The WD Interview: Tiffany D. Jackson

This interview first appeared in the September/October 2022 issue of Writer's Digest.

If you’ve ever read a novel by Tiffany D. Jackson, you’ll know one thing: She’s a master of the plot twist. Whether it’s the did-she-or-didn’t-she of her debut, Allegedly, or the thrilling Is the house really haunted? question of her 2021 release White Smoke, readers never really know what the ending will hold until they see it on the page.

How does she approach writing suspense?

“By making sure I give enough kernels of information throughout the text,” she says. “It’s kind of like appetizers, right? A book is very much a three-course meal. You wanna give appetizers … you maybe get to a salad before the dinner, which is typically the climax, and then you have the dessert, which is the end. I think knowing how hungry I get, I’m very mindful of making sure not only that the chapters drive the story forward, [they] also satisfy you as you go along.”

But her first career plays a role in her writing style as well. Before she was a New York Times bestseller, the Coretta Scott King—John Steptoe New Talent Award-winner and NAACP Image Award-nominee received her master’s degree in media studies from The New School, and she has more than a decade of experience in the television industry. This background in media puts a unique spin on Jackson’s storytelling, not only for crafting a killer story arc, but also with the inclusion of things like fictional podcast transcriptions, true crime book chapters, and text message exchanges between secondary characters. These additions allow readers to experience how the novel’s characters view themselves, but also how everyone else views them.

While a love of horror brought her to write White Smoke, it was also a love of film that inspired her latest release. That’s where we began our conversation.

I have seen The Weight of Blood being described as a revamped Carrie. What was it about the basic plot of Carrie that made you want to revisit that story?

When I was younger, I was a huge Stephen King fan, and Carrie was my absolute favorite horror movie … But there was always something about the story that stood out to me in terms of bullying and aggression and revenge, and the events of the last couple of years really inspired me. What happens if someone did get this sort of epic revenge? What kind of message would that send? And it made me think back to Carrie. <Laughs> I really wanted to honor Stephen King with this homage to his great first work. Especially since it inspired me so much to go down this path of thrillers and horrors.

Knowing that a lot of your readers are going to be at least minorly familiar with the basic plot, how was your approach to writing this book different than in the past?

I think though people are going to be familiar with the spine of the story, they’ll see a lot of me there, especially since this book is loosely inspired by real events that happened—real cases of black and white proms, real cases and situations of segregation in the south. I was able to hold onto my certain type of branding to make the story come alive a bit more and add it to this dynamic of a girl who is passing for white. So, there’s a lot more conversation happening in this book.

And this is, ultimately, my first time tackling racism, which you would never know considering a lot of my other books have a thread there that’s not direct. This is the first time I’m really directly addressing it.

What do you think is important about retelling stories?

Ultimately, the first thing is respecting the first storyteller’s message. Sometimes stories are very subjective; what is the message of a certain book like this? Like Carrie … everyone has a different idea of what the story was actually about. … That’s the most important part, just knowing what the actual message was at the beginning, and then how do we expound upon that message?

I think for me, the power of The Weight of Blood was that I could see that Carrie was the kernel, but it was not the story that was being told. In a lot of ways, I am hesitant to say that this is a retelling because it feels so … fresh is a terrible word for it. But when we think about today’s youth, the story changes so dramatically just with the introduction of things like cell phones.

Yes! That’s the other thing, just incorporating different types of media into this whole book … was really important because I was also able to dump a lot of information that typically we don’t get.

… I do oftentimes hesitate to say this is a retelling, especially when people could be very sensitive and be like, “How dare you do something like this?” And I’m like, “No, no, I’ve been inspired. I really want to give this honor to Mr. King.” I don’t think I’ll say this is a retelling, but I understand why people would. It does feel like it’s a story that lives on its own.

The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson is now available. Order your copy today.

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Speaking of using different media, some of your books explore media bias and allow us to see the narrators from their perspectives and the perspectives of the people around them. How do you decide where you’re going to insert those other pieces of media in the narrative?

I’ve pulled inspiration from the best sort of writers who like to leave chapters on cliffhangers. Typically, when I know I’m going to use an excerpt, I try to put it right at a really good cliffhanger, give you that breathing room to … give you a glimpse into things that potentially are going to happen in the future. It reels you in because you’re like, “Wait, they mentioned this, and I haven’t gotten to this.” This use of [multimedia] is all honestly a callback from my first book, Allegedly, which did very much the same thing where I was using media to sort of tell the story in a different way …

I think that’s the best part of using mixed media in books is that you become a part of the investigation. … you have more of a 360 view of the situation at hand. So, yes, it’s honestly my favorite kind of storytelling device.

Your books are also not afraid to dive into mental health issues like PTSD and OCD. Often, I feel like when mental illness is employed to create a narrator, the reader might find them unreliable. But when I read your novels, I never find that distance. How do you balance this potential unreliability with the—for lack of a better word—likability of your characters?

I think the secret is making your characters not likable because I think ultimately, we all—deep in our hearts—know that we’re not all likable. … The secret is making my characters a bit flawed and showing their flaws pretty early on. And having them keep those flaws and hold tight and fight those flaws throughout the entire novel. I think that’s the biggest part about making sure that we as readers … still [root] for them the same way that we root for ourselves in our real lives. That’s what helps us become more connected to characters because when they are actually real, you really can honestly put yourself in their shoes. When I read characters or books or even thrillers that have these like super perfect characters or hyper flawed characters, I’m like, “This doesn’t even seem realistic.”

I think it’s safe to say that young adult books tend to be very character-focused. But your books also hold messages larger than can be—or should be—contained by a single character. And cultural criticism tends to run alongside your character’s journeys. So, when you sit down to write, how do you make sure that the overall message isn’t eclipsing the character or vice versa?

I don’t walk into books with a message in mind. I typically walk in with the actual problem, the plot itself, and then as we’re going through the motions of the story, the message, honestly, it presents itself. …

[This] made The Weight of Blood a bit more of a complicated story for me, because this is the first time that I’m walking in like, “OK, I know I’m going to talk about racism, but how am I going to talk about racism?” And then bringing this cast of characters together, there were issues of colorism. There were issues of not being Black enough. There were issues with being that one Black guy within a group of white friends and are they actually supporting you or are they just pretending to support you? Honestly, that’s the way real life is as well, right? Like, we don’t walk out the door and say, “What issue am I going to face today?” It just becomes a part of the way we learn.

I think it’s important specifically for young adult readers to be able to identify [the message] within the text. That’s one of the reasons why I try not to spoon-feed lessons. I like for my readers to see it happen in real-time and then say, “Oh, yeah, that wasn’t cool.”

Truthfully, there are a ton of adults who read my work, which is lovely. And I think the reason is that a lot of these problems I’m addressing … is something that we all dealt with, but we didn’t have the tools and the language to voice [it]. We didn’t have books like this when we were younger to explore our feelings behind what’s happening to us. We only had our own mental scape. And so, a lot of times, I find that adult readers are kind of … I hate to be so cliché, but reparenting that inner teenager and telling them, “Look, this has happened to somebody else, and what you went through wasn’t OK.” … It brings some closure, I think.

YA as a category is still so new in terms of the history of publishing … It seems like every year we have to recontextualize what this category means and who is consuming it. What do you think the future holds for YA literature and for readers who love it?

That feels so hard to say!

If only we had a crystal ball, right?

<Laughs> Right?

I think that tastes are going to evolve. Just like when YA became incredibly booming, I remember it was mostly vampire stories and The Hunger Games, and now there’s far more diversity. Every couple of years, we’re going to evolve … This all is really contingent upon kids. I think people kind of forget that we are catering to teens and their tastes. I leave it up to them—what’s going to happen to our industry is solely based on what teens want and what they need.

One of the great things happening now is that we are seeing far more diversity in stories. Kids can actually have a chance to see themselves on the page or even see others that they don’t get to see every day. So, I think that’s also a part of the bigger question: How do we support kids looking for themselves and looking for different experiences?

One way to do that is to still have our ear to the school streets and know that we are catering to our audience. I think that’s the most important part.

You have written suspenseful novels in the past that were not horror, but you really can’t write a horror book without employing suspense. So, was there a difference in the way that you approached these horror novels than you did for, say, Monday’s Not Coming?

Horror novels are really hard! I’m still super nervous for this book to even come out … I’m scared. <Laughs> There’s a skill involved, right? With setting that tension. I had to read up, I had to study a lot of mentor texts in terms of haunted houses, telekinesis, finding that gripping sort of, How do I keep this suspense and still have a message inside of it?

I also grew up in the house of [R. L.] Stine and Stephen King. Those are my two mainstays. I think that also helped [that] I grew up reading all of their novels because it’s programmed within me to do the things I was taught to do within the texts I’ve always been reading.

When it comes to writing horror for YA, is there anything that you find constraining or that you wanted to tackle and then were told it wasn’t age-appropriate?

Actually, no. I’m really blessed that I have an incredibly amazing publisher, Katherine Tegen Books … my stories always sort of lean into that line where it’s like, is this appropriate or not? They’ve always supported me and even said, “No, if you want to go for it, go for it!”

I will say that the end of The Weight of Blood gets pretty gory. And that was different from my other novels. But it was necessary in order to tell the story, to home in on the ideas and the messaging.

But then I also had to be true to my own horror heart. I’ve been watching and reading horror my entire life. I know what’s supposed to happen. I know what’s supposed to happen to the villain. I know where the jump scares are supposed to go down. I’m not going to disappoint young Tiffany who would pick up this book … I’m thinking of if young Tiffany would say, “Oh, this was corny!” if there was no jump scare or there wasn’t something bloody that happened. <Laughs> There has to be some of these things in there.

YA horror is kind of complicated because it’s not always what people are looking for, specifically in a diversity realm. … There are not many YA horror novelists, especially women. … it’s a very small pool that we’re coming from. But I truly believe that we need to be in this space because there are so many readers who look just like us, and they don’t get to see themselves on the page. They don’t get to see themselves be the hero or survive the night per se. And I think that’s important for us to have that.

I find that a lot of YA authors tend to have adults be absent or very secondary characters. But your novels have those adults as active participants in the characters’ lives, for better or for worse. What about the adult-teenager relationship do you find compelling?

It goes back to our conversation about having something that’s real, and especially in Black households … I saw my parents every day. They were very much an active part of my life as a teenager. … There was also church where I was a part of a community, where I had a village, and that’s in most households. And then being a city kid, there was a huge part of my life that was also independent because we had to take the subway or stuff like that.

I think it’s incredibly important to also have those adult-like figures show their flaws so that way real kids know that adults are not perfect and to not expect that from them. I guess that’s the biggest part—I want to show the reality. I always hear kids talk about how they’ll read stories, and they’re like, “How do kids find the time to do stuff when I’m still doing homework?” <Laughs> I was the same way … and then I had a part-time job. I had a little brother to take care of. Like, who had time to go out and search for a killer? So, I felt like it was important for us to show not only adults can also be a part of your life, and they can be also flawed individuals, but that if you are in trouble, you really can go to adults. I think that’s an important message to have, especially nowadays.

… I mean, granted, I do love the stories where the parents are nowhere around. But I also love the stories that feature the parents because that is a huge part of our daily lives.

What do you find compelling about writing horror?

I use this as an example often, but it bears repeating. I grew up in Brooklyn during the ’80s and ’90s, a very tense period of time. I felt that horror novels replicated the emotions that I was having in my general daily life. That was somewhat comforting because I knew there was escapism there. Like, the realistic side of myself knew that none of this was real, that there was no such thing as Jason or Freddy Krueger. But the tension those stories brought me was like, “Oh, this is familiar. I like this. How do I get out of this? How do I survive the night?” So, I was always really drawn to stories that produced visceral reactions versus stories that I don’t have any attachment to, like nothing is happening, the paint could dry and I’m fine.

I love to read romance, and I will be in it as I’m reading. But then I finish the book, and I’m like, Oh, that was nice, and I put it on the shelf. There are so many things about horror, and even other suspense genres like mystery and thriller, that like … I don’t know if it’s the surprise twist or holding those emotions in your body for so long, but I think it’s harder to …

To walk away.

Yes! And it emphasizes the messages within those books because the longer you’re feeling what it made you feel, the longer you’re thinking, Why did it make me feel that way? What was this saying?

That is one of the devices I use … I’m known pretty much for my plot twists, and everyone gets angry at me. <Laughs> But I always say, “Did you forget the story? Did you forget the lesson in it?” And how important is it to have books that have these shocking endings for kids to read? Because they’ll never forget it. And they will remember those lessons as they walk into adulthood. They’ll remember that compassion they’re supposed to have for the girl in class [who was] rejected by everybody else. Like, how would you treat that girl differently if this was a real-life situation?

I think about all the time with my book Monday’s Not Coming, how so many kids are more self-aware and aware of their surroundings in terms of, “Oh, I haven’t seen that girl in a while. Is she OK?” To me, I feel like when you have super shocking endings, when you have things that really bring about that visceral reaction, it makes you remember … I think that these are life lessons that we’re trying to instill in kids, but also provide a sense of safety and entertainment.

Do you have any advice for our readers that we haven’t already talked about today?

This is going to sound so corny, but whatever. I went to school for film, but I was always an active writer, and things like Writer’s Digest and other craft books are really what gave me my chops. I really am passionate about people going and seeking their own guidance and information. … So, go out and find all those craft books, go out and find magazines that really speak to what you need, and truly study them. And don’t just be hungry to find an agent, to get your book published. You really want to be a published author? You need to solidify your craft. And that’s the only reason why I’m here today sitting in the hot seat.