But I do feel like outlines are made to be broken. I never used to outline, though, but I started to because I could show my editors, and it really gave a backbone to the book. When I get lucky, these scenes are the beginning of my book, or sometimes something that goes in the middle of the book. KE – I get a character kind of talking to me in my head, and I’ll just write some lines or a scene. TPC – When you bring to write, where do you start? I have been in bands, but none of them were successful, they were always really nerdy and weird. I am glad that they didn’t send me to a school like that. My parents just thought I was being annoying and banging on things. When I was in preschool, my teachers were telling my parents that I had excellent rhythm, and I should be enrolled in a music school. TPC – Exile has a lot of music in it, did you grow up around a lot of music too? It took me five years to get my first book published, Carlos is Gonna Get It. And I was like okay, this is what I want to do.

Harry Potter, a Series of Unfortunate Events, things like that. I was there for a few years, but I was still thinking about what I wanted to write, I wanted to write something, noodling around, so I started reading what the kids were reading. I quit that, and I got this really awesome job as a biology teacher in a school in Boston. I would write little stories in notebooks. KE – I moved to Maine and Boston to be in a band with a bunch of friends, where I got a job as a bank teller which was an awful job, especially for a writer and a creative person. TPC – What did you do between graduating college and publishing your first book?

It was always my identity, like if you knew me in middle school, you’d be like, “oh yeah, Kevin, he’s going to be a writer someday.” Although I really withdrew in high school and never shared my writing with anyone, and I got really self-conscious about my writing. My friends and I would write fan fiction – well, it really wasn’t called that back then – I wrote about Indiana Jones, and James Bond, and just story after story after story. I started writing when I was in the third and fourth grade. TPC – Did you always know you were going to be a writer? That book, the way it combines comedy and tragedy, and the way that the main character is jumping around in time, and that there are four-legged aliens, it’s got everything. But I think that my favorite novel since then is a book I didn’t like in high school which was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Kevin Emerson: My favorite book, up until high school, was The Stand, by Stephen King.

Interviewed by Adrienne, Teen Press Corps~Īdrienne, TPC – What is your favorite book ever, and why?

Carlos Is Gonna Get It by Kevin Emerson