I love collections; you've got arbitrary collections, and then you've got your saved searches, like where I've got a specific location, and I want to keep track of every time that it comes up in the book. So then I can do a revision where I just go and look at that location."

Nicole also narrated the audiobook recording of Unscripted. "I auditioned with the audiobook company. I practiced all the voices. And there were 33 distinct voices in my novel, and some of them are performing. So sometimes it's a voice doing a voice. And I didn't really think about that as I was writing the book. It was a challenging experience, but so wonderful."