When I started writing, I was still in elementary school.
At the time, I was reading a lot of R.L. Stine books, both Goosebumps and Fear
Street, so many of my short stories were similar. My friends liked my stories
and I enjoyed writing them. That was enough then.
By middle school, I’d given up on those thriller/horror
short stories. Most of what I wrote was for class because outside of class, I
spent a lot of time reading. My favorites then were the Sweet Valley books,
along with some Baby-sitters Club, mostly because they were so many to read. I
also liked Ronald Dahl, Avi, Madeleine L’Engle, and Lois Lowry. I didn’t try to
imitate any of these.
I still read a lot outside of class in high school, but
my mind often wandered during class. I started writing while my teachers
talked, partly to make it look like I was paying attention and partly to be
doing something. By my senior year, my short stories had grown longer.
Eventually, I wrote my first novel. Though I didn’t know it at the time, the
novel was YA. It was probably better than what I’d written in elementary
school, but it was still crap. I tossed it aside.
College was different than high school in that I was too
busy for any long-term writing projects…until my senior year, when I took a
seminar in creative writing. The class was year-long and we were required to
write something throughout both semesters. One of my classmates wrote poems, a
couple of others short stories, and two or three of us tackled novels.
I didn’t know what I was doing then, not really, and my
seminar professor was an older man with little experience outside of his own
genre. Still, he knew what it took to write a novel and helped me get through
mine. So did my classmates. Though the characters in my novel were adults, one
of my classmates once commented that they often sounded more like teenagers. At
the time, I was insulted. I also didn’t listen.
I should have listened.
Because after I wrote my novel, after I graduated from
college, I did some revisions and sent out some queries. I didn’t know what I
was doing. I also tried to sell the novel as Adult fiction. It wasn’t, but I
didn’t know that. Eventually, with no success querying, I gave up.
Sometime after that—as I moved cities, got a job, and
started my “real” life—I started reading YA novels. One of my first was
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. The cover
caught my eye while I was walking through a bookstore (and yes, I judge books
by their covers). Though it’s never been one of my favorites, that novel got me
interested in reading other YA books. I read more and more and more. Because I
loved YA.
A year or two after I picked up Twilight for the first time, I was reading more YA novels than
Adult ones. And I was starting to think about writing again. So I wrote. This
time, I knew right off that I was writing YA with the hope of getting one
published someday. Now, I’m three YA novels deep, querying and contesting and
searching for a literary agent.
Until yesterday, I hadn’t thought about my college
classmate who told me my characters were acting like teenagers, but I wish I’d
understood what he was telling me then. It might have saved me a lot of time,
gotten me on the YA track back in college.
But I also believe that if I’d started writing YA back then, there would
have been no guarantee I’d have found an agent and gotten a book published.
Like I said, my professor was an older man who knew nothing about young adult
books. He wouldn’t have been able to help me much and I would have flailed
around awhile before figuring things out. Or I may never have figured them out.
Now, I know where I am, what I’m writing, and how to query.
I know how to go about finding an agent. I don’t have one yet, but I feel like
I’m finally on the right track, that with a little more persistence I might
actually make it.
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