What Else?: A conversation with Kristina Forest
Hot girl walks and shower thoughts
I always seem to have one too many things on my plate.
Writing a novel. Working a full-time job. Hosting a reading series. Keeping up social relationships with my family, my partner, and my friends. Hitting my reading goals. Watching that show everybody is talking about (also applies to albums and films and podcasts). Remembering to eat. Making time for working out. Cleaning the apartment. Getting enough sleep, or at the very least enough down time. Just looking at this list reminds me how many things I’ve ignored this past month alone, which also makes me anxious about the ones I have probably forgotten. There is always too much. And I struggle to figure out what items I should prioritize over others. No matter how many times I rearrange my calendar or cancel one obligation to make room for another, the pieces never quite fit.
A few of these responsibilities make me happier than others, of course. For instance, a day of writing is always much nicer than a day spent in work meetings. Finding a moment to get exercise in is also preferable to most other tasks. And yet I don’t make my choices based around what brings me joy. But my recent conversation with Kristina Forest, the author of seven young adult and adult romance novels, made me think perhaps I should change that.
Kristina’s Greene Sisters trilogy—composed of The Neighbor Favor, The Partner Plot, and The Love Lyric—is one of my favorite series to release in the past few years. Each novel centers on a different sister in her unexpected pursuit of love and happiness. My personal favorite is the second book, the story of Violet Greene reconnecting with her high school sweetheart Xavier on an unexpected night out in Las Vegas. When Kristina read at Wine and Pine last year, I was delighted to find she’s just as charming in person as the characters are in her books.
This week, Kristina and I caught up about how her writing and workout routines surprisingly work hand-in-hand. We also manage to see the charm in our type A personalities, plus find book inspiration in unexpected places.
What is something you do for yourself that is completely unrelated to your writing?
I’d say exercise. I walk. I need mental health walks at the end of each day. I also go to barre three or four times a week. I’ve been doing that for over a year, about 140 classes all together.
How did you start going on mental health walks?
Prior to Covid, I was living in Brooklyn and walking everywhere. On my lunch breaks, I worked near Central Park and would walk around there. Once the Covid lockdown happened, I left New York and went home to New Jersey to live with my parents in the suburbs. I would say it’s a fairly walkable place. Not like Brooklyn, but I still tried to get walks in, as I do now, too, living in a smaller city. I just like to move my body.
Why did you choose barre?
When I moved back in with my parents, I started doing these Jane Fonda-esque cardio workouts in the morning with my mom. At the time she was furloughed from work and I was working from home, so we both had more free time and flexibility. But when she went back to work, it was less fun to do them by myself. I wanted something I could do consistently and that would also get me out of the house. I was starting to feel a little isolated as a young person out in the suburbs.
I had been doing pilates once a week before Covid and wanted to get back into it. Then I saw a girl on TikTok who was going to barre classes. I did ballet when I was younger, too, so I thought barre was something I would probably enjoy. This was also a few months before I got married. I didn’t buy into the whole diet culture that you need to lose weight before the wedding. I think you should just try to feel your best, whatever that means to you. But I did want to maintain my weight because I had to buy my dress a year in advance and alterations are expensive! So I thought if I stayed consistent with a workout routine I would stay within the same size range.
I did barre once a week to begin with, then after a couple months I started going twice a week. Now every week I take three to four classes. I’ve felt myself getting stronger and more flexible. I’m able to do a split again, which I haven’t done since high school. I like to see progress when I’m working out.
Also, barre is hard as fuck. Even though I’ve been doing it for a year and a half, the classes are pretty difficult. While I use my walks to think about stuff, I’m usually not thinking about anything during a barre class other than pushing through. That’s a release in its own way, trying to stay in touch with my body. There are also cute outfits, which are an incentive. If I’m going to sweat a lot, at least I can look cute doing it. I also like to get fun versions of the grippy socks.
I’ve done pilates before and enjoyed it, but I find the social culture of workout classes a bit terrifying. Have you experienced this, or is it just the introvert in me?
I have not had that experience at barre. I’m sure it’s probably like that at other studios. I see stuff on social media where I don’t know that I would feel welcome there. But I haven’t felt that way.
I started going to barre when I lived with my parents, and a lot of the women in those classes were older and retired. They were jacked! But they were also really nice. Where I live now, it’s a mix of different ages. I’ve never felt like it wasn’t accepting. It’s also nice because it’s people of all different body sizes, including the instructors. I like to be able to see those with similar body types to me being really good at what they do.
Do you find it difficult to carve out this time for yourself to be active? For me, it always falls off the list first when I’m over committed.
For the classes, if you don’t go, you get charged $15. There are some mornings where I’m like, “No,” but then I don’t want them to charge me so I get up and go. It’s also helpful that I’m writing full-time now and have control over my schedule, so I have more flexibility to choose classes that work for me.
In terms of my mental health walks, I know I’ll feel different if I don’t do them. Sort of trapped and isolated. Something I quote a lot is from the movie The Other Guys, where they say, “I’m a peacock, you’ve got to let me fly.” That’s me with the walks. I track them, too, make a game out of it. It’s not an exercise junkie thing. I’m just a Capricorn and like to best myself. When I’m writing all day, I’m by myself and that can be really hard. I’ll start to think I’ve got the worst book to ever hit the shelves. The walk is a way to separate me from my work day and return to being a normal person, kind of.
You mentioned you sometimes use your walks to think about your projects. Do you have a specific memory of having solved a plot point or created a character while on a walk?
The one that sticks out to me most recently was toward the second half of last summer. I was in the middle of working on a revision for my YA novel, Heartsick. Originally, it was a story about a boy and a girl who were classmates but had never really spent time together before the novel. Something about their relationship wasn’t clicking. On this walk, I was trying to think about what wasn’t working, and then I had this epiphany moment where I realized they should be exes. It was perfect! I laughed to myself because I had three weeks left on my deadline. It was also a month before my wedding. Everything was up to the wire.
It’s part of my process sometimes. I write maybe 20,000 words of a book where I think I’m going in the right direction. Then I have this moment where I’m like, “Oh no! It should’ve been this.” And I have to start over.
Clearer ideas come to me when I’m not thinking about writing. When I’m washing my hair or cooking dinner. Last night when I was getting in bed, I realized something, so I had to hurry up and write it down. The next day, I was like, “Now, what the hell is this supposed to mean?” I have to use my own context clues to figure it out.
Taking a shower and suddenly solving a book problem while in there is such a real thing.
Yeah! If you’re not actively looking at it, your brain relaxes enough to unravel the problem.
Are you the kind of person who works only in structured blocks of time? Or are you more open to the creativity flowing whenever?
I’m a very strict Monday through Friday worker, and I know going into every writing day what I need to work on. Before I even start writing, I usually need to hand in a pretty detailed synopsis to my editor, so I know the majority of what has to happen. I also give myself grace knowing that a lot of times, things end up changing. Different characters come in, different things will happen, and that’s okay. But generally, I have a strong trajectory of the story. I like to get my vision in place as much as possible because once it goes to my agent and editor, it can feel like too many cooks in the kitchen when you don’t even know the recipe yourself.
I also get a big poster board and put the different chapter descriptions on Post-its. I write in pencil, so that way if something changes, I’ll just erase it and write something else. Sometimes an entire scene doesn’t need to happen and I can pull it off. This is going to sound really type A, but I also create a calendar that goes all the way up to my deadline where I put in what I need to be working on each day. I also like to have an extra month after I finish the draft for a very rigorous self-editing process. I don’t want to be freaking out that when my deadline comes I’ll hand in a shitty book. So with the calendar schedule, I go in each day knowing what I’m going to work on and just try to meet that goal. Sometimes, it takes four hours. Sometimes, it takes eight. I really do treat it like a job.
As I speak to you, I am staring at the color coded spreadsheet of chapters I have left in my novel draft and the days when I need to write them. So, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one.
It’s a sure way to know when the work will get done. Even if I feel like the draft is horrible and no one is going to read this book, I know that it’s going to get done, that I have the time to work on it. It takes the pressure off. Creating art is already so subjective. If I can find different ways to make less pressure for myself, I’m going to do it.
What are you excited about in terms of your forthcoming books?
Heartsick comes out in October. It’s the most fun I’ve had writing a book, and I think it’s because that time in my life was really zany. I was moving and getting married and all this other stuff. It’s about these teens—Margot and Isaac—who broke up recently because they’re going to be attending different colleges and were feeling anxious about whether or not their relationship would work. Margot is interning for a company called Healing Hearts that’s created a pill to make you fall out of love with someone overnight. And Isaac comes into the center one day (not knowing that she works there) because he wants to get the pill in order to fall out of love with Margot. While there, they happen to overhear one of the Healing Hearts CEOs admitting that they know there is something wrong with the pills, but they don’t care. Margot and Isaac then decide they’re going to take it upon themselves to track down the people having bad side effects in order to expose the company. I’m excited for it to be out in the world.
I’m also in the middle of revising my next adult romance novel, The Summer Girlfriend, out next year. That’s a story about a woman saving up to go back to college, but she’s thousands of dollars short. Until she meets a wealthy man in need of a pretend girlfriend for the weekend. He hires her to come with him to his family’s beach house at the Jersey Shore, and sparks fly from there.
Kristina Forest is the USA Today bestselling author of romance books for adults and teens. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and she lives in New Jersey, where she can often be found rearranging her bookshelf.
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