The LMC welcomed author Jeff Giles last Monday afternoon. The author discussed his career as an author and his novel “The Edge of Everything.” Along with this, Giles spoke about the importance of writing to students, the many inspirations it encompasses throughout life, and how his inspirations affected his writing.
“No matter whether you want to be a writer or not, writing is a really good skill to have because there are so many different types of writing you are required to do in life, not just in school,” Giles said.
Giles also overcame self-doubt and gained confidence through celebrity interviews when he was a journalist. This was a key aspect in developing good writing in his novel, as a writer, and in everyday life. He explained these inspirations in hopes of helping Mustangs adapt to his perspective.
“Self-doubt was both scary and inspiring because it’s doing something without a safety net. If you fall, you’re afraid you’re going to hit the concrete, but self-doubt is always going to be there. It’s how you overcome it,” Giles said.
“I wouldn’t have done all toured without the confidence and inspiration I got from my interviews. I had to go to conventions, answer questions, do book talks, come up with the dialogue in my novel, and it would have been hard if I were still scared, and now I’ve been in panels and talked to people and I’ve gotten laughs and I’ve messed up and [have done] bad, but it’s not the end of the world,” Giles said.
Giles elaborated when discussing inspiration and using TV shows and general hobbies to reflect on his characters and their personality. “It’s like when you write, everything you ever liked comes back out,” Giles said.
Along with this, Giles began the visit by interacting with students, asking them about their favorite activities and preferences. The novels Giles write are, for the most part, about teenagers so he asked for some feedback from Mustangs. He wanted get a feel for the different personalities in the crowd and connect with the students.
“To make a connection with students is really valuable when it comes to the whole love of literature and being able to feel comfortable about reading a book. I felt that this author did that,” LMC director Debbie Turner said.
Soon after Giles briefly explained his novel in which a seventeen-year-old girl, Zoe, recovering from her father’s death, is brutally attacked in the woods with her brother on a blizzardy night in Montana. However, they are rescued from a mystical bounty hunter named X from an underworld named the Lowlands. As they learn more about their colliding worlds, they begin to question the past, their fate, and their future.
All the inspirations that brought the story to life and the story itself helped Giles discover an underlying theme:being kind to others.
“There is a lot in it about how much we do for our friends and for our family and strangers. And I’m really glad about that, because suddenly we are in this time where we don’t want people and/or immigrants in our country, so there’s that correlation of being kind to others and helping each other out,” Giles said.
At the end of his visit, Giles opened the floor to questions and brought up the expected release to the sequel of his current book, “The Edge of Tomorrow,” which expected to release within two years.
