The “Real World Horror” panel at SLJ‘s Day of Dialog 2013 included  (l. to r. ) authors Elizabeth Wein, Julie Berry, Elizabeth Scott, Matthew Quick, Adele Griffin, and moderator Karyn Silverman.

Following Holly Black’s keynote on her recent foray in horror, a panel of YA authors shared with nearly 250 children’s librarians what inspired them to write about “tough stuff” at SLJ’s annual pre-BEA Day of Dialog event. Moderated by Karyn Silverman—SLJ blogger and librarian and educational technology department chair of the Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School—the panel’s discussion flowed from dark to light, touching on topics such as school shootings and Nazi Germany.

Matthew Quick, author of The Silver Linings Playbook on which the Oscar-winning film is based, grew up in a blue collar town “where you didn’t talk about depression or mental health,” and where being a young man who cried about books meant that there was something “profoundly wrong with him.” Quick didn’t read much YA fiction as a teen, but revered Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway as father figures. His new title, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock (Little, Brown, 2013), centers on a potential school shooter, and was galvanized by a deeper look into recent alarming events. “Literature is the place where I can tell the truth as I see it. I’ve met so many kids that are like Leonard: kids that so many people would easily dismiss, when really they are dark storms on verge of crisis. I wanted to explore what happens when kids don’t pull the trigger,” shared the former educator-turned-author.

Adele Griffin took inspiration from a personal tragedy when writing Loud Awake and Lost (Knopf, 2013): very much like Amber, her main character, Griffin’s own brother experienced a life-altering car accident that left him and his family indelibly scarred. “Fiction can be so humbling. I don’t know why I got the privilege to write this story, but my brother had to experience the actual tragedy,” she confessed. She enjoys writing for teens because “they’re on the brink of their own lives, and have a certain suppleness to their character. They’re willing to be changed and can still be changed.”

Elizabeth Wein. Code Name Verity author, also endured a similar cataclysmic car accident that resulted in her mother’s death, and left her brother quadriplegic to this day. “This experience in my background is what drives me to write about horrible things, and how despite them, you go on living,” she shared. Wein’s new title, Rose Under Fire (Hyperion/Disney, 2013), is a companion novel for the acclaimed Verity, and follows another brave female pilot who is caught behind enemy lines during World War II and is detained in a Nazi concentration camp.

Known for her hard-hitting novels, Elizabeth Scott’s works are a far cry from the “issue-books” and frothy “Sweet Valley” series that were prevalent during her teenage years. The idea for Heartbeat (HarlequinTeen, 2013), about a girl whose mother is brain-dead and being kept alive by machines for the sake of the unborn baby, came to Scott when she read an obituary about a woman in a similar situation. The author opined, “everyone has a well of misery somewhere in their lives and some people are drawn to it more than others. Writing about the dark places that some of us don’t want to see is incredibly liberating, because you’re telling something that needs to be said.”

Quick shared that he tries to make order out of chaos in his books, and he hopes that readers can understand that “It’s not just chaos. We’re not alone.” His biggest fear is not connecting with people through his writing. “You just hope that when you stick your hand out someone will be there to shake it,” he said. Scott is most afraid of people’s inaction. “I’m afraid of people who look away when something bad is happening. How it can be obvious that someone is suffering, and how easy it is to look away.”

Despite the heavy themes, Silverman pointed out that in each of the panelists’ books, redemption came in the form of friendship, and that in these stories, making connections with other people continued to be a saving grace. Julie Berry, author of All the Truth That’s In Me (Viking, 2013), loves titles with romance, but “one of the things that makes me nuts is when romantic stories are spun so that the love interest is the total focus for the main character. Without friends we’re toast—girls should know that their lives gain richness not from some guy, but by a core of female friends.” The mostly-female panel emphatically agreed.

Friendship is the definitive theme in Wein’s Verity, and makes a comeback in her latest book, she noted. While conducting research on Nazi concentration camps for Rose Under Fire, she discovered a common thread: “From reading the survivor accounts, I gathered that if you didn’t have people to count on, then you wouldn’t make it. Friendship had to be present so that my character could survive.”

Wein added that the underlying theme for her new book is hope, something that the authors agreed the real world—and the teens they write for—need to see more each day. In a place where Sandy Hook and other tragedies continue to be in the news, YA novels can be conduits for teen readers.

And Berry argues that this is good for kids. “The scales are falling from their [teens’] eyes. They see the news; they see the truth in their communities. There is no guarantee that you can make it through life unscathed. There are no answers, but the novel is the closest we can come to approach them; there can be a messy resolution, or a blossom of hope.”

Photograph by David Ho

Your novel Code Name Verity begins after a British plane piloted by Maddie crashes into Nazi-occupied France. It’s tough to talk about the story without giving too much away.

When I’m trying to sell it to people who know nothing about it, I just say, “It’s a spies-and-pilots thriller. It’s about the Air Transport Auxiliary and women who worked as pilots and spies in this little-known world of the Special Operations Executive. It’s about a friendship between these two women.” But I really don’t go into detail. I may tell them that they’re going to need a box of Kleenex.

After Queenie, a spy for the French Resistance and Maddie’s best friend, bails out of the burning plane, we slowly find out more about their past as her captors torture her to confess. Was it emotionally draining to write the story?

I took out shares in Kleenex. I have never cried so much over a book that I’ve read or that I’ve written. Even though I knew what was going to happen, every time I’d write a particular scene it would hit me as though it were the first time I knew about it. Then when it was over, just anything could set me off. You know, mentions of songs in the book. I went to one of my kids’ band concerts, and they had this jazz band that was playing “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” and I burst into tears. And I’d look at a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and I’d burst into tears. I was really very emotionally traumatized by writing it.

Did being a pilot yourself help the story?

I couldn’t have written the story if I hadn’t become a pilot. I don’t know if I’d have had the inspiration. I certainly wouldn’t have had the knowledge. And I really enjoy sticking in little bits of my own experience. When Queenie describes Maddie’s flight in Scotland, where she’s looking at the snow-covered Highlands and it’s snowing in the cockpit, that’s actually a pretty straightforward description of many of my own flights.

What else did you sneak in?

I sneaked in a lot of personal stuff, but a really good example is the slimy Resistance guy.

You mean Paul, the letch with the roving hands whom you’ve graciously given some heroic qualities?

Yeah. He is a conglomeration of all the passes that have ever been made at me. Every slimy thing he does to Maddie has been done to me.

Maddie and Queenie exchange a list of their biggest fears. What are yours?

In no particular order: nuclear war, global warming, forgetting things (maybe this is why I write historical fiction, “Lest we forget”), the cat (I worry about him biting people or blinding my daughter by jumping on her head and accidentally scratching her in the eye. No, really), and the Yellow Bolt. That’s how my grandmother refers to a lightning strike that came in her bedroom window and exploded an electric fan standing at the foot of her bed. It’s a catchall term I use for the Big Disaster that hasn’t happened, but is lurking around the corner.

Does your novel have a message for readers?

The message is that if you are a girl, you can do anything. I really didn’t want my female characters to feel stopped by the fact that they were female. I wanted them to be able to control their lives, to do what they were good at, and what they wanted to do regardless of what society’s expectations were. I think that’s a good message for modern girls, as well, and that they need reminding about.