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I tend to write about characters who are younger than me. In the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books, the characters started out being sixteen and by the end were nearly twenty. In The Last Summer (of You and Me) the three main characters are in their early and mid-twenties. At readings and in interviews people often ask me why this is so. I’m not sure exactly why. But it’s a pretty fascinating stretch of life. Many if not most of the great novels of the last couple centuries are about teenagers or characters in their early twenties: Jane Austen’s novels, the Bronte novels, much of Dickens, Thackeray and so on. It’s the time in our lives when we are making critical decisions (and mistakes) about who we are going to be and whom to love. We get to take longer to figure it out this century, but it’s still a pretty dramatic period of life.

Besides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life. When I write about a character who is eighteen or twenty, I try to include her as she was when she was four and eleven and also as she’ll be when she’s thirty-five and seventy. When I think of my own self twenty years ago, I don’t feel like I was a different person. The circumstances in my life have changed a lot, but I don’t feel like there is any chasm to cross between me now and me then. My interior life feels very much the same.

The other explanation is that I have a deep emotional attachment to that juncture of life and haven’t quite moved on from it. I guess that’s possible too.

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My husband, Jacob Collins is a painter. He works downstairs and I work upstairs and we live and raise our family in between. Our work is obviously quite different, but it has been fascinating, over the years, to figure out the many things we have in common. One of them is this thing I'll call creative euphoria. It usually occurs after you've worked for many hours in a row, most often in the wee hours of the morning when there are none of the daytime rigors to check your mood, when you haven't talked to anyone other than yourself in a long while.

So in my case, my mood elevates, my heart starts beating faster, and the ideas start pouring in from every direction. I can't type fast enough to get them all down. I have so many ideas, so much intention for every word I write, that the words seem to heat up and glow. It's like I am a glassblower--as long as the glass is liquid and searing hot, the colors are intense.

The trouble is, the colors change and dim when the glass cools and hardens. I find that when I get up the next day and reread what I've written with a cool mind, the words don't glow anymore. They don't seem to contain the intensity I thought I had put into them. They just kind of sit there.

My husband describes this phenomenon as "the gremlins." He says that when he goes to sleep after a euphoric night of work, the gremlins creep into his studio and paint over all of his brilliant work and by the morning they make it just regular.

There is a feeling of frustration when the euphoria ebbs. You feel like your great work was stolen from you. But then, of course, you have to wonder whether it was ever so great, or whether you were just tired and manic enough to think so. It's like when you drink too much and you think the things you say are extremely clever, but they probably aren't.

Sometimes I think I'd like to sell my books with a blowtorch or maybe a bottle of vodka. But the torch would incinerate the book and the vodka would just give you a hangover. These are not lasting pleasures.

When you work with a sense of calm and keep your critical faculties with you, it's not as much fun at the time, but it feels a lot better in the morning.

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 Ann Brashares, The Last Summer (of You and Me), sisterhood, love, loss, friendship, Fire Island, growing up, Penguin Books, books

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The working life of most writers is pretty unstructured. Mine especially. I don't teach (so far) and I don't write short fiction or essays or magazine articles (so far). I write novels with long deadlines. So I've spent a long time trying to figure out how to shape my days--what kind of daily goal will cause me to write well instead of badly and what unit of writing will best quantify my progress. (I have to admit that on many days I am happy not to quantify anything at all, but rather to fritter away the hours knowing that I will begin my book later.)

I started with pages. I set myself a goal to write seven pages a day. The problem with goals is that you orient yourself to them. I got so taken by the idea of cranking out the pages, I would use big spaces between scenes. I'd celebrate finishing a page by going off and doing something else. When I'd lose myself in thought I'd realize I wasn't writing any pages and jostle myself back into action. This was a problem. Thinking, it turns out, is important to writing. Pages are a necessary feature of books, of course, but it's better if the words on them are good.

I thought I'd be tricky and writerly and switch from pages to words. I set myself the goal of writing two thousand words a day and would fiercely resist the desire to translate that into pages. (It's eight pages.) I would sit there typing away, devilishly padding sentences with extra thats and looking down at the word count every few seconds. I would write five hundred words and spring from my computer to go do something else. My sentences were flabby and I was hanging around on the surface of my story.

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Ann Brashares is our guest blogger during the week of May 19th. If you have any questions for her add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about The Last Summer (of You and Me):

From the author of the multimillion-copy, #1 bestselling series The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants comes a heartbreaking first adult novel.

Ann Brashares's series, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, has made her one of the most successful contemporary authors, shipping more than 8 million copies over the last five years and winning even more millions of passionate fans. Now, like Judy Blume (Summer Sisters) before her, Brashares turns her spectacular gifts to adult readers. In The Last Summer (of You and Me), Brashares uses her remarkable storytelling, emotional insights, and talent for capturing relationships to weave a rich, textured, mature novel that will resonate as clearly with readers in their forties as in their twenties.

Set on Long Island's Fire Island, The Last Summer (of You and Me) is an enchanting, heartrending page-turner about sisterhood, friendship, love, loss, and growing up. It is the story of a beach community friendship triangle-Riley and Alice, two sisters in their twenties, and Paul, the young man they've grown up with-and what happens one summer when budding love, sexual curiosity, a sudden serious illness, and a deep secret all collide, launching the friends into an adult world from which their summer haven can no longer protect them.

As wise, compelling, and endearing as her Traveling Pants series, and as lyrical, thoughtful, and moving as the best literary women's fiction, this novel is sure to win an entire new generation of adult fans.