CULTURE CLUB
Local author Cecilia Vinesse tells us about her writing life and latest YA novel, The Girl Next Door A Cambridge WRITER’S DIARY
The Girl Next Door is a young adult, sapphic romantic comedy. I describe it as a very chaotic, bisexual, fake dating love square! The main character is Cleo, who wants to get into NYU film school with her boyfriend Daniel. But the summer before their senior year, Daniel breaks up with her for a popular head cheerleader type named Kiki. At the same time, Kiki ditches her girlfriend Marianne for Daniel. Marianne is Cleo’s next-door neighbour and they used to be friends; Cleo is an artsy film nerd while Marianne is a cool swim jock character – and they end up teaming up together to fake date in order to win back their mutual exes. It’s very much a romantic comedy – bright and bubbly, and lots of fun. It was lots of fun to write, too. It was a book I was trying to write for quite a long time. I’d written versions of it before the pandemic, but none of them ever quite felt right. And then in lockdown, when the world went quiet and felt really scary, I did what a lot of people did, which was to connect with things that I loved; that brought me comfort. For me, that was romantic comedy. I grew up with Nora Ephron movies and Stephanie Perkins novels, which are very vivid and romantic. And I found myself shedding any personal bias I might have about leaning into tropes like big gestures, swoony romantic scenes and silly humour. During that period of time, I realised that these things aren’t pointless – they play a vitally important role in our lives, and can see us through dark times. Writing YA involves getting into a young person’s mindset – which my partner claims I never really left anyway! That’s probably partially true. I worked in children’s book marketing, originally,
on from. And that’s okay, in this instance, because I just channel it into the angst of YA novels. A major turning point in my writing career has been realising that you can only write for so many hours a day. You can only devote so much time to actually sitting down and putting words to paper, or putting words to screen. So developing a routine that restricts my writing time has been, oddly, the most productive thing I’ve ever done. I typically aim to write for about two hours a day, which I prefer to do earlier in the morning. I try to keep the writing time soft and nurturing and nourishing. When it feels too much like a job then it just becomes a slog, and that shows itself in the work. I moved to Cambridge about eight years ago, as my partner is the director of studies and an English fellow at Wolfson College. I don’t think I would have ended up in Cambridge without her, but I’m settled and happy here. I love Bould Brothers Coffee and I adore the Arts Picturehouse – it’s such a cosy, nestled, artsy space and the little cafe area is so cute. That’s a perfect day for me. I’m currently working on another queer romantic comedy. I love romantic comedies and I feel like that’s where my voice lands naturally. I’m very happy writing those. But I hope that this life and this career are long, and that I can experiment with other genres and other areas of the industry at some point. I’m also very drawn to horror as a genre: I love horror books and horror movies. And I think if I were ever just feeling as unromantic as possible, that’s where I would turn to…
and fell in love with that market because there was an urgency to the books. You’re writing for young people, and you know how tumultuous or lonely everything can be at that age, and how much you crave connection. Books can provide that. Feeling that weight behind all the books I was reading in my marketing role meant something to me. It gave me a path forward to what I could see myself writing. Another part of it is that I moved around a lot as a teenager, so I felt a little disconnected and never fully at home or safe in any one place. I always knew that my surroundings could change at any moment. That being the case at such a pivotal time in my life has kept those years very fresh for me: it was something I can’t forget or fully move TEEN DREAMERS Cecilia’s latest is a swooning sapphic rom com with a high-school setting, inspired by a lifelong love of the genre
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