On Writing Graveyards and Mentor Figures — Author Interview with April Yu

April Yu is a fourteen-year-old writer from New Jersey with an affinity for language, running, and human anatomy. Her work is published in or forthcoming from Peach Mag, The Lumiere Review, Milk Candy Review, The Aurora Journal, FEED, and more, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Ethos Literacy, and Ringling College of Art and Design. She is a graduate of the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers.

Here, teen writer April Yu shares her tips for other youth writers from her own experiences.

Emily Pedroza: I've been raving about your writing for so long now. Thank you so much for meeting with me today! Just to start us off, I’m curious about your origins in writing and what originally drew you to the craft. 

April Yu: Oh, absolutely. When I was young, I was never sent to any writing classes specifically. My third-grade teacher was the one who introduced me. I think that having a mentor figure is so important because she introduced me to just being able to write as sort of a hobby instead of just for school. 

Later on, my fourth grade teacher introduced me to the site called Storybird. And it's basically where you can just look at art projects, and then write about them. I'm really glad that it got me interested in writing, got me writing every day. And I think that if I hadn't let that sort of flourish, I wouldn't be writing today. So I'm really grateful that her guidance was there in my writing journey. 

EP: I was also really curious about what your writing process looks like right now.

AY: I think that sometimes it's a little bit difficult to get writing considering we have school and extracurriculars that we have to do as students and teens. But for me, personally, I can get inspiration from very random places. Sometimes, especially when I'm just silent, just sitting in my room, or when I'm looking outside at nature, I just randomly get a sliver of an idea. And so once I have that, I sit down by my computer and just start writing. I wish I had more of an elaborate writing ritual or things like that, but I think it's mostly just sometimes listening to music, but sometimes it distracts me as well. So sometimes I'll just sit at my desk and just write and if it comes to me, it comes to me. 

Then, later on if I don't like it, I'll store it away into my “writing graveyard.” But if it does work, then I just continue revising it for the next few days.

EP: Your comment about a writing graveyard really stuck with me. What are your best ways to organize scraps or just your projects in general?

AY: I used to just delete my stories if I didn't like them anymore. But I realized when I looked back at some of my stories, they weren't actually all terrible. Maybe they just weren't working for me at the moment. So I have this little Google Drive folder where I just like to put all the ones that are in progress that don't work for me in the moment. And then sometimes I'll just go back and read them. Sometimes it's just for fun, sometimes when I’m stuck, for inspiration. Sometimes I do take it out of the graveyard again and then kind of rework it. Sometimes it just stays there.

I think it is totally fine if I leave some scraps there, because not all of my writing is to be published or to be seen. Sometimes it's just practice. So I don't know, it's just a way for me to organize my writing, but also for me to look back at the sort of writer I was in the past. 

EP:I love the idea of keeping tabs on progress. I was wondering what your opinion is on things like re-editing or redrafting.

AY: I think it's great. I love redrafting. And I think that it can really help just to re-craft the narrative that you're trying to write. I think especially as a pantser myself, I tend to just write whatever comes to me for the very first draft. And sometimes that's just not what works. 

Sometimes I'll just go back and rewrite it, and it makes so much more sense after I rearrange my sentences and ideas, especially since I don't think structure comes that naturally to me. So I have to go back and rework the structure, and really think about the way that my events should go. So I'm definitely a huge advocate for rewriting our redrafting.

EP: Currently, is there any way your process of redrafting or writing has changed from the past?

AY: I really hated revisions when I was young, I would not do them at all. I don't know why, but I just always thought what I wrote first was always going to be the best, thinking: I don't have to change it. So I would just leave it as is and publish it. 

Going back, I realized that mindset was a huge flaw and stunted my growth when I was writing. So now, I try to go back and look at things, even with flash fiction. I used to think that flash fiction was easy to write because it's so short. And I would think there might not be as many revisions needed for the genre. But I have found I actually do the most revisions with flash fiction, just because you have to make every single word count and make sure that every sentence is necessary. 

I think it's really helped me think about language in a way that it's not something that is unchangeable. I realize now that language is very malleable, and that you can think about it in a way that's creative, and in a place where you, as the author, can change elements and make your piece mean different things. I definitely have become a little bit more in touch with how to revise and how to revise my own work specifically.

EP: I saw that you were an editor on other publications. I was wondering if this shaped your own writing voice, and if so, how? 

AY: I think it's related to just reading other people's work in general. But especially when you're reading for a magazine, it's really interesting to see what people present as their best work, because usually, you submit what you think is ready for publication. Sometimes I might not, personally, connect with a writer's voice. I think it's really interesting. 

And just in general, reading other people's work has definitely influenced me a lot. My writing style has changed a lot from when I was younger, which was a little bit more humorous and sarcastic. And now I think I'm paying more attention to what people consider elaborate language. I think my values for what I write about and what I think that “good” writing is have changed from reading other people's stories.

EP: How do you know when a piece is ready to be sent out?

AY: This is an interesting question because I think I used to send out my pieces prematurely just because I was always in this huge rush to go out and get myself published. And I think that that really stunted again, my writing growth. Looking back, those definitely were not pieces that were ready to be sent out.

I think that I know I'm ready when I'm kind of sinking in my piece at that point. Usually, I revise it until I'm like, I don't want to see this anymore. I've seen these words a little too much. When the rhythm of the words is so ingrained in my mind that I can't even think about ways to change them anymore. So I think that's definitely my marker.

Also, I think that I'm done when it just feels like the ending is what I want and that it says everything I need to say, even if maybe the ending is an open ending or a cliffhanger. I feel like as long as there's some kind of subtext that already exists that maybe opens the door, I feel like I've kind of done my job with the piece.

EP: That was really insightful. Thank you! Before you touched a little about inspiration, like how you look outside of windows or listen to music. I'm wondering how you organize bits of inspiration or how you keep track of them. 

AY: Last year, I was at this workshop called Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, and Tamra Pierce said she really recommends keeping notes; you know, whenever you have an idea, you should just kind of write it down. I really took that to heart. Now, I have a little notepad next to my bedside table, just because I get really random ideas at night. I feel like that's definitely a way for me to keep track of them.

I also just write random things in my Notes app sometimes. Just like random notes everywhere, especially because I feel like my inspiration comes a little bit randomly. I always need something on hand so I can write them down.

EP: I feel like a lot of the writers that I know in real life, they either stick mainly to poetry or prose. And so it was super exciting to see you dabble in both genres. And I was wondering, how your process changes when it comes to writing poetry versus prose.

AY: I started out as a prose writer, and so I had a rigid idea of it from reading traditional novels and short stories. I believed it had to have a very specific structure, so I didn't experiment with language because I thought that was more for poetry. But I think that with poetry, I've let myself be a little bit freer with it. Especially when I started to write surreal poetry. I loved that I didn't have to stick to rules like I had to in prose and had the freedom to write what I want. And sometimes it doesn't even need to make complete sense to yourself. As long as there are the emotions that you want in it. 

I feel like as long as a poem has some kind of theme that other people can possibly relate to, even if it doesn't really happen in their own life. I think it's done its job. So, I really, really love that in poetry, I can be freer. And it has also affected the way that I write prose — now I think of prose as something that can be almost poetry-adjacent. You can really experiment with your figurative language, metaphors, and symbolism in the ways that I used to think were reserved for poetry. 

EP: For my last question, what advice would you give to beginning writers?

AY: I think that this advice is more specific to the teen community, but just in general, I feel like there's always this need or expectation that you should constantly be publishing. I think that because there's so much talent out there, it's just very common for you to see everybody posting about their achievements — winning this achievement, winning this contest, or getting this publication — and so it’s easy to feel like you're behind before you have even started. But I would just recommend that you not get caught up in this dominant paradigm of constantly submitting and constantly getting yourself out there; instead, think of your writing as a journey where if you get published, that's amazing, but it's just a goalpost along the way, not your end goal.

I would recommend thinking of writing as something that grows with you, a friend to you that will always be there, rather than something that you can conquer to be the best,if that makes sense. 

There are also so many writers who start a lot later in life and they're amazing at it. So, definitely, I feel like it's something you can explore at whatever age.