Sitting in on two recording session for his novel changed Jay Asher's perspective on the words he'd written. The first day he heard Joel Johnstone reading the part of Clay Jenkins, the hero of Thirteen Reasons Why. Clay, is one of the characters who received a tape from Hannah Baker, a girl he loved, but couldn't save from suicide. Johnstone's voice was just what Asher expected, but "it was surreal to hear a word that your wrote being read by someone who's putting emotion into it."

On the second day Asher heard Debra Wiseman perform the scene in which Hannah Baker uses lowered tones as she plays cat and mouse with a peeping tom hiding outside her window. "In my mind, I'd imagined Clay with a female voice, talking at the exact same tempo as Clay. My first thought was, 'That's not how I meant it to be read' but as I heard more and more, I thought 'Wow, she's taking it beyond how I wrote it. And I absolutely love it.' " (You can read his blog about this experience.)

This changed perspective also characterized Asher's first publishing experience. For years he wrote humorous fiction for younger children. Then listening to a King Tut audio tour in a Los Vegas casino, he thought about how this would make a fascinating format for a book. The book idea didn't come until later when Asher was living in Wyoming for six tense dark, icy months. He thought about how it would be to take "an audio tour through a girl's life after she'd decided to end it and if you got the tape, it meant you were on there, you were one of the reasons why."

Asher had never written anything eery, serious, for teens, or in a female voice. "It was new territory and took me almost 3 1/2 years to write partly because I was working on other things at the same time, partly because I was so tense writing the book that sometimes I couldn't work even work on it."

Writing a novel so clearly destined for audio format also changed Asher's experience of listening. He'd mostly heard non-fictions because he could listen without having to rewind, but since publication, he's been converted to fiction. A recent favorite is Jerry Spinelli's "Star Girl". He found it was fascinating to hear the actor's perspective, to see which words were stressed and how her impressions changed his view on the story. "Reading is more intimate. You read at your own pace and can slow down to really appreciate the language. It becomes more real when you hear a novel read aloud."

Asher's experienced another shift after speaking to high school students. "I never intended to talk to teens, but they ask the most amazing questions. One student asked if I ever considered suicide. I don't think an adult would have asked that kind of question." Asher's now writing his second book for young adults, convinced that it's "the greatest age group to write for".