An April 2005 interview with author Alex Flinn, a former lawyer turned teen crime fiction writer.

I like the commute and the hours. When I was a lawyer, I always just wanted to be writing, so I'm happy that I am now.

What authors influence you the most?

Richard Peck, Chris Crutcher, and Pat Conroy.

What advice do you have for young writers?

Finish something. If you only write parts of books, you can never get published, so try to write something from beginning to end, then go back and revise. But realize you'll have to revise. Also, try to write something unique. There are a lot of people out there trying to write "the next" Harry Potter/Lemony Snicket or whatever. It's better to write something only you could write.

Are you working on anything now?

My work-in-progress is tentatively titled Diva and it's a companion to my first book, Breathing Underwater. BU is about a teenage boy in an anger management program after his girlfriend takes out a restraining order against him. In Diva, Caitlin, the girlfriend, has transferred to a performing arts school and is pursuing her dream of singing. She is still working through her broken relationship and her feeling that she sort of needs to have a boyfriend. I decided to write that story because I talked to a lot of teenage girls who seemed to feel that way. But your teen years should be a time to find yourself and not just devote your life to someone else. So that's what this is -- a story about finding yourself, but it also brought back some funny memories of my own performing arts high school days.

What kind of research did you do for "Fade to Black"?

Good question! I spent a month writing the first draft of Fade to Black and over a year researching it and rewriting it in line with my research. I had to research numerous issues in writing Fade to Black including HIV/AIDS and the language difficulties associated with Down Syndrome. I always do a lot of library and online research (an interesting fact I found was that in a 2003 study by the University of Minnesota, 38 percent of people surveyed didn't know whether or not one could contract HIV from a toilet seat, and an even larger percentage thought it could be transmitted through a sneeze).

After that, I contacted several AIDS organizations and found one, AIDS Project South Florida in Ft. Lauderdale, very helpful. I'd had friends with AIDS when I was younger, but treatment has changed a lot since then. So I sat down with a group of their counselors and ran all my questions by them, describing the characters and events of the book and saying, "Does that sound right?"

I did the most research for the character of Daria who has Down Syndrome. A close friend's daughter has Down Syndrome, and it was upon her that I based the character. I wanted to have a specific person in mind because there are all different kinds of people with Down Syndrome, and the character cannot represent every person with Down Syndrome. I watched how Stacy talked, and what was happening behind her eyes when she wasn't talking because she is a quiet girl. I felt like there were a lot of words between the words she said, and that one way of conveying the haltingness of her thought/speech process was through free verse poetry, using the pauses in the lines of poetry to convey that haltingness. After I decided to write her parts this way, I spoke with a poet friend who also worked as a speech therapist and worked with kids who had dysfluent speech due to Down Syndrome. She explained some of the speech problems that might be associated with Down Syndrome and helped me understand how this might best be written as poetry. I ran all the poems by a second poet I know, Kirsten Hamilton, a children's book writer whose niece has Down Syndrome, and she offered some great suggestions. Finally, I had my friend, upon whose daughter I had based the book, read the whole manuscript. I'd heard her blast other books about kids with Down Syndrome, so I knew she would let me know if I'd done anything inaccurate. She really liked it and said that I'd managed to capture how you sort of had to know what the child was going to say, in order to understand it. The poems in the book don't represent poems Daria would write or even what she might say (Only the quoted lines are what she says). Rather, I tried to convey her way of seeing things and that there was a lengthy process for every word she said.

Finally, the third viewpoint character in the book, Clinton, is from North Florida and has a strong accent. I wanted to convey the lilt of his speech without making him sound stupid (i.e., by having him use words like ain't or cutting off parts of words). Some of the things Clinton does or thinks are stupid, but I didn't think he was fundamentally stupid. This is hard to do on paper. I had a friend from Arkansas (Laurie Friedman, who writes a great new series of younger kids' chapter books called Mallory), who has a strong Southern drawl, read the book and tell me what she thought I needed to do and change.

[ Potential Spoiler!! ] As you made such a point in "Fade to Black" of Alex's feelings about how his mother is always quick to claim that his HIV status came from a blood transfusion and not from drug use or homosexual sex, I'm curious as to how you decided on the actual method of his infection (a sexual relationship with an older girl). Can you give us some details?

I had a lot of trouble deciding how Alex got it (This was another part of my lengthy revision process). People associate HIV with homosexual men and IV drug users. However, of newly infected persons in the United States, 15% of men and 75% of women were infected through heterosexual sex

For this reason, and because over half of new HIV diagnosis are for persons under the age of 25 (meaning, my readers!), I didn't want teens who read the book to be able to dismiss Alex's experience as being one that couldn't apply to them. I thought this was a risk with straight readers if I presented HIV in a stereotypical way, as a gay disease or a disease that happens to IV drug users. I have always sought to defy stereotypes. In Breathing Underwater, for example, I wrote about an well-off high school couple who are in an abusive relationship because people always think of dating violence as something that only happens to lower class people (It isn't). In Breaking Point, I wrote about two boys who plant a bomb at an exclusive prep school, because people always think that if you go to an expensive enough school, you'll be safe (Not necessarily). So with this book, I wanted to write about a straight kid with HIV, to defy the stereotype that only homosexuals get it. Once I decided he'd gotten it from heterosexual sex, I thought the obvious choice would have been for him to have gotten it from someone older. This happens a lot. I put him in a situation where I felt that the average teenage boy would not have said, "No." Stubbornly, I also wanted to avoid the stereotypical, I-only-had-sex-once-and-this-happened, so I put him in a relationship as much as I could.

What was your favorite book as a child?

Two I remember reading over and over were A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Blubber by Judy Blume. I recently reread Blubber and was struck by how real and cruel it felt, even so many years later.

If you could be any character in any book, who would you be?

Hmm, characters in books usually don't have easy lives. Maybe Lizzie Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. It would be hard to live in her time period (1800's) but she's marrying rich Mr. Darcy in the end (I hope I'm not ruining this for anyone) so she would have servants to do all the icky things people had to do back then, like churning butter and emptying the chamber pots, and so she would just go around visiting people and wearing beautiful clothes, and since Mr. Darcy wanted an "accomplished" woman, maybe she'd write a novel someday . . . .

Either that, or Pippi Longstocking.

What is your writing process like?

I think of an idea, and then I'll sit down and see if it's something I could write about, by writing a few chapters. I write longhand, and usually I'll write until I run out of things to write, then go to the computer and type it up. By the time I'm done with that, I'm hopefully ready to write some more, so I do. Write, type, write, type. I usually do my research in bits and pieces, as I'm writing. When I've finished writing a full draft, I have someone read it and then start retyping it, changing stuff according to their suggestions and my own whims. A lot of people think I'm crazy, retyping a 200+ book, but it really helps me see it in a very linear way. I pay much better attention when I'm typing than just reading.

Oh, and I don't outline. My revision process is probably lengthier than it is for writers who are outliners, but I'm not an outliner. I usually write myself some notes.